By all accounts it was a smashing success, save one: my own.
I've never had such an experience where my perception of what had occurred was SO different, so diametrically opposed to what others related to me, even as a performer; I could always say "well, THAT piece didn't go so well, but THAT one was all right, yeah?" This time, however, I felt relentlessly negative about my efforts--I remember thinking that my throat was dry despite all the liquids I'd been drinking; I was nervous, which meant my breath support went out the window, requiring me to breathe in places I'd never meant to; my voice felt thick, wooden, not at all flexible or reliable (oh yeah, did I mention that because of the stress of doing a solo recital, I'd managed to get sick the week before and was singing on a cold?), and so I felt I oversang to compensate. You name it, I thought it--and the Inner Critic was relentless and vicious, critiquing the thinness of tone, the poor phrasing, the word flubs, the pitch issues in the Poulenc piece and the fact that I'd let the accompanists' tempo change from rehearsal to recital throw me off in it....all through the concert. By the end, all I wanted was to crawl under a rock (preferably with a cocktail or two) and never call myself a 'professional' again.
My friends and colleagues, on the other hand, were generous and unanimous in their praise. And I couldn't believe a word of it.
I spent a lot of time the next day thinking about that. How could my experience differ so profoundly from what the audience had experienced? I didn't want to think my friends were merely blowing smoke up my posterior when they praised me. Why couldn't I believe them? What was wrong with ME that I couldn't accept or trust the praise, and that I was so damn hard on myself that I couldn't find a single thing to praise for myself? Had all the internal work I'd done on my self-esteem gone for naught, blown out the window by a few flubbed words and missed entrances? Where did that self-loathing come from?
It took a conversation with a friend a few days later to help me realize what I had missed. I confessed to her my feelings about the concert and my bewilderment at my reaction compared to others'. She said to me,
"It's because you were in hyper-critical musician mode--you were looking at it from the standpoint of 'I'm not operating at 100% vocally, and can't sing as well as I know I could, so it's not gonna be any good!'
"--but what you didn't hear was that, whatever you felt you my have lacked vocally, you more than made up for in terms of connecting with the spirituality of the poetry and communicating that beauty to your audience."
I was taken aback. I hadn't considered this at all, having been so intensely focused on the technical aspects of the performance. But she was right--and that was the missing piece of the puzzle, the reason my audience had responded so enthusiastically and generously....it wasn't about technical perfection, and never had been. I think that for a lot of us singers, we do focus so intensely on the technical that we forget to connect with the emotional depths of what we're singing about. We're taught to get the rhythms and the pitches, but not about HOW to get the rhythms and the pitches so that our audience understands them too. We forget that it's as much about the words as the music, and that it's more important to connect than to impress.
The whole reason we sing is not to show off our proficiency, but to communicate--to share uniquely human, and universal, emotions in a way no other art form can quite match.
I am so grateful for my friends....for their support but also for their insight and help in allowing me the grace to see and accept what really happened last Wednesday night, and that I always have more to learn about what it means to be a singer.
I was so busy rearranging twigs on the forest floor that I forgot to look up and see the light coming through the branches.
RM
