Evaluation of Group Performance on Wednesday 9th December 2015

 Reflecting back on the group performance assessment on Wednesday 9th December, overall I believe that as a group we performed to the best of our ability and I personally believe that during the assessment was the best time that we performed our pieces throughout the whole rehearsal journey.

Before starting our assessment, I felt nervous. This was because I thought that we were slightly under rehearsed as a result of bad time management and lack of designated outside of lesson time rehearsals, however this was a difficult task as not everyone was free to rehearse at the same time due to other commitments and so on. If I were to do this task again, I would plan a rehearsal schedule with my group and organise a plan that is suitable for everyone.  We did not have a second song fully prepared and well-rehearsed until the morning of the assessment and I think that had we set a rehearsal schedule, this would not have been the case.  As the performance began my nerves seemed to dwindle away and grew more confident with what I was singing and began to connect with the other group members. We had a false start at the beginning as we started playing the piece in the wrong key however I think that this was purely due to nerves and not feeling comfortable with how rehearsed we are. Although the last song that we arranged ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ was not as rehearsed as ‘Do Wah Diddy Diddy’, during the morning before the assessment we spent a long time practising and we, including myself became more confident with ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’.

In order to help with understanding nerves I have read the second chapter of the Inner Game of Music by Gallwey. This discusses the 'two games' - how to deal with nerves.

The performance went very well considering the panic and worry prior to the assessment. In particular, the use of harmony within our piece was a strong point for us as we spent most of our rehearsal time arranging close harmonies and finding a close blend of timbres and a range of vocal parts; Soprano, Alto, Mezzo-Alto, Tenor-Bass. Looking back, I would have liked to have paid more attention to presentation. Rather than us standing next to the piano we could have created a more intimate performance space with the audience by standing nearer to them and not situating the piano off centre. I also now think reflectively that we should have changed out positions between songs as this would showed the audience that the two piece were different and that we thought carefully about each one as an individual performance in comparison to one long performance. We chose to only have a piano as it worked well for our genre of ballad and I enjoyed our use of the piano however to improve we could have used more instruments such as guitar or drums.

Overall, I am pleased with the final product that we produced and I have learnt that team work plays a massive part in progress, the use of various instruments rather than just one or two can make a piece more effective and finally I have learnt that it is not always about the final product but the journey it took to get there.