Last year, I was the accompanist for a community choir that was focused on Latin-American music. I loved this choir – the people were nice, the music was fun, and it was the first time I’d done something musical in a while. There was no written piano accompaniment for any of the pieces, just the vocal parts, so I had to come up with all the accompaniment. I fused melody lines with chord patterns for most of the songs, but there were a couple that I fully arranged a piano part for. One of those was a song called Melodia de Arrabal (Suburban Melody), a catchy tango by Carlos Gardel. It was my first time arranging an accompaniment, and I put a lot of effort into it. I spent two or three weeks on it, looking for previous arrangements and piano solos, researching the stylistic characteristics of tango, and tailoring it to the vocal arrangement we were using and the needs of the choir. In the end, I had something I was pretty proud of. The trickiest part was the introduction – the vocal arrangement had a little introduction to the rest of the song, but the choir needed a piano introduction so they could get their notes. I didn’t want to change it too much, so I mostly copied the vocal harmonies, but added some chord inversions and a different bass line. It ended up a little awkward to play, but I liked it, so I didn’t change it. However, a week before the choir’s first concert, the singers requested a slightly different chord pattern so they could get their starting notes a little easier. I came up with something that worked, but it was a little more difficult than the original, and I practiced it over and over again so I wouldn’t mess it up on the day of the concert.
The big day arrived, and Melodia de Arrabal was our second last song on the program. I was reasonably nervous about playing the introduction, but I reminded myself that I’d successfully played it many times before, and that I knew the score inside and out. I began to play – and slipped on a note I wasn’t expecting. I panicked a little and messed up the chord pattern I’d worked so hard on. If I remember correctly, I hit a bunch of wrong notes that sounded awfully discordant, might have stopped playing for half a beat, and managed to recover enough to hit the bass note on the downbeat the singers were supposed to come in on, but I think it took me a full bar to recover entirely. It was a painfully obvious mistake. I was terribly embarrassed to have messed up in front of an audience like that, especially considering it was in an exposed section of a score that I’d arranged, and in a part that the singers were relying on. The choir handled it wonderfully, though, and came in right when they were supposed to. I apologized to the director afterwards, and she was very kind and told me not to worry about it. I was frustrated about it for a while and kept thinking “how could I have made such a foolish mistake”, but in the end the negativity got swept away by the rest of the choir’s joy at having pulled off their first concert and I filed the experience away as a reminder to be prepared for nerves. In the interest of honesty, the content of the readings wasn’t anything new to me. I’ve been to therapy before and the steps that you follow to change negative thought patterns are fairly similar to what was outlined in the articles. It used to be very easy for me to get stuck on a thought, like Ghislane in the first article. In this situation, the thought would probably have been something like “I made a very obvious mistake in an important place, so I’m a failure.” Therapy taught me how to break down those kinds of thoughts and see where they are coming from, like Lightner did when deconstructing the responses to rain. By trying to “finish the sentence”, I would have thought of “failure at playing the piano”, “failure at performing”, “failure at arranging”, and landed on “failure at being an accompanist” as the thought that bothered me the most. At the time of the concert, I’d already been using therapy skills for a while, so I managed to avoid getting stuck in the thought to begin with, but I still needed to address my frustration and embarrassment. After the concert, I examined my thoughts and recognized that I was feeling as though I’d let the choir down with my mistake and was afraid that they would think less of me for having made it. So I looked around to see if my interpretation of the situation was backed up by any concrete evidence, and no, the choir wasn’t judging me harshly for messing up. They were completely focused on enjoying the feelings of a successful concert and many people thanked me for playing with them. I was still a little embarrassed, but it was at a manageable level, and I was able to enjoy the rest of the evening. By applying these mindful techniques, the whole experience became something to learn from instead of a horror story that would negatively impact future performances. I am grateful for knowing how to handle emotions a little better than I used to, especially now that I’m facing down a constant stream of assignments, essays, and performances, and I appreciate the reminder of how these techniques can make a positive impact on our lives.
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