What are Informances?

Informances are a way to share our music-making. Like concerts, we use informances to present a brief performance which incorporates the music used thus far in the school year to learn concepts and practice skills. Unlike concerts, they are more informative and informal. We take the time to really delve into what we have learned and why we learn it so that parents and guardians can come away with a deeper understanding of what their children are really doing in music class. We make them more informal to reduce performance pressure. They happen during the day to prevent conflicts with the many after school extra-curricular events in which our students are involved. They happen in the music classroom rather than on the stage for a more intimate and acoustically pleasing setting than a large, echoing cafeteria. Finally, we choose to do one class at a time so that more children are involved in more elements of music-making. It ensures that children are never passive and that each child has many opportunities to shine in different ways.

Source: - Countryside Elementary School, Edina, MN

"Informances"

Too many music programs focus on concerts and performances as the only means of developing "visibility" for their programs. While performances are an obvious result of music instruction, we must remember that our students are not professional musicians (even if they may play/sing close to that level). By scheduling numerous concerts, we end up "teaching to the concert" just as teachers in other disciplines might "teach to the test." Concert repertoire should be chosen in light of the musical concepts we want to teach and should therefore represent easy, medium, and difficult pieces with the idea that not all music will be performed in a formal concert setting. "Informances" are a unique way to highlight the musical concepts students have studied and provide parents an inside view of substantive and sequential music instruction. The best way to describe this concert technique is to say it is similar to the Bernstein children’s concerts. Instead of educating children, we are educating the parents.

Source: - California Music Educator’s Association - Advocacy

Recently, informances–programs designed to inform parents about the music program and curriculum–have become a popular alternative to the traditional school music performance. This type of program has the advantage of requiring less additional preparation time because it is essentially a "show and tell" of what goes on in the music room. Informances provide information about the variety of musical experiences available to students as well as information about the quality of the school's music curriculum. At both traditional music concerts and informances, however, parents are essentially observers–they are, after all, the audience; it's their job to listen and their children's job to perform

Source: -General Music Teacher, MENC, Spring, 2002 (Mark Turner, assistant professor of music at Austin State University,Nacogdoches, Texas)