Can AI Make a Great Program for My Concert?

It's the week before the concert.

You've got the setlist locked. You've got a hundred other things pulling at you: sectionals to run, risers to schedule, a kid who still hasn't turned in their release form. And somewhere on your to-do list, in smaller and smaller font each time you look at it, is: make the program.

You know how this goes. You've got two options, and you've used both of them.

Option one: you build it from scratch. Open a blank doc, stare at it, and start typing out the event details, then the setlist, then try to remember what you said about that Whitacre piece two years ago because you liked how it sounded. Ninety minutes later you have something. It's fine. It's also 11 p.m.

Option two: you open last year's program, find and replace the song titles and the soloists' names, and hope nobody notices that the director's note still references "an unforgettable fall semester" in the spring concert program. You've got twenty minutes. Twenty minutes is not enough time to make something feel new. It's barely enough time to make something feel finished.

Neither of these is a personal failing. It's just the reality of the job. The program is real work that deserves real thought (it's often the only physical, lasting artifact of the concert for a parent or grandparent who's going to tuck it in a scrapbook), but it almost never gets the time it deserves, because everything else on your plate got there first.

So here's the actual question: how do you make a concert program in twenty minutes that reads like it took ninety? Turns out, AI can get you most of the way there. Let's walk through what that actually looks like.

What goes into a good program

Before touching any tool, it helps to know what you're actually building. Strip away the formatting and a concert program is really just five things, done well:

1. Event details: concert title, date, time, venue, ensemble name(s). Simple, but it's the first thing people check, so it has to be right.
2. A director's note: a short, personal paragraph that sets the tone for the evening. This is the part that makes a program feel like your program and not a template.
3. The setlist with program notes: each piece, its composer, and a few sentences of context on what it's about, why you picked it, what to listen for.
4. A roster: who's performing. Every section, every name, formatted so nobody's left off.
5. Acknowledgments: boosters, accompanists, admin, the parent who hauled risers on a Saturday. The people who made the concert possible and rarely get thanked in writing.

That's it. Five components. Screenshot that list if it's useful, it's the checklist worth having open before you start, whether you're building a concert program example from scratch or working from a sample you already trust.

Here's one, start to finish

Let's make this concrete. Say you're the director of a mixed high school choir called Riverside Chamber Singers, and your spring concert setlist looks like this, pasted straight out of your rehearsal notes:

Raw setlist, as-is: Sing Me to Heaven - Rutter Set Me as a Seal - Clausen Loch Lomond - trad arr Sirett Java Jive - novelty arr, feat. jazz combo Homeward Bound - Paul Simon arr Shaw Total Eclipse of the Heart soloist feature - arr TBD

Messy. Real. Exactly what's actually sitting in your notes app right now.

Now, an AI-drafted program note for one of those pieces. In this case, feeding the tool just the title, composer, and one line about why it's on the program ("we're closing with this because it's the seniors' last concert"):

"Homeward Bound" (Paul Simon, arr. Bob Chilcott). Written in a train station in the middle of a tour, Simon's ballad has become an anthem for anyone who's ever missed home. Tonight it carries extra weight, closing our program in honor of our graduating seniors, four years of Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and the long road home that's just beginning for them.

It's a first draft, not a finished thought. Keep it, cut a line, swap in an inside joke only your seniors will get. You're editing instead of staring at a blank page at 11 p.m.

Do that same pass across all six pieces, drop in your event details and roster, and fifteen minutes later you've got a finished, polished layout. It looks and reads like you spent your whole evening on it, because the thinking is yours. You just didn't have to generate every sentence from zero.

If you want to try this with a general tool you already have open, a prompt like this works well in ChatGPT or Gemini:

"Write a warm, 2 to 3 sentence program note for [piece title] by [composer]. Context: [why you picked it / what it means to your group]. Audience is families at a school concert, keep it accessible, not academic."

Run that once per piece and you've got a full draft to edit from. Or, if you'd rather skip the copy-paste-into-a-doc part entirely, MusEdLab's Concert Program tool does this same drafting, plus the layout, roster formatting, and acknowledgments, in one pass. Some teachers search for it as a concert builder, others just want something that acts as a concert creator or a concert maker so they're not assembling every piece by hand. Either way works. The tool matters less than getting the twenty minutes back.

The roster and student privacy

The roster looks like the simplest part of the program. Just a list of names. So it's worth pausing on, because it's actually the part that should make you most cautious about which AI tool you hand this task to.

Any tool that asks you to upload a class roster, a spreadsheet of names, or a rostered list pulled from your gradebook is asking you to hand student data to an AI system. That's true even for something as low-stakes as a concert program. Names, grade levels, and section assignments are still student records, and under FERPA, how that information gets handled, stored, and processed matters, even when the end use is as harmless as printing "Sarah Martinez, Soprano II" on a page.

The safest version of an AI-assisted concert program is one where the AI never sees a real student name at all. Draft the event details, the director's note, and the program notes with AI. Then add the roster yourself, by hand, at the end, into a tool that was built to never ask for that data in the first place. It costs you an extra minute or two of typing. It also means there's no upload, no stored list, and no question later about where your students' names ended up.

If you're evaluating any concert program builder, whether it's a general concert compiler, a specialized concert program tool, or something you cobbled together yourself, this is the question worth asking before you consider the roster the rest of the setup: does it need my students' names to work, or does it just need a place to put them?

Try it yourself

The program is one piece of what we think of as "the everything else," the pile of real, necessary work that surrounds the actual music-making and rarely gets its own time slot. Separate from the rehearsal and the performance, this is the paperwork, formatting, and last-minute assembly that either eats your evening or gets rushed past entirely. It's exactly the kind of task AI is suited to helping with, quietly, in the background, so the time you get back goes toward the parts of the job only you can do. It's part of a bigger shift, too. Ask any director and they'll tell you AI tools are already changing how ensembles program, market, and promote their concerts, not just how they get printed.

If you've got a concert coming up, give Concert Program a try. Worst case, it saves you twenty minutes. Best case, it's the last time you dread building one of these.

For a full walkthrough, our Help Center has a step-by-step guide to get you from raw setlist to finished program.