Most music studios offer one recital a year.
The students dress up. The parents film it on their phones. The teacher hands out programs. Each student plays one song, sometimes badly, almost always with shaking hands. There’s a reception with cookies afterward. The studio posts photos on Instagram. Done.
That’s the cement-the-win moment for the entire year.
We do four. And not one of them looks the same.
This is the sixth letter of the ADVANCE method. It’s called Cement (pun intended) — because we’re literally locking in the win, making it real, turning the new skill into something the student can point to and say I did that. And we believe deeply that one annual recital is not nearly enough — and for some students, it’s not even the right tool.
This is true for kids. It’s even more true for adults.
What Cement actually is
Once a student has built a new skill (Acquire) and gotten to enjoy it (Nourish), we make it real by creating a memorable moment around it.
That’s the whole job of Cement. Take the abstract — “I learned this thing” — and turn it into the concrete — “I did this thing, in this place, on this date, and I remember it.”
Here’s the part most studios miss: the memorable moment is the point. Not the audience. Not the dress code. Not the program. The memory. The thing the student will look back on and say yeah, I did that. That’s what makes the skill stick. That’s what tells the student’s brain: this matters, this is real, this is part of who I am now.
Performance is one way to create that moment. It’s a great way for some students. But it’s just one tool. And studios that only ever reach for that one tool are leaving most of their students under-cemented — kids and adults alike.
The range of what Cement can look like
Some moments that count just as much as a recital — sometimes more:
A recording. Audio or video, made in the studio, sent to whoever the student wants to send it to. Permanent. Shareable. Replayable. A kid will watch their own recording fifty times and grow three inches taller every time. An adult will listen to their own voice and — for the first time in their life — not flinch. That’s massive.
A video for the family group chat. Aunt and grandma in another state? Cousins in another country? Send them a quick recording. The applause that comes back through text messages is no less real than the applause that happens in a hall.
Playing for someone who matters, in a moment that matters. A kid playing for mom in the lobby after a lesson. An adult playing the song they’ve been working on for their spouse on their anniversary. A worship leader actually leading worship at their church for the first time. A returning-adult guitarist playing a song they wrote for their grown kids at Christmas. These moments end up in family lore. Remember when Dad finally played that song he’d been working on? That’s cement.
A casual jam in the studio lobby. No audience. No pressure. Just a student who wanted to play the thing they just got, and somebody happened to be there to hear it.
A private, just-for-yourself moment. This one is mostly for adults — and it’s underrated. Sometimes the cement is you, sitting at your instrument, playing the thing all the way through for the first time, and knowing. Knowing you can do it now. Knowing it’s real. Some adult students didn’t come to lessons to perform. They came because they always wanted to play. The fact that they can now is the whole win, and the moment they prove it to themselves is the cement.
A performance at a casual public space. Which is one of the things we actually do — and I want to talk about that, because this is where MJS is genuinely different.
What we do at MJS
We host four performance opportunities a year, and each one is intentionally different — because different students need different kinds of pressure and different kinds of audiences. This is true whether the student is 7 or 67.
We have one at a public park — completely informal, anyone-can-listen, low-stakes, family-friendly. Some students will play their hearts out for strangers walking by. That’s a totally different muscle than playing for a captive audience.
We have one in a formal hall venue — actual stage, actual lights, actual program, actual this-is-a-show energy. For students who thrive on that, it’s electric. For students who don’t, it’s optional.
We have a series of small backyard performance nights in the summer. Tiny audiences, lots of friends, low-key vibes, often with food. Real intimate. The kind of thing that feels less like a recital and more like a music night with people you love. These are especially good for adult students who don’t want a kid-recital vibe.
And we have one out in the community — somewhere like Winehaus — usually in the early fall, where students perform in the actual ecosystem they live in. Not a kid recital. A real adult-coded venue, where music is happening anyway, and our students get to be part of it. This one is a particular favorite for adult students, but plenty of kids do it too — and they grow about three inches when they realize they just played a real venue.
Four chances a year. Four different vibes. Four different audience sizes. Four different kinds of pressure.
Some students will choose all four. Some will pick one. Some will skip them all and Cement their wins privately, with recordings or family moments. All of those are right answers — for that student, with that goal, at that point in their journey.
That’s what Cement is supposed to look like. Customized. Specific. Intentional. Not a one-size-fits-all event we drag every student through every May.
Why the once-a-year recital model is broken
Here’s the problem with one annual recital being the only Cement opportunity a studio offers.
If a student has a breakthrough in October — say they finally nail a complex piece, or land a vocal technique they’ve been chasing for months — and the next recital isn’t until May, that win goes uncemented for seven months. By the time the recital comes, the moment has already passed. The skill is old news.
That’s not cement. That’s just a calendar event.
Real Cement happens close to the win. The skill gets locked in by being witnessed, marked, and made memorable while it’s still fresh. Studios that only offer one recital a year are forcing every student’s wins to wait until everyone else’s are ready — which means most wins go un-witnessed entirely.
The other problem: recitals are inherently performative, and not every student is built for that. Some thrive on the stage. Some find it terrifying. Some find it actively damaging — adults who carry “stage fright” wounds for decades almost always got them at a recital they were never ready for.
And here’s the part nobody talks about: most adult students will never attend a kid-recital. They don’t want to play the Moonlight Sonata sandwiched between two seven-year-olds playing Hot Cross Buns. So if the only Cement option a studio offers is a kid-coded annual recital, adult students get cemented exactly zero times a year.
That’s a quiet tragedy in a lot of music education. Adults who are doing real, meaningful, often late-in-life musical work — and never getting their wins marked because the studio’s only model doesn’t include them.
When performance IS the right tool
Let me be clear: we are not anti-performance. Performance is amazing for the right student at the right time.
There are kids in our studio who light up the second they get on a stage. Who feed off the audience. Who play better with people watching than they do alone. There are adults in our studio for whom performance is the whole point — working musicians, worship leaders, gigging artists, people who want to be comfortable in front of a room.
For all of them, performance opportunities aren’t just Cement — they’re skill-building too. Bring it all on.
But — and this is the part that matters — performance should be one option, not the only option. The student should get to choose. And the studio should offer enough variety, in enough different vibes and venues, that every student finds the kind of Cement that actually fits them.
What this means for parents
If your kid’s studio only offers one performance opportunity a year, your kid is being under-served. Period. Not because recitals are bad, but because one performance a year cannot possibly catch every win that needs to be cemented.
Ask their teacher: what other ways can my kid mark their progress? Could we record this song? Could they play it for me at the end of a lesson? Could there be a casual moment somewhere that’s not a recital?
If the teacher’s answer is “we just have the recital” — that’s a flag. The skill-building might be happening, but the cementing isn’t.
And if your kid is a child for whom performance is more terror than thrill — believe them. Don’t push them onto a stage in the name of “growth.” Find the kind of Cement that fits them. A recording is just as real as a recital. A video sent to grandma is just as real as a hall performance.
What this means for adult students
If you’re an adult taking music lessons — or thinking about starting — the way your studio handles Cement matters more than you might think.
You are not auditioning to be a child prodigy. You are not preparing for a recital that’s tonally aimed at seven-year-olds. You’re doing something brave and meaningful that a lot of adults wish they had the courage to start, and the wins along the way deserve to be marked in ways that fit your life.
That might be a recording you send to your kids or grandkids. It might be playing at a community venue with a glass of wine in your hand and your spouse in the front row. It might be finally leading worship after years of being too scared. It might be picking up the instrument in your living room and realizing you can actually play the song you’ve loved for thirty years.
If your studio doesn’t make space for adult-coded Cement moments — if their only offering is the annual kid-and-parent recital — your wins are going un-witnessed. That’s not okay, and it’s worth asking about.
What’s coming next
Next up — and last in the series: Evolve. The seventh letter, where the cycle begins again. We reflect on where we started, what we built, and what comes next. The caterpillar gets to decide what it evolves into.
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— Kristi