A week ago on the new moon, I sat in a “circle” of 9 women over Zoom, and set a bunch of shit on fire… in my living room.

(Who knew, I’m also a poet. And a witch, apparently)

I’m not entirely sure why I haven’t done this sooner, because it felt AMAZING. Damn. Why don’t they teach us these things in school?!? “Setting Things on Fire is Pretty Fun 101.” Seems like a no-brainer where absolutely nothing would go wrong.

Of course I’ve enjoyed many a fire before. I grew up right on a beach in rural redneck Nova Scotia where nightly summer bonfires were as inevitable as the attending drunks who would stumble into our yard to pee (or pass out on the tent containing me and two other kids). But this wasn’t just any standard burning of rotten wood and Bud Light cartons…

I was burning my creative demons.

I mean, technically I was burning little pieces of paper on which I had scrawled the names of all the grade A shit-turds I have encountered in my life. I don’t mean the kind of shit-turds who yell at you for saying 2 words in English on the streets of Montreal, or who walk around the upper floor of an apartment on the heels of their feet. (These are grade B or grade C shit-turds at best; or simply, “turds.”)

I’m talking about the kind of shit-turds who see the embers of something beautiful in a budding artist… and make it their mission to stamp it out. If I only knew from age 7, when I met my first creative demon, what I know now: these people are miserable, and feel a lot more comfortable when everybody around them is on the same level.

Helene, one of my mom’s delightful partners growing up, would listen to me playing concertos on a 3/4 size violin and call me a sissy, preaching that I should be playing hockey outside like a normal kid. My violin teacher for the first half of my Bachelor’s degree in music treated me like I was 8 and made me play matching repertoire, crushing my desire to practice. The conductor of my first real orchestral job pulled me into his office after my winning audition and informed me how lucky I was that he had decided to take pity on me, he could have just as easily not hired me. The man then proceeded to bully me during rehearsal breaks all year, aka when nobody was watching. Mm, so lucky.

The list of creative demons goes on, and on. Snore. We’ve all had them. It doesn’t escape me though, that most if not all of my demons bared their ugly heads during my classical music career. I wonder how much of a coincidence it is, that during this pandemic when all of my normal distractions are gone, I have realized that I don’t really love playing classical music anymore. Did I ever really like playing it? SHUT UP, BRAIN!!

Let me just humor this passing thought for a second though. I mean, of course I loved playing classical music, and still do. Sometimes. When I love playing classical music, it is because the intention is pure. I, and everyone surrounding me, want nothing more than to share something meaningful and gorgeous with each other and everyone in the audience. This happened a lot in my youth when I used to take part in summer music festivals where we were worked to the bone for free room and board, not a penny more. We must have loved what we were doing if we were doing it for free!!

Now as I progress in my musical career and call myself a professional, earning a sizable chunk of money for my services (pandemic shit-show aside), I find I am often surrounded by people who have forgotten why we got into this business in the first place. If we are being paid, that must be why we are doing it. We get bogged down in matching up all of our bowings and articulations and playing it exactly as the composer intended, in the “correct” style of that period.

We are the highly-trained musicians of an internationally renowned professional orchestra, and goddammit IT HAD BETTER SHOW!!

If my poor stand-partner (I write this but I really mean me) is unfortunate enough to play an up-bow while the rest of us play down, or they hold a half-note for a fraction of a second too long, or heaven forbid, they misread an accidental… you would think they just audibly sharted during the slow movement of a Beethoven symphony, their face will flush such a deep red.

We shouldn’t be deeply embarrassed if we play a wrong note; we should be deeply embarrassed if we play an entire concert in the pursuit of perfection, forgetting our true purpose: to connect with each other. What we lose in technical accuracy, we gain in creating a transcendent experience for the audience, and ourselves. I miss the concerts of my youth, when there wasn’t so much at stake.

I remember during one of the summers I played with the Verbier Festival Orchestra, we were performing Mahler’s 4th symphony. The one with the famous scordatura concertmaster solos in the 2nd movement. All of our concerts were filmed for Medici.tv, so we always had a bit of an extra edge to our already youthful adrenaline-fueled performances. Not even 4 bars into the sea of difficult solos, our concertmaster Roberto’s E-string (or, F#-string, in this case) snaps clear off of his violin, and he has to suddenly transpose everything over to the next available string. It’s truly every violinist’s nightmare. But Roberto is almost fired up by the challenge, and performs the rest of the piece with flair, sporting a mischievous smile- as though to let the audience in on the joke. It’s by no means perfect, but it’s exciting as hell.

After the concert, a bunch of us sit on my twin-sized bed crowded around a laptop, and re-watch the moment when Roberto’s string snaps over and over, freeze-framing on his face the exact millisecond he realizes he now needs to recalculate every single note of the solo, in front of live cameras. It is just pure, undiluted horror… and we are absolutely PISSING OUR PANTS laughing. Not at him!! But just, in utter glee because this kind of thing isn’t allowed to happen in the classical world. We feel exhilarated! We just witnessed something entirely new, something we didn’t spend hundreds of hours planning for!!

When we shared the footage with Roberto, he was understandably dismayed at first, because he is a fantastic player and he wanted the audience to experience the music exactly as practiced. This is how classical musicians are conditioned. But our laughter was contagious and soon Roberto was peeing his pants too. What Roberto gave us, and the audience that night- was something real. It was vulnerable, it was beautiful, it was hilarious. It was art.

I have had so many great experiences during my classical music career, but I’m just not sure it’s sustainable anymore. At least, not as my primary creative outlet in life. All of my creative demons along the way have certainly rocked my boat, but I think what is finally sinking it is the unbearable expectation to be perfect all the time. To have to hide a significant part of myself in my art, just because “that’s how it has always been done.” When we are only willing to present our creative work to audiences in a perfect state, we deprive them of the most special part.

On the new moon I don’t think I was just burning my creative demons. I was burning my identity as a classical musician. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I am here, on December 21st, 2020 (the winter solstice) standing on my figurative mountaintop and yelling my dreams at the top of my lungs. I need to be in a medium where I can be 100% myself. Where I feel safe sharing the whole, not just the polished exterior. Where I can make a giant mistake that becomes the story, and I make everybody piss their pants laughing.

“HEY UNIVERSE! I WANT TO BE A WRITER!!”