(Oops, I'm doing it again.)

Problem with me and emotions is that I need to understand and be aware of emotions in order to be effective at what I do, which is telling a story through music (music performance). The words (notes) are already written (in most cases) and so I just have to add emotional triggers and inflections etc. So how can I do that when I abhor my own emotions? Even worse, I usually put myself into a neutral state when I practice music and then I end up sounding like a robot (very common comment when I play in studio) because either it's just notes and rhythms or everything is far too deliberate and subtlety gets lost. I end up faking it until I make it and only then do I start to get some kind of personal emotional affect from the music I'm playing. It takes a while, and when, in my line of work, I only have days or at best weeks to learn a piece,... well, I think you know where it goes from there.

How can I put emotions into music when music by itself has no emotion? I mean, it's emotionally and spiritually evocative, but it can only be that way to a person when it conforms to some predetermined standards, which are somewhat consistent and yet completely unknown to me (I don't know exactly what triggers a person's emotional response, but I can guess on a broad spectrum). I only know what affects me. My job is to learn their language and then convince others that that should affect them that way too, in their language. Or I convince them that my language is worth paying attention to.

I was at a flute recital a few weeks ago and there was a piece on it that was piano and flute, written by a Japanese composer. It was a beautiful piece. I thought it was sad and melancholy. A bunch of other people thought it was uplifting. Maybe if I listened to it in a different context I'd think it was uplifting too. It's all subjective. And very annoying. In the recent concerto competition last month, there was a guy who was playing a horn concerto, and he played it in such a way that when people asked what it was about and he asked them what they thought it was about, they were very close to what the composer's notes said about the piece.

Most people are used to a specific piece of music affecting them a specific way (based on the performers doing such and such in the music), and so when they hear it a different way it can be quite jarring. Sometimes it's good and sometimes it's... not as good. (I don't want to say "bad"... like, Sabine Meyer is going to play Debussy's Premiere Rhapsody differently than Wenzel Fuchs, and while I really don't like Wenzel Fuchs's interpretation, it's still a good piece. Same thing with comparing the Chicago Symphony's performance of Tchaikovsky's 5th symphony with the New York Philharmonic.)

So in the end, it's not so much about what I want but how to give other people what they want - a quality musical experience that speaks to them more than they hoped. Not my emotions, but what speaks to theirs.

It's like differential equations. For those that don't know, mathematicians work on many DEs by guessing at the solution (and have been taught some specific guessing methods like what to try first) and then tweaking it to fit the problem or parameters. It's not concrete and also is very annoying.