June 01, 2025
This morning, I attended my cousin's senior guitar recital and high school graduation party. She performed a selection of solo pieces, two duets (one with her dad playing the guitar and one with my sister singing), and a quartet with her teacher and two other students from his studio. The performance was sandwiched by thoughtful speeches from my cousin, her parents, and her teacher and was followed by a lunch reception. It was an enjoyable program, a worthwhile culmination of her fourteen years of guitar training, and a wonderful opportunity to celebrate her.
I mostly helped with setting up the venue and cleaning up afterwards, and I was also in charge of recording the performance. In between my tasks, I had some time to think about senior recitals, graduation parties, community, maturation, appreciation, and related themes.
It seems a high school graduation party is an opportunity to bring together many groups of people who are connected to the graduate in different ways: extended family, friends of the graduate, friends of the family, fellow members of the music community, and so on. (That may actually cover everyone.) There's nothing wrong with the standard high school graduation party, but it often ends up becoming a less memorable appreciation of the graduate's accomplishments, especially for attendees who are more tenuously connected to the graduate. The graduate can give a speech, but the [number of people resonated with]x[depth of resonance] product probably has an upper bound.
In contrast, I think a senior recital is an excellent centerpiece for a graduation event. The musician's formal training will likely come to an end once she heads to college, so the event acts as a proxy to show her maturation over her childhood years. It requires the musician to give something of herself, to demonstrate her hard work, focus, discipline and ultimately, personal growth, in order to warrant the appreciation of the audience. I tried to sketch out who exactly benefits from a senior recital and why, and I ended up with a few ideas.
For the musician, a senior recital represents the perfect opportunity to cap off her musical training. It's a long-form performance in which she can demonstrate her technical fluency, stylistic maturity, and most importantly, enjoyment for playing her instrument. Perhaps equally relevant are the practical considerations: if the graduate is not pursuing music as a career, a senior recital is one last chance to ramp up, bear down, and push towards an ambitious endpoint.
For the friends of the graduate, the recital is an opportunity to celebrate her achievement and hard work in a dimension they may not typically see up close. Friends are also sometimes unaware (for the better, I think) of the demure character of classical music audiences, and it also doesn't hurt for the musician to see and hear her highly vocal supporters in the audience.
Many parents are involved in their kids' music training, be it purely logistical or musical as well. For the parents, it's easy to get lost in (or annoyed by) the grind, especially if it entailed lots of driving during rush hour. For the immediate family of the graduate, a senior recital is an opportunity to step back from the daily chaos and see a concrete accomplishment arise from all the hard work, both by the kid and parents, over the years.
The music teacher's perspective is probably quite similar to the parents. A longtime teacher has seen the graduate grow up from childhood and is deeply invested in her growth both as a musician and a young adult. A recital is an opportunity for the teacher and student to see through the evolution of their mentor-mentee relationship and produce something together that is artistically compelling.
The senior recital is also valuable for members of the extended family and friend circle, who are aware that the graduate plays an instrument but aren't directly plugged into the graduate's musical journey. For them, the recital is an artistic response to their implicit question, "what have you been doing all these years?" Regardless of their own musical proficiency or interest, they will be able to appreciate the magnitude of the graduate's achievement as exhibited through the performance. Also, a shared musical experience is a great conversation starter at the reception for people on opposite sides of the social network.
The final group I can immediately identify as benefitting from the recital is younger musicians in the community, including younger siblings of the graduate. Seeing a slightly older kid give a performance is probably a great motivator for what is within reach.
Good programming makes for a great senior recital. I enjoyed my cousin's (and my sister's senior recital two years ago) in part because of the music selection. Yesterday, my cousin performed a blues song that called for technique typically not found in the classical canon and showed off a different style of her musicianship in the process. The duet with her dad demonstrated how music was a source of connection between them, and the quartet with her teacher and two of his other students showed the kinds of shared experiences attainable in a musical community. In accompanying my sister, who sang an ABBA song, she also showed off the versatility of the guitar as an instrument for solo, ensemble, and accompaniment. Yesterday's program was the right length and the right variety to keep the audience engaged and leave them satisfied.
I didn't have a senior recital. At the time, I was indifferent to my mom's request and perhaps uninterested. I was satisfied with enjoying my TMEA All-State experience, and I expected my big endpoint to be playing Sarasate's Navarra duet with my sister and my high school orchestra during our senior concert. TMEA happened just before COVID, but unfortunately the high school senior concert was cancelled. Perhaps any possible regret or second-guessing is ultimately pointless, as COVID would have also cancelled anything that I could have planned anyway, but I had still hoped to be able to play that duet with my sister. My next opportunity would have been during her senior recital, but I was in Zürich at the time and therefore unavailable. Luckily, we were finally able to perform it during the UT University Orchestra chamber recital in my college senior spring.
If I had to give advice to myself in the past or future (or someone else), I would recommend always taking the opportunity for a "final performance" or similar event. I think I was a bit narrow-minded in rejecting the recital purely because I didn't care about it. I now appreciate the more refined perspective that such an event is a celebration of not just myself but also my family, mentors, family friends, and all those community members who have been an integral part of my growth and development, both musical and overall.