I’ve been thinking alot about failure of late.

Nothing disastrous here, just an emphasis in my mind lately about the learning opportunities offered when we don’t meet or exceed expectations. I am thinking about elements of my career (first as a player, then as composer, conductor, teacher, administrator), elements of my personal life (husband, father, son, sibling, friend), and pursuits outside of my career (handyman, carpenter, scuba diving).

In so many ways I have not seen aspirations achieved, and in each of those cases I have learned so very much. And those lessons have offered me an opportunity to broaden and/or strengthen my understanding of both what things I want and how I want to do them.

Perhaps this comes from being, at base level, a teacher. Music has been the activity I am driven to pursue, but teaching has been the natural strength since I was little. Music has been what I wanted my natural strength to be, but it was really something that took/takes a ton of work to get better at and, as a result, finds me a pretty idiosyncratic composer. Teaching, though, is rooted in a perspective of trying to understand how someone else sees things, and I am unendingly curious about that in a way that is much stronger than the value of my own idiosyncratic way of musical thinking…