Black and White and Heard Nowhere

Ahoy!  Unemployment ahead!

For all of the wonderfully poetic rhetoric about the arts being the most flexible and transformative discipline one can study, the road to professional success just sucks.  Not that anyone's road to success is particularly yellow and bricked in our given economy (womp, womp...), but the method of becoming a professional musician, visual artist, dancer, etc. is just strange.

There I was last weekend playing a, yeah I'll say it, pretty kick-ass recital.  I played beautifully, not perfectly, but with a lot of heart.  I was proud of myself and people enjoyed the concert and connected with my choice of music.  And that's what it means to be a musician and an artist and a person, really.

Fast forward four days when I was playing an audition for...well, for a summer program that shall remain nameless.  I warmed up, sounded good, walked onstage, played fairly well, but cracked a note in Ein Heldenleben.  Heldenleben is one megolomaniac's attempt to confine every orchestral instrumentalist to the practice room for the rest of our lives, trying to learn this stupid grandiose tone poem.  (JK, I loves it, but I mean really Strauss...fewer notes could've been just as heroic.)  And as a result of that, I probably won't get in to this program.  And that means I don't get a chance to perform for four weeks with awesome people for free while drinking a lot.  So big deal, I can't go to band camp this summer, my life is so hard.  But the point is, I still had/have a lot to offer.  As a performer, as an artist, as a horn player.  But because of the orchestral audition process, the standard by which my instrument's success is judged, the only thing that counts is the lack.  Lack of detail, lack of perfection, lack of playing it the way the conductor expects.

I'm not saying that there shouldn't be auditions in life.  Of course there should.  People need to be weeded out, the most talented and hard-working should be the ones we hear.  I just think there should be a bit of a gray area between "professionals" and everyone else.  It's the difference of a couple notes in almost every winning audition, yet losers sometimes slip into this oblivion where they can't play with anyone and no one gets to hear them.  It's the story of the sprinter who nearly made the Olympics.  Except different because music is meant to be heard and needs an audience to work its magic.

This is why I truly believe there need to be alternative venues for classical music besides the concert hall.  Sure, it's nice to go to the symphony; I go often, mostly because I can be guaranteed a certain level of artistry by the musicians.  Presumably, they all had to win auditions to get to where they are, so we can be free to be moved by what they do, and talk about the symphony like an old pretentious uncle.  But what about the others?  What about people like me?  Sure, I haven't won that big audition yet, but I bet most listeners can't really tell the difference between pros and near-pros.  Except on our resumes.

Beautiful playing happens all around us, we're just too scared (myself and other "trained" musicians included) to endorse it without some other large arts structure backing us up.  There are all different degrees of musicianship; let's open the window a little wider, shall we?  Fresh air could do us some good!