Text 1: Under the depot lights, by Safiya Bowen

An original contemporary memoir extract.

When I joined the Riverside Community Choir, I had not sung in public since primary school. For twelve Tuesday evenings, forty of us rehearsed in a chilly church hall. I learnt to watch the conductor instead of the person beside me and practised the most difficult song quietly at home until my family knew every word.

Our concert was held in a converted railway depot. On the afternoon of the performance, we arranged four hundred chairs, tested the microphones and warmed our voices in a storeroom between towers of folded tables. Everyone had been asked to wear black, but I brought two different black shoes and did not notice until another singer pointed them out.

From the stage, the audience seemed much larger than it had while we were arranging the chairs. During the opening song, the bright lights hid the conductor's face and I came in two lines too early. The singer next to me touched my elbow, and I stopped, watched for the next signal and rejoined the choir.

By the final song, I was no longer staring at my feet. The audience stood to applaud, and I spotted my father waving from the back row. Afterwards, we stacked every chair again and swept the floor. It was nearly midnight when I reached home, too excited to sleep and still hearing the last note in my head.

Text 2: My first appearance with the band, by Thomas Willet

An original autobiography written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

Text 2 is from the autobiography of a man who joined a town band in the 1870s.

I had practised the cornet for six months in the loft above Mr Dale's forge before the bandmaster judged me fit to appear with the others. Our first engagement was an afternoon concert in Elverton market square, where we were to collect money for the local infirmary.

My uniform coat had belonged to a broader man, and my sister spent the previous night moving its buttons. On the morning itself, the band walked five miles to Elverton with our instruments packed in wooden cases. I carried the bundle of music as well as my cornet and guarded it anxiously whenever we crossed a muddy stretch of road.

A wooden platform had been raised outside the town hall. Tradesmen stood in their doorways, and children crowded so close that the bandmaster had to ask them to step back. During our second piece, a gust lifted two pages of music from my stand. One page caught beneath a vegetable cart, but the drummer continued beating time while I played from memory.

When we finished, the crowd cheered and filled three collecting tins. The bandmaster said I had kept my head, which pleased me more than the applause. We walked home after sunset with sore feet, sharing a loaf and the last of the cheese along the road.

Using information from both texts, explain briefly what preparing for and giving a public performance involved for these writers.

You should make it clear which text you are referring to.