On Perspective and Personal Thinking

Today we saw another amazing concert(I know, shocker) that featured a string quartet, a woodwind quintet, and piano. If I’m being honest, I wasn’t having a great morning. I hadn’t slept well last night, my breakfast included a very bruised banana, and my brain felt like a good portion of it was “gone fishing”.

But this small ensemble concert. It was incredible. First of all, some people reading this might not know a lot about music, so I’m going to talk about small ensembles for a little bit. This concert ranged from duets to quintets, but the main thing that’s different is that there’s no conductor. These are pros so they honestly never need one, but that means that you get to see a lot of communication through movement, eye contact, and music that you don’t get in large ensembles that have a conductor. This communication is my favorite part of small ensemble music(and most music, honestly), because it allows for more personal playing I guess? You hear exactly how each player has agreed to play the piece with each other, not the directors vision, and they are going to play it like they want to.

When you hear this kind of music by pros, you therefore hear the best they can play. There’s no limits besides what’s on the page, and sometimes not even that. I believe the performers today got to show off themselves, their instrument, the music, but most importantly their best performances possible.

But the whole time that I was in shock from how incredible their playing was, my brain was waking up and realizing what was going on and telling me a lot of not great things. I’ll never be that good at my instrument, there’s something they have that I’ll never have, things of that caliber. If I’m being honest, that’s exactly half of the reason that I was crying during this performance.

But I shouldn’t listen to that voice. It doesn’t know what it’s talking about, even if it might be right. My value, and everyone’s, isn’t based on how much applause they get, how much their tickets cost, their grades, their achievements, their money. I think it’s how they treat others, how they aim to help the world, and what they want their impact to be. Those guys on stage this morning were also good people, but I can be that good of a person too without being able to play Mozart at a world-class level.