First of all I want to say thanks again to our performers and those that came to join us last Sunday for our recital. We had a wonderful time playing, and it seemed as though the friends and family that joined us did as well, which is always a welcome bonus.
As a student and a teacher, a performer and an audience member, I find the whole endeavor of putting on a recital about as gratifying as it gets. As a performer the suite of feelings is comprehensive, be it the fear of failure at the moment of performance, the elation of success when we lay out our best, or the emotional architecture of the piece itself; those of the musician as much as the music.
To see a student perform is no less exhilarating it turns out. To walk with someone down a path for some time entails a sense of what they’ve seen of the woods. In watching my students perform I wait, breath shallow, wondering what they’ll take with them from our time together. What have we built? When all else stops but them, for however many moments they make music, some partial answer is rendered in that performance.
Although I thoroughly enjoyed (and thought highly of) each performance, my favorite parts were the mistakes. The second law of thermodynamics, for those that are unfamiliar with it, can be paraphrased as, ‘over time, order tends toward disorder’. Even simpler, things fall apart. Mistakes happen, and the realms of performance are not immune. So the goal shifts from perfection to a focus on building resilient habits. We talk about playing through the mistake, following through with the music, keeping the thread weaving, and we do so precisely because the instinct is to stop and fixate. And as the pulse of each piece carried through, in spite of missteps and missed notes, I felt the strength of what we’ve built so far.
Thanks again and congratulations on a job well done to all involved, it was a genuine treat. Otherwise I’ll leave the reader with the video of my part in our performance, replete with a quick (mostly accurate if not complete) history lesson and bit of Beethoven, mistakes and all.
Always learning,
R
