This afternoon I sat in an orchestra rehearsal in my normal place but, because of injury, without my cello. Even though the rehearsal did, of course, have my undivided attention, I started thinking about a note I hurriedly made on a list of vague, potentially bloggable ideas a few weeks ago (the Mac sticky note widget is a great invention), which reads: ‘We need to be more like conductors rather than individual players in an orchestra, who too often see one part of the bigger picture and do not empathise’. I wrote this during a period of thinking a lot about the parallels between playing music and living the other bits of life, and how the processes should ideally be symbiotic. ['Symbiosis': A great word which I spent an age trying to recall, defined by my Mac dictionary widget as 'a mutually beneficial relationship', and not to be confused with 'osmosis' which, for some reason, I keep doing, and totally misleadingly gives me mental images of GCSE biology experiments on potatoes.] My experience today has finally inspired me to transfer this thought from sticky to Rabbit…

So often we get so caught up in our own lives (our own instrument’s part) that we forget that others are sharing the same experiences, just from different perspectives, but being aware of how we fit into the bigger picture (the symphony, or whatever) may actually help us along our own paths. At the time of writing the sticky note on this subject I believed that attempting to oversee entire situations, giving equal but inevitably limited attention to each component (being the conductor), would help individuals gain the most valuable perspective. Sitting in my seat today without the challenging distraction of sight reading the music myself, however, I realised that I was in the prime position (similar to that of a musician listening back to their own recording, as discussed in the Feb 4 post, ’Hit pause on ‘perfection‘‘). I was connected enough to my own part of the whole to keep track of the small but important details for which I (or rather my fellow cellos) was responsible, but I wasn’t occupied so much by this part that I couldn’t keep an ear out (or more) for the overall ‘sound-vision’ or corporate goal. It’s certainly not invaluable to experience being the narrow-focused orchestral player or the zoomed-out conductor, but functioning on this middle ground between self-awareness and empathy seems ultimately ideal.

On a tangential note (perhaps a tritone – sorry, terrible geeky music joke), one more concerned with the temporal than the spacial, we should also keep in mind the teleology of a phrase, movement or complete work rather than only concentrate on the single note or chord being played at any given moment. In other words, living life with our longer term goals in mind, in addition to a more balanced awareness of the environment in which we function, can help us make sense of and tolerate the smaller steps along the way, just like my March 19 post (‘Save a goat this Easter‘) asserted that recalling previous personal patterns of mood and perspective can help us understand the present and anticipate or dictate the trajectory of our future.

So, as ambiguous and motiviation speak-inspired as this may sound, perhaps we should all try to live our lives as the Silent Farsighted Potato, I mean, Musician.