• he/she/they

early 20s.
starting to make sense of the facade
the true self remains uncertain



kirinwoah
@kirinwoah

i stumbled on this question while watching a twosetviolin video. i think this question is actually pretty easy.

a good musician has found their own way to navigate the tension between self-expression and discipline. this, to me, is a pretty universal way to measure someone's state of becoming in really any art form. it applies to life as a whole as well.

when i sit at the piano to practice, above playing the keys, reading sheets, and transcribing, i honestly spend nearly all the time meditating on this inherent paradox. ill warm up my fingers with hanons, ill play some jazz exercises, ill work through some standards, ill work through classical sheet music, and then ill do some transcription where ill listen to a recording and try to copy it as closely as possible. but at the back of my mind, there's this little voice asking "is this you?" and "are you being yourself?" and "is this music you?" some days the answer is no. some days the answer is yes.

but yet during practice i still have to make time for the opposite. i make time to play only the songs that make me happy. that speak to me. sometimes i noodle at the keys with no goals at all. and while i do that, there's a little voice in my head that fills me with doubt. "no one will think this is interesting." "you expression is terrible." "you should listen to your teachers more." the thing is, i think its too easy to confuse this voice as insecurity or merely imposter syndrome. its much deeper than that—the ongoing flow of these questions is me wrestling with the tension between self-expression and discipline.

a good musician has put in the years exploring, practicing, living, finding different inspirations, different teachers, different challenges, different stimuli, until they discover their own way to be comfortable between these two forces. opera singers need to navigate this. jazz pianists need to navigate this. pop producers need to navigate this. classical pianists have to navigate this. as far as i know, all genres, cultures, disciplines, mediums, traditions, everyone has to navigate the self and the exterior because thats the nature of human existence, no? so we look up to artists because they (hopefully) represent a moment where the self and exterior have arrived at some sort of harmony, if not for a brief instant.


cohostminorityfeed
@cohostminorityfeed
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