Help! Hard oboe piece! what do I do?
I am preparing a piece on oboe for a solo and ensemble festival which is in two weeks, BUT I am starting to realize that this piece is too hard for me, its above my skill level. I have to play the piece in two weeks and I don’t feel prepared for it at all and I feel like if I go through with this I won’t be ready in time and won’t be able to play it. I can always back out but my private teacher really wants me to do it but I seriously doubt that I’m gonna be ready for it. I practice the piece every day but I haven’t got much progress and it’s getting to be really stressful and causing me anxiety and I don’t know what to do!
One can look at this in different ways. It’s possible the work isn’t really too hard, but that the student isn’t practicing and the teacher knew that and decided to force him/her to hunker down and work! I do have students who are very good sight readers (frequently sight reading lessons … and yes, I can frequently figure out if that’s what’s going on) and I might opt to choose a tough piece just to make sure a student simply couldn’t get away with sight reading. It’s also possible that the work really is too difficult and the teacher didn’t realize it or (I hate to think this would be true) simply didn’t care. Some teachers don’t understand the difficulty level of some pieces. (There are several reasons for this that I might go into at some point.)
I try to choose pieces that are challenging but _possible_. It’s not fair, in my little opinion, to do otherwise. We want our students to be challenged but also successful. At least that’s how I see it.
Oh … but I didn’t answer the student’s question, did I?
Seems to me it’s a bit late to choose another piece. Anything one could learn in two weeks or less is probably too easy. I think the student probably should have figured out the work was too difficult more than two weeks prior to the festival! (Which is why I do wonder if the student is a non-practicer and the teacher was fed up with that, but of course I don’t know the whole story!) I’d probably say, “Just go for it at this point. Do your best. Smile a lot. Don’t telegraph your thoughts about it being over your head.”
Speaking of “telegraphing” …. I have another post to write!
