Traveling To Play Music

Years ago, I spent my vacation time traveling by car through designated States like Arizona and Oregon. I had specific ideas for spending my time driving through these States and organized everything beforehand. I ensured I got to experience worthwhile sites that catered to my interests. Those adventures did not include musical performances at the time. But my trips led me to parts of the world only found in fairy tales and enchanting stories.

However, as a musician, I have traveled extensively, performing, touring, and playing for different audiences. Traveling offers a different approach or path for us to grow and learn as musicians. We also experience the world differently.

We can travel as musicians by playing solo, ensemble, or orchestral concerts, tours, and competitions.

How can we, as musicians, benefit from our travels apart from visiting a new place geographically?

In addition to our studies and our performances, we grow by performing in other regions by being exposed to different circumstances and possibilities while we go abroad or even to a different city.

We share our music with different audiences
We learn about our needs as musicians
We find out how instruments react in different halls
We adjust ourselves accordingly for future travels

Sharing our music is important to us, and traveling to perform offers us the opportunity to learn about different audiences. In my experience, not all audiences are the same, and that alone has taught me many lessons. Music is communication, and audiences react differently to the performer.
Therefore, those are valuable experiences in the learning and growth process as the player engages with different audiences. The distinctness of these experiences helps us progress as we play and learn.

Each player has different needs in terms of playing and performing. For example, my hands need to feel warm before I get on stage, and I often do that by keeping my hands on my cello fingerboard until the moment I get up on stage. This issue I have might not matter to someone else. They might just wait patiently for the time to come and just play.

Instruments can react differently in varied surroundings, and learning about that is also quite valuable for our future performances. It is also essential to know different settings in different halls and acoustics. I have been in situations when I could not hear my playing or the person's playing next to mine. But I knew the sound was traveling. Therefore, one must also be prepared for such circumstances and be able to adapt to situations as they come up.

Playing in different halls gives us different perspectives, and playing with different groups also offers us a chance to determine our musical ideas and how and in what way we would like to achieve our musical goals.

Consequently, we get exposure to other cultures and their ways of handling performances and audiences, and through these experiences, we can also learn things about our playing and instruments. Even though it may be difficult sometimes to play in changing circumstances, it still offers us valuable lessons in what we do in our routines and practices. All the little things we learn during our trips and travels about our playing can be added to the list of things we do before performances. Therefore, we can make appropriate adjustments and plan for them differently to be more effective in the future.

Therefore, if you must travel to play somewhere else next time, enjoy the new experience in all its possibilities. Isn't it wonderful to travel and do what you love all at the same time?

How do you feel about traveling to play music? Please share with us in the comments below.