What I’m Trying

I am still, yes, still working on how to approach my audition mind.  I wrote about this before HERE and HERE.

As I practice for this month’s audition, I am trying to get away from working solely on the music.  Of course the music is important, but I know these concertos and excerpts.  I’ve worked them out a million times, played them in auditions, and even performed most of them in the orchestra, and my basic plans are in place.  I am trying now to get myself into a good, focused, clear mindset before each one.    I want to use my breathing to launch myself into a place of focus.  If I can get to where I need to be with a few mindful breaths, perhaps I can control the time and my mastery of the stage while I’m in that crucial ten minutes. 

So, I play an excerpt.  I make sure I know how I want it.  Then I stop, breathe, and try to find my way to the timeless place, the place where I totally know what I’m doing and I can turn the scorekeeper off and just enjoy playing beautifully.  This is so hard to do.  My plan, once I work through all of the individual pieces like this, is to start stringing them together, as I would play them in the audition itself.  Practice taking the breaths quickly between excerpts to clear my head, reset, and be the me I want to be. 

I know this technique is fairly obvious, but it’s genuinely something new for me.  Of course I have practiced stringing excerpts together before, and practiced finding my mental cues and my tempo, and practiced getting from one mood to another.  What I have not worked on in that process is my own brain.  I was always thinking about the music.

 That last statement troubles me, and I think it’s the reason I have taken so long to get to my current project.  Of course it should be about the music.  What on earth is the point of what I do if it’s not about the music?  I should be the conduit for the music, and the interpretations I’ve prepared should just flow through me, and I shouldn’t have to think about myself.  That is what feels awkward about this.  I’ve resisted making the issue be me, because I always assumed that if my interpretations matured just a little more, or if I chose my reed more carefully, or if I pushed through that crescendo more meaningfully, things would just work out.  If I took care of the music it would take care of me. 

But the problem, and the reason that I am not making the beautiful music in a much bigger arena, seems to be that I am getting in the way.  My self-talk and distractibility over the course of a multi-day audition process HAS prevented the smooth, perfect flow of the music, and in order to correct that I have to focus on myself.  So as to take the focus back off myself.  Paradoxical, yes, and difficult, but clearly the answer. 

My success so far has been mixed – sometimes I feel right but then I make mistakes (so am I not as focused as I think?  Or is the focus not the only answer?) and sometimes I just can’t get there at all.  Meanwhile, though, in context – in rehearsals and concerts  – I find that I can fairly easily get to where I want to be by broadening my visual field and looking at more than one note or line of music at a time.  If I can turn on the right feeling and attitude in the orchestra but not alone at my music stand, what is the answer? 

I’m open to suggestions.  Meanwhile, I keep working.  Working harder is probably the answer.