Trust fall

Sometimes it’s good to close your eyes and let go. Sometimes it’s not.

Picture it.

You’re a musician on a stage, in a church, in an auditorium, in some big space into which your sound is traveling. You call out into that space. 

“How’s it sound?”

And the friend who’s listening tells you whatever needs to be told: the low notes are too muddy, the high notes are too bright, you need more pedal, you need less pedal, you must play more incisively, you’re too loud for the other musicians, you’re not loud enough, your text isn’t clear, you don’t need to worry about text. 

“I hope that helps!”

Your mind is racing because the feedback doesn’t match up with your own perceptions. Too loud? I can barely hear myself! More bass? What am I, Metallica? How is it possible that it sounds so different to me?

Now here’s the bananas part. You have to believe the feedback. 

I know! Shortly before the performance you’ve worked on for months, you have to fine-tune your body and mind to new parameters on the fly, incorporating feedback that might seem to contradict the evidence of your own ears. You do it because you’ve learned that you can’t perceive your own performance perfectly. You rely on this feedback, and it’s absolutely in your best interest to find the people who will give it to you straight and clean, and to work at the kind of dexterous flexibility that helps you shift a little in the last hours before the audience comes. 

Learning how to do this is an absolute imperative for a professional musician, and it is terrifying. 

I was in high school when I got my first serious teacher. Carol Sue showed me how to really practice, how to take a problem and strategize fixing it, how to find satisfaction and even creativity in the unsexy work of sheer physical repetition. I started to understand that I had been training my mind and body all along while fooling around at the piano, and that if I wanted to get better I needed to get way more intentional about the training. Piano for me became simultaneously more thrilling and more frustrating. I started to get big praise for my playing and encouragement for my future, and I started to cry at the bench, almost every day. No one was being mean to me - Carol Sue would never - but the experience of opening myself up to advice and feedback was scary, truly overwhelming, and that would be true for many years going forward. I was only starting to understand how much I didn’t know and couldn’t hear yet. 

It’s hard to describe, this mental vertigo, the disorientation of discovering how wide the gap can be between what you hear and what others hear. But then, on the other side of it is this better result. When I listened to Carol Sue and believed her, my playing got better, my music-making got better. Pushing through my own doubt, discomfort, protest, and anxiety was worth it to me, and I began to learn to set aside my gut reactions for this reason. Which was a valuable part of my training, and not harmful while I was in Carol Sue’s hands. 

Isn’t it easy to see how all of that plays into the suffering artist mythology, tears and heartache leading to sublime creation? From Beethoven mastering his own deafness to Rent-hemians rapping in their cold, crappy apartments, our tradition lifts up the idea of physical and emotional suffering as part of the artistic process to a degree that’s, well, theatrical. When it comes to discussions of balance and boundaries, music and theater spaces are really struggling to close big gaps in understanding and practice. It’s not hard to understand why. To do what we do, you can’t train alone. You need eagle-eyed observation from outside yourself, and you need to be able to take in and process this feedback. The rub is that, for most of us, this process starts when we are far too young to understand what is happening. And for the most part, even the best of our mentors have lacked the tools to help us navigate it well.

For music and theater kids, things usually start to shift in high school. Competition is ramping up. UIL, solo and ensemble, All-State: you’re getting adjudicated all the time, both individually and as part of your school. That’s also the age where you start to realize that you have a voice, a communicative gift, a notable level of dexterity - some combination of things that stand out and get you noticed. You might start to realize that you want to Do This, even if you don’t understand what that means beyond the rubber-meets-the-road thrill of showtime. And you’ve done just enough study to have learned how to put your trust in a teacher’s word, even if you don’t understand what they’re asking just yet. 

So the first time a teacher says, we’re staying here until we get this right, you might think, but you said rehearsal ends at ten and I have a curfew. You might think, I have to study, I have work in the morning, I’m so tired. But you probably also think, I should put those thoughts aside and trust this course of direction. I have evidence that doing so will help my performance. And in the end, what you want is a chance to give that performance. 

By the time we get to college, we’ve had a lot of practice in overriding our own instincts, for better and for worse. The first time a rehearsal leader yells, or makes a joke about someone’s appearance, or singles someone out for uncomfortable attention, we might think it’s unfair or wrong. But chances are very good that we’ll stay quiet, waiting to see what happens next, wondering how to make the road as smooth as possible between this bad moment and the performance to come. 

Our industry has numerous issues of unfairness and injustice rooted in all the above, in the way we’re trained to place outside authority over our own gut feelings. Abuses of power in our rehearsal spaces are systemic, ranging from cruel speech to insensitive jokes to racist or sexist commentary to physical or sexual harassment. Support positions in our spaces, everything from rehearsal pianists to stage management to low- and mid-level administrative positions, are often poorly compensated and ill-supported. There is a culture of gossip in many companies in which problems are widely discussed rather than directly addressed. And even on a pure artistic level, too many young classical musicians lose the confidence to make musical decisions without the stamp of approval from an outside authority. It’s not only the potential high cost to the individual that keeps people from speaking up in these situations, but also the learned practice of not speaking up. 

How do we change this? I think it’s imperative that we counterbalance the skills of tempering our own reactions and trusting our coaches. We must make sure we’re not only encouraging our students to express their ideas and opinions, but actively coaching them to do so with precision and confidence. We must stop weaponizing expertise, making it safe to have artistic disagreements. We must share more information about how all parts of our institutions run. We must make it safe to talk about money, and examine the ways in which our culture of overwork has led to continual underpayment of support staff. 

The romance of honing our physical and expressive skills will not change as we do this work. I was in the practice room today wrestling with my next program, and it was the daily epic saga, tiny trudges up the mountain, moments of despair and euphoria serving as stage lighting for the largely dull and repetitious road. That will never change, but the suffering-to-nirvana story doesn’t need to be played out in the systems that surround the work. 

The work is risky, but what if the spaces around it - the rehearsal studio, the office, the boardroom - were truly safe? What if we could begin to treat each other as though we were irreplaceable?

Picture it.