Christmas and New Year’s is a fabulous time of year to foster music appreciation. Whether it’s a full-blown production of Handel’s Messiah, children’s school choirs, or piano and organ recitals, the joy of the season will be communicated through music. This is the time to look ahead to concerts being offered throughout the next year, and make some tentative reservations before tickets sell out.

But if your family is anything like mine, a little prep work will go a long way toward the parents, at least, enjoying the concert. Give the kids some pre-concert tips and you’ll be good to go. This is what I’ve told mine, and because they’re not yet adults, we can only hope that they have not been scarred for life….

1. Observe the pianist’s fingers, arms, and posture. Try to duplicate the same when doing your own practice sessions. Please refrain from practicing any imaginary piano during the concert itself. (That includes air guitars, as well.)

2. Watch how all of the performers keep to the beat of the music. The conductor’s baton may signal 4/4 time, for instance. The conductor is a skilled musician and truly does not need your help keeping time, particularly in tapping your foot next to the person’s ear sitting in the tiered, theater seat in front of us.

3. During a concert, distractions are frowned upon. Slinking down in the pew, getting up to go to the bathroom, asking questions or talking during a selection, noisily umwrapping a candy, or feeling the need to yawn loudly should be squelched. If you cannot squelch yourself, I am here to help.

4. Other patrons have either paid, or simply arrived and scheduled their time to watch and hear the performance promised them. No matter how entertaining or cute you may perceive yourself to be, you will not turn around in your seat, make silly faces, nor go into any other type of dramatic displays. Should this occur, there will be great drama when we return home….

5. We will respectfully dress for the occasion: no pajama look-alikes, flip-flops, or uncombed hair. If the orchestra is dressed in formal-wear, or the chorus’ black-and-white outfits match one another, we can make some effort, as well. And no matter how hard you try, you will not convince me that you should go to the concert dressed as a runaway ballet dancer from The Nutcracker Suite. No tutus, and no heavy stage makeup, even if every person you see on stage is sporting such.

6. Our family will plan to arrive early, in order to be on time. Parking the car, using the restrooms, and finding our seats can all take time. I may bring notebooks and pens for you to use pre-concert and you can sketch anything new and unique around you, except the people seated nearby. Write your impressions of the instruments tuning to the first violinist, or the almost-palpable feelings of excitement in the concert hall. During the concert, the notebooks go away, along with the clicky pens or sharp pencils that might drop and roll down, down, down the aisle.

It’s been our experience that well-rested, and well-fed children (not to mention adults) do best at concerts. Schedule one sometime this season… and enjoy!

—————-Copyright 2011 – Alexandra Bartologimignano

(Alexandra jets here and there with her two boys, two girls, one husband, and two dogs, while chronicling their larger-than-life adventures at www.destinationsdreamsanddogs.com.)

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Among the many ways to motivate a young musician one of the finest ways is to take that young musician to a concert. It really doesn’t matter what kind of concert it is - it just has to be a concert of good music.

I remember well when I was probably 14 I was invited to see Errol Garner play at the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium for a concert and I barely knew who Errol Garner was at that time. He was the great jazz pianist who composed Misty and lots of other wonderful tunes but I had no idea what I was in for - it was just a piano concert and I thought “well, how can a piano without an orchestra or band entertain everybody for a full two hours?” To the surprise of my life I had no idea before that the piano could be played that well to make it sound like an orchestra and more than an orchestra - to sound like nature itself with the dancing keys in the high glissando and the deep bass chords - all the exciting stuff that the best of music has to offer. I remember he played “I remember April” a great jazz tune of that era and I just was so thrilled because I had no idea that music could be that exciting.

After the concert it was about an hour back to my home. I got home probably 11 o’clock or so but I remember staying up late and probably driving my parents mad but I just couldn’t get enough of what I had heard and wanted to try out all that on the piano. Of course what I played I’m sure sounded silly and continued to sound silly for lots of years and of course compared to Errol Garner it still sounds silly but I was inspired to really practice hard after that and learn my chords and to learn improvisation and so on. So that was a great motivation in my life - that single two hour concert.

A year or so later I was invited to attend another concert at the Memorial Auditorium of touring there in Sacramento on 16th St., (still there by the way) and this concert was called Jazz at the Philharmonic -a guy and impresario named Norman Granz organized this concert. He got a bunch of great jazz musicians together to play in this concert. I remember some of the musicians that were there were Illinois Jacquet, Sonny Stitt, Ray Brown the great bassist, Oscar Peterson the great pianist from Canada who greatly influenced me as well and again I had no idea the piano could be played like that. He was different than Garner but equally as exciting. I also saw Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz and many other of the great classic artists of that day and of course they are all in the Jazz Hall of Fame right now. So that was another concert that greatly motivated me to practice and to learn my my chords in and learn how to improvise and so on very very inspiring.

Still another concert that I went to when I was so probably 15 was a classical concert - an opera called “Amal And The Night Visitors” by Gian Carlo Menotti and it was a wonderful opera is based on the story of the of the Oriental Wise Men coming to see the baby Jesus from the East with very haunting music - exciting stuff - great singing, great music. That was another inspiring concert.

Then when I was about 16 or 17 the Dave Brubeck Quartet came to my high school auditorium in Auburn California to Placer high school and Dave had his whole Quartet there including the great alto sax man Paul Desmond and of course bass and drums. I don’t recall who was on bass and drums at that time. It was so exciting to see the interplay between Desmond and Brubeck as one would play a melodic line and the other would imitate it or play it back upside down or inside out - playing little games of cat and mouse - all off-the-cuff, all improvising and it was just extremely exciting and again it motivated me highly to start practicing and refine some of the things that I had wanted to learn.

So never underestimate the power of a concert to motivate a young musician. It has the power to make them excited and to get them practicing and to let them see that lessons are worthwhile and that some worthy goals lie ahead for them, and that these kinds of goals are achievable.