Recital Meltdown
(Chock full o’ stress here at CGS)
I heard that smoking cuts years off your life; every time a recital pops up I think I may give it a try. Those two days a year in the fall and spring are my least favorite of the year and things get plain chock full o’ stress here at CGS. The first text message I ever received on my cell phone was right before a recital. “I’m in the parking lot. I’m not coming in.” People get nervous before they play. I do too. Personally, I have had two recitals this month and the anxiety never goes completely away. People handle the stress in different ways. I remember one teenager sat in the chair without playing a note and scowled menacingly at the audience one at a time hoping they would go away. They did not, but I asked her to.
Recitals are expensive, ungrateful, time confusing affairs. My pet peeve? It isn’t the people who don’t play well that bother me; it’s the ones who play well - and then get up and leave before the recital is over. I guess they assume that everyone else came just to here them play! I know what you’re thinking: All this begs the question “Why do it then? You can still teach guitar without recitals -all the other guitar teachers in Columbia do.”
The problem is I don’t teach guitar. I teach people. I have many guitars and I have never taught any of them. I tell people when they come that there are no contracts involved, but that is not entirely true. When you sit across from someone who wants to up their guitar game, you make a contract with them. “If you do this, and this, then this will happen. The recital is when that contract takes shape. The recital is the deal closer and it a primary and indispensable key for growth as a player.
I finally figured out how to have a studio of great players, by having a studio of great players. Hearing other guitarists who are working through the same pieces as you, or pieces you will someday play is invaluable to progress. Being involved in a studio means that your practice helps out everyone who hears you play. The recital is the lab where a lot of the real foundation for progress develops. That is why I do it!
This year we are going to have an optional dress rehearsal at our house the night before. I hope you’ll come. In the meantime, let’s hear about how you deal with recital craziness.
About Me
- David Reynolds
- Provenance: Bryn Mawr Pennsylvania College: Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University
11 comments:
I am not a guitar student but my friend Jen is. I've come to her recitals and we always watch all the students play, even after she has finished playing!
I haven't played a recital in at least 15 years. From what I recall it was anxiety-inducing when I was young.
Last year I played drums in my first band and I think playing for hip kids in a rock band is not that unlike the recital; you still feel like people are going to judge you! If there was a magic pill that would allow me to just enjoy playing and not worry about what people think, I would take it in a heartbeat.
Jayn,
Thanks for that comment. I think you have stepped through and important door. You are right, the one big card that each of else holds is ourselves. No one else can reproduce that and allowing ourselves to play that hand in public can be a huge moment in anyones life. I can't think of a more exciting way to spend an afternoon in November or a lifetime!
Piano was my instrument for many years, beginning when I was 6 and barely able to touch keys and pedals at the same time. Though I loved playing, I hated every recital, every competition, every home practice session that ended in a pre-teen huff when someone entered the room to listen. (It didn't matter that my back was turned; the presence of an audience drilled into the spot between my shoulder blades, sharper and more high-pitched than any dentist's tool, and equally painful to endure.) My joy in the instrument disappeared over the years, as a pianist's excellence became one more thing I was required to achieve rather than something that had anything to do with me. By the time I went off to college – ironically, the first place where I might have been able to play in private, behind a door with a lock – I was unable to find my way back to what I’d once loved.
So a year ago, when at age 33 the absence of music began to feel like a regret, I decided to find my way back. A new instrument, on my own terms, for me and me only, with no one’s expectations other than my own. Except…except. The mandatory recital.
I approached my first CGS recital with a curious mix of intense anxiety and intellectual detachment. The piece, I knew, was still beyond my abilities, and only sheer force of will allowed me to play it through (damn you, Blackbird, damn you a thousand times). I knew it was possible I would rise to the occasion and play better than I ever had; I figured it was equally likely that muscle memory would fail and I would simply freeze, a sacrifice at the altar of Kittamaqundi. Either way, I would wake up the next day.
I don’t recall the moments (hours?) of my performance. I played, I believe, with tinny, nervous competence, tightly strung, neither excellent nor awful. But I do remember things that stay with me as we approach November 30th.
I remember discovering that most of the girls and women performed in jeans, not in a dress as I’d chosen that day, and I noted it with relief for next time. I remember the chairs set in a circle, the casual embrace of that configuration. I remember one of the classiest gestures I’ve ever witnessed, when an older, more experienced student coaxed a nearly paralyzed young “first-to-perform” to the stage with a hoot of encouragement and a raucous round of applause. I remember my envy at the spindly, graceful hands of teens far taller than I, and wondered whether they could see their own beauty through the haze of self-consciousness. I remember my husband next to me, digital video camera tucked discreetly by his hip, and our 3½ year old son squirming on my lap, whispering that he “would be so proud of me” and was it almost over and could we go to a restaurant for dinner?
With this fall’s recital just a few weeks away, I’m far less nervous than I was six months ago. Not because my skill has increased, though I’m fairly certain it has. Not because my selection is any easier, relatively speaking. It’s because for the first time, I understand – as a performer – the collective of trust that forms between audience and entertainer, in the best of rooms, be it open mike night, Broadway musical, arena concert...or a little stone church in the suburbs.
Has anyone rounded up an audience to play for the recital?
Here I go pestering David one week to post more on the blog, then I get so busy I don't notice that he has!
It's ridiculous. I'm a complete ham. I have no fear of public speaking; for whatever reason it doesn't seem to constitute "performance" for me.
What Jess said about being overly attuned to the presence of an audience rings true. It reminds me of high school, and the semester I took typing. I'd had a typewriter since I was 11, I loved writing on the thing, I was very comfortable with it. I thought the class would help my speed, teach me the "right" way to do it. And I was going gangbusters! Doing a great job! Until the teacher set the timer.
It was typing, for goodness' sake, not performing in any way, but there it was: that pressure from something outside myself. It had tripped me up in piano recitals as a kid, and in choral auditions, and even sports. When I first started lessons at CGS, the spring recital came up right away so I didn't have to participate. That fall, I was as nervous as I'd been about anything in ages. My heart was beating so fast it was affecting my ability to place my fingers correctly. I didn't know why it was so much harder there, in that chair, than it was in my own living room.
All I can say is, the atmosphere at the recitals is so relaxed and valuable, I think I've actually grown to appreciate the experience. Although I don't exactly savor it, I think it's an important part of what I'm doing as a student.
Well Sunday was a difficult time for me. After all the time spent on practicing, i didn't play well at all and seriously thought about packing it in. i realized that i'm into the guitar for what i get out of it and while i can sound great by myself or playing in front of David, live performance is just the next journey in my guitar evolution. I well get better...
This has nothing to do with recitals, but I just read that George Russell, the father of the "Lydian Chromatic Concept," passed away. I was curious about how widely his theories of tonal gravity are accepted and whether they are given much academic weight at places like Peabody. I am aware that his work was a big influence on Miles Davis and his modal phase. And no, I don't pretend to understand the Concept; I'm just curious.
-Steve
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