Klarinet Archive - Posting 000283.txt from 2004/10

From: Adam Michlin <amichlin@-----.com>
Subj: RE: [kl] Differing skill levels
Date: Sat, 9 Oct 2004 11:26:57 -0400

These are feelings many people have had and many people will have. I used
to have trouble with the quality of playing in community groups until I
took a tennis lesson.

Tennis lessons, you say, what do those have to do with community bands?
Well, I happened to have a music student whose father had a former career
as a hi-end tennis teacher. He no longer taught (real estate being a much
more lucrative profession), but we became friends over time and he offered
to give me some tips on my tennis playing (I was then and am now a very
very bad tennis player).

He showed me what I was doing wrong (which was almost identical to what I
had once been doing wrong as a musician, a story for another time) and I
immediately became depressed and refused to play tennis for 6 months. I
realized I was making the same mistakes in my hobby which I had spent years
correcting in my profession. I was visualizing having to start all over
again, relearning everything about tennis.

Then it hit me one day. Tennis is my *hobby* not my profession. It is ok to
be very bad at it, as long as I enjoy myself. I do try to play tennis with
people at or below my level (believe it or not, one or two such people
exist!). Or people better than me who simply love playing the game. I try
not to play with the players who are worried about competition or how good
I am at playing tennis. I can well imagine John McEnroe would look upon the
prospect of playing tennis with me in disgust.

You can't apply a professional standard to a hobby. These people want to
have fun playing, they're not worried about how well they play (to a
certain degree). They certainly aren't interested in starting all over
again to do it correctly, and they shouldn't be.

Your mistake is playing with them for free. If they want to hire you, then
you play your part (whatever part that may be), cash your check, and don't
dare criticize them for hiring you. If you volunteer, you have only
yourself to blame if you are unhappy.

Finally, I would add that I have rarely found a playing situation where I
couldn't find something to improve in my own playing ability to take my
mind off of everyone else's playing problems. I'd like to think I became a
better musician as a result. Try playing Sousa transposing at sight on to
your A Clarinet (no, I have never been crazy enough to do this myself) if
you feel that you have nothing left to improve on your Bb performance.

-Adam

PS: All those professional players who look down on the community groups
should consider the members of those community groups, in all their poor
playing but having fun with music glory, are likely to be the ones paying
admission prices for the professional players' precious "professional"
performances.

At 09:16 AM 10/9/2004 -0500, Christy Erickson wrote:
> I take pride also in a quality performance and don't understand the
>"let's just have fun and not worry about it" attitude. How can you have fun
>when the performance is littered with poor intonation, incorrect rhythms and
>screechy tone coming form the people who insist in playing a first part and
>usually don't know how to finger any note above a C, let alone voice those
>notes or play them in tune? It IS great fun to give a great performance.
>Anything less is not fun to me at all.
> As you may have guessed, I live in a small town where the "let's just
>have fun" attitude has been the dominant one for forever. However, our area
>is growing and I've noticed more and more of the professionals in the area
>do not want to be associated with some of these bad community groups.

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