Practice Mute

<img src=”http://www.oleoptene.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/p2054.jpg” alt=”p2054.jpg” border=”0″ width=”100″ height=”100″ /> I got a practice mute this week for my violin and viola. Its metal heft perches on the bridge and keeps the voice of my instrument a whisper that only I can hear, so I can practice late at night without disturbing neighbors or children. It surprises me, the need to practice for myself after practicing with all of them.

I am practicing with four boys now, most days. With several weeks when both teachers are on vacation we’ve been missing days here and there, and not beating ourselves up about it, either, even though a little voice in my head nags me about the importance of consistency. Rainer, who is four, just got his tiny violin a few weeks ago, and we squeezed in one lesson before his teacher left for a month’s vacation, so he and I practice rest position and playing position, with more confidence than when I was doing it with any of his older brothers, aware of how many times he has to practice putting the instrument up before we can move on to the next step. We don’t negotiate practice, it’s a fact of life, and I think he feels like it’s a privilege he’s grown into, like his brothers.

I practiced with Aodán, who is eleven, late tonight, after dinner, impressed yet again with how gracefully he accepts my suggestions, wondering how long that will last, how long until he feels like there isn’t room for me in his practice, like I don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t know as much as he does, which is surely inevitable. I may grumble about the time commitment of practicing with each of the four of them, but this can last only a brief time, and it has sweetness. When he went in to get ready for bed, for me to read to him, and I stayed out in my studio where we practice and slipped the mute on and imagined my viola singing out more fully.

A week ago at Bahà’í camp Xander, my nine-year-old son, and I performed a duet in front of 150 people, my first time performing since high school. He had been talking about doing this since the day we got back last year, and I love his eagerness to perform and for him I worked to overcome my ambivalence about performing. I don’t want to pass on all of my baggage, so I try to examine it, my fears of not being good enough, my fear of people appraising, my fear of my own desire for attention. So many days I can feel almost invisible, safe, surely, but it can be its own hell. I can practice with the practice mute, secure in the knowledge that I am not disturbing anyone, and yet there is a creeping awareness that at some point I am going to need to remove the mute, and let my viola sing out. Playing something short and simple in front of the most un-critical and supportive group of people one could ask for was a tiny step, and I still had to spend an hour by myself beforehand thinking the crazy thoughts, got through it by focussing on my amazing kid.

In the collection of paradoxes I treasure and keep at hand there lies this one: humility and confidence nearly always accompany each other, two sides of the same coin. We sort of confuse insecurity with humility, or we have a hard time accepting applause, play a false humility, put ourselves down, pretend like the validation doesn’t feel so good. We have stories of divas and people who are so insecure and broken they seem to live only by performing. I haven’t gotten this one figured out, I think it’s somehow about getting into some sort of proper relation to the self (only I am not sure who is doing the relating then, or whether the self is so simple to talk about) only that the best moments practicing the stuff that isn’t the music falls away. I don’t know how to do that in front of people. But I suspect that true humility comes when we’re finally confident enough to realize that the performance really isn’t about us at all.