Freedom, constraint, and binaries

Some disorganised thoughts:

I'm noticing a tendency among classically trained musicians and those of us who primarily play classical music to conflate jazz with freedom (implying that classical is not free). I don't find this accurate as it reinforces a binary between classical and jazz that I don't think exists. Certainly in the context of most Western classical art forms, other and more recently developed art forms can be seen as more free; but correlation does not imply causation, and generalisations usually hamper communication more than they help it.

The greater the number of people we are working with, the greater the chance that our creative freedom may be restricted. Why do I think this? It is not necessarily the case. I have felt artistically constrained in orchestral settings; I have felt that I might be overbearing in chamber music settings; I have learned that I must edit how I choose to communicate my artistic expression, and perhaps part of this has been simply the people I have been working with (not always my choice), but I think, also, that part of it is the models by which we are taught to be classical musicians. I haven’t thought through exactly what about these models tends to inhibit unhindered expression of artistic freedom. I don’t have answers. I just have complaints and grievances and regrets. How English of me.

[The greater the number of people we are working with, the more we will be asked to compromise. This is how any relationship between humans works.]

Freedom is not a zero-sum game, and someone else exercising creative freedom does not take away from our own expression of our own creative freedom. We are taught to compare our technical ability to that of others, to know how we match up against our year-mates in an attempt to define how able we might be to find work in our field. There are those of us who, as children, were educated (and I do not only mean by our teachers) in such a way as to now feel incapable of embarking on any venture which might prove itself a failure. Freedom is a leap of faith, and we must wholly trust ourselves and our artistry if we are truly to be free. Traditionally, a classical music education does not teach us to trust ourselves.

(I haven’t done my homework for my class that’s in two and a half hours, and I have no desire to do the homework. I feel sick, because this makes me a bad student. I might cry. Apparently I can only cry in public places now.)

There are times when I think that freedom cannot exist without constraint. Am I, are we setting up a false binary between two concepts that are nowhere near polar opposites? Children are free because our parents are responsible for our basic needs; constraint. I also think that too many words make my head spin, at which point I am unable to be free. I’m thinking too much.