MTT has a question for you.
American composers don’t appreciate the advanced harmonic language jazz has provided for this culture, and I think it’s to their detriment.
-Thomas Oboe Lee
Thoughts?
(Mr. Lee is from China, but has lived in America since 1966. He and I communicated just a bit some time ago about a pretty oboe work he wrote. I got the impression he was a bit frustrated with orchestras and the lack of new music they performed, but I could have been misreading.)
I received a call at 9:00 this morning about a job. Now that caller made an assumption. One of these two:
Heh. Some musicians actually do go to church. I do believe a majority of others sleep in. Go figure. 😉
(The job is on December 24 and 25. At a church. It was a church choir director who called me. Odd.)
… arpeggios have been around for centuries.
But any composer who uses them now will almost certainly be accused of stealing from Philip Glass.
-Lawrence Dillon (RTWT)
So true! (Mr. Dillon has great blog, for those of you who don’t bother checking out my bloglinks to the right.)
So the blogger (and I’ll keep the blogger nameless here, as I have no permission to expose the player) I wrote about promised not to quit oboe due to the fabulous oboe player.
Good to hear!
So “secret blogger” (for now, anyway; I need your permission to put up a link to your site) … know you aren’t alone. Some of the fears I read about at your site are fears I still deal with. And then there are the others. The “what if I, as a professional musician, am really, really, awful and no one has the nerve to tell me” irrational fear. (I say irrational because certainly if I were that bad some conductor somewhere would have gotten rid of me …?)
But really, so many of us out in ProfessionalMusicLand™ have these bizarre fears. I just read ACB’s post that included the following (and I so wanted to hug her and the other singer who ‘fessed up to this and say, “Yes, yes, yes!”)
** Today I had a friend call me “the hardest working girl,” in terms of my rapidly-filling-up season. Maybe it’s because of all the free time that the above schedule allows, or maybe it’s because I just love my job, but I always feel like I could be – should be – working harder. Like I’m not really doing what I’m supposed to be doing, and someday I’m going to show up for a gig and they’re going to say “How dare you show up so unprepared?” and I’ll get fired and my career will be over.
Ok, that’s maybe a bit melodramatic, but I’ve had the thought! I mentioned this to a mentor this summer, and he shared that another singer had expressed a similar fear about starting a new program, afraid the she would show up and get “found out,” that she didn’t really belong there. My mentor was surprised to learn that she felt this way, as she seemed very confident – and ready! He went on to tell me of an article that talked about the psychology of successful people, and many of them share this fear. Why is that?
Man, can I relate to all that! Of course ACB is at a higher level than I, so maybe I should have these fears? 🙂
At the same time, and dare I say this?, I think many of us have that other voice that says, “You are so good! They will figure it out eventually!”
Maybe I shouldn’t ‘fess up to that part, but I think a lot of us have it and I think that’s what keeps us going. If we only had the negative voice would we continue? (Should we?) I wonder.
And, because I am so wacky and all that jazz, there’s that third voice that mainly screams, “Don’t blow it! Don’t mess up! Don’t be an idiot!”
Heh. Yeah. That’s the loudest one.
