Performance is in some regard about the illusion of spontaneity. A great performance feels immediate, like everyone is in a musical and the emotions have suddenly run so high that the scene must erupt into song to capture the outpouring of heart.
Great performances are big fat lies. Spontaneous they ain't. Performance takes an extraordinary amount of work. How do we get there? Practice. And more practice. We practice alone to keep up our chops: exercises, scales, tricky bits of the part in an upcoming performance, changes from a rehearsal. And then we practice together: entrances, pacing, swells and reels, ritardandos, tricky bits everyone has to land spot on. And we discuss at length what tempo makes sense at measure 34 and whether to pause at the conclusion of the phrase. And so we practice how to hear one another and how to read the passing of a melodic line and how to glance up to catch one another's eye and breathe together.
And all the work is a form of grasping at something you can't practice into being. Practice is a necessary but not sufficient condition, because then you have just a few opportunities to capture the magic of that piece, to be tuned into one another and zipping along the energy of the audience and not be too tired or too nervous or too eager. It is still in some way up to chance.
But how do you give yourself the best odds?
Practice.
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