The second-best part of Halloween after the trick-or-treating is definitely the trades.
My kids will spend a remarkable amount of time devising increasingly Baroque trades of candies to optimize their stash to their tastes. This always strikes me as ironic, since much of their candy ends up uneaten, even months later.
But, then, isn’t that what we do as ensemble directors? We work incredibly hard to optimize performance of our current repertoire in November and December, even as we know that most of it will be no longer performable come December 26.
The joy, I think, comes in the trades themselves – the creativity and the human interaction. And so it is with music-making. The candy and the performance aren’t the point. Creativity and the humanity are.