Friday, November 25, 2011

some more thoughts about music...

...so you can skip this if you're tired of them.

My junior recital is in a week.  (December 2!  7:30!  Martin Chapel!  You should come!)  So today when I was practicing I decided to play through everything straight, the way it will be next week, without stopping to fix mistakes, so I can tell what I want to work on between now and then.  And it wasn't perfect, but it was exactly what I hoped for.  Because after I was done I knew I got it.
Music isn't about perfection, it's about passion and joy and expression.  I can't expect every note to be in tune and clear and the way I want it, but today I knew the right feelings were there.  And that made me completely happy, because what more could I ask for?  I just want to give the music what it deserves, and I just want to make people feel something, and I just want to lose myself in the emotion of it.

In String Pedagogy on Tuesday, Joan told us horror stories about people who play for professional orchestras, and let me tell you, if I had ever been thinking seriously about auditioning for one, I'm not planning on it anymore.  I don't want to be part of anything where people can lose their job for one mistake or slash each other's tires from the pressure of it.  To me, professional orchestras like that have lost the essence of what music means to me.
Anyway, the moral of the story is, I'm learning to find pure, simple joy in my music.  After years of striving for perfection, it's nice.

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