Perfection, Striving and Self-Criticism walked into a bar…
…and killed Creativity. Because the bar was too high, in fact, it was the wrong bar. So because it was the wrong bar and too high, Creativity had to die.
I know that made little to no sense, so I wont fault you for not getting it, but maybe you do…
Being trained in classical music is no joke. I know, because I endured over a decade of classical piano training in my childhood. I had talent, so I was interested in learning how to play piano because it felt good when I got it right and people praised me. I have felt both blessed and cursed for the felt sense memory of standing ovations. Blessed because they were kick ass moments in my life I will never forget. Cursed because they happened when I was 14 years old, so for decades afterward, I realized I would never experience that elation again.
It was during this time that my critical inner-voice was born. And I had spent decades with that sharp critical voice telling me all the ways I am getting it wrong. Back then, getting anything wrong - a note, a chord, a difficult arpeggio, a phrase with syncopated timing, anything, was sometimes too much to bare. My little 14 year old egoic mind couldn’t take it. So I strived for perfection, not understanding the soul of the music I was playing, like at all. For all of those years my conscious mind saw music as something to be conquered. Not something to be felt and realized. For me, music was already realized and I was just there to stand in as a representative to what was already considered perfection. And because I derived my sense of acceptance and belonging to being a pianist, the stakes were really high. In my mind, body and soul I had to get it right, and get it right in front of a lot of people staring at me.
It was the 80’s and if you know anything about the 80’s, it was perfectly natural for a junior high school girl to wear high heels, at least in my neck of the woods. So I would wobble up on stage (I’m sure I wobbled, I was 14), and I would display my panty hosed high heeled leg, sticking out of my knee length white lace dress (I was a Madonna fan), and rest the front tip of my wobbly shoe on the sustain pedal. At the time, I had a nervous tick that plagued me until I learned to make fun of it: my leg would nervously shake if I rested my foot on the pedal, it was as though that pedal was a trampoline, or like the vibration platform I use today for balance. Anyway, it was at first mortifying but I made it funny and won the audience over with my antidote: I would raise my hands high and dramatically clutch my leg to make it stop. Chuckles from the audience would surely ensue and then, off I’d go…
For years I performed well. For years I played well. And then, one day, as dramatic is as dramatic does… I quit, onstage, in the middle of Rachmaninoff. I did what a performer is forbidden to do. I stopped. Mid-song. No improvisation. Just silence. I was horrified, shocked, confused, not knowing for a good long moment what the piano even was, it looked like something an alien might use in the kitchen for all I knew. I left that stage in deep, unrelenting shame. And I believe that shame haunted me for most of my adult life thereafter. Not now, but for most of it.
So that was when I stopped playing piano for 8 years. The piece I was playing, if you were interested, was Rachmaninoff Prelude in G minor. https://youtu.be/GhBXx-2PadM Here the lovely Yuga Wang is playing it impeccably.
I cannot believe I was meant to play that song at 14 years old. I couldn’t even begin to understand the intensity and meaning behind it. At the time, I was also preparing this one: https://youtu.be/sCtixpIWBto This one I can still play today, because I don’t have any trauma tied to it. The other, not so much. So that is why I spent 8 years away from the piano.
My dry spell broke when I was 23 and dating a musician in a Pink Floyd cover band. Ryan, said boyfriend, asked me to teach him the Division Bell intro. With reluctance I opened up my grandma’s Steinway, feeling a deep shame of all the dust and candle wax caked on the case that covered the keys. And I taught him that beginning line of the Division Bell, effortlessly.
Before I learned to read music, I was taught how to hear music and play by ear. It was a language that has always been easily accessible to me. So that was when I came back to my craft, and have spent years in and out of my classical pieces, bastardizing them (my words), and not playing them the same twice, improvising the hell out of them, and year by year, that critical voice of perfection, as it pertains to my piano playing at least, has faded into the background for the most part.
I now play with my husband and his best friend. We re-create classical music with all of our influences which span from Dead Can Dance, Thievery Corporation, Thelonius Monk. And we have a blast doing it!
Our perfect little home studio!
WISDOM WITHIN WELLNESS
Kellyjoy Kanaley has spent over 18 years studying and practicing psychotherapy and over 25 years practicing meditation. To inquire for a consultation please click below.