Being a self taught recorder player there is always the question of who my "audience" is. It's well enough to play for my own pleasure but performance gives a certain excitement, a sense of purpose for pursuing excellence, and a community. Playing as part of a school band or orchestra always has performance built into the model somehow but there is nothing automatic about it. I've enjoyed performing at church a few times, but it's been a struggle to find my comfort level with it. Our society largely uses recorders as educational toys with no intention that anyone actually learn how to play properly, so if you announce a recorder performance a lot of people will expect nothing but what they've experienced before. I didn't want to play in public until I could smash away people's expectations. Also, my experience is that many music performers aren't really that good until they've been playing for a fair number of years, so I have had trouble believing that my playing is any good. Early on I felt like I was playing quite well but I assumed that was just the Dunning–Kruger effect in play, the overconfidence of the beginner. I am quite aware I'm prone to such over confidence so I made a point to find recordings by actual professional players to compare myself with, which was both inspirational and quite sobering. Erik Bosraaf, Lucie Horsch, and Michala Petri sound amazing and often given me whole new perspectives on what the instrument can sound like. But, there is no way I'm ever going to perform like people who started serious performance practice as young children and went to world class conservatories for training. Continually comparing myself to them isn't healthy, but as a self taught player I struggle to find many alternatives. When I do perform in public I often feel like I need to practice for months before I'm worthy to present my art and I'm so obsessive about it I struggle to practice anything else in the meantime, giving public performance a really high cost both in terms of time and emotional investment.
The other performance venue I've had consistent access to is posting video's online. I didn't want to do much of this to begin with. I've had my share of experiences with internet trolls and again even when I felt like my performance was exciting and excellent I knew the Dunning-Kruger effect was altering my perceptions. Nothing seemed likely to draw trolls as much as an overconfident beginner playing badly without knowing it. But on the other hand people did seem to appreciate seeing what I was doing, so I mostly posted video's in private chat messages and only occasionally posted them for everyone to see. As my equipment improved my recording files became too large to send in private chat messages and sending videos became very cumbersome.
While learning to do live broadcasts for my church I had to learn to use YouTube. Posting on YouTube has been the perfect solution to the difficulty of uploading video files for every person or group I want to share with individually. It's been a big step forwards emotionally to post performances there, a statement to myself that what I'm doing is worth showing to the public. To begin with it was mostly only a few family and friends looking, but recently the audience has expanded and my video's are getting many more views. That is emotionally exhausting and exhilarating at the same time. I don't want to get sucked down the track of trying to compete for attention on the world stage, become hooked on giving YouTube free labor on the possibility that I could become monetized, or spend enormous sums of money setting up a home recording studio. But on the other hand it feels like validation that all of my obsessive practice has actually started to pay off and I'm musically maturing. I'll never be a professional, but I can now consider myself a mature beginner. It's nice to feel like I've finally arrived.
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