At the beginning of his first rehearsal, the conductor advised those of us in the orchestra not to fixate on the chair placements we'd been assigned. He said not to focus on being ranked as the supposed best or worst player in our section. He brought up his days at a prestigious conducting institute, saying that he didn't go into his conducting classes thinking that he was the best or the worst conductor. "I can only be me," he reasoned.
It was a nice, if disingenuous, disclaimer. (Whenever a conductor or teacher would tell the class that rankings don't matter that much, in the long run, I would always think, "Why were we ranked, then?") Contrast that conductor's approach to numerical rankings with my high school English literature teacher's observation. Just before handing us slips of paper with our first quarter grades, he said, "I form a rough impression of how each of you are doing based on the way you participate in class. When I added up the numbers to determine your grades, though, I was amazed to find out how well or how poorly some of you are doing. Numbers are very dehumanizing things."
So, I was fourth chair out of 10 bass players in an orchestra, and second in an English class of 30 with an A- average. Did those rankings and that grade matter, or didn't they?
