Any performer will, at one time or another, have a performance that doesn’t go according to plan. Whether it’s a concert, an exam, a competition or a casual event, we all have performances we’d rather forget. So what do you do when things go wrong?
If you are in the middle of a performance the golden rule is to keep going, even if you have to make something up until you find your way back to the music. In orchestra we would find some pattern to play, like open strings or the tonic, or in really dire situations just keep the bows moving in the same direction as everyone else until we found our place again. If you play a wrong note very few people will notice, whereas if you stop or slow down considerably it will be very obvious. I have broken this rule only twice that I can remember, one of which was in the most disastrous violin solo I ever played, which ironically was a piece I had deliberately chosen as the easiest from a recent exam and was sure I knew inside out. I can’t remember what happened to throw me off so badly but I tried to ‘nod’ and pretend I was signalling an intentional rest to the accompanist, but even the audience members who weren’t familiar with the piece knew something had gone badly wrong. It was embarassing but I survived and played solos in future concerts, because what else was I going to do? It would have been silly to abandon 8 years on an instrument off the back of one failure, however bad it felt at the time.
The other time this happened I unfortunately didn’t have much choice but to stop. Halfway through the B piece for my Grade 7 piano exam I turned the page, the slightly wobbly music stand on the old piano in the exam centre decided it was going to become very wobbly and the entire book fell off the stand and landed on the floor. I completely froze and just stared at the examiner like a deer in headlights – I didn’t know the whole piece from memory and there was no way of hiding what had happened, so what on earth was I going to do now? The examiner was not fazed in the slightest, and seeing my brain had clearly broken she told me to just pick it up and carry on, which I did. I still managed to pass the exam overall, though I didn’t tell my own teacher what had happened until after we got the result because I didn’t want him to worry about it. I’d concluded that if I failed the exam as a result then so be it, it would be unpleasant but I’d get over it and try again at some point in the future.
This fairly relaxed attitude to the result was partly attributable to another experience in high school. During our A-level years a friend of mine was upset that she failed an exam by a very small margin, and our music director told us that him having a successful career had not been held back by the fact that at probably around the same age he failed his first attempt at Grade 8 violin by quite a considerable margin (if I recall correctly it was 78/150 – for context the pass mark is 100 and if you get less than 70 they don’t even send you the mark sheet). He actually brought the mark sheet in as proof, and then did something I still find quite amazing to this day: he framed it and hung it on the wall in his office, which was also a practice room so both students and staff would see it on a daily basis.
I don’t know many people who would be brave enough to do that. I think most of us would probably hide it away somewhere, or possibly burn it, and never speak of it again. I imagine the fact that many years had passed probably helped; most adults have acquired stories that are very amusing to recant now but we certainly didn’t find them amusing at the time (like when I and the rest of the chamber choir got kicked out of Cologne Cathedral, which is now widely regarded as the funniest thing that ever happened at school but at the time was both embarassing and infuriating beyond belief, but that’s a story for another time). He was a very skilled violinist, pianist and organist as well as a classroom teacher and conductor for the various ensembles and choirs in the school, so while I don’t know the full path he navigated between that exam and becoming our school’s music director he clearly found some way around it.
A bad experience does not mean you are a terrible musician or that your musical journey is doomed. We try to figure out what went wrong and how we could deal with that better in the future – like turning the pages a bit more gently next time! – and we carry on, because what else are you going to do? Maybe you don’t want to do another exam or play in another big concert, at least not any time soon, and that’s fine, but if you keep playing you will keep improving and your musical journey will continue regardless of any bumps in the road along the way. You may have some setbacks but you only really fail if you abandon the journey entirely.
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