Author: EEBaum
Date: 2010-07-15 16:26
I'm with George. Try it! Comfort with being looked at is a hugely awesome trait, and one that can be learned. I'd start by playing a random really loud note in an atmosphere where it's not expected and people may notice, but also has no negative consequences and is not an out-of-place thing to do. Maybe when an ensemble is warming up before a rehearsal. Everyone's just noodling around, whatever. Play an altissimo D at the top of your lungs. Try to make the note shriek and squeak and crack. Maybe people will look at you, and if they do, smile and give a friendly wave, as if to say "hecks yeah, I just did that! And I'll probably do it again"
Maybe you'd find that embarrassing, but you can then look at the situation and think "why is this embarrassing? I didn't do anything wrong, it was just unexpected." You might even get some thumbs up or applause. Whatever happens, do it for the pure joy of making an awesome sound. Maybe even do it with the person next to you, and see who can play louder.
You can approach music from a couple different angles... you can try to minimize the things you're doing wrong, or you can try to maximize the things you're doing right. As long as you're concerned about someone hearing you do something wrong, you're playing catchup, and beating yourself up for anything you miss, doubly for so for anything *SOMEONE HEARS YOU MISS*. However, if playing is always a challenge to see how much you can do right, you leave yourself a lot of room to experiment. Is this too loud? Too soft? I won't know for sure until I've tried it both ways, and maybe something a bit louder than I thought actually sounds even better.
What that REALLY helps with, though, is to avoid spiraling "I screwed up" jitters and embarrassment, where you miss one note and therefore you're already docking points off your "perfect show" scorecard, then you start keeping a tally in your head of everything that's gone wrong, until you're convinced that your whole performance is a disaster and THEY'RE ALL GONNA LAUGH AT YOU and the room turns dark and everyone dies.
Worse yet, you play everything right for a while, and you're so happy because it's like you got an awesome combo in Guitar Hero and you're aiming at a legendary perfect score, and you get so excited that you refuse to let even the slightest thing go wrong, and the pressure and nerves build up so much that you freeze and get into a weird out-of-body mode and go so out of control that really bizarre things go wrong and you feel helpless to stop them and you get scared and start playing really soft.
OR
If missing a note or someone hearing you botch a passage because you actually played it loud is simply one thing that did NOT go right, you're fine, because you can immediately move on and focus on how well you'll play the next passage, and look forward to all the cool things you can do with the passage, and constantly strive to see how cool you can make the next part and the part after that. You can realize that loud will be called for and soft will be called for, and you might even feel that, today, maybe the next passage would sound great played even louder than usual. So you try it. Maybe you're right, maybe you're not, but you did something to try to make the music come alive, and you have instant feedback on how it went (you'll hear it, other players might respond by changing what they're doing either to match or to let you be heard, the conductor may ask for more or less or give you a glance of just right), and can incorporate that into the rest of the performance.
Don't think about it as "showing them what YOU can do." This isn't about you. You're helping to make music happen. Instead, look at it as "what can I do with the MUSIC." This creates a meaningful contribution, a sense of ensemble, and very importantly, makes it about the music, and not about you. If something goes wrong, the music is the victim, and you can apologize to the music and try to make it up to the music. If something goes right, the music is great, and you're ALL rewarded with good music.
As an aside, the absolute worst, I'd say criminal consequence of judging your performance by how much went wrong is that you've given yourself a theoretical maximum for the best it could possibly go. Unfortunately, your definition of best might be different from someone else's, and your definition today may be different from your definition next year. So you've effectively set an artificial limit to how well you can play something, and it especially sucks if your limit is lower than others' in the group because you prevent them from bringing you up with them. If instead, you leave yourself open with a toolkit of how to make music awesome, with no limits, you may just find yourself exceeding your expectations and creating a truly spectacular performance.
-Alex
www.mostlydifferent.com
|
|
The Clarinet BBoard
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
.jpg){kind=small}
