“I believe strongly in failure”
– Marin Alsop, Musical Director,
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra.
Driving into work on Wednesday morning, I heard Marin Alsop being interviewed by Libby Purves on Radio 4. Something about what she said really caught me. Firstly, Marin Alsop is a rare beast indeed – there are very few female conductors of her standing. She was talking about her life and work and about failing in the context of her work. She gave the example of a violinist who can practise all the time and experiment with their instrument. A female conductor, however, does not have such an opportunity to try out different things, as the orchestra is her instrument. You get one opportunity and if it doesn’t go well, then you are not asked back! She believes that in order to be really, really good at something (she said ‘wonderful’ also!), you have to fail.
Leonard Bernstein was her mentor. He was generous, embracing and hard on her. She recounted an anecdote, in which she was practising a piece and he came up to her afterwards and said, ‘the conducting’s great, really good….but it doesn’t really move me.’ They took a break and she went outside, sat down and looked at the trees thinking, ‘well, I should shoot myself now – my life is over, Leonard Bernstein said I’m not moving him’. She then got to thinking about what she could do about this (as emotionally resilient people do). She said that when she went back in she felt as though she had had a massage; she was completely relaxed and stopped trying. Instead, she was ‘being about the experience’, not worrying about the technical part of it – judging, measuring, assessing – not having a fear of failure: ‘Once you fail you don’t have to worry about it anymore’. She conducted the piece again and Leonard Bernstein whispered to her, ‘yeah, that’s it.’
I thought about how close these words were to what I feel. Also, how they open me to embrace failure even more and allow me to risk failing. I feel that I look at my life – more often my work life – as an ongoing experiment.
I am going to do my best and to do that without a fear of failure. To get to that point, I have to be prepared to ‘fail’, as in fact we all do, and as it is actually ok to do. This is part of what I want to teach our children because, ironically, it is that fear, sitting in the back of my mind, that creates the conditions for me not to be as present and absorbed in what I am doing, and thus increase the likelihood of underperformance. Professor Guy Claxton who visited the school last week, identifies resilience as key to learning and describes it as ‘enjoying the feeling of learning’. To put it another way, dropping the judging, measuring and assessing and actually being present is a very enjoyable and blissful state to be in when I am learning.
As I see it, at the foundation of our community is the relationships we all have with one other. If we can keep a high quality of dialogue going this will serve us well and for me this means continuing to communicate fully and honestly. I feel that as a staff and parent community, we have the potential to give the children in our care a really creative, compassionate, well-rounded and emotionally literate education. The more space and freedom we can give each other to experiment and learn, the more able we will be to deliver this. Paradoxically, by accepting the possibility of failure, we open ourselves up to greater freedom and creativity, which is more likely to enable success.