By Chris Wilson

One of the great advantages of subscribing to a blog, online site such as Drumchattr, or dutifully reading articles in Percussive Notes is that students are no longer in the dark about what the “Real World” of music performance and business entail. I have personally written both blogs and articles on how to prepare for performances and how to book performances, and I have read hundreds of blog posts on what a younger musician or first-time professional should be prepared for. Whether it’s having the right sticks or mallets, bringing a full score, or having options for your conductor, the basics of what to be prepared for in both rehearsal and performance are being well documented for the younger generations.

However, there are other areas of presentation that are not as often realized in such posts. I am not speaking of what to wear or how to speak, but I am interested in writing about how we prepare.

We as musicians spend countless hours preparing for what we are going to play, and how we are going to play it. If you are a musician who speaks to an audience (like in a clinic, presentation, or school assembly), you have to also spend countless hours preparing for what you are going to say. One major advantage that most of us have is that we have received some sort of crash-course training in what to do when the performance goes wrong. Maybe the person you’re playing with misses an entrance. What do you do?

Another question is… what do you do when you are speaking to a group and something goes wrong? Maybe it’s a forgotten line, maybe it’s an odd question posed by an audience member. What do you do?!

This is an area where most of us are probably not as well trained. Sometimes when I am driving to a gig I will pretend that I am being interviewed, to make an attempt at practicing for sneaky questions. The trick then is to go back and sharpen your speech so that you don’t sound like you’re fishing for words in your head. Yet, with all of this practice and information bobbing around my head, I was recently completely dumbfounded by a perfectly simple question:

“What’s the most embarrassing thing that has happened to you while performing?”

It was a Q&A session after an elementary school assembly. The student could not have been more than eight years old. The children began to giggle, and I probably blushed as I chuckled at the clever question.

Then, it happened. My mind drew a blank.

I paced. I opened my mouth, “Ugh…” I scratched my head. My mouth opened again, “Well…”

At this point I am more nervous about losing my captivated audience: it has been a forty-five minute musical journey, and now all they will remember is how the ‘loud guys who played the marimba’ stammered and bored us at the end. My mind began to race. At this point there is no way I will be able to come up with a good story because of the pressure I’ve put on my brain.

After the eternity in my head (which was probably only a few seconds), I spoke about how I couldn’t think of anything big, and definitely nothing along the lines of walking on stage with my zipper down. They exploded with laughter, I breathed a sigh of relief, and I mentally thanked my high school band director who did walk onto the podium with his fly down.

On the drive home an ironic thought came across my head. At my undergraduate college (Eastern Washington University) we had a weekly convocation for students to perform. The first convocation of my freshman year my percussion instructor asked me to perform Charles De Lancy’s Love of L’Histoire. It’s one of the pieces I played when I auditioned, and a personal favorite of his. I prepared for the performance, and was mindful of the fact that when I played it before the wood blocks and cow bells slid around the stand.

At that convocation I strode out onto the stage in front of three hundred people whom I didn’t know, and started to play. My leg was shaking, my heart was pounding, and my setup was… slipping! I had taped down my instruments to a towel, but had not taped the towel to the music stands. The stands were now beginning to flip, and I had to quickly grab and straighten them out before disaster ensued. I did so successfully, and found a way to finish. It was a moment in which the audience had no idea what had almost happened, yet I was very embarrassed in front of the audience because I wasn’t prepared.

Ironically, exactly what happened when I was asked that fateful question at that recent assembly.

So, is it possible to be prepared for everything that will be thrown at us? I guess there will always be something that surprises. The great thing about the internet, like I said before, is that everyone can become an even more informed version of themselves. For fun, we’d like to see what YOUR most embarrassing moment in performance was. It could be a humorous and entertaining way for us to learn from each other.

What embarrassing moments have you had while performing? While presenting? How else do you prepare non-musically before an event? Leave your thoughts and stories in the Chattr Section.