The dos and don'ts of concert conversations.

Why does a cheerful, chatty teenager morph into a melancholy mute when faced with an audience? My job as a clinician for the Milwaukee-based Piano Arts Competition has been to effect that transformation in reverse. The founder of the competition, Sue Medford, was prescient: she saw, long before others, that the coming generation of musicians needed to be able to speak, as well as play. So she incorporated a novel element into Piano Arts auditions: students are required to talk about the pieces they will perform. My job has been to work individually with the contestants to prepare that portion of their auditions.

After doing this for a number of years, I've noticed a curious evolution. For the first couple years, students learned about their pieces and composers, wrote out speeches and proceeded to read them. The competition organizers caught on to this temptation and directed students not to read their talks. Bingo--problem solved. Sort of. Now the talks are memorized and recited, rather than read. Worse yet, as the Internet has moved from curiosity to mainstay of daily life, students have ceased to consult libraries and whole books. They happily settle, instead, for "sound-bites," and often blithely include in their talks, concepts and terminology they do not understand. The idea of conversing with, instead of talking at, an audience is still a very foreign one. As I work with the students, I find my primary job is to persuade them that the audience is actually interested in them--who they are and what they think. That does put a certain responsibility on them to think interesting thoughts, but these young pianists are no slouches.

Over the years, finding that I repeat myself too frequently, I've often wanted to issue a set of commandments and admonishments that students could study and maybe even memorize, reciting them to me before the competition! I urge you to share these "commandments" with your students, setting up opportunities at studio recitals for your own young orators to hone their skills.

Concert Conversation Commandments

1. Thou shalt not read your talk--or even surreptitiously glance frequently at notes.

2. Thou shalt not memorize a given text and recite it. No matter how perfectly you know it, you'll sound like one of those automated phone messages that barely resembles a human voice.

3. Thou shalt never, ever use someone else's words in your talk. Even if the words are anonymous ones on that most anonymous of human inventions, the World Wide Web, they were thought of by someone, and that someone wasn't you!

4. Thou shalt never say something about a piece or composer that you don't fully understand. Either track it down or leave it out.

5. Thou shalt not include boring facts. Dates, places and long names are depressants--not stimulants.

6. Thou shalt not use big words that you'd never utter to a friend. Encyclopedia Brittanica is available online; leave it there.

7. Thou shalt never speak about a piece of which you've only heard one part. What if the next movement is even better?

8. Thou shalt not compare one great composer unfavorably to another just to make "your guy" sound great. Just because Beethoven was emotional doesn't mean Mozart wasn't, right?

9. Thou shalt not sight read your examples, even when they're from a part of the piece you aren't performing. Playing your examples is a performance.

10. Thou shalt not look as if "thou shalt never smile when speaking" were another commandment. No pain, no gain is not a sentiment your audience wishes to share.

So What Shalt Thou Do?

1. Read a biography of the composer you plan to talk about. Do not only read what's available on the Internet--it's paltry, and you can't cuddle it in your hands while reading before bed.

2. Pretend you're going to interview yourself. What questions would you ask? How about:

* Who is this composer? When did s/he live, where did s/he live, where does the piece I'm playing fit in with other things s/he wrote? Is it early, late, best, worst, in-between?

* In what style period was this piece written (for example, classical, romantic, impressionistic or modern), and how do I know, aside from the fact that my teacher told me?

* What makes this piece really great and different from all others? Why do people want to keep playing it over and over again?

* What do I love most about this piece? Why in the world did I choose to play it? Why should everyone who hears it like it as much as I do?

3. Write out a "talk" if you wish, and then distill it down to an outline. Put the written talk away--far away. Or just make an outline from the start.

4. Pick your examples. A talk without examples is like a paper without arguments. No one believes it. Support every major point you make with an example at the piano. If you say the piece is full of awesome modulations, play one. If you say it's virtuosic and fiendishly difficult, prove it! Note each of these examples on your outline by page and measure number, and then mark them with tabs in your score. That way you won't spend all your allotted time at the performance searching frantically for that quintessential example that went AWOL. (Even if you're playing your whole program by memory, no one will object to you using a score for your examples. They'll be relieved you're human.)

5. Practice your talk with a tape recorder and for friends or relatives. Your talk should be different every time you give it because you'll be funnier, sadder, cornier or smarter on different days. Tell your audience to boo every time you start to sound like a stuffed shirt. Make sure that everybody finds themselves laughing a bunch of times; if you're never funny, you probably won't make people happy?

So there you have it--know a lot, smile a lot and carry on a conversation-not a thesis defense. When you're done, you'll feel more relaxed about playing, your audience will be primed for the music it's about to hear and you'll feel that you're looking out at friends instead of judges.

Good luck--enjoy the opportunity to preach what you practice for a change?

Catherine Kautsky, professor of music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has played in major cities in the United States, England, France, China, Korea and South Africa in recent years. She has lectured nationally and internationally and has been published in journals such as Clavier, AMT and International Piano.