year’s end, mid-season

I still can’t wrap my brain around the fact that it’s December already. The beginning of October seems like just last week to me. I’ve been playing in the Oregon Symphony since 1995. Nineteen ninety-five. Sixteen years. How did all of that time go by so quickly? I almost feel like I’ve been on a transcontinental airplane flight all of that time, and my soul, which has been lagging behind me on an invisible tether, is only just now starting to catch up with my body.

I was 26 when I joined the orchestra (just a week or so before my 27th birthday), and now I’m 43. Did I think I’d still be here back then? I remember in the interview portion of the finals of my audition (they used to do that for all candidates in auditions back then), James DePriest asked me where I saw myself in five years’ time. I don’t really recall what I said, other than that I was savvy enough to know that the answer “anywhere but here” was not the right one to say. I guess I figured that I’d earn tenure here and then try to move up the ladder to an orchestra with more prestige and better pay. And I did try. Came close a couple of times – heartbreakingly close in one case a couple of years ago.

It’s interesting to think about what might have been once you get to a certain point in your life – and there’s literally no point too far back in one’s personal history that’s off limits, at least for me. I wonder if I should have taken one of those Marlboro Festival auditions that I was always too scared and (conveniently) unprepared to take each year, even though lots of people said I should have done so. I wonder if I should have taken the plunge with the Ethos Quartet and taken on professional management when the opportunity arose, even with the personnel issues we were having at the time. I wonder what would have happened if I’d been offered that position with the Mendelssohn Quartet that I auditioned for back in ’95. There are no answers for such musings, however. Only more questions, more permutations, more uncertainty.

I find myself more and more convinced, however, that I’m not a ‘lifer’ in the orchestra arena. As much as I love my colleagues and the great music we make together, I feel very much that at some point, there will need to be a change. I don’t know what that change will entail. There’s a temptation to embrace change at certain intervals or round numbers. The violist and new music specialist Garth Knox said to me once that he liked to upend his professional life every seven years. He played in the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Arditti Quartet, and then embarked on a solo career – each of seven years duration. On the other hand, there is the appeal of saying that twenty years and out is the way to go. It matches with the military retirement scheme (not altogether an inapt analogy) and the gold watch of corporate worlds past. But it, too is a line in the sand, and perhaps is too inflexible and unyielding. In the end, however, it remains up to me what to do and when to do it.

So, today I put it out into the universe: what’s next? I’m ready to explore.