Guitar &c.

Last weekend I was writing an article for the local guitar society newsletter. Production schedules being what they are, I was writing for the January issue on the somewhat unsurprising topic of “New Year’s Resolutions”. The gist of my article was that important resolutions rarely get accomplished in one grand gesture, but rather in lots of little increments of trial and error, some setbacks, and many incremental successes. Here’s how I summarized the process:

Each month, I’d notice something new about what happened when I was playing…Each time I’d ask myself the same questions: what went well – do that again; what went poorly – try something different next time.

That same weekend, I played a small concert. Not a big or important event by anyone else’s standards, but significant to me. As people naturally do, folks asked afterwards how I felt the performance went. This is the part where I decide whether I’m going to actually live by my own advice. Do I answer that things went better in practice and I’m a little disappointed that the performance didn’t’ flow as smoothly as I’d hoped, OR do I answer that there were a couple moments that surpassed my expectations and this was probably one of my best performances ever.

The challenge is that both of these answers are true and important. Over time, though, I’ve learned that one answer is private and one is public. The private answer is that things almost always go better for me in practice. I usually have more focus and achieve better musical flow without the anxiety of an audience and the tiny surprises that crop up in any performance. The private answer is that these are exactly the things I need to work on to improve for the next round.

The first part of the question I’m supposed to ask myself, though, is “what went well”. This is part of the public answer. People were gracious enough to show up, give me an hour out of their days, and listen with focused attention. They came to enjoy a special, unique experience. My job as a performer is to provide that, not just through the notes I play, but by the environment I create through my demeanor, my attire, and my words before, during, and after the performance.

So when someone asks how I felt about the performance, I search for something honest that I can share with them. In this case, here’s some of the things I noticed: the guitar sounded especially nice in the performance space, I was really pleased with how the second Tarrega piece went, I always really enjoy playing the Brouwer, I was energized by how focused and attentive the audience was. These answers help people to know that they shared in, and helped create, something that was very special for me. Something that I hope was special for them as well.

For the longest time, I neglected to ask or answer, the “what went well” part of the question. I’ll definitely think about “what went poorly” and what could be improved as I practice over the next few weeks; I certainly expect to have a great conversation about this at my next lesson. For now, though, I’m working to carry forward the small successes and nourish them. They’re a tremendous source of encouragement and energy as I work through the details of all the things that need refinement and polish for next round.

This summer I attended a fantastic master class with Ben Verdery.  In addition to Ben’s boundless energy, there were lots of terrific performers, great music, and a very fun ensemble performance.  I also got one exceptionally handy little handout:  a copy of a little pamphlet titled Don’t cramp your style by the British Association for the Performing Arts Medicine.

The pamphlet consists of 12 simple stretches to be used during practice and performance.  One of the key ideas is that musicians rely heavily upon their entire bodies; they should take the same care to warm up and prepare that any other athlete would.  In addition to improving my warm up routine, I’ve started trying to incorporate these easy stretches into periodic breaks I take during longer practice sessions.

It would be fantastic to have this kind of organization in the US.  In the meantime the BAPAM has a number of other useful factsheets for performers on their website.  As they say, “Think of yourself as a performance athlete,” and treat your body accordingly.

My old site design served me well for a number of years as a place to post performance information and a few recordings.  As time passed though, I wanted to have a more “modern” presence on the web and figured I should build myself a new web-home.  I thought about just putting up a MySpace page and calling it done, but, frankly, that seemed aesthetically and technically yucky. 

So, instead, I set out to build MarkBussey.com 3.0:

OVERALL PLATFORM AND THEME

• The entire site is built on top of WordPress (2.7.1).  After some research and evaluation, I picked WordPress as a sufficiently flexible, but stable platform to begin posting and managing more regular content updates.  I wanted the site to reflect my personal style, so the ability to develop a custom them was a key selection factor.  As a techie, I could have just built the whole thing in PHP or Rails, but that seemed like re-inventing the wheel.  I considered other blogging and CMS platforms as well, but WordPress seemed to have the best balance of getting up and running fast while letting me evolve some of the advanced design and features I’d dreamt up over time.  The large number of available plugins was also a key deciding factor – I wanted an elegant way to let visitors hear my music.  The nearly automatic ability to turn Piece of the Month  postings in a subscription PodCast cinched the deal.
• I looked at a number of themes, but ultimately decided to build my own.   Not for everyone, but a fun, educational, and periodically challenging endeavor.
• The base typography of a site gives alot of character.  I’m indebted to the folks at codestyle.org for their overview of how to Build better CSS font stacks and specifically their pointers to Michael Tuck’s 8 definitive Web font stacks.
• The overall look and feel was strongly inspired by The Fell Types website.  «The Fell Types are digitally reproduced by Igino Marini. www.iginomarini.com»  Most of the limited decoration on this site is based upon the Fell Flowers font sets.  I really like the spare clean look of  Marini’s own site design.  Obviously, I diverged from both.  I’d been looking at a lot of older books’ fronts-pieces and other decoration which ultimately inspired the look of the site.
• One of the fun challenges with the theme was trying to make the layout relatively liquid, i.e. text and columns will resize and re-flow to adapt to the size of the browser window and the layout will adapt to the default font size set in your browser.  (Try Command - or Command + on a Mac or the equivalent on a PC).   Hopefully this makes the site a little more readable on a wider variety of displays – from netbooks to 30″ Apple Cinema Displays – Although, I haven’t been able to try either yet.
• Sometimes it feels like the site isn’t “Web 2.0″ enough, and maybe I’ll add some gradients, reflections, and rounded corners in the future…but probably not.

REALLY USEFUL PLUGINS

• I’d always thought the blank media player / quicktime window that popped up on all of my mp3 links was ugly, but never did anything about it on the old site.  The WP audio player plugin is really cool, easy to install and use, and unobtrusive to the overall design.  I should customize the colors to fit with my theme someday soon.
• The table of Contents is built using the Link Widgets plugin set to display only links from a specific category.   Each of the contents menu items is just a normal WordPress link with the category set to the (user defined) category “Contents”.  {The widget sorts items alphabetically, but I was able to take advantage of the fact that the roman numerals I-VIII happen to alphabetize in the same order they represent numerically.}
• The author block uses the default WordPress text widget.
• I looked at a variety of different ways to handle Upcoming Events; most were overly complicated for my needs.  Ultimately found the Simple Upcoming Events widget by Hideaki Hayashi.  {I’ve added a tiny bit of code to add the “View All” option at the end of the list, but the widget is perfectly useful without this.}   In order to determine which posts to display, the widget requires you to set a custom field with the event date.  I built a custom query that uses this field to sort entries in the Schedule view, but I think there are actually a number of plugins that can provide this same functionality to change the display order of posts in a specific category.
• The ‘Recent Updates’ menu uses the WordPress default “Recent Posts” widget.  Again, I added a tiny bit of code to provide the “View All” functionality.
• The RSS feeds are provided using the Category Specific RSS Menu plugin.  As you can see, I’m predominantly interested in getting people to follow updates about my playing – either at live events or via MP3.  This widget along with the audio player basically gave me a free podcast for the audio updates.  Since I didn’t include it elsewhere in the theme, this was a good place to put the overall site RSS feed as well.
• In order to create internal links within the site without creating ping-back notifications, I use Michael D. Adams’s No Self Pings plugin.
• Having already experienced “comment Spam” without even having officially launched the site, I’ve also enabled the Akismet plugin provided with the default WordPress install.

It’s been a fun leaning experience putting the new site together, and I’ll probably keep tinkering a bit over time.  Although, hopefully now that I have the site up, I can redirect more of my free time to getting more gig’s scheduled and keeping up with the Piece of the Month posts.