As long as it sounds good?

After having a great lesson this week with visiting teacher Tom Sherwood of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, I had many great ideas to work with, and lots of fresh inspiration!  One of my favourite discussions was on an older philosophy that 'it doesn't really matter how you're playing, as long as it sounds good to the audience'.  Both Tom and I disagree with this wholeheartedly!  Why we were first opposed was this: when you have tension in your body (or mind), there is going to be at least a little of that creeping into your sound in some way.  Or if you're doing something technically unorthodox, there is a chance that it could make things difficult for you later on as you further develop your skills.  But for me, as I thought about it later on, I think there's one really important thing that takes priority over everything else- we have to love what we're doing!  And that matters more than anything for the product that's going to be delivered to the audiences. If we make our priority in our performances our love for music, our love for the work that we chose to perform and our love for what we're doing at that very moment (remember we could all have chosen 50 other things to do with our lives!), it can't help but come out of our bells in the form of beautiful music!  As Plato once said, "music and rhythm find there way into the secret places of the soul," but I think its the other way around too- when we truly perform from our hearts, the secret parts of our soul are expressed in the music and rhythm!  Let us love what we live every day, and make our performances truly magical.