Klarinet Archive - Posting 000620.txt from 2001/04

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: Re: [kl] Conductor's and Musician's Ego
Date: Thu, 26 Apr 2001 05:04:02 -0400

On Wed, 25 Apr 2001 17:44:51 -0400, gnibbelin@-----.com said:

> A mystery to me concerning the egos of the Revellis of the world is
> that if their egos are backed up by self confidence, why do they feel
> it necessary to disrespect and humiliate others to build their own
> already more than adequate egos?

First, their egos may not be backed up by self-confidence. (After
all, we're not privy to the inner life of most music directors:-)
I'd say they are often principally after results, because what they
really love is the music. And people after results use whatever they
have at their disposal.

Second, and connected with that, such people mostly don't 'do
disrespect' in order to build their egos directly. Of course it's true
that getting the best possible results may incidentally build their
egos.

I forget who it was who advised conductors: you can do the job by
getting the players to love you, or you can do it by getting them to
hate you; but you can't do it with anything in between.

Though I don't know whether this is really true, it implies that one
rather mechanistic viewpoint if you're a director is: are you interested
in doing the job? And if you are, what are you prepared to use?

Perhaps that's the question that 'sadistic' directors have answered for
themselves in their 'sadistic' way.

Now, there have of course been lots of examples of directors who got
results essentially by getting their players to love them. And there
are even examples of people who, further than that, weren't interested
in the results at all if they required that their players were forced to
do *anything* they didn't want to do -- but who had some success
nevertheless.

Of course, it would be nice to say that these last two categories always
got the best results.

But beyond all this, I think musicians ultimately love more deeply, and
therefore do best for, the directors who seem not to love *them* at the
time at all, just the music; but whom they came to feel, did love 'the
larger them', *really*. So that it somehow wasn't to do with what they
were doing, but what they were being.

I suppose love is a funny thing.

But we knew that before:-)

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE GMN artist: http://www.gmn.com
tel/fax 01865 553339

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