Well last night was a first – over the past couple of weeks I’ve been working with a small group to develop a karate performance piece we’ll be presenting in an informal performance tonight for our own school.  We’ve been rehearsing in the evenings, and we’re using music for the piece.  It’s percussion, providing a nice rhythm to which we can sync our movements.  It’s coming along – it’s not a high production-values kind of performance, but we’re doing our best!

Of course working through these kinds of things amongst people who only sort of know what they’re doing tends to provide moments of intense collaboration – a nice way of saying gentle disagreements.  We are really doing just fine, but at one moment last night we did seem to be divided into the two of us who play instruments and the three of us who don’t.  As I was counting out the rhythm and talking about how you can hear it, one of my fellow performers chimed in, “You’re the musician!”

I had to take a moment to smile and thank him.  If I’ve been slow to adopt the “violinist” label (and I have), I hadn’t even considered the fuller “musician” label yet.  It’s definitely going to take some time for me to identify with that one.

Thanks for reading.

Ryan