Last night my students put on one of their CMAS concerts and, in addition to proving they are able to continually raise the bar each time with regard to their writing, performance, and production skills, they also demonstrated a new kind of musical maturity that I had not seen yet from them.
The shows themselves are pretty musically diverse since there are so many styles and tastes across the student demographic of the program. This is made all the more pronounced since they can only perform original material at the event so they, like most of us, write what they enjoy. This is all good, and after so many years of this, not really very suprising to me.
What was interesting about last night was that for the first time there seemed to be this universal sense that no matter the performer, no matter the style or skill level, every act was going to be given the same "start treatment." Keep in mind that the program is so big (a great problem to have) that many students working the production end of the show do no know all of the performers that well, if at all. This is significant and it was very interesting to simply observe them transition from "I'm going to do a good job just for my friends," to a far more mature, "I'm going to do a good job for everyone, because there are hundreds of people here watching this show and I need to make sure they get their money's worth."
It was even more impressive when we did the post show debrief that we always have to hear comments solely related not to, "I want 'this' or 'that' next time for me," but "I have an idea how we can train the newer student's in the program to learn to be more involved in the success of the event."
They are starting to see the forest-for-the-trees and it's pretty cool. Of course, each time they raise the bar it moves that much higher, so it'll be interesting to see if they can maintain this for their next show in mid-December.
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