by Serguey Shinder
Forty minutes, a small room, maybe sixty people, and I had spent more time choosing the songs than rehearsing some of them. I was proud of that list. I can still remember its order.
It went badly in a way that took me years to understand, because nothing actually went wrong. No strings broke. Nobody forgot anything serious. We played roughly what we had practised and the room drifted away from us somewhere around the third song and never quite came back.
The list was built out of what I most enjoyed playing. That sounds harmless and it was the whole problem. The pieces I enjoyed were the intricate ones, the ones with the awkward middle section I had finally got clean. Two of them sat next to each other in the same key at almost the same tempo, which I had not noticed at all, because when you are playing them from the inside they feel completely different. From six metres away they are one long song.
Position three was the slow one I loved most. It is a good piece. It is a terrible thing to put in front of people who have not yet decided to trust you.
Afterwards the man running the sound said something plain and generous. He said we had played well and that he had not known when to listen. I thought about that for a long time. He was not talking about the playing at all. He was describing a shape, and our set did not have one.
What I had done was design the evening around the performer's experience. My attention was fully occupied for all forty minutes, so I assumed everyone's was. But the player's attention and the listener's attention run on completely different clocks. Mine is full the moment the first bar starts. Theirs has to be earned, and it resets roughly every four minutes, and it notices contrast far more than quality.
The other thing I had to admit is that the songs that land are often the easy ones. The ones I had grown bored of, because I had played them two hundred times and they no longer asked anything of me. A room has never heard any of them. My boredom is a private matter and has no business near a setlist.
Now I build the order by writing out the audience's forty minutes rather than mine. Something immediate first. Contrast early, keys and tempos actually checked against each other on paper. The quiet one placed late, once there is a reason to follow us into it. The piece I am most pleased with somewhere past the point where being pleased with myself is relevant.
The list is worse to play and much better to hear.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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