Hi.
Or, “been a minute,” as someone said to me at The Key (a youth services organization that I visit regularly, for music-making purposes) after I waltzed in after pandemic isolation kept me away for over a year. Or maybe it was two, or four, or 20; time is hard these days.
Know what else is hard? Playing an instrument, in this case the Wurlitzer 200 electric piano that you may remember from previous shots across your bow in newsletter form, with actual professional musicians on an actual stage for actual people who maybe expect actual competence. OH and all the music is in this dots and lines on paper form that I often make but very rarely actually read, in realtime, in public. I am told that these dots and lines correspond to events, in time, for which I am responsible.
At Carleton, where I teach, we have prestigious guest artists visit us, called Light Lecturers (after Christopher Light, who endowed the fund). They blow into town for mini-residencies (I have taken to calling all visits to Carleton “circuses,” for reasons unknown to me). I curate the music department version of this circus, which has been a joy, and has brought into our community some extraordinary musicians and people (Caroline Shaw, Anna Meredith, Dan Trueman; I could go on.) This year, Jason Treuting is here. Literally here; I know because I had dinner with him and with Beth, his partner and musical collaborator, and Christine, my partner and everything collaborator, last night, and we CLOSED DOWN the restaurant (amirite?!) because in Northfield you sit among flipped chairs and the medicinal smell of kitchen cleaning liquid if you are still at your table at 8PM, not exaggerating. Sidebar: the kitchen cleaning liquid smell made Beth exclaim “amoxicillin!” which made me die laughing. My mind does not go to antibiotics before, say, Mr. Clean, Pine Sol, SOS, but these are city slickers, so who knows what goes on out there in…Princeton.
As you might have read between the lines, I adore these people, and so when they asked, months ago, even longer, if I would play electric piano on the concert part of the circus (ring two, of three rings total) I said yes. And I meant that yes, resoundingly, thinking at the time that I would most certainly have my act together by then, would most certainly be the best version of the self that says yes by then, would most certainly be practicing over the many months leading up to the “then” in “by then,” and now “then” is “now,” or more accurately “tomorrow,” and sure I have been practicing but. But. BUT! Butt? (I am exactly five years old.) Did I become my best self? Should I ever say yes to anything?
Here is what I did:
Printed the music, after putting it off A LOT, strategies for which included searching for the most recent archive on my computer and then organizing all of the folders. Looked at the freshly-printed music while listening to some reference recordings, then immediately composed a text to Jason saying I could not play this music. Deleted that text. Sat at the keyboard and played a collection of notes that were related to the notes on the page in some way, then moved to the next set of notes and did that again, then stopped and had some tea and composed a text to Jason that I then deleted. Made numerous quesadillas. Found my metronome, which Miles had been using to play A440 while building Legos, which was not in any way annoying. Halved all the metronome markings and began. Ticked them up by maybe 1 or 2 every time I made it through without a dumpster fire. Moved from playing with the metronomes to playing with the reference recordings. Had small celebrations on occasions when I would run out of notes at the same time the recording would stop. Eventually moved up to “replicating the unpredictability of playing live music” by asking Miles to try to distract me while I played with the deliberately-too-quiet reference recordings out of my phone during the installation of our bathroom door while making sure that Bowie the Dog did not escape the house by using my eyeballs and then tracking them back to the score. That last one was yesterday. Before dinner. After dinner I played again, quietly, practice pedal engaged, reference recordings very quiet.
And now it is the morning of the day on which the ensemble will come together to practice this glorious music, before performing it publicly tomorrow night (8PM! Kracum!) and after centering the entire experience of learning onto my own self-concept—inadequacy, over-promising, under-preparing—it occurs to me that Jason’s work will unleash upon this community an expressive power and vision that dwarfs self-concept, that obliterates the proffered narrative. I could feel it loosening during practice, could feel the initial inward gaze catch the Actual Thing, could feel ego trying to hold on (This Is About Your Weird Musical History) but ultimately sublimate in service to Something Else Entirely ( ). It has been so long since I tried to do something like this that it may as well be the first time. I understand how one could get hooked on it, on doing it this way versus the way I (I?) have always done it.
We enter the practice as ourselves but every tick on that metronome is like a single chip away at the solid-appearing surface of who we think we are, or that we think we are the most important thing happening on that stage. Even after having been in music’s orbit for this many years, I see something I had not seen before: ego might get you into the room, but its loosening is what keeps you there. All roads lead back to that practice. I am hoping that I will walk out to my instrument in service of that loosening of self, that to me it will not be about me. And then we will begin and every tick is a chip and every chip is a break and every break is a place where the light might get through.
Wishing ourselves translucent,
Andrea
Practice never makes perfect, practice is an excavation, a deepening of understanding, a bonding with the material, both through muscle memory and a gentle peeling of the soul. Perfect is for machines, practice allows you live through the music, the art, the performance in a new and unexpected way.