Cultivating Commentary
Are you wondering about the creepy eye in the orange and how it relates? Read on.
About a year ago I decided to join the circus - or rather, social media. Instagram and YouTube.
It’s been, on the whole, a really gratifying experience. My piano performances have reached audiences from all over Europe, Asia, Russia, the US, India, Latin America. And with the audience has come some surprising, colorful feedback.
A few months back, I received this:
у вас очень напряженное лицо и вы не моргаете
I google-translated it:
your face is very tense and you don't blink
OK. I have to admit that when I first got it, I was a little hurt. I had put a lot of work into that Bach Prelude!
My initial impulse was to delete it. In fact, many people had advised me to disregard social media commentary because it could be cruel. But I decided not to. In Cultivating Feedback, we encourage remaining open to all kinds of feedback.
I was a little reluctant, but I clicked back to the comment and reread it. While on the surface it seemed a pretty straightforward observation, the more I thought about it, the less it seemed so. For one, it had originally been in Russian. Maybe the responder had meant something like: I notice that when you play you're deep in concentration; perhaps if you relaxed a little bit your interpretation would read as more effortless.
Had the feedback been lost in google-translation?
There was only one way to find out – engage in conversation. I responded:
Thank you for your comment – it's helpful for me to know what I look like when I perform.
The moment I posted my response, I suddenly felt the weight sparked by the comment disappear. I had acknowledged their feedback without hiding away from it. In doing so, I had completely neutralized the sting. I felt empowered.
Their response (in English):
sorry for my stupid comment :D
Suddenly the whole thing took on an air of lightness.
Feeling newly resilient, I no longer felt the urge to dismiss their judgment. Maybe there was something valuable in their feedback.
Over the next few days, I rewatched the video and could see that, in fact, I didn’t blink. And while I don’t think any pianist should change the way they look as long as they’re serving the music, it did help me realize that, in general, I wanted to work on relaxing my demeanor so as not to distract viewers from my sound. I had just started out on my video-making adventure and was going through a steep learning curve, and this piece of feedback helped me see the directions I could pursue. I have user-jw1vz9mu5w and Cultivating Feedback to thank for this insight.
AI generated the image: “eyes pried open like in clockwork orange.”
Garrett Fisher performs Bach without blinking.