One of my first interactions at last week’s 2024 International Double Reed Society Conference was harsh, brutal criticism from someone who was about to perform one of my works for the first time. It was about my contrabassoon writing, which was too high and too fast, and I learned in that moment that my music had been changed without my permission to be more comfortable. It worked, because I am good at writing invertible counterpoint, but I felt that I should have been included in the decision to change my music.
This is the treatment that I am most used to when people perform my work. I am very accustomed to receiving criticism, because it is mostly how I talk about my own music. It is very easy for me to internalize criticism. This interaction was normal for me, and I started immediately discounting and minimizing the work I did on my first bassoon quartet because of that criticism. I can do better, I told myself. These people deserve better that what I gave them.
I have a very long history of crippling self-deprecation. Apparently people find it off-putting. And I now see why.
Because that was the first and last criticism of my work that I received at the 2024 IDRS conference.
I am not used to praise. I don’t really know how to take a compliment. When someone compliments me, I feel like a worm trying to wriggle off a hook. I usually deflect, ask the person about themselves. Anything to escape being complimented for my work, because my brain is telling me that I absolutely, unequivocally do not deserve to be praised at all for the work that I know I did.
Praise creates visibility, and I am used to being invisible. I am used to expending way more energy in creating music and receiving an amount of energy less than equal when it is experienced. It is hard to stand in the spotlight, because I have never felt like I deserve it.
There’s a big difference between someone telling you that you’re great and telling yourself that you’re good enough to be told that you’re great.
By the fourth day of IDRS, I had experienced 5 of 6 premieres and an avalanche of praise after each one. In the immediate aftermath of the premiere of Sandbox Mode, the English horn octet that my brain was convinced should have never been championed or made possible by eight English hornists in any normal reality, I finally broke down. Overwhelmed and overstimulated by wave upon wave of praise, my body had no further ability to process all the emotion and I collapsed onto a chair in a hallway outside the IDRS exhibition hall and began to cry, no longer able to stop myself.
Enter probably the best person to encounter at an IDRS conference when one is emotionally and physically bereft of energy: Julie of Barton Cane. She immediately plops herself down next to me, encourages me to let it out, offers me some much-needed water, makes me laugh, and informs me that the fact that I’m having trouble processing praise means that I am not an asshole but am actually a badass. She gives me a big hug, which allowed for some of the negative energy I had internalized to dissipate, and I went back into the fray.
I then sought out the advice of Jennet Ingle, who has changed my life in so many ways, most of which I will outline in my upcoming IDRS retrospective. She recommended additional grounding techniques, a book about self-doubt that has been an infinitely difficult but enormously illuminating read so far, and the wisdom that only 49% of my work is below average, which is simply true. All of this to say that she gave me tools to work through the fact that I struggle to process praise, and went back to the conference a little more prepared to face it.
I am not complaining about being praised for my work that was included at IDRS 2024. That was the culmination of eight months of composition work, the organizational power of many people around me, and a community of musicians breathing life into my music in unexpected ways that revealed something between my notes that I didn’t know was there. I know I did that work. I know that I surrounded myself with people who were there for me doing that work.
I really want to be able to tell myself that I deserve the praise I got at IDRS. I haven’t been able to do it yet. My brain keeps telling me otherwise.
I know that my ability to process praise in a healthy way is impaired. I know that my craving for criticism that centers me is an unhealthy addiction. I’m working through it. This was the first step in healing a long history of pain, humiliation, and self harm caused by chronic criticism. I know I had a lot of work to do. I know it’s not going to be easy, but I also know that I will be a better, happier person if I do it.
I also know that the contrabassoon part for my bassoon quartet was damn good, that the criticism I received about it was not warranted or timely, and that I deserve better than to normalize criticism as how I rational what I do and evaluate the music I make.