One of my composition students is having the first live read of a piece he’s composed this week. The first read of the piece, and the first read of his life.
As we finished our lesson today, I urged him to keep his mind really open during the rehearsal, and to focus on systems lessons. Focus on the what you can take from the experience that you can apply to every single piece you write from here forward.
We can, and must, focus on the details of the piece in front of us; but if we ignore the systems lessons throughout the process, then we’ll simply keep making the same mistakes in each successive piece, until we take the time to learn them.