For the first day in a couple of weeks, I did not have to do stuff to ensure the care of my Mom. I didn’t receive a call from her caretakers and didn’t do follow up on connecting them. I did, of course, do her bills, but that is pretty easy.
Instead I spent much of the day in the same room with panicking young artists.
In the first case, I drove to Kentwood and popped into the high school luckily finding Jordan VanHemert, my student’s teacher (and my musical colleague) standing right by the door. These Solo and Ensemble Festivals are usually housed in large complexes and require a bit of navigating to find where I’m supposed to be. Also lucky was my student’s warm-up room was the first door on the left and his performance room was the first one on the right.
My student had opted out of a second rehearsal the night before. Our ensemble was distinctly under-rehearsed which is sometimes the case with these Solo and Ensemble performances. When the students are playing simple learning pieces this is less critical. My young saxophonist was playing a piece that I found marked 4/5 in difficulty on the arranger’s site.
I had carefully prepared my part so that I would not disturb his performance even though I had little idea of what he would try to say musically with the piece since we had only gone through it a few times.
And the damn piano was a flimsy little electric piano.
My soloist had indicated that he had decided to play the piece a bit slower than we had rehearsed. Very judicious in my opinion. And in fact he began at a solid tempo. He and I had chatted about the interp of the YouTube video (the one I embedded in Friday’s post) and agreed that it was a good performance (and tempo).
Unfortunately, he got pretty rattled as the piece proceeded. He played pretty well but his intonation revealed his fear (he went very sharp). The judge talked to him about it afterwards. The judge asked him how he felt about his performance. I was pretty impressed with the way he hinted to the young student how to strategize about one’s fear.
Of course, when one is a teen and going through such stress, one doesn’t hear much. So it’s hard to tell what he took away from the performance. I always think that this kind of performing (before a judge and often peers and family) at this age is pretty cruel. At least it can be very terrifying.
I jumped in the car afterwards and came back to Holland. After lunch I drove to church to do some organ practicing and then to the ballet studio.
I was pleasantly surprised when my favorite teacher came in the room to lead the Joffrey audition. I had expected to have to work with someone flown in from New York and was sort of prepared to adapt to whatever they needed for the audition.
Instead, the teacher took them through an hour and half of dancing that resembled a ballet class she would give.
Again, the people were young and frightened. I tried to make my improvs very clear and simple to help them through the combinations.
It is exhausting to watch young people striving toward the prize of well performed art with such anxiety.
*********************************************************************
Began the next essay in Don N. Micheal’s In Search of the Missing Elephant this morning.
It’s called “Leadership’s Shadow: the Dilemma of Denial.” There is some amazing stuff in it.
He further clarifies his take on hope and optimism:
“I turn to hope instead of optimism, [hope which is] that state of mind that wills going on seeking betterment in the face of evil and confusion without any gratuitous belief that the effort will succeed.”
This way of thinking is very helpful to me. It describes my struggle with many parts of my life. It’s probably a big reason I returned to church music in the face of such overwhelming devaluing of my particular way of doing it as an art (another reason of course was that I could use the bucks).
In this same essay Micheal once again points clearly to “the complexity of the human condition” which is “now so great that is probably incomprehensible.”
I love his description of how people deny this complexity.
“…[M]ost people know so little about this complex world that the enormity of our predicament is lost on them. They live in a world perceived through a distorting lens that personalizes societal circumstances and reduces them to cause-and-effect sequences.”
Sorry to put so many quotes, but I’m actually only putting up some of the sections of the first part of this essay that hit me. One more. Micheal points out that present socialization and education fails miserably.
“It’s not a matter of whether most people could learn to read with some understanding, do enough arithmetic to balance their home accounts, write simple coherent paragraphs, or even become modestly computer literate… far more is required to engage this world knowledgeably:
the ability to read, write and discourse habitually in terms of multiple variables,
dialectical processes,
systems dynamics,
both/and instead of either/or logic,
and circular instead of linear cause-effect relationships.”
In other words, thinking competently.
I think this nails it.
********************************************************************
This poem hit me pretty hard this morning. Williams is writing about his own mother who died shortly after he wrote this.
ANOTHER OLD WOMAN
If I could keep her
here, near me
I’d fill her mind
with my thoughts
She would get
their complexion
and live again. But
I could not live
along with her
she would drain me
as sand drains
water. Visions pos-
sess her. Dreams
unblooded walk
her mind. Her
mind does not faint.
Throngs visit her:
We are at war
with Mexico – to
please her fancy –
A cavalry column
is deploying
over lifeless terrain
to impress us!
She describes it
her face bemused –
alert to details. They
ride without saddles
tho’ she is ig-
norant of the word
“bareback,” but knows
accurately that I
am not her son, now,
but a stranger
listening. She
breaks off, her looks
intent, bent
inward, with a curious
glint to her eyes.
They say that
when the fish comes!
(gesture of getting
a strike) it
is a great joy!
- William Carlos Williams
*********************************************************************
I discovered that I had not read one of the four or five January issues of the New Yorker so I dragged them around with me yesterday. I found this short story very engaging. I love the stories within the stories. Recommended.
Etgar Keret: “Creative Writing” : The New Yorker
*********************************************************************
