organically

Funny, I had been planning on writing down my hilarious impressions of my adopted hometown, but, in this time of pressures from work, school, and what I’ll generously call my music career, I’m afraid you’re in for another emotional post.

Some things have to happen on their own time.  You can’t hurry up and grow your organic wasabi root – the thing can take up to three years to grow, organic or not.  You can’t hurry up and make your voice do what you want it to do.  You can’t wake up one day and have the career you want.

Welcome to the world of vocal studies.  You know how you want to sound, and what it is you’d like to be able to do.  Unfortunately, at any given point, your body is about three months behind your mind.  Musicians get so frustrated in the practice room because of this.  At the very least, writing is an art in which the finished product is not based on your performance in one instant.  I can spend hours – or minutes – caressing a sentence, and the mistakes stay on the cutting room floor.  I can also spend hours in the practice room, but mistakes will still end up in the performance.  You can’t rush your own progress, you can only be impatient with it.

I’m making perfectly good progress.  I feel that every time I perform is better than the last, I work hard to behave professionally, I take every performing experience seriously, and I’m an entrepreneur by creating performing opportunities.  So isn’t it annoying that the other people’s success feels like my own failure?  A colleague wins a steady performing job, without even auditioning.  She was in the finals the year before, and they just decided to give it to her this year.  In so many ways, I’m not at that point.

Just a matter of time, you say, these things have a way of working themselves out, stick around awhile and things will happen for you too.  Hmm.  It ain’t so easy in an unforgiving profession.  Though I’m reminded of a musician I met a few years back.  He played some obscure Renaissance instrument, like the crumhorn or the bombard.  He was describing his career, and how it takes quite a while for things to get rolling along.  But he did conclude that there’s always a space for the next batch of musicians.  “Cause y’know why?  People eventually die.”

A little too busy to properly post...

As evidence of the sleep-deprived, swamped state I’m in, I was laughing to tears during my continuo class this morning. Why? I cracked up whenever the prof described the plucking mechanism of the harpsichord. It brought to mind a favorite tongue twister:
http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~mentor01/song.htm

“She’s lost it,” proclaimed a friend.