The life Of A Mentally Ill Musician- Day 13

The semester is so close to being done and I’m very excited. Yesterday was pretty chill, I went to practice (though I honestly mostly wanted to play that bass flute) and that was all good. Then I ended up going to get fro-yo and some “real food” (chick-fil-a) with some flute friends to celebrate juries (theirs bc I did mine today). But that was nice just getting to talk and hang out with them. We did go to Petco and I 10000% got Piper another toy. Other than that I didn’t do much. Last night I did kind of do a silent run through of the Chaminade to see if it would help. I’m not convinced it did, but it was worth a shot. Though I’m sure my dog thought I was insane standing in my bedroom with nice shoes on and my flute out to finger through the piece.

Speaking of, today I did have my jury! I was honestly sort of nervous for it, I think because this is a new school, so new faculty to play in front of and it was my first memorized jury. I’m pretty happy with how it went. Though I thought I sounded better in the practice room just before, which is frustrating. I never play the same in front of people as I do when I’m alone and it can be super frustrating, but I guess that’s just part of being a musician. I also had a smaller memory slip…which honestly is extremely frustrating to me. Again, I’ve been working on memorizing this piece for like three months and apparently it still isn’t perfectly in my fingers or brain. It’s very frustrating in ways that I don’t think I can explain. I just feel like my memory shouldn’t be slipping after this long and how much work I’ve done to get it memorized. Everything else was ok, it wasn’t the greatest I’ve played or the worst. There was some really cool and good things (like the high note tapers I did in the cadenza), but also a lot of just mediocre stuff.

I know a lot of people get discouraged, loose motivation, get stressed, or even depressed around jury time and I definitely have experienced probably all of those throughout my short 8 (I think) juries. It’s the end of the semester, it’s the last thing you have to do and it’s intimidating!! Walking into a room with a bunch of faculty sitting behind a table basically getting ready to critique your playing and decide if you should be a musician is really freaking scary. Not to mention most of the time when you’re done playing all you get is silence and a “thanks”. Juries are scary and can be stressful. For me, I always tried not to think of juries as an end all be all. A jury is just another performance, it can be good or bad depending on the day. One performance will never determine someones worth as a musician. Never. So it’s okay if it’s bad. Maybe you’ll get a bad grade, who cares? It doesn’t mean you’re any less of a musician. It can be really hard to walk out of a jury, or even any other performance, not feeling good about it. It sucks. There have been multiple times, honestly even one recently, where I had a performance that I wasn’t happy with. I was disappointed in myself. I knew I could do better. But it was also just one performance. It’s like a lottery, you can only do so much to prepare for it. Honestly, I think a lot of the time when I don’t feel good about a performance it’s usually not about me. Yeah, I’m disappointed and wished I could have done better, but I also worry about what others will think. I don’t know if that’s the social anxiety in me or the musician or even the perfectionist. But I worry about what people would say or think about me because of the performance I just gave. I don’t think about this when it’s a good performance though, only ones I don’t feel good about. So why should I care about what people think when I have a “less than pleased with” performance? I obviously don’t care what they’re thinking after a good one. I’m not thinking “wow they’re going to know how amazing of a flutist I am now” after a good performance, but I’m thinking “wow they’re all going to wonder why I’m even here choosing this career” when I have a bad one. That seems harsh, but it’s the reality for me. So, this just goes to show that I, along with probably tons of people, need to let go of caring too much about what people think, and even what I think, based off of one entire performance. Because that’s all juries, auditions, and recitals are. They’re all just a performance of how you played that specific day at that specific time. One performance can not possibly determine that you are a bad musician, even if it feels that way sometimes.

That was a lot of deep stuff right there… moving on… I also had my aural exam today, which is basically just sight singing melodies and rhythms. It honestly went really well! We had prepared melodies and rhythms that our prof would chose at random and I ended up with the one rhythm I didn’t want to do, but I did fine. I surprised myself too because when I would finish I’d look at him and ask if I sung a certain interval correctly lol. Then at the end he 100% said that he’ll see me next time and I was like woah man, that was the final there better not be a next time; I don’t think I’m failing. We’re good though lol. After that I had annoying printer issues on campus, but got it worked out enough to finally go home. I watched my jury video back and took some notes on it to add to my portfolio (which basically consists of all of my practice logs and lesson notes) and then completed all of that. As a random-ish side note, I did also get another planner so that I can dedicate it to my practice logs, that way I can have it all in one spot and not have papers flying everywhere 🙂 . I’m very excited for it for no reason. But now the only thing I have left is my theory final on Thursday! I probably will no close to nothing but clean tomorrow and then I’ll be back with a post Thursday!