Often people ask me if I’m done yet with my concert project, or how it turned out, or something to that effect.
I assume these folks have not fully registered that there are 252 towns in Vermont. Or maybe they think I just pull up to the town green with my keyboard, bang out Chopin’s Minute Waltz, and drive off to the next municipality. If I were done now, I would have played about five concerts a week. Not real!
In the initial publicity for this project—and as of now, what it still says on the “About” page of the project website—I said I would complete this by the end of 2026, which is a bit under 5 years from the start, or an average of just over one concert per week.
Yeah, that’s not happening either.
The pace of concerts so far has been a strain. There were no huge miscalculations as to what this project would entail, but several small and medium ones. Among other things, I underestimated the time I would spend on concert writeups, the time it would take to learn the typical Scarlatti sonata, and the time it would take just to do a concert: sometimes a 2-hour drive or more each way, arriving 2 or more hours early to have time to rehearse with my local collaborators, 90 minutes for the concert, time after for breakdown and to schmooze, plus time on either end to pack and unpack. It’s almost always a full day, often a long one. Sometimes extra long because we try to cram in a piano-venue scouting mission or a recreational activity once we’re making the trip—but so far these have been just that, crammed in, which is very much at odds with the “recreational” concept.
My wife Annelies appointed herself roadie, driver, videographer, and (often) dog minder. I didn’t ask this of her: she volunteered. She’s as enthusiastic about the project as I am, hasn’t missed a concert, and (as of now) doesn’t intend to. That said, I don’t know how I would do this if she weren’t my 100% concert-day assistant. Initially I had imagined having one of the project interns come to concerts to do recording and maybe help with odds and ends, but that was before I realized just how long the typical concert day would be. At this writing, I don’t have anything like the budget to pay my interns for 10- or 15-hour road days.
So I’ve started to re-think this as a 7-year project. That would come to exactly three concerts a month on average. If we get better at advance planning, we could arrange one overnight double-header each month, which means we could do three per month while leaving half of our weekends free for other things. And seven years has a nice Biblical ring to it.
I told this to Annelies, and she did not see this as a solution!
Because the pace so far—the pace that has already been a strain, and has cut into our other activities together—has been about three per month anyway, so Annelies doesn’t see how the shift to a 7-year plan is any alleviation.
Her assessment sounds self-evident. Except that there’s a learning curve to every aspect of the project, including concert-day planning and logistics, and I think that the same pace will be more manageable in the second year and beyond than it was in the first. Greater financial support, which I’m actively pursuing, would also allow some relief, in the form of course releases and more background assistance. But I totally understand her skepticism: this could all be wishful thinking on my part.
For now, we’ve agreed to present just two concerts this July as we take stock and discuss different strategies. This is the opposite of my original thinking, that in the summer I could do 4 or 5 concerts a month to balance out a slower pace the rest of the year, when juggling the demands of teaching and winter travel.
But what we do for any one month will make little difference in the long term, so I can let that go for the moment. And it makes a lot of sense to reconsider the pacing from a place of relative calm, and after having caught up a bit on the purely recreational time together we’ve been missing. Plus there’s a backlog of a zillion concerts I need to write up for the website. And I can look ahead at upcoming Scarlatti sonatas and other repertoire I’ve been wanting to learn but have been too busy to work on. And focus on some auxiliary aspects such as the funding pursuit.
In the next post I’ll look at my reasons for wanting to complete the project sooner rather than later. I think they partly make sense and partly don’t, and maybe blogging them will serve as a kind of out-loud self-analysis to put things in perspective.
P.S. “Or maybe they think I just pull up to the town green with my keyboard, bang out Chopin’s Minute Waltz, and drive off to the next municipality...” Not gonna lie, when I wrote that just now it sounded surprisingly tempting. Maybe I have been going a bit hard.
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