Wednesday, September 28, 2011

questions posed, answers attempted.

I recently posed on our studio blog the following:

"....how do you interact with the ideal in your musical life? Is it an inspiration, or do you find it daunting knowing that you will work your entire life only for an approximation, travelling along a teleology with an impossible end-point."

Formulated on the heels of my most recent engagement with Hegel, these questions represent a reflection of my tumultuous relationship to The Notion. Most violently manifested in my abandonment of institutional musical study, this proverbial 'bad boyfriend' led to a springtime terror of entropic sameness. Things fell apart while my addiction to that claustrophobic and suffocating peril—the stage—remained.

I discontinued my relationship with performance for so many reasons; the most pertinent (for the present discussion) was that nagging and inevitable inadequacy to which any musician worth her salt falls prey. At the time I thought the choice would bring contentment: my desire for achievement thusly sated with a vision of the forthcoming sedation in domestic ether. But of course, this dumb and happy apparition revealed itself as nothing more than a mirage. To be alive is to be haunted by an ideal, inaccessible; inexpressible.

How then, do I proceed in my current position, my current reality? For me, teaching represents the intensity of performance mitigated through the mediating force of the student. The student functions as a kind of resistor, tempering the direct current between performer and audience; artistic intention is transmuted and transfigured via the potentiality of youth.

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