Learn to Play Recorder

Lesson 86: Performance Preparation, Part 1 — Program Building

  • Build a 45-minute recital program from pieces you already know.
  • Order the program so the audience's attention curve matches the music's intensity curve.
  • Pair contrasting works (period, key, affect) without losing coherence.
  • A repertoire of at least four ship-ready pieces (the Loeillet, Handel, van Eyck, Telemann arcs above provide them).
  • The audience attention curve.
  • Key and period contrast.
  • Programmable durations.

A recital is not a list of pieces. It is one long piece made of smaller ones.

The next five lessons walk through what happens between “I have learned this piece” and “I am performing this piece for an audience.” They are not technical lessons. They are professional-life lessons — the considerations that distinguish an amateur who plays at home from a performer who plays for others. This first lesson is about program building: choosing which pieces, in which order, for which audience.

The 45-minute envelope

A standard recital first half is 35 to 45 minutes of music. (Second halves are usually shorter, after an intermission.) Within that envelope, the standard structure is three or four pieces with planned silences between them, totalling 40 to 45 minutes of programmed time.

Use your stopwatch on each candidate piece in performance. The Loeillet D minor sonata is around twelve minutes. The Handel HWV 360 is about thirteen. The van Eyck Doen Daphne is about eight minutes for theme plus three variations. The Bach Brandenburg 4 movement is about five minutes. You have the materials for a 38-minute program from those four works alone.

Ordering the program

A recital audience's attention has a predictable arc:

  • Minutes 0–5: alert, settling in, slightly anxious.
  • Minutes 5–15: peak engagement.
  • Minutes 15–25: attention fades unless the music holds it.
  • Minutes 25–40: recovery if the program varies; collapse if it does not.

Program with this in mind. The strongest piece does not go first (the audience is not ready) and does not go last (the audience is tired). It goes in minutes 5–15, where attention is highest. Use the first piece to settle the room; use the last to send them home with a single memorable gesture.

Key relationships

Pieces in the same key, played back to back, sound monochromatic. Pieces in unrelated keys, played back to back, sound disjointed. Programming is finding the middle path:

  • Relative minor / major (G minor → B-flat major) is a natural pairing. The keys share the same key signature; the affects contrast.
  • Dominant / tonic (D major → G major) sets up a sense of resolution.
  • Mediant relationships (C major → A minor) feel like a colour shift without a strong tonal break.
  • Distant keys (C major → F-sharp minor) work as deliberate ruptures — useful between halves of a program, less so between adjacent pieces in one half.

Period contrasts

A program of four Baroque sonatas is monochromatic in another dimension. Vary the period:

  • One Renaissance work (van Eyck, Playford dance).
  • One canonical Baroque sonata (Handel, Telemann).
  • One late-Baroque or galant work (Loeillet, Bach).
  • Optional: one contemporary work (Linde, Hirose) as a closing piece.

This is the standard period-contrast frame. Modify as you have repertoire.

Worked example — a 40-minute program

  1. Van Eyck: Doen Daphne — theme + three variations. 8 minutes. Settles the room; introduces the recorder as a serious instrument.
  2. Handel: Sonata in G minor, HWV 360 — complete. 13 minutes. The heart of the program, in minutes 8–21. Highest attention.
  3. Loeillet of Ghent: Sonata in D minor, Op. 1 No. 1 — complete. 12 minutes. The French counterweight to Handel's English-Italian. Contrasting affects.
  4. Bach: Brandenburg 4, second movement (recorder part with continuo) — 5 minutes. The closing showpiece. Sends the audience home.

Forty minutes of music plus ~five minutes of between-piece time = 45 minutes total. Three different keys (D minor, G minor, then D minor again, then E minor in the Bach), three different national styles, three different periods if you count Bach as transition.

Practice

Build a program from the repertoire you have learned across this curriculum. Write it on paper. Time each piece (stopwatch, real performance tempo). Adjust until the envelope and the attention curve align.

Now play these

The four pieces from the worked example are the recommended candidates. If you do not yet have all four learned, choose any four from your current repertoire and treat the program as a draft.

When you have written a 40–45 minute recital program with timed pieces, ordering that respects the attention curve, and contrast across keys and periods, move on to Lesson 87.