recital ovenbird After the year end piano recital there is an awards ceremony. My daughter wins an award, though not the top award, and she’s happy, until the girl she just finished performing a duet with wins the top award, and everyone goes on and on about this girl’s prodigy-level accomplishments: blasting through three levels of RCM repertoire in a year, getting the very top marks in the province on her exams, getting first place in a number of major competitions. In the car on the way home my father-in-law is singing the girl’s praises—how she moves while she plays, how she looks like she’s feeling the music, how incredible it is that she’s done so much at the tender age of eight. I want to scream at him to shut up. I’m watching my daughter fold into herself. Her face is half rage and half disappointment. “Stop comparing me to her!” She yells and then gives her grandfather the cold shoulder for the rest of the evening, which I don’t blame her for at all. When we get home I go up to her room. I help her get out of her recital dress and into more comfortable clothes. We shuffle aside all the trophies she has to make room for the new one. I take my nearly ten year old child into my arms and kiss the top of her head and turn her face to mine and say, “Look. Don’t compare yourself to anyone else. You have so much to be proud of. There’s a lot of focus in music lessons on grades and exams and competitions, but I don’t think that’s even remotely the most important thing. Look at everything you’ve overcome this year. You started out with a catastrophically broken arm. You played repertoire with your left hand for months! Then you battled through debilitating anxiety, learned all sorts of new coping mechanisms, dedicated yourself to learning through therapy, and came out a thousand times stronger on the other side. You no longer panic when you have to play something from memory. You took on a piano competition because you wanted to challenge yourself. You played original compositions with your dad. You learned non-repertoire pieces just for fun. The skills you’ve acquired this year go way beyond the technical ability to play the piano. You’ve grown your own heart, you’ve grown your own resilience, and those things matter so much more than any grade. “I don’t care for even one second whether you’re the best of the best at playing the piano. I only care that you are doing something you love, something that makes you feel like you’re connected to the fabric of this world. If you want to practice more, you can do that. But maybe that’s not your priority. Maybe you want time to dance and sing and make art and read books. The piano doesn’t have to be everything. It can be one aspect of creative expression and I don’t care at all about how fast you move through the levels or how many awards you win or where you place in some random competition. I have watched you go to war against the things inside you that keep you small, and you were more triumphant than I could have ever imagined. You have a million things to be proud of. “And honestly, don’t listen to grandad. You can’t take that guy anywhere. Dad had to kick him three times to tell him to be quiet during the performance.” She smiled then and she sent a picture of her trophy collection to my mom. If I can teach her anything at all I hope it’s that success isn’t about who you beat in a competition, it’s about how you learn to tend to your own fragile soul. It’s about finding joy in a world that will try to tie your worth to scoring systems that don’t know a damned thing about who you are. It’s about letting all the music in you out, in whatever form lets you tell the story of what it means to be a witness to this bizarre, evolving universe. 260615 what's it to you? who go blather from