What are we willing to say no to?
For some background on music as possibility and its role in helping us confront the toxic state of our politics in contemporary society see this introductory post.
I want to start this post by sharing a piece of advice I received as a student; one that I imagine many others who have pursued a career in music are familiar with:
“Say yes to every opportunity you can. When we are starting out it’s more important to get exposure and build a network than to be choosy with our artistic projects.”
I lived by that mantra for nearly a decade as a student. Saying yes to every opportunity led to some truly great experiences: participating in numerous competitions, helping run a new music organization, earning co-curricular arts leadership and nonprofit management certificates, just to name a few. Saying yes led me to play music all over the world and meet colleagues who have become friends for life. Through it all, I became very good at juggling the complex web of projects and commitments, showing up to each project with enough of myself to be invested, but also prepared to shift gears quickly to the upcoming activity. I lived my life always thinking: “what’s next.”
I’ve written before about the concept of reliability and how to say no in a previous post discussing the acronym BRAVING as a structure for understanding trust. In that piece, I talked about how a wonderful mentor during my doctorate came to me with some concerns about how busy I was keeping myself. I took a lot of pride in my ability to handle the busyness, to stay afloat on a sea of competing commitments. She acknowledged that it was impressive that I was able to handle so much and to keep my head above the water (albeit barely), but she was worried that I wasn’t fully present in any of it. She made clear to me that my time was a limited resource, and that in my efforts to say yes to everything, the quality of my creative work across the board was suffering. With her encouragement, I learned how to say no, to prioritize the creative work I found most important, which since has directly led to many of the performances and projects that have had the most impact on me and my community.
The work of building spaces of collective imagination and possibility requires patience and sustained intention. Just creating a flash-in-the-pan, one-time performance isn’t enough on its own to move the needle of change when the forces of modern life and the resilience of the status quo actively seek to keep everything the same. Change is hard work and accomplishing it through an artistic practice means always having to place this value front of mind when choosing our work. This is where reliability comes in. What projects and performances will we be willing to say no to in order to make space and time for work that more closely aligns with our goal of creating experiences of shared imagination and possibility? Our time is one of our most precious limited resources, and in order to achieve the consistency needed for change to occur, we need to be deliberate where and when we choose to show up as artists.
“What projects and performances will we be willing to say no to in order to make space and time for work that more closely aligns with our goal of creating experiences of shared imagination and possibility?”
There is an extra layer to this conversation about reliability for those of us with the power to curate the music student experience in higher ed. One of the reasons music students are so good at saying yes to every opportunity, is that their class schedule teaches them how to juggle an immense to-do list. It’s not uncommon for a conservatory or music school student to only have a handful of free credits for elective classes over the course of a four year degree, limiting their ability to explore other areas of interest outside their immediate focus. Also, music students are used to receiving one credit hour for a class that meets up to 6 or 7 hours a week. Everyone who has earned a music degree has experienced the day where you wonder when you are going to eat lunch, because there isn’t a break in your schedule from when you wake up till you go to sleep. How then can we expect music students to invest time in community projects when they don’t even have time to take the classes they want? It’s up to us with the ability to mold those courses of study into curricula which support students with the essentials of musicianship and the freedom and space to deeply explore artistic projects they are interested in.
The work of building and sustaining community relationships which engender the collective possibility unlocked by creative work take as much intention and practice as preparing the artwork itself. The music is a conveyance to accessing the collective wisdom in the room, envisioning the possible futures, and then helping to make those futures with the community. That means showing up even outside of the boundaries of the performance or teaching project and being willing to be present and do the work that needs to be done. What are we willing to say no to, in order to make the time for us to be reliable to that promise to our community? Are we willing to say no to the status quo, to challenge it through music by saying yes to possibility, connection, and imagination, creating a new world that we build together?
