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Showing posts from March, 2011

From the valley

I am in a tough spot these days because you don't always get to pick who you make music with. It's made me think about how much I value the artists and musicians who are mature, and how soul-killing it is to work with the ones who aren't. Of course, the behaviors I complain about are familiar to me because I may have invented them. There isn't a single dumb, vain, mean, angry, sloppy, arrogant, or un-loving thing in the artists' hall of shame that I have not done. I look back on whole decades of my life as a performer and cringe. But, cringe is good, right? It means I have perspective. In my symphony choir thing that I do, there is a woman behind me who is so busy commenting on others' mistakes I don't know how she has time to sing at all. If there is a bad note she chuckles. If the conductor makes a mistake she either yells out the correct answer or mutters it under her breath. At one point we were working on a song where the conductor really needed us to