Just got off playing a 3 hour solo gig…drained is the word. I noticed a funny thing, towards the end I was feeling pretty much like I was running on fumes, I’d lose my rhythm unless I was really on top of it, but there was this amazing speed to my fingers and bow that was as easy as it gets, I just had to think it and it happened. There was also this wonderful expression to my playing, I finished off with two airs that I really nailed. Really felt one with the instrument but had to pay so much attention to the music.
Anybody else find this kind of beauty in playing when you are at your limits?
PC
"Anybody else find this kind of beauty in playing when you are at your limits? "
Yeah, man, sometimes it just WORKS!
I think we often approach things in life, including playing music, with a sort of resigned feeling of “Oh, well, this is the best I could ever do”, and block our own progress. Sometimes, when we’re at our limits as you put it, the barriers come down, and we realize we are capable of a LOT more than we ever gave ourselves credit for. Valuable lesson to learn, useful in all areas of life!
Sometimes, when we’re at our limits as you put it, the barriers come down…
That’s so true! In acting class a couple years ago, we did this awesome exercise that really made me realize that. I was doing a monologue from “Saint Joan” and was having a hard time connecting to it that day. Finally my acting teacher made me stand on a box and had the rest of the class surround me. She instructed them privately to kind of mess with me as I did the monologue, starting out with them kind of ignoring me, then challenging me and pushing me around a little, and then finally circling me and shouting me down. As they did that I had to, of course, speak louder and more forcefully to be heard, until finally I was so preoccupied with just being heard I totally forgot about “trying to connect”. By the end I was so frustrated, angered and upset that I literally screamed the last line “I know that your counsel is of the Devil and that mine is of God”. My whole class started congratulating me as I began to cry. lol. I’ve never been that in-touch with a monologue, before or since that day. I was pushed to my wit’s end and able to let go of my inhibitions.