Performances don’t always go as planned.
Some lackluster performances can be blamed on someone – “I missed that cue” or “You didn’t learn that part as well as you should have.”
But many performances don’t have a convenient spot to blame. It was a novel acoustic environment, or what someone at for lunch that day, or a sick relative on someone’s mind, or any of 1,000 (more like, many of 1,000) causes for the mistakes that veer an ensemble away from their performance potential.
It’s why, with as much passion as I can muster, I urge my students to not hand out blame. It’s bigger than that, it’s less clear than that. Blame only hurts relationships and does little to make the next performance any better.
Especially in educational ensembles, where the point is the growth, there is no value in assigning blame after a performance that doesn’t go as planned.