Summer’s end is approaching and I have felt and embraced the shift of energy. A habit of past years suggests a repetition of a cycle: Mourning the decrease in daylight. Less time to accomplish… What exactly?
Summer 2022, like most summers, didn’t meet my expectations - but it exceeded the expectations of 2021, so that seems like something… Just a few years ago it would have been hard to imagine performing the violin publicly again; and to imagine sharing the experience with my sister, friend and colleague Brittney Marquand Sedgwick wasn’t foreseen when I “left” the instrument a decade+ ago. Yet I found my voice, a thing notably absent in recent time, through this old tool of music embedded in the memory of my being. Like the teenager who hid in marble halls of old buildings to scream via four strings and centuries old wood, the current iteration of Noah spent much of this summer preparing for a single evening where everything stored up would be released to anyone choosing to be present. The evening and my performance was far from flawless, but it was perfect. Through many imperfections I stumbled my way through doubt and fear, with some of my biggest concerns coming to fruition; but the show continued on. With little space-time to consider a missed run, or mourn a bungled entrance - a more important ethic dominated. An opportunity to connect with a world that felt impossible to approach.
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I read Wendell Johnson’s “People In Quandaries” (written in 1946) this summer; A book on the science of “General Semantics” - An early 20’th century study of ways perception and language effect reality and communication. Despite the book’s age, much of its content remains relevant to our time, and places where it shows prejudice of its time - it hinted at solutions: compassion being the chief among them. Johnson, having been diagnosed as a “stutterer,” spends significant time toward the end of the book describing causes and solutions for stuttering. One line feels worth sharing: “…to hesitate to hesitate is relatively serious in its consequences.” Here, Johnson is warning of a spiral possible when an individual becomes so afraid of failure - effort becomes paralyzed by an instinct to avoid acting in error. A stutterer, in an effort to cure their “pathology” may become so entrenched in not-stuttering that they stop speaking. This can become a reality for any person who becomes so afraid of saying the wrong thing, that they say nothing. For the “non-stutterer” (not having the prison of a diagnosis) it may manifest in speaking endless small talk or suffering in literal silence - in either case, joy is avoided in favor of predictable circumstances.
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Despite immense preparation and best of intentions live performance is not predictable, which may be why we tend to hold it in such high regard. Vulnerability displayed in arts and competition where one lays all the preparation aside to experience and express a moment that does not exist past its now - despite our efforts to record on the best available device, it remains an imitation (lacking significant information to be considered a facsimile). Live performance “is” an intimate exchange between those present. If you were present, thank you. You shared more than you may know, I hope this message might lend more insight into an ongoing process. Teaching has an element of performance. Presenting music on the violin is perhaps more obvious, but we forget that any interaction with high stakes or social cost carries this inclination to “perform” “flawlessly.” Stuttering and stumbling one’s way through existence is necessary in any effort that is directed toward growth and improvement. Of course a true practice of Zen or Taoism wouldn’t be concerned with such finite goals as growth or improvement, but as a violinist or a person at a social gathering I often fail to embody the ethic of play, perhaps I should stop trying to succeed; What a show we would all be in for then…
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