(I wrote this post at the beginning of January and somehow never hit publish until now. Whoops!)
This past Sunday I went to a meetup of musicians who get together twice a month and sight-read classical music together. They meet in a café–where there are already people–and play music they’ve never seen before. Once I got there I realized that literally everyone else there had gone to college for music, and many of them made their livings as musicians. I was way out of my league. So, stepping outside my comfort zone, I picked a duet, and I and another clarinetist played it. We had to stop I think 5 times, and there was a brief passage we just had to skip because I couldn’t play it.
When we were done, everyone there clapped, quite sincerely. I didn’t look or really listen; I did not want to let the applause “in”. I did not want to own it, because I’d failed to perform the way I want to be seen performing. “How well,” I asked myself, “would you have to have played it before you’d let the applause in?” I started naming conditions, and interrupted–“And do you get that if you were so good that you could come in here and sight-read all this music perfectly, that the applause would be meaningless?”
“Where the F*@& did this thought come from?!”