Recital
Last night I performed my senior recital. For readers who are not familiar with the degree requirements for an undergraduate music performance degree, they include two recitals, one typically performed in the third year -- the junior recital -- and the other typically performed in the fourth or last year. Exact requirements vary per school and are determined at the discretion of department heads and individual teachers, but length and difficulty are common considerations. My program can be found here.
In addition to being a requirement for my degree, this recital is a component of my senior thesis project (a thesis is optional; I've chosen to write about women composers, and thought that this recital, comprised of four pieces written by women, would be a good place from which to start). My thesis director asked me to reflect a little on the experience and write that down; I'm choosing to post it here because, frankly, I don't know what else I would post this week.
(I guess this is the month of long posts! whee!)
1/12/19
3:53 PM
I've been noticing over the past few days that I have trouble converting what I do really well solo -- in the practice room, in lessons, and even on recordings -- into what I do when I'm playing with a pianist. Is it because I hear everything differently? Do I need to practice alone less and spend more time rehearsing with piano? My bank account disagrees.
I am nervous for this recital. I am not nervous because I am underprepared, as was the case for my junior recital; I am nervous because I am giving a performance that will be many people's first exposure to the works of four composers who all happened to be women. (I say "happened to be women" to get away from qualifying them as "women composers.") I am nervous because in my dress rehearsal on Thursday night, I made mistakes that I had made before and that I had thought I'd fixed. I don't trust myself not to make those mistakes tonight. Screwing up tonight means that these four women may never have another chance.
It's all a mental game that I play with myself. I'm prepared. One reason why I'm better prepared for this than any other recital I've given is because I am passionate about this music in a way that I have not been about a lot of other music that I've played. Apart from it being music by women, it's been a lovely and enjoyable time learning it, and the great news is that this performance is not the end of my journey with these works.
Another insidious thing that I want to stop doing: self deprecation. I tell myself that I'm not good enough, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I've prepared well, and in addition, there are a lot of people -- teachers, colleagues/friends, family -- who believe that I can do this. Self deprecation helps no one. It's a bad habit.
There are a lot of threads in my life right now, and they're all tangled in my brain. Tonight, I want to set the tangle gently to the side and let everything go for an hour or so. It will not be perfect; it's not a studio recording. I hope that it will be human. I hope that I do the musical ideas of myself and of these women the justice that they deserve. I hope that people experience complex emotions as a result of the music I play. I hope that this performance lifts me out of myself, even for one moment.
1/13/19
12:42 PM
Last night felt really good. It felt like a synthesis of everything I've been doing until this point (which is what a degree recital is intended to be, I think), in a very organic way. I knew that I was going to sweat; I knew that the rings on my fingers would move as I played; I knew that my hair would sometimes get in my way. I think knowing that these things would happen and telling myself that it's okay to let them happen was an important moment for me.
I've been framing how I experienced this recital partly in terms of how I experienced my junior recital. That, too, felt like a synthesis, but in a less relaxed way (think pressure-cooking versus stovetop cooking). I was in an older recital hall where everything felt slightly more cramped (and the backstage really was cramped). I was prepared, but not as well prepared, and I didn't feel quite the same emotional connection to the music I was playing. Don't get me wrong, I'm proud of my junior recital program, but it was still fairly standard repertoire by composers that everyone in a music school knows well.
Several people told me afterwards that they really enjoyed attending a concert of works by composers who they'd never heard of. This made me feel great because that's exactly what I was going for! I am fairly confident that if people didn't enjoy the music, that isn't because I performed it badly; I believe that I presented an honest and nuanced interpretation.
There were a couple of places where I still felt a little uncomfortable with the piano, but I don't think anyone else noticed (most of them were intonation spots).
When I was onstage, my brain was completely immersed in what I was doing. This isn't something that's happened to me a lot, and it definitely hadn't happened since before my junior year of high school. I noticed it about three movements in, and I'm almost crying writing this because I didn't realize at the time how powerful I felt -- how in control of myself I was. I can be a bit of a control freak sometimes, and one of my long-term personal goals is to become better at relinquising control over things that I realistically cannot do anything about; I felt, last night, that everything that should have been under my control was, and that I knew what I was doing in a way that I didn't a year ago.
One reason why I love performing music that no one knows is because it feels like a really creative endeavor; the less standard a piece is, the more I can really sink my teeth into it and make it my own. Of course, there are still ways in which I can do that with a Haydn concerto, but it doesn't feel the same. Choosing this repertoire has helped me become more assertive and focused in my lessons; preparing it has helped me get over some of my fears, because doing non-traditional projects requires a willingness to fail that I didn't have before. That's probably a big part of how much I've matured as a musician since my junior recital. It's felt like a coming of age, in a way, because I've been as much of a driving force in my technical and interpretive decisions as my teacher and mentors have. Again, control.
I made mistakes; my hands didn't always do what I wanted them to do; but the change that started in me last February with summer festival auditions paid off -- I no longer let every mistake mess up the rest of my performance. I'm not entirely sure how I got here, but I'm thrilled that I'm here. Last night was the first solo performance that I've felt truly comfortable accepting praise about, and that feels massive. It feels like a confirmation that I'm doing the right thing, not just by playing the cello but also by programming and performing music by women and nonbinary people. And I think, reading over what I wrote yesterday, that my hopes were realistic and that all of them happened.