Existentialism on the boards

I’ve reiterated the “public” goals of this project on my website, in interviews, and from the stage: to support Vermont’s community centers and to make a statement about the unsustainability of  routine long-distance travel. But there’s another personal goal: to see if, after almost 50 years of performing if not exactly sporadically, anyway not on a sustained weekly basis, I can at last become really comfortable on stage, to learn to perform at the level I’m capable of when playing in private. 

When I tell people this, they say “ah yes, desensitization”. That’s certainly a big piece of it. You can only get really worked up about a thing so many times, and when you normalize an activity, it usually starts to feel more normal. Also, every time your worst fears fail to be realized—you stumble but don’t fall...or maybe now and then you do! but it doesn’t kill you, and no one even laughs—those fears start to recede.

Another thing is simply that you have to practice whatever it is you want to get good at. No amount of practicing will make you an expert performer if you don’t also practice performing.

And there’s a third way this project is helping me “get over myself”. Some people counsel nervy performers that the quality of their musical performance isn’t such a big deal; it’s not a matter of life and death. But downplaying the significance of aesthetic excellence negates the passion and dedication necessary for artistic achievement. After all, from lots of pretty convincing philosophical angles, in the grand scheme of things nothing matters. But if nothing matters, why bother? Things matter because we decide they matter, which seems good, but then we’re stuck caring about them. How can you care so much and not care too much at the same time?

Conceptualizing a performance as one of an anticipated set of over 250 allows for a kind of end-run around this paradox for me. I get to care, but at the same time it’s clear that each individual performance of comparatively little significance. Whatever happens, there are hundreds more coming to average it out. And there’s little time to brood: I can’t sit and stew about how I played Scarlatti’s K.2 and K.162 in Brownington, I have just 5 days to learn K.3 and K.51 for Underhill. 

A cool bonus is that, unlike desensitization and mastery through repetition, this third way of overcoming performance anxiety can work immediately. Already in the second performance, I was not just intellectually but viscerally aware that this concert was just one brick in a much larger edifice. And while it certainly helps that these 252 concerts constitute an integral project, this ought to be workable for a performer in any situation: every concert is (just) the first concert of the rest of your life.