Confusing Musician's Feedback

Back when I studied composition at university but also during my first few recording sessions I was eager to get feedback by musicians who played my music. A lot of what I got back was really helpful and helped me to gain a deeper understanding about how these instruments work and what is possible and what not but there were many times when I went out of such a dialogue being completely puzzled.

Quite often, I was confused that some of the things that I learned in the direct communication didn't line up with what I read in orchestration manuals, and other times I was confused by things that the musicians recommended to write into the parts that I have never heard before. It took me quite some years to actually figure out how to make sense of such feedback rounds and what to actually take away from them.

One of the reasons was that some of the orchestration texts that I read were quite old and instruments have developed since then. In fact, especially with woodwinds, there has been quite drastic developments over the last decades that made things that used to be very difficult or even impossible to play quite playable on these. I will touch more on this subject in the orchestration series.

However the more important thing to realize was that the musician as a performer and I as the composer were coming from two different approaches to the music.

Musicians go through a life long training of making even the trickiest and most awkwardly written passages sound effortless and somehow get them to work, their entire motivation is to be able to play anything that you put in front of them and things that are written mildly unidiomatic or awkwardly often get performed without much drama. It might be a struggle for the player but they will play those notes and rarely complain about them as they understand it as their job to get these things to sound right. Consequentially, they will give you the impression that things are playable that are really awkward to play in reality. 

There is also often this microscopic view on small passages happening. Something like "I can play these three notes, if I extend my pinky like this and lift my elbow like so, I just need to practice that". Which of course might be true but in context of the entire part, these three notes might be the cause for problems in the performance then, especially in a sight reading session. Just because they could do it in isolation doesn't mean that it will come out confidently in context. But of course, they very often will not tell you that it's tricky because that would (falsely) feel like they admit that they're not capable of playing something like this. So just because they say they can do something that is unidiomatic and badly written doesn't mean that it will actually sound good or confident in a performance.

I however, as a composer and orchestrator come from a standpoint that I want to write music that brings my idea across and has all instruments play in the most idiomatic way possible, because that will of course will give the most confident and best sounding performance on these instruments.

So obviously, between these two approaches there is a gap that can be source for confusion and it really depends on what kind of musician you ask. There are a lot of musicians who wouldn't hesitate to tell you if they feel that something is not written well for their instrument but there are unfortunately also a lot of musicians who due to false pride feel like they need to struggle through every badly written passage with a smile on their face.

Additionally, and I say this with the most respect for all musicians, some of them rotate in a very tiny microcosmos of their own instrument. If you get feedback from them, they will tell you that they would play passage x with an obscure playing technique y that is only known in the world of their instruments and recommend to write these into the sheet music because they would pencil it into their part when they play it. In a way, they start to micro manage how they would interpret the notes and see it as a valuable feedback to the composer. Which is of course fine if they actually play that part in the end but is not the best idea if someone else is to play it who might feel patronized by all this micro managing and restricted in their interpretational freedom of this part.

So as a consequence, not every feedback you get by musicians is always valuable. However, especially musicians who are capable of looking beyond their instrument and understand the bigger context might give you priceless feedback on your music. On the other hand, musicians who lack this ability due to a lack of experience (for instance in session playing or even ensemble playing) might give you very confusing feedback that goes way too deep into "personal interpretation territory".

The bottom line here should be that musician's feedback can be an invaluable source for becoming better as a writer but you should sometimes take them with a grain of salt.