Surviving and flourishing

So, I survived a rather full week of practicing and performing.

Not just survived, it was actually pretty successful.

A mixture of brutal honesty and high standards for myself mean that I feel like I could have played better, but I'm happy with my level of performance and so were others.

The whole experience taught me a lot and gave me a bunch of constructive experience. It was wonderful experience working with some highly skilled musicians. Few rehearsals meant that we had to get the most out of each time we met. As a performer, I experienced the full gamut of composer interactions - from the composer I only met on the night of the concert after we had played, to the composer that attended multiple rehearsals and wanted to be involved at every step of the learning.

As I played in my own piece, I was happy with the balance we struck within rehearsals. Not that there was any real chance, but I wasn't a control freak; I was open to critique and interpretations, and the other players were happy to join in that creative collaboration that is music making.

With all that said, I look forward to doing this again in the future. I love playing new music and I really enjoyed the process of premiering some new works. While it was great to play my own piece, in the future, I will prefer for my works to be played by other performers; the more people who play it, the wider the spread of that music. I don't think I'll ever want to premiere my own piece, but this had been performed before, so it was nice to have stepped into that other role this time around.