Anyone following this will have realized by this point that i'm having a lot of difficulty catching up, or even keeping up with my every day commitment in the meantime. i think there is something about having fallen behind in the first place that made me feel like it was no big deal to add the additional day, and since i've fallen behind i've gotten used to having to do at least 4 or 5 entries at a time to make me feel like i've made any progress. so obviously i fall even more behind because the bear of having to do 5 entries in a day is quite big. so i'm not sure how to continue because at my count right now i am a total of at least 33 days behind, over a month. i'm still going to try, but i feel like calling this a 365 blog at this point is sort of dishonest.
in that vein, the next group of posts will be a series in reflection or recapping the events and lessons of the 2011 ithaca international conducting masterclass, which was held last week. i was privileged enough to be invited as an auditor. the whole experience for me was not a turning point but a great opening door for me. here were, in a non-technical sense (subsequent posts will be devoted to technical/concrete lessons i learned or was taught), the major insights i derived from the class.
1. as the baby of the group at 23, i learned that i still have quite a while to learn how to make this work. of course, it will be hard if, at 30, i decide not to try anymore and then have to get a job in a field i haven't been engaged in for the last several years. but hopefully at that point i will be able to weasel my way into some sort of arts administration, where i can at least be engaged in work for a cause that matters to me, even if i'm not actually doing work that i love.
2. these types of conducting workshops are THE primary method/avenue of engagement, learning, and community building for conductors. In any given locale you aren't going to be able to get a bunch of conductors together the same way you can have a bunch of violins or singers or wind instruments; after all, they are not only very busy but also far in between. even if there happen to be a number of ensembles in one city all with different conductors, they are likely to be different enough and work in ways such that the conductors will not often need to get together and chat about their work.
3. technique building in conducting has always been fuzzy. in the case of the clinician, CSC, it seemed as though his technique building phase came mostly from sheer self discipline. he talked quite a lot about how he used to practice his patterns on a rotating weekly basis, 2 pattern on tuesdays, 3 on wednesdays, etc... and how he used to just lay in bed trying to see whether he could conduct some pattern, waiting for music to come along so he could "attach" his technique to do it. there isn't really a consistent school out there like suzuki which has established these things, much less can teach it. to a degree that's nice because conducting isn't as if you're playing an instrument - but there are still right and wrong things to do, and it's difficult to figure out just how much right is "right" and how much is actually helpful. figuring this out, though, seems to be an act of self-study, and few people are out there who have either the time or patience to sit down and tell you what you're doing wrong in such an exact sense.
OK, that did take me less than 15 minutes to write, maybe i should just turn this into a "music reflections" blog :P
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