C is for Cello, Chocolate & Comparison

My studio has two recitals a year, without fail. We have our winter recital after the holiday-hoopla and then spring recital in late May. Last year our two recitals were both virtual. This year, as did most people, we zoomed into the new in-person fall semester full of hope for a “normal” season. I don’t need to tell you about the actual Zooming that we did.

As the winter recital approached so did a new Covid variant. Feeling the need to respect everyone’s right to decide whether or not to play in-person, I sent out a poll to the studio. The results were a bit lackluster (it is a recital, after all) but leaned to another virtual [recital.] performance.

I once again asked people who felt willing, to record their recital work at their convenience and send it to me to share with the rest of the studio. In my mind this fostered a feeling of cello-community where there hasn’t been able to be one.

Just before my face would freeze in that lovely way to end a lesson, I would screech, “Don’t forget to record!!”. Amazingly I didn’t get many enthusiastic responses before the screen went black, but that was easy enough to blame on Skype.

Each recital, people could, if they chose to, invite family or friends to join the call. I’d have Paul come in from the shop and we would all stare at each other on the screen waiting for the student to begin. There was, as you can imagine, a lot of hair adjusting going on.

As the curtain came down on the second full week of recitals, the recordings began to dribble in. Interestingly, an adult student, who has studied the least amount of time, sent her recording in first with a flush of bravado born to someone new to the terror of recording themselves. I applauded her bravery as did others. Then, feeling that the dam had been broken, they began to send in their own. I had told everybody that I didn’t care if they recorded it fifty times before choosing the one to send in. If there is one good thing about virtual over live recital, it is that you get more than one shot at it.

I would receive the recordings and send [it] them out to the studio. Everyone began to respond to performers with cheers, bravos and clapping emojis. I watched it all with some trepidation; I had mentioned to Paul that my only concern with doing this was the big “C”. Comparison. He reminded me that they were given the opportunity to record or not and in a live recital, wasn’t there even more of a chance for comparison?

Like many things, it all seemed good until it wasn’t. There had been a few responses to an especially good recording, ‘That is how I would like to play”, and “Man, I won’t ever be able to sound like that.” I cringed a little from behind the screen.

One evening I received an email from a student who made a confession that I felt spoke for many people when they record themselves for the first few times. He said that he had really felt like he sounded like Yo Yo Ma when playing at home and when he clicked open their recording was devastated. He had been depressed for hours because there were students older, younger, less studied, more studied, all of whom that sounded “better” than him. Now if the recital had indeed been live, there would have been these same feelings but he wouldn’t have felt that pain over and over again in the way he was sadistically able to experience with a recording.

I sat at the computer and stared at the screen for a long time. In the email he said that he had not been able to pick up the cello since hearing these recordings. He was, quite literally, crying for help.

In everything that we do, especially things that mean something to us, there is the danger of comparison. Without fail there will be someone who is better and someone who is worse than you. When someone is worse you can smile magnanimously and feel pretty darn good about dolling out advice on how to be you. When someone is better, we don’t feel quite so compelled to send congratulatory emojis or, for that matter, send in our own recording. The silence is visual and deafening.

What my student wanted was to have me say, in strict confidence, that he was just as good, or maybe even a bit better. That would have made everything OK again. But I could not. Not because it was or wasn’t true but because it wasn’t the important thing to do or to say. An unwritten rule of teaching is to never be comparative, even within yourself. When I am teaching Sam, it is Sam and how she learns that matters to me. She won’t learn like anyone else and my job is to help her to see exactly how she learns and when to turn left instead of right. Nobody’s anatomy is the same, nobody’s brain works in the same way. We are not in any way homogenized.

Two pieces of wood, cut from the same tree, will not produce the same sounding cello. Two students playing the same Bach, will not tell the same story: because the story they are interpreting is unique to each of them.

What becomes important is to realize that where we are on our own paths is individual. I like to remind people not to fix their gaze to the end of the process, but to be right where they are and dig deep into their own process and enjoy it. When you listen to your best recording, smile and feel grateful that you are able to hear yourself smack dab in the middle of where you are right now. Yesterday you were different and tomorrow you will be different again. Change is the only constant.

My job, as I see it, is to walk beside each and every student along their path. I’m not there to judge but to help navigate the stones that inevitably get in our way as we walk. Someone else might be walking faster than you but you also might bump into someone who is sitting on the side of their path taking a break, intent on returning to the walk, but resting. What remains the same is that with each and every step that we take, we get closer to the top. All we have to do is to keep walking.

I wrote all of this and received an email telling me that he was going to begin practicing again and that he was happy to have company on his hike. It made me smile and I wrote back that I was delighted to walk beside him and that the only responsibility he had, other than to keep walking was, of course, to bring the snacks.

Melissa Perley