After all these years, I don’t consider myself the master of anything that I play, and there is always more discovery. The learning can happen not only from your peers but also from the younger participants. And that is a wonderful thing, that learning comes from every quarter.
Young participants should be open to the experience and engage in the act of not only learning to work with people but learning that people have different ways of looking at something. To be open to that, you realize that your way is not the only way to look at something. In rehearsing, it’s inevitable that people feel things differently, and the inclination to be defensive is in your gut, not just as an intellectual thing. But there are times to yield, and that can open up new possibilities.
Some of the greatest joys in groups have been in the study of the music; the performance—whether we did or didn’t have one—was truly beside the point. That’s rare. That’s music-making at its purest, when it’s simply for the joy and love of studying the music. That it can be such a prolonged togetherness with this music goes beyond just the joy of reading something and discovering music in that way. There can be a different joy in prolonged study… you can connect more deeply with the music itself and with what could go into the offering of this music.
