Guitar Lessons In Tulsa | Celebrations
This content was created for Curtis Music Academy
Similar to what I just talked about in the podcast on our famous and beloved guitar girl and she’ll class. I want to take a couple of minutes to talk to you all about our awesome celebrations. And these celebrations are what we call [inaudible]. You could say that they are recitals of sorts, but we don’t like the term recital because it often has really negative connotations that aren’t just not just not super great or exciting. So we choose to call them celebrations or performance opportunities. And these celebrations are unlike anything you will find at any other music academy. In fact, this is something that separates us so much that we even chose to put it on our very special priced differentiator sheet that we give to all of our new students. So that clearly is something that we pride ourselves on and I think it’s worthy of its own article about teaching guitar lessons in Tulsa.
So what these celebrations are our performance opportunities for our students who take guitar lessons in Tulsa, whether the student is three years old or 75 years old. So we want to really make them conducive to the students of all ages, which might present a challenge when determining where to do it. But so far we’ve had really awesome success in picking out awesome places for our students to perform. And unlike a traditional recital where it might be in a hot, stuffy old church, these celebrations that we have, we make sure that they are places that people want to be. So they’re cool, exciting, warm, and inviting.
We want to make sure that these recitals are not something stuffy and taunting or place for people to be ridiculed or nervous, anxiety inducing. Because we have found that at a lot of other music schools, the students are not excited about the recitals and they’re really nerve wracking in traditional, well, we want to break that mold of traditional recitals and we have chosen to make it our own. So since we have so many instructors that have each taken music guitar lessons in Tulsa for pretty much their entire lives, we have a lot of experience on the table of people who have performed in recitals, been to recital, seen recitals, whatever it might be. So we’re able to all kind of come together and talk about what we can do better than the ones that we were involved in as kids.
That is something really great that I think also separates us from everyone else is that we have so much experience that we can genuinely thrive as a music academy because we know exactly what not to do. And I think a lot of music schools are kind of lacking in that if there’s only one person who has taken guitar lessons in Tulsa for a really long time, um, they just don’t have the experience that we have at Curtis Music Academy. So we have found that these celebrations are a way to get students excited and pumped up about playing music.
Because like I said a while ago, if a teacher only teaches the things that they want to learn, not the things that the student wants to learn, but the things that the instructor wants to teach, well that student is probably not gonna like music very much after awhile. And I believe that the same thing applies to our celebrations or recitals. So if a student is forced to perform in a recital that they don’t really want to be at, whether it be in a church somewhere really formal, they’re have to play a specific piece. It also lends itself to the students being burnt out as well. So we try to be incredibly wary of that because we know how important music is and children’s development and the way that they see the world. So we just strive to make them as student friendly as possible.
Like I said, whether that student is young or old. So to kind of give you an example of how different our celebrations are than other music academies recitals, I’m going to kind of point to a couple of examples and things that we have done. So since I’ve been involved with Curtis Music Academy, Teaching guitar lessons in Tulsa, I have seen us do three recitals. Two I should say, and we’re about to do a third. And the first one that we did was last fall. And this one was by far my favorite and I think the best one that Curtis Music Academy has ever done.
So all of our students who take guitar lessons in Tulsa, they were invited to join us at the Tulsa Zoo. And at this recital they were able to get a ticket to come in the door. So they got to explore the whole zoo before and after the concert. And then we had them perform in one of the, um, concert areas inside of the two. So this was just an incredibly different recital, different than anyone has really ever seen, I think. And so all of our students and their families were invited to the zoo, which is just awesome. We were able to provide that fun for them because not only was it ever sidle, but it was also just a family fun, friendly event.
People could bring their kids, their family members, relatives, whatever, and everyone got to hang out at the zoo together as a family. So I think that was just incredibly special and very different from anything else I’ve ever seen. So while we were at the zoo, what we did was we had one concert for younger, the kids, the younger students, and this one was first. So the parents of these students could bring, bring them in, they could walk around the zoo for a little bit and then they performed in the, in the hall after the younger students concert was over.
We had the adults come in and the adults performed right after the students. We just didn’t want it to be weird where as a young child who’s playing chopsticks or something on the piano plays and it right after an adult who’s been taking guitar lessons in Tulsa for 10 or 15 years comes up and plays. We just really did not feel like that is fair. But what I will say about our choice in venue was that everyone had a good time, so it wasn’t just the kids that enjoyed it. We had tons of positive feedback from the adults as well, so the adults genuinely loved getting to hang out at the zoo. I think for them it was one of the things that they don’t get to do often. If you don’t have kids or whatever, then you probably aren’t spending a bunch of time at the zoo.
I think it really gave them the opportunity to reminisce and just have fun for a little while while also performing a song for their loved ones. So the two was just a really casual atmosphere that we thought really captured the attention of all of our guests in all of the students. So of course the kids were so excited to come because being at the zoo takes all of the anxiety and nervousness out of practicing and performing in front of people. So if you get to go hang out with the zoo, who is not going to be excited about that? I mean really. So these kids were stoked out of their minds to be hanging out at the zoo. And I think that took a lot of pressure off of them to perform at the recital. So they were just so excited about being there. They didn’t even stress out about playing.
So I think that was awesome. Something that more people should do at music academies in the area. Just ways to connect with your students and take that nervousness out of those recitals. So that is why we call them celebrations here at Curtis Music Academy, because we want everyone who takes guitar lessons in Tulsa, whether that be guitar lessons in Tulsa, piano lessons, or vocal lessons. We want everyone to feel excited and welcome and feel the same joy about music that we all do here. So we really try to instill that joy in others in our students. And one way that we do that is through our bi annual celebrations and performance opportunities.