Recital Recap (Thoughts on Success)

My recital wasn’t perfect.

This isn’t surprising. I haven’t counted exactly, but I had several thousand notes to play, and there are a lot of ways a note can come out wrong. It can be the wrong note, or out of tune, or not attacked cleanly, or left cleanly, or the wrong length, or not well blended with the notes on either side . . . and that’s not even getting into issues of phrasing and making compelling musical shapes. Playing a note correctly involves an intricate coordination of fingers, breath, and tiny muscles in the mouth, and a minor change in any of those can lead to failure.

So yeah, I made some mistakes. Some of them I noticed in real time as I was playing, and others I’m sure I’ll discover as I spend time with the recordings. In many ways, this is what classical training is: a relentless honing of one’s ability to ferret out mistakes and correct them. I’ve had a lot of that training, and I’d like to think I’m at least halfway decent at said ferreting out and fixing. I have a running list of areas for improvement in my playing, and I’m sure some of those will be reinforced by listening to this recital.

But I think it’s important to note that fixing everything on that list isn’t really a goal I have. It’s very easy to equate technical perfection with musical success, but I think that’s wrong. I don’t make music to show off my technical prowess. I make music to make people feel things.

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The Road Ahead

Given my impending recital and then cross-country move, my blogging schedule is about to become wildly erratic, so instead of putting out Yet Another Take on the Orlando shooting (let’s be real, there are already more than enough white voices involved in that conversation anyway), I want to outline what my plans are as far as the blog goes so that we’re all on the same page and no one is surprised by a lack of Content they were expecting.

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OFAN Mini: Reviews

I’ve always had a lot of thoughts about concerts. It kind of goes with the territory of being a composer/performer — when you spend so many of your waking hours picking apart your own playing and writing, it’s pretty hard not to do the same to others. For the most part, I kept those thoughts to myself, or at most talked about them with whoever I happened to see the concert with. That was fine as far as it went, but that wasn’t very far; when your thoughts just disappear into memory, it’s hard to build on them or notice larger patterns.

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Old Friends And New

My first few months in LA were lonely. I moved out here to take the job I currently have as a music archivist, but none of my friends were moving with me, and since I work in a room by myself with a bunch of old sheet music, I don’t exactly have a cohort of coworkers to bond with. I tried out for a spot in a youth orchestra towards the end of that first summer, but I didn’t win the audition, so playing bassoon — which in college was a great way to branch out and meet new people — became, like composing, something I would have to do by myself, in the solitude of my apartment. There were weeks where the only times I used my voice were singing along with the car stereo on my ten-minute commute and saying “hi” and “thanks” to cashiers in grocery stores.

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