draftback

I started this a couple weeks ago and didn't finish it. Didn't want to let it die forever in my draft folder...

My thoughts tonight have turned towards the destruction and delusion of the self. I consider this an evolution in my personal ethos born from the experience of the past several months. I think often lately about something I said in an extremely rare fit of massive over confidence; I was speaking to some friends and I blurted out with anger that I was ready to conduct professionally. I believed it at the time and in full disclosure I do experience these cycles of self confidence and self hatred which at the apex of the cycle lead me to the conclusion that I am one of the best conductors on the planet. Of course at the worst they lead me to the conclusion that my mere existence on the planet is a drag on the species and the most moral thing I could do with my life is stop living. Nonetheless the memory for me encapsulates a former version of myself which has been destroyed in the past few months.

The story as I tell it begins with the boring details of my own wallowing and bemoaning of the fact that I begged and prayed unsuccessfully for 10 years that an accomplished conductor would take an interest in me. Then suddenly beginning in mid-March of this year I had within a 3 week period of time validation from several conductors I respect highly. One of them even offered to teach me and so I made my way to him and what followed was the destruction of that previous self described previously in my memory.

This man is a marvelous musician with a powerful artistic voice which is simultaneously exhilarating, compelling, inspiring and terrifying. It makes you on the one hand want to drop to your knees and worship him while on the other hand leaves you feeling eviscerated and embarrassed. It just leaves no room for anyone else. And that's what a good conductor is supposed to do I think, to make you feel like their interpretation is the only possible correct one in the universe. What accompanied this feeling and magnified the terror aspect of it was an encyclopedic knowledge of the craft and most relevantly the score. Any score really. We talked through scores of works he was studying with his students, works he was conducting with his group, works I was planning to conduct which he had no problem reciting off hand as if he had just finished writing it. There was a breadth and depth to his knowledge that stripped my silly talent naked and then laughed at me.

But of course that way of looking at things is the problem isn't it? Rather than view it as some terrible process I should see the beauty and the purposefulness of it. Out of that destruction came a rebirth and I know that to be true. I appreciate it deeply and am grateful immensely to have experienced it. It was the first bit of genuine conducting training I've ever received and while it painfully revealed the scope of my ignorance it also left me for the first time feeling as though I know which direction to travel. What happened though is I think best described as a genuine destruction of self, or at least some part of my self. This person with confidence and a sense of being ready to conduct professionally was suddenly stopped cold and instead I became consumed with humility and awareness of the work to be done.

Then I saw a video of a man speaking about the fundamental human delusion being that of the self. Really I think he may have been speaking more about the narcissistic self which elevates our own fears, priorities, desires, opinions and values above all others.