In music, you have to suspend your ego, arrest the rhythms of its constant self-conscious chatter and cede them to the music’s time—although of course it is the ego that is performing, that is indeed crucial to the idea of performance itself. You have to relinquish all thought of who’s looking at you, of how hard you’ve worked, even of how well you want the performance to go, in order to become the music, immerse yourself fully in the music’s time. You have to take yourself out of one time in order to fully command the next.
