Waltzing

Posted February 22nd, 2005 by Sean Williams

It has been said that the most important thing in music is silence, and it is probably the most important piece of artistic advice I’ve ever gotten. There are two things that I do with a choir that make all the difference (and this isn’t my idea, this is pretty much anyone who’s ever directed), I make sure that we all agree on what kind of vowel sound we are making at all times and I make sure we know exactly when the cut-offs happen. Those micro-seconds of silence are the most important thing in making a choir sound like a unified voice.

When you are dancing, it isn’t the movement that is the answer, it’s the focus that happens when you aren’t moving. When you waltz, there is that step, side, together thing, but there is a hiccup between beats one and two, where you pause, focus, in almost too small an amount of time to count. Without that pause, it’s just stepping in rhythm, it isn’t dancing.

More important than any of this, as an artist, is knowing when to keep your trap shut.

I have two things looming over me right now. I have a play that I have to finish writing, and I am buying a house. Those are two very large things, and I find that the myriad of small things attached to those two large things are plaguing me in such a way that I have become somewhat less useful to my friends and family. I find that the slightest provocation sets me off in such a way that I worry about doing lasting damage to my relationships.

Frankly, as long as my writing partners and I are getting along, I couldn’t give a shit about the rest of it, and that’s a real problem. There is no telling what I might say in the blog when I am like this.

So, I am not taking a hiatus, but I am going to allow for that silence that needs to be there. I often feel some pressure to keep this up, mostly because a lot of my friends and family read it when they can’t talk to me and it reminds them that I am still out here. I will be better in two and a half weeks, when all of this will hopefully be in check and I can laugh with the people who currently make my blood boil. But until then, I may not write at all.

In high school, I had a bit of a thing with a girl in my orchestra. She was in college, I was a lot younger, and I think she hooked up with me because I had a mohawk. I got her on the phone one day, long after she had grown tired of me, and we actually had a nice half hour talk. I thought, “Man, I am gonna *SCORE*”. The next day I called her back to let her know I was going out of town, and she just started laughing. I realized that, after trying to avoid me for a month or so, she had spent that half hour on the phone, hoping *that* would get rid of me.

It is in the same spirit that I offer up this pseudo-hiatus notice. Rest assured, I am fully aware of my or this blog’s importance to anyone. Take this as more of a protection against my own self recriminations at being lazy than it is begging off from you the reader. I may update, but not very often in this next few weeks.