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.

Excited Exhaustion

Some time after midnight last night I returned from the rehearsal of the big band where I have played baritone saxophone for the past ten years or more, and, as usual, I was too keyed up to go to sleep. I ate some cheese and crackers and read the newspaper till about a quarter to one. And even then I didn't fall asleep right away. When you play with a big band, you absorb energy.
I have to concentrate hard on the music to play it even close to right. I still find it challenging to master the parts and play them tight with the other musicians. My early musical training was in classical clarinet, and the rhythms of classical music, as they are written out, still are easier for me to play than jazz or Latin rhythms, as they are written out. You have to hear them and imitate them. (I believe that's because standard Western musical notation evolved with Western music, the way the Roman alphabet we use was invented by the Romans to write Latin, and it doesn't work all that well even with English, though we're so used to the anomalies we don't notice them.)
Our conductor, Eli Benacot is a fine musician, and playing in his band has been like taking a group music lesson every week. The baritone saxophone part in big bands is challenging, though they're not always technically difficult. Sometimes the baritone plays in rhythmical unison with the other four saxes, sometimes it plays with the trombones, usually the bass trombone, sometimes it plays with the string bass, and sometimes it plays on its own. So I have to know whom to listen to in every part of every piece, so I can play together with them.
Incidentally, when we perform, we often sit in an arrangement different from the one we rehearse in, and the band sounds different. Suddenly I can't hear the bass trombone very well. That's another challenge.
The music is exhilarating because the sound of the band is so intense, and the rhythms have so much drive. Last night we were practicing with our vocalist, Noa Anava, which calls for more sensitivity than we show when we're blasting out an arrangement by Gordon Goodwin. But even when we're playing behind a vocalist, where are moments when we have to roar. When it works, when the band plays tight and swings, there's nothing like it!

I Just (Self-)Published a Novel

The novel is called Site Report, and it's available on Amazon and a few other places. I began writing it 30 years ago.
I realized when I was finished with it that it was unpublishable: too long and on an unpalatable subject (Israel), so I forgot about it. Then, maybe 10 years ago, I rewrote it, cutting out about half of it and sharpening the language, but I didn't have the heart to go through the long process of trying to get it published. I have too much dreary experience with that process with my clients.
Then I heard about Create Space, the self-publishing possibility sponsored by Amazon. You can design and upload your book and have it available print on demand and as an ebook, for free. So I decided to try it out.
Obviously, part of the self-publishing process is rereading your book, which is something I didn't want to do in the worst way, so I waited another couple of years. But finally, I went through with it.
Astonishingly, I liked the book. I didn't remember a lot of it, and I was surprised I had done such a good job with it.
It's the story of an American woman who spend a sabbatical year in Israel in 1980. I imagined her with old-line kibbutznik relatives, orthodox relatives in Bnei Brak, and a Russian immigrant cousin. She encounters all those people, has a love affair with a Moroccan architect, and can't decide whether to marry him and stay in Israel or return to the Boston area.
So look it up on Amazon. There is also going to be a Kindle edition, but they haven't finished processing it.

Simultaneous Relaxation and Effort

When I play flute, my right hand often cramps with superfluous effort. After all, it doesn't take much strength at all to close the holes in the body of the flute with the keys. I've seen Youtubes of a girl of eight doing it fantastically, and I'm sure my hands are stronger than hers. But the application of that strength is entirely unnecessary.
My hand cramps because I'm trying to do a bunch of things all at the same time. I'm holding the flute up, I'm pressing down the D# key with my right pinky both to stabilize the instrument and to improve the sound of the notes from E up. I also have to raise my left index finger for D# and D, but I have to close it when I go up to E, and when I go from D to E, I have to open the D# key again. This is an awkward fingering compared to saxophone or clarinet (which has awkwardnesses of its own), and I'm not used to it. So in my effort to do it right, my hand cramps up, especially when I try to do it fast, which, of course, is when I should be applying the least strength, to obtain agility.
So in my last few days of practicing, I've been concentrating part of the time on relaxing my fingers as I play. The problem is that when you concentrate on a movement, even if your purpose is to relax it, you often make it more effortful. How do you make an effort to relax?
It's the same in pottery (and in typing, for that matter). You have to exert enough strength to control the clay, but not so much that you lose control. At this moment I'm listening to the tenor saxophonist, Houston Person, a perfect example of total relaxation and total control.
Yesterday at my pottery class, one of the other students told me that she could see by the way I was working that I loved the clay, which was true and perceptive of her -- I don't know what she saw. I want to play music in a way that also shows how much I love the sounds I'm making, and to write in a way that shows how much I love the language I'm using. That's not something you can try to do. It's something you have to allow to happen by being relaxed, so that you are free to apply the real effort, not the technical effort but the expressive effort.

Music and Politics

Last night we attended a marvelous chamber music concert in the YMCA auditorium here in Jerusalem, part of the international chamber music festival. A brilliant group of musicians from Israel and abroad have assembled for an ambitious series of concerts, and the auditorium, as in past years, was packed.
Despite boycotts and international disapproval, Israel is still able to attract some of the best musicians in the world. I am always grateful to artists who come from abroad for their moral and spiritual support and for their contribution to our cultural life. They strengthen the positive side of Israeli society, for we have an impressively rich cultural and intellectual life.
Is it self-indulgent for the music lovers among us to enjoy concerts like these when our government is doing things we can't approve? Shouldn't we be out fighting injustice? That is, assuming music lovers want to fight injustice, which need not be the case. The connection between politics and art, or, for that matter, ethics and art, are ambiguous, especially abstract art like music.
I want everything to be connected. I wanted cultured people to be good people and vice versa. But that's not the case, is it?
So I spent two thrilling hours hearing the finest music performed by accomplished players with conviction and understanding, sharing the experience with a large and appreciative audience. I didn't have to think about Gaza and the Palestinians, about the inequality between rich and poor in Israel, about the corruption that keeps surfacing, about the unfair treatment of Israel in the world press, because of anti-Semitism -- or about personal problems among our friends and family. These topics, along with global warming, the outbreak of Ebola in Africa, the civil war in Syria and Iraq, the crisis between Russia and the Ukraine -- an endless list -- are mainly things I can't do anything about in any event. So thank God for great music to keep my mind off them!