Last night was the first time I actually felt like a symphony musician.

 I've been a musical performer since childhood, though school band was as far as I got in  large ensemble work. I'm a competent and working pop/jazz bassist ... my main outlet there being the fabulous Clamdaddys.

 I've been playing in the symphony for a while now, learning, making progress, and over the past couple of  days I crossed a threshold.

There are two aspects to this pleasant transition. I refer to the first aspect as "being able to bow and chew gum at the same time". I've certainly been there in pizzicato work for decades, but suddenly, I'm there with bowing.

The second aspect is more subtle. Playing with pop ensembles featuring up to about 12 players, I could always hear everything everyone is doing and see the whole thing in the mind's eye as an interweaving pattern. Now the symphony is the same for me, as it was not, even just a week ago. Now I hear it all, and see it in the mind's eye.

 The moment  last night when I realized this second transition, we were cooking along right smartly through Beethoven's first symphony. The cellos started, smoothly and collectively, to fall off the tempo like one wagon in a line of haywagons starting to tip by itself. I felt the incipient wreck and saw it as a visual matrix of the cellos and violins stretched in scale on the time axis ... then they rocked back into tempo and the wagon didn't tip. The sensation was so intense that I started to chuckle ... and missed my own cue.

 I've got a lot of work to do, but I don't have any more kozmik questions. It all makes sense to me like pop music and jazz music makes sense.

Satori at the Symphony!