You will never be happy as a musician.
Sorry, did you think that this would be a fun video about my senior recital? Ha. No.
I was able to do my last semester at Berklee during the summer where I only needed to take two credits:
my directed study, in order to graduate.
My major was jazz composition, which basically meant that I had an hour lesson every semester in preparation for my senior recital.
I could have just coasted, but I wanted to make the best use of my time that summer, so I set a goal for myself.
I would aim to write a new piece of music every week that summer for ten piece jazz ensemble and then at the end of the summer I would
pick the best pieces that I wrote, and include those in my senior recital.
I really tried to stretch my compositional chops, I wrote an arrangement of an Aaron Copland setting of an Emily Dickenson poem,
I wrote some cool jazz-indian fusion tunes, and I wrote a bunch of odd-meter songs, 'cause, as everybody knows,
the more odd meters that you have in a piece of music, the better it is.
I was so excited for this. It would be the culmination of all the music-making that I had made so far in my career.
I was even more excited about the fact that Berklee would professionally video record and audio record the recital
so I would have some really awesome YouTube videos to show everybody how awesome the music I was making, really was.
"I'M... AWESOME!"
The day of the recital came...and went.
I remember hanging out at some crappy college apartment along Hemingway Avenue, at some party,
people were occasionally coming over to congratulate me.
And I was saying, "thank you", but inside I felt...hollow.
As I stood there, on the fire escape, Bud Light in hand, all I could think about were all of the mistakes that I made, and other people made
during the recital that made it so that the music didn't come out the way that I wanted it to.
The glory that I sought from having awesome YouTube videos would never come.
What's more is that this was the end of my Berklee experience. A week later, I was home in my parents' house in suburban Maryland
500 miles away from Boston and all of my friends, with absolutely no creative drive or inspiration left in me.
I got very depressed. I didn't play bass for a month and a half afterwards.
I really didn't think that this "music thing" that I had obsessed over for so long was really worth it, if this was the feeling that came with all of that hard work.
I had basically burnt out. And pretty hard.
This was my wake-up call to a reality of the creative experience, and honestly, the human experience,
because when you're new to something, it's easy to get wrapped up in the idea of an "end goal", like have a kick-ass senior recital without any mistakes, for example.
This is the kind of nervous energy that often comes with musicians about to release their first album, or single, or what-have-you, out into the real world.
They're expecting that all of their hard work be rewarded with a sense of contentment, or accomplishment, or perhaps adulation from the general public.
They will, almost always, receive none of the above.
"You get NOTHING. You LOSE! GOOD DAY, SIR!"
In Tibetan Buddhism, there's a tradition of creating mandalas, or geometric paintings that represent the cosmos, out of sand.
Over the course of several weeks, a team of monks will painstakingly "paint" a complex and detailed image, bit by bit, grain by grain,
slowly adding sand to the overall composition. When the mandala is complete, after weeks of hard work, it's ritualistically destroyed.
All the sand is cleaned up, and then there's nothing left of it.
The point, in this exercise, is to show the impermanence in the world, as represented by the mandala.
Everything changes. Everything that humans ever build is destroyed.
I can imagine that it teaches the monks to not hold on to the idea of the finished mandala as the goal.
Holding on to that idea is only going to lead to heartbreak when the mandala is eventually destroyed and sent back to the ether.
Instead, the point in this is to embrace the cycle of creation and then destruction.
The parallel here, I hope, should be fairly obvious.
When artists, or musicians, seek the end product of their hard work as a source of personal validation, they will be disappointed.
This is an easy way of getting burnt out, like I was at the end of my recital.
In my experience since then, the joy of music-making (and I can only can only assume, mandala-making) comes from the process of it.
The sweat, the attention to detail, the thought, the concern, and the work of it all.
At the end of a project, you just gotta leave the music alone and look on to the next piece of music that you're going to create.
The old music is done, it's finished, it's destroyed, in a sense.
French philosopher Albert Camus wrote an essay called, "The Myth of Sisyphus" after the Greek myth of a man condemned by the gods to push a stone up a mountain for all of eternity.
As Sisyphus nears the top of the mountain, the stone is fated to slip through his fingers, tumbling back down the mountain, where Sisyphus must then descend down the mountain and try the whole process again.
Always in vain.
Camus intended this as a parable for the human condition, and how we might find meaning in meaninglessness.
Why toil all of our lives, when the end result is death? Or the destruction of a mandala? Or...having a crappy senior recital?
Camus ends his essay like this:
There's a quote that's widely attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, that I quite like:
You're never going to be fully content with a piece of music, and it's never going to feel like it's truly done.
You're never gonna reach the top of the mountain. Instead, at some point, you're gonna need to let the stone go,
so you can start the process all over again.
Even though this video might seem philosophical, in my mind, it's fairly practical to look to the insight of Camus
and the Buddhists to transform your personal relationship to the music that you make.
One day, you may find yourself descending down the mountain, feeling depressed and hollow, and feeling completely burnt out.
Don't worry, you're just taking part in the eternal cycle of creation and destruction. And one day soon, you, like Sisyphus, will start carrying that stone up the mountain once again.
Hopefully, this struggle towards the heights is enough to fill your heart, as well.
By the way, the background music that you have been listening to is a piece that I wrote for my senior recital.
It's a tone poem depicting a certain Greek myth. It's called, "The Myth of Sisyphus".
Anyway guys, thank you so much for watching this. This has been, "Adam Neely's Bass Lessons"...I guess?
I hope it's a bass lesson. It's really not a bass lesson. But thank you so much for watching it.
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