Soprano-
Nicely said! My wife and I were talking about this the other day, about our son and his future (quite natural,considering what wonderful but wacky, strange and challenging environment music is...) and we came to the same conclusion, that given his passion, his absolute joy and love for it/living for it, and what he demostrates when playing we feel confident that whatever he does he will be okay, because on top of everything else he has turned into a well balanced (well, okay, except for music *lol*), thoughtful and decent young man who this summer really seemed to find his place at the music festival he went to (we could tell, we would be im'ing or talking to him on the phone, and then suddenly he would disappear...later he would say "I can't get any peace, people keep coming into my room"
.
I agree totally about other experiences, besides the musical things (going to performances, concerts, master classes, watching performers on tv, dvd and you tube), he also does things like an open mike night at a local music store, which has taught him about performing in 'less traditional' spaces and also about creating an audience
, plus a variety of other things.
With competitions and such I agree, you have to be careful about taking too much out of what happens there, depending on the competition and who is judging it it may not mean a lot. There are competitions out there where the judges are local music teachers who may not be that great a judge of high level talent, or who may have local bias as S.M said. I told the story in another post of my son getting an ASTA evaluation playing a piece of solo Bach. The teacher, who was basically a local violin teacher, told my son he was playing it all wrong, that you don't play bach like that, but that with his enthusiasm she couldn't knock him for the way he performed...meanwhile, he was performing it exactly like his teacher (who will be his teacher at Juilliard) taught him, and also got him praise at a master class he had a week after the evaluation, where he played it as far as he and I can tell, the same way......in other words, don't let any thing determine that.Likewise, seating placement in orchestras or winning soloist competitions in youth orchestras may or may not mean something, sometimes those running the orchestras have their own ideas about things, giving high placement, for example, to teachers who they know and like, or because some of them get intimidated when faced with really talented kids *shrug*. And as I wrote above, Yo Yo Ma entered competitions and finished last in some of them, and he started playing the bach solo suites when he was 8!