Ok, as you may or may not know, I've been talking about this performance I had coming up. It was tonight. And it went really well.
I'll say a bit more than that though.
A couple of months ago, I filled out the official forms to participate in my town's local annual Music Festival. The piece; Prologue
For the previous 7 years, I've performed and watched others perform in the festival. I've done guitar solos, piano solos, a guitar duet, a guitar trio, guitar ensemble, modern guitar solo, piano concerto and choir. This was the first time I have performed an original composition. A piano solo.
Out of my 8 years competing in this festival, I've had ups and downs. I've felt the euphoria of succesfully completing my pieces, and the self-disappointment in feeble attempts, and one time I could only perform one of my two submitted pieces. I was late to start learning the piano, age 10, when others had been learning from 5 or 6. So there I was, a good couple of feet taller than the younger, more disciplined girls that I was up against. I should point out now that the festival is split up into sections, such as grade restricted piano solos and age restricted solos for other instruments, and then marked and critiqued by an adjudicator.
The adjudicator changes from year to year, although they're always the well learned and highly skilled and experienced musicians. Sometimes they judge hard, sometimes they judge soft, sometimes they comment negatively, sometimes positive, it's a real russian roulette to see if you're going to suffer at the hand of a merciless judge. So, year after year, I'd walk out onto the stage, light shining brlightly on me, and out there is about 300 seats, with probably 100 filled with parents hoping that their child doesn't forget their dynamics or that they stick to the tempo. I'll say now, as a 10 year old kid with about8 months experience on the piano, and about 5 months on guitar, going out onto a bright stage, and looking at all the anticipating parents, and the adjudicator, pen at the ready, it's no wonder some kids succumb to tears, and it's certainly no surprise to feel terrible nerves. For the first couple of years, I coped remarkably well. A few years into it and I was coping much better than others, but unpreparedness caught me unawares. While it was all fine and dandy to play my piece of 4 lines long and take away a glittery certificate, as I gained more experience, the music became more complicated, I needed to practice more... I needed to practice. I learned that public performance isn't always so easy. The music wasn't that hard, but even a little doubt and a whole lot of nerves can lead to a downward spiral of disappointment. But it's something you get over. When you think about it, there's hundreds of people performing, going through that same mental challenge, the nerves before a performance. No-one's going to judge you for stepping down or for fumbling a note, or, in one instance that I had, forgetting to open up your book and playing without the music only to realise what you had done once you finished. There's also the mature age entries, the people who started learning an instrument at age 45 rather than age 5. To them, it's not about going on into a bright and prosperous career in music, rather a personal goal, a yearning to learn the universal language of music and to share it with the community. Now for a lot of these people, it's a step out of the ordinary life, performing in this event, and so they get the nerves too. Age doesn't factor in one's ability to cope under pressure, although experience does help. A friend of mine performed tonight brilliantly in a lengthy cornet solo. It appears that he has all the confidence in the world. But for the amount of times he's been out on that stage, the nerves become just another part of performing.
I don't get nervous nearly as bad as I used to, now I don't really take these nerves as a bad thing. It lets me feel alive and vulnerable, like I'm gambling on the expectations of the audiences. Tonight I was a little more nervous than if I were just performing some song that some professional composer wrote, but this was all me, performing my own composition which only a few have heard me play before. So I was being judged on the composition as well as the performance.
Well, it's suffice to say that, as the only competitor in my section, I scored a first place (not always guaranteed, I'll let you know) with an 85/100 with a kind, but tough judge. The comments were all positive, and the audience enjoyed it too. My mum cried. My grandparents cried, and my father was rather proud of me. Friends and acquaintances gave congratulations, two of my past music teachers were backstage, and they were rather impressed. They had seen me attempt to tackle my last two years of music in high school, skipping grades in an attempt to reach the standard of piano performance required for university. I didn't do so bad in the end, but not enough to pull through. But that didn't disappoint me. Performing isn't my strong point, and I tried to bite off more I could chew attempting to reach a 6th/7th level grade starting from 1st grade 5 years earlier (first couple of years were preliminary grades only). So I've settled in with my strengths in composing, and I've come to enjoy the occasional performance, now that the pressure has eased off. I'm only doing it for myself, and I find comfort in the fact that my family supports me and is proud of me, and my friends and teachers enjoy hearing me make the music that I love making. My theory teacher came up to me after the performance and told me about a songwriting compotition he thought I should enter the piece into, so it's great to know that this teacher, who's taught me oh so many things, and watched me gain confidence and skill, only to decline in the last few years and pull up right before the finish line, he sees what I've done as a thing worth nurturing and building upon.
I apologies for not paragraphing this better, and I appreciate those who take the time to read this "personal journey" of sorts. I feel this is worth sharing, as I don't think I'm alone in these experiences, and others might posibly benefit from gaining some insight into my performing "career".
Thanks very much newgrounds.
Mizox
whoo! I wouldn't be able to do something like that! I mean, I've marched through New York City playing my trumpet a couple of times, and at Nascar, and some other places, but I was just one out of 300+ people playing the same piece of music, I wouldn't have the nerve to play on my own, to be out there on my own, to have hundreds of people watching my every move
you got a video of it? can you show us? (please?)
...
so I was watching an old Mythbusters rerun yesterday that I had somehow missed the original broadcast of, and they made a 4-foot wide subwoofer powered by a diesel engine and it put out, like 190 Decibels (enough to shatter your internal organs) and they were testing to wee whether or not an overdone sound system could blow up a car and the sunroof blew out and then the speaker exploded
WritersBlock
Sadly, I don't have a video of it.
I'm really hoping to take what I've learned here to start up a band when I move out of home, and learn to write some punk/rock tunes and experience the local band atmosphere there.
Yeah, I've seen that episode, I found it quite amusing, but the show really has gone downhill since then.