Be here now?

Thinking about my last post, where I said that one reason I’ve been blogging less is that I’ve been too busy doing. And that the “doing” is mostly logistics: booking, publicity, locating/assessing piano venues, finding local collaborators. In other words, everything but playing music.

And also, I’ve spent a lot of time creating the multimedia write-ups of the first four (so far) performances on the Concerts page of the website. When I was young, one often saw persons of a certain nationality,* a people known for its dual loves of travel and high-tech gadgetry, in places of touristic interest. It was common to make gentle fun of the fact that these people were so busy photographing every moment of their trip that they seemed not to be actually experiencing any of it directly.

Well, they won. That’s most of everyone now, walking around protected from direct interaction with the world by their smartphones. If they’re even present at all (as opposed to texting, scrolling, gaming) they’re often engaging with the world behind the lens...or they’re in front of the lens, engaging with it.

Not exactly the same thing, but all the logistics and oversight and documentation for this project reminds me of when Alan Gilbert began as music director of the New York Philharmonic. He decided to blog about it, which was doubly cool: blogs were not associated with the buttoned-up world of elite orchestras, and also, back in 2009, blogging was just still...cool. 

You can read his first post here, but the gist of it was: being Music Director of one of the top orchestras in the world, the one he’d dreamt of leading since he was a boy in NYC, is 10% musical activity and 90% shit work. (I’m paraphrasing; he was much more diplomatic, and he didn’t use any bad words.)

This resonated deeply. I had similar thoughts about my job in academia, which was ostensibly 40% teaching, 40% performance, creative, and scholarly work, and 20% service...but in actuality was about 65% teaching, 30% administrative work (much of it of little consequence) and 5% actual “doing music”. But I was an associate professor at a regional state university, not artistic leader of a world-class orchestra. It was both astonishing and oddly reassuring that Maestro Gilbert felt the same way.** That it was not, even where he stood, all rainbows and unicorns.

Then, if I recall correctly, he never wrote another blog post about his directorship. Which was kind of QED: who has the time?

*I have learned well from my mother, diplomatic and respectful to an extraordinary degree, who literally told jokes like so: “Three members of an ethnic group walk into a bar...”

**Particularly since Alan and I were at college together, where he was just another talented young guy. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about the time I beat him out for a plum college conducting gig. (Spoiler: my triumph had zilch to do with our relative conducting skills.)