Can there be success without winning?
I think one mission for music educators, particularly ensemble directors, must be to insist that there can be success without winning.
We live in a society where the biggest cultural institutions have winning and losing at their center. Professional, college, and high school sports are an obvious example, but so too are politics, and major arts aren’t far behind (thanks to the Oscars, Grammys, Tonys, etc.). Pick a part of society and you can point to a way that it is focused on winning (and, necessarily, losing.) Every year around this time, we see “winners” in the best-high-school-according-to-carefully-cultivated-criteria awards, for example.
When my ensemble makes good music, there are no losers. Does that mean we aren’t winning? Perhaps, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t successful. But in a society that equates success and winning, those of us in front of ensembles must get to work.
I try to repeatedly talk about the idea of winning as opposed to what we are doing. Even when I’m taking my choir to festival or to something as “winning” driven as the World Choir Games, we will have long talks about our personal definitions of success and whether they necessarily correlate with a particular color of ribbon or medal.
It can’t be said often enough: success and winning are two very different things.