Fear of Playing Well?

My music guru, the late Arnie Lawrence, used to say: Play great! You know what it sounds like, so play that way!
If it were only so easy, every musician (and artists of all kinds) would be great, and we're not.
Arnie wasn't dumb. He knew that. So what did he mean?
Once I brought my clarinet to his workshop, and he said, "Play like Barney Bigard," Duke Ellington's clarinet player. If I could have played like Barney Bigard, I would have been giving Arnie's workshops, not attending them.
My natural response to Arnie's manic encouragement was to shrink: Man, I can't play clarinet like Barney Bigard.
But my response was self-defeating.
Why tell myself that I could never be great? That I can never even come close to playing like a really great musician?
Why not say: That's the way I want to play, and, damn it, I'm going to go for that!
My new music guru - and I only use the term tongue in cheek, here and above - Raanan Eylon, who is teaching me how to play the flute, has been working with me for nearly two years on my sound, on getting a focused sound on the flute, and on vibrato. It takes a long time for a man my age to catch on.,
I didn't really have to put myself through the hard work I've been doing to meet Raanan's demands. I could have accepted the crummy sound I had figured out how to make by myself, with the help of some Youtube lessons, and let it be at that. But I said to myself, if I'm going to play the flute, I'm going to play it as well as I can. Otherwise, why go for it at all?
So I've gone back to the basics of long tones, scales, arpeggios - a long warmup before I even try to play music. It's had an amazing (good) effect on my saxophone playing, on my ear, and on my awareness of sound - a kind of remedial musical education. Better late than never, eh?
Recently, I've been coming much closer to producing a decent sound on the flute, and I realized that somewhere inside me there was actually fear of sounding too good. I don't know what that is about (or, maybe I do, but I'm not going to post that kind of thing on a blog).
Raanan has frequently said - and it's kind of astonishing that a man who could hardly be more different from Arnie Lawrence, should be saying many of the same kind of things - that when we play music, we are free to do and be what we are unable to do and be in ordinary, life. But you have to want that freedom and enjoy it.
In ordinary life, I'm not interested in impressing people, but I have to remember that when people listen to music, they want to be impressed. Why else would they listen to music, to say, "That wasn't so interesting"?

Paying for Punishment

No, I'm not a masochist, and I'm hard enough on myself in general, that I don't need to pay anyone to make things more painful.
I'm talking about my flute teacher, who is holding me to the highest of standards, even though we both know I'll never reach them.
Actually, my ceramics teacher is equally demanding, but in a warm and cordial way. She believes in encouraging her students with great enthusiasm for what they do, but she also won't let us be satisfied with a pot that's too thick or poorly trimmed.
My flute teacher is also encouraging, but not as much fun (in general men aren't as much fun as women). Sometimes I get pissed off at him (though I don't express it) for being so hard on my playing. But that's an immature reaction. What's the point of paying a teacher to tell me that everything is fine?
My progress in flute has been much slower than I expected, considering that I've been playing wind instruments all my life. Partly I lay it to my advanced age. A fairly talented kid who has been playing flute as long as I have would be way ahead of me, I think. But partly it's because my teacher won't let me be satisfied with less than the best I can do now, knowing that it's not good enough! Next week I must have a better best!
I still have no goal for my flute playing beyond flute playing. There are a million flautists around, and if I want to play in another orchestra, I'm in more demand as a baritone sax player than I would be as a flautist.
It's a bit analogous to what my teacher says about communication. He has told me more times than I can count (which doesn't mean that I've internalized the message) that vibrato is the key to expressive playing on the flute. Expressive of what? Not of anything specific: I feel sad because X. Music communicates itself, and whatever resonates in the musician when she plays and the listener when she hears is not communicated by the music but aroused by it.

A Reading Project

I downloaded the complete works of Shakespeare to my tablet, and I have been making my way through them. I started with the Sonnets, which I had studied very thoroughly when I was a graduate student, and The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis, which I'd never read.
As for the plays, I just finished reading Hamlet (for at least the twentieth time, I imagine), after going through some plays I never had read: As You Like It, All's Well that Ends Well, Coriolanus, and Cymbeline. I had read the Comedy of Errors once and vaguely remembered it, and I read A Midsummer Night's Dream out of sequence, because a production of it appeared in Jerusalem this summer.
Except for As You Like It, I don't think anyone who read the other plays would imagine that Shakespeare could have produced a work of such high genius as Hamlet. Even though I was very familiar with it (not that I had read it very recently), I was bowled over by it, noticing things in it that I didn't remember at all.
The main thing I noticed this time was the change in Hamlet's character in the fifth and final act. His near brush with death on the ship, when he discovers that he is going to be executed as soon as he reaches England, and then his capture by pirates, which proves to be his rescue -- a far-fetched plot device typical of romances -- transforms and empowers him. We suddenly learn that he is a skilled fencer, he proudly calls himself "Hamlet the Dane," when he leaps into Ophelia's grave after Laertes, and he no longer feigns madness (of course one never knows how mad he really was).

Why have I undertaken this project?
Partly to enrich my English. After all, writing/translating is my profession, and I have to keep my English alive.
Partly out of a sense of self-respect. I have a PhD in Comparative Literature, and one of my fields was English literature of the Renaissance, and I haven't read all of the greatest English author of all. That's a failing that called for a remedy.
But mainly, because it's simply superb.
Even the bad plays, the ones that are mainly of historical interest, are full of glorious poetry. I've also been noticing the political dimensions of the plays, which I hadn't paid attention to before. I'm not reading any explanatory notes, and when I don't understand a passage, after wrestling with it for a while, I just go on. The occasional obscure bits don't interfere with understanding of the plays.