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Jon Michalik (.com)

Thought Bubble: The Perfect Performance

5/9/2019

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I'm a musician. Well, I think I'm a musician. Or was one? At some point, I changed my idea of what I was from a musician to an entertainer. I just happen to use music as a way to entertain others. When I perform for an audience, I don't really picture the music as the end goal. The end goal, to me, is being able to entertain others. I want, more than anything else, to transport that audience to a world where the music lives and breathes and tells a story.

This is inherently difficult. As a composer, as a performer, as a person trying to convey a thought. Even having just one person, yourself, myself, try to tell a consistent story is hard. Add others to the mix, with our own experiences, thoughts, strengths and weaknesses, motives, and tools. It's a wonder we come together with a coherent message by the end. It's hard.

But I argue that's what makes this great. Striving for a great performance.

Recently, at a rehearsal the night before a concert, I was approached with two ideals working on two different pieces. These kind of outline the two major ways I can see people approaching music, so it's always fun to see these present themselves so close to one another.


One Truth

On one hand, we kept stopping after hitting a certain part in a piece where not everyone was in agreement for where the pulse was. We'd all play around a certain part, and there was definitely some dissonance in our playing, if not in harmony then in time. After a bit of shedding, one of the group says:
 
“It's good that we're able to play through that part and end up together, but I really wanted to get a run where we all nailed it.” 


When I was in college training to be a professional musician, I would have agreed with this sentiment. The perfect run. It's what we all strive for as musicians. A immaculate capturing of the piece as it is notated. The composer knows best and they want it exactly as it was written. We want it to sound like that.

Fun part about notation is that it doesn't make sound. You can't hear notation. Interestingly, this one member has played this piece before. We've been using a recording of his when we've been approaching the piece. So I wonder, are we aiming for what is notated? Or are we aiming for what it sounded like when it was performed before? The rest of us are building our story, what the piece sounds like and means to us. We want to push and pull our phrasing and hear things happening at points that the others don't.

This group is not the group that played it before. The performance we use is a reference point to what 4 people interpreted the piece as many years ago. This group is not that group. And not being the same people comes with not having the same experiences, goals, and motives for playing this piece. This group's collective perception of perfect is different. Striving for what was done before is strictly not possible. If we wanted to convey that, the audience could listen to the recording instead.


Telling a Story

On the other hand, we are playing a piece with a guest artist and composer. She recognizes that we're not playing with the energy that we had been toward the beginning of rehearsal. This has been a pretty long day and everyone is becoming mentally taxed. She decides to tell us stories of how the music came to be written.

We all take a break from playing and just listen. She walks through the piece and tells us of her motivations, beyond the notation. The sounds of crowds cheering and chanting, of samba groups in the street, of capturing what she gathered as the positive force of energy surging through this community of people. This resonates with people. It resonated with us. The next time we play, we're not trying to play notes, we're trying to tell a story.

This is still difficult. The story is experienced by one person, and that story makes no sound. But humans are really, really good at interacting with a story. More than just directions, which is arguably what notation is. It gives you a map of what the music is structured like, but it offers no story. While it's insanely difficult to get more than one person to tell a story in the same way, being able to attach the energy that inspired the piece to the notes goes a long way to agreeing on where that energy goes.

She also said, and I like this:

“Notation is a wonderful thing. It really is. I love notation. But there's only so much it can do. We don't need humans to play notes. We need humans to make music.”


And that's kind of gets at the core of what this ideal of perfection in a performance is. While it doesn't say exactly what I'm thinking, it strongly hints at it.  If there were a perfect way to play something, why is a human necessary?

There is no perfect performance.


Telling Your Story

Okay, so what are we striving for then? What was I spending all this time trying to learn this thing as the composer intended for? What's the purpose of it all?

I'd argue that you need those skills. You need that time. When you get to a point that you're working on music you're choosing, you do it because you hear something that resonates with you in someone else's performance of that music. You want to take that piece and play it too. But there's more to it that just playing it. With everything I've chosen to play, I want to play it my way, with others whose experiences I want to infuse with my own into a collective narrative. I want to share a version of this music with the audience that only exists when we play.

I want to tell a story. Our story.  My story.

I think this goes beyond music. When you understand your tools, your motives, your goals, you can start to find ways to put your own spin some existing work, model, or structure. One of my favorite thoughts with this applies to reading books. The author may put those words to paper, and they are telling their story, but it largely, if not completely, leaves their hands once it's released. Those characters become the reader's characters. Those settings become the reader's settings. That story becomes the reader's story. Their experiences will reflect differently on that structure than the author's, and that's amazing.


A Mirror

It occurs to me that creative medium, especially those consumed and performed by others are special. When you start, they're always encased in stone. You're reading what's strong enough to see through that hard surface.

You eventually get to a point where your skills allow you to pierce the rock. You see more than just the name of the creator of that piece. It's soft like sand and you see more of the words, more of the faces, more of the meaning.

As you hone your skills and learn to look at the piece with nuance, you're able to brush away the dust without changing the piece underneath. You can see that there's a picture there. You can look at it for days, in awe of all these vivid details that have long gone unnoticed.

Then one day, you feel skilled enough to move this piece. You have to show others. And when you do, when you move it for the first time, the picture moves. This has never been a picture. It's a mirror. Engraved with the details of the piece. But how much it pops, where it's subtle, where it's big and small, light and dark, is completely dependent on how you're looking at it. Every angle, every setting, every person will see it differently, will share it differently, will experience it differently. Each of these provides a new and fascinating perspective against that engraved surface. No one of them the same. No one of them greater than the rest. All of them wonderful in their own respect.

And knowing that, to me...is perfect.
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Thought Bubble: Goals and Progress

4/14/2018

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Recently, I've realized that I've been chasing a few goals. Not ones that I'm expecting to complete anytime soon. I've been doing a lot of writing and design work lately that I'm hoping will one day be something I can share. In working on these projects, I need to keep an idea of what the end result will look like. And to make things difficult, I change my mind about what that end result looks like a lot! Recognizing progress is one of the key factors I have in keeping on track. In considering this, I thought to reflect on a goal closer to realization.

Some Reflection
When I graduated from college in 2010, I weighed almost 300 pounds. This is something that surprised me greatly toward the end of my senior year. While I did see this as a problem, it never really got in the way of accomplishing any goals I was setting at the time. I kind of dismissed this.

When I returned home, looking for work so I could pay off my student loan debt, I got a job at FedEx as a package handler. In no way was I considering this a way to address my weight issue. But over the course of a few months, I had already dropped about 20 pounds. Not that I was living any better, but I did like how just getting a job that had me moving around could have this effect on me.

Visualize the Goal, See the Progress
It wasn't until I had started my career as a programmer that I had noticed how attached I was to maintaining a moderately healthy weight. Even just a few months on the job, I was back up 10 pounds from when I started. During this time I noticed how uncomfortable I was with my lifestyle. Noticing these few things triggered something in me to a point where I decided to set a goal for myself. I wanted to get back to where I was before college. I wanted to be healthy.

In 2013, I stopped drinking pop altogether and started running everyday after work. Over the course of a year, I had dropped down to about 250 pounds again. Still way higher than my target (in high school I weighed a bit over 180 pounds), but it was progress. Progress.

In 2014, I began walking at least one mile per day. The running that I was doing in 2013 was starting to be something I wasn't enjoying, so I decided to dial it back and use it as a time to think. During this time I noticed not only that I was losing some weight, but that I was starting to feel healthier in general. I wasn't running out of breath as often and my endurance was improving. Progress.

In 2015, I began pushing myself onto a healthier diet. Just eating less was tough. My brain was so conditioned to eating when it was bored and it liked only the worst things for me. Still, making tiny shifts at a time, a sensible diet was forming. Over a couple years (and one really big 6-month push), I got myself down to 200 pounds. Progress.

I maintained that for most of 2017, but during the winter holidays, I started gaining again. Not wanting to fall into a trap of being okay with that, I turned myself to what seemed to be the next sensible step: daily exercise. What started as a couple exercises before bed grew into a 10-exercise regime. Now, not only am I feeling healthy, I'm starting to look the part. This coupled with my existing dietary restrictions, diet in general, and walking, I'm now sitting at 190 pounds. Just 10 pounds shy of my goal from 2013. Progress.

Reality Check
Now, that sounds like a long time to lose about 100 pounds, but it was also an underlying lifestyle shift. This is realistic when devoting your life to a goal isn't possible. For most of us, we have to maintain a lot outside of our goals to simply live, so these long-term goals are what we're capable of setting. This can be difficult to keep up with since our time is limited enough as it is. Not getting where we want to be immediately is something we have to endure. The driving factor over the course of that time, for me, was that I was making progress.

You see, one of the things I learned reflecting on this is that as long as you're aware of your goals, and you still have them in your sights, there's no reason to think they're beyond you. There's almost always something you can do to make that little bit of progress to your goal. Even little ones that only impact you, like my weight loss above.

For the goals that matter in the grand scheme of things, we have to be aware that progress is one of the greatest indicators that we're working toward a goal. You can't be discouraged by not seeing the result in very little time.

Humans and Progress
As an example, let's say you're really upset that the beaches on the planet are getting completely trashed. Asking yourself what difference it makes to go clean it up when it'll just get dirty again is complacency at its finest. If that's a goal that you have, to clean the environments around our oceans, you should make those little steps. A couple things can happen.

Your actions can inspire others. Humans are beings driven to other humans. When they see another human doing something that resonates with them, they are likely to either join the human that is resonating with them or share the story of the human that resonated with them with other humans. In time, your tiny steps have encouraged others to take tiny steps with you. Together, you make a slightly bigger tiny step. But you'll notice that you're making progress. Progress.

So take the tiny steps where you can. Look for those little signs of progress. Take some pride in knowing you helped make that progress. Let that pride evolve into a humble inspiration that drives you to keep going.

We may not be here to see the result for everything we do. The people that will see that result may not even know you. Just know that even your tiny steps can change the world, for you and everyone. Don't let instant gratification stop you from seeing progress. The outcome might not have been realized without you.


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    I'm a game design enthusiast with some cool ideas to share!

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