erase yourself
the counterintuitive creative survival strategy hiding in plain sight
In the documentary The Only Girl in the Orchestra (Netflix), we meet Orin O’Brien, the first female member of the New York Philharmonic orchestra, joining the organization under Leonard Bernstein and retiring only recently after a 55-year career.
A double bassist of international renown, O’Brien resists the filmmaker’s every effort to lionize her: “It’s been very accidental,” she insists about her accomplishments. “It’s completely accidental.”
“It’s not,” the director replies.
“[I] don’t feel so very special,” O’Brien continues. “If you compare my life with somebody else.”
“People want to celebrate you, Orin.”
“That makes me laugh,” she replies. “[I] don’t feel I’m an artist. I don’t feel I’m good enough. I’ve never felt that I’ve been good enough. [You’re] trying to make me more important and I’m not comfortable with that.”
It’s a powerful and revealing moment. At first, my instinct was to feel sorry for O’Brien, someone who has performed at the very highest levels for such a remarkable length of time and seems to doubt her own worth. But then I questioned that interpration.
The film reveals some of the many hurdles O’Brien overcame throughout her career. In one representative newspaper clipping from her early days with the Philharmonic, a music critic insists that, while O’Brien might be competent now, she will never have the creative longevity of a male musician. (Ha!)
Maybe O’Brien’s attitude isn’t a matter of self-esteem but one of self-preservation. Is it possible that O’Brien persevered not by “proving the critics wrong” but by negating her own ego so completely that the barbs became, though painful, largely irrelevant to her work as an artist? The documentary makes clear that O’Brien’s great joy is to blend into the orchestra and operate as a cog in one massive, seamless machine. Even her choice of instrument—the double bass—was deliberately selected to place her as far from the spotlight as possible (even if in one of the world’s greatest symphony orchestras).
Feedback is the lifeblood of an artist—every book on creativity tells you to develop your own taste and forge your own path, but without an audience to close the creative loop, it’s impossible to achieve your potential. Even so-called outsider artists who lack formal training share their work, pay attention to the response, and tailor their work based on what they learn.
There are two edges here: while artist and audience collaborate to make art, artists are intensely vulnerable to toxic feedback loops. Think of all the young creators warped to near-madness by the perverse incentives and distorted metrics of social media. Orin O’Brien, in strategically erasing herself as an artist—and I’d argue this was conscious on some level—protected her art in an environment where fair judgement—accurate feedback—was essentially impossible. Sure, Bernstein saw her talent clearly, but the classical music world in general simply couldn’t. In 2000, 34 years after O’Brien joined the New York Phil, economists Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse published a seminal paper about symphony orchestra auditions indicating that blind auditions, with a screen hiding the identity of the musician, dramatically increased the proportion of women hired.
The challenge in this fractured media landscape is learning how to solicit healthy, useful, unbiased feedback from an audience without subjecting yourself to the toxic stew that threatens to overwhelm every online creator. Bigots and bad-faith actors pose a very real danger to authentic creative development.
That may be impossible. It isn’t always feasible to “never read the comments.” We absolutely need data—some sort of human response flow—to hone in on what’s working and what isn’t. Maybe the best we can do is O’Brien’s approach, systemically separating our identities from our work. Erasing ourselves from the equation to see the data with clear eyes.
Some feedback shapes the creation. Other feedback shapes the creator. Be wary of the latter. The internet is no place for an unguarded ego.
This article is extremely thought-provoking. "Learning how to solicit healthy, useful, unbiased feedback from an audience without subjecting yourself to the toxic stew that threatens to overwhelm every online creator" is indeed difficult!! This is one reason why every thoughtful marketing expert who understands the creator economy recommends newsletters over social media. Yes, it's true that the size of your newsletter subscribership will never be close to the size of your social media following -- but what's important is not the NUMBER of subscribers; it's WHO is subscribing. The people who subscribe to your mailing list are generally the people who care the most about you and your work and therefore will give you both more positive and (when you're lucky) more constructive feedback. And I think it's not just feedback, but also *creative momentum,* that comes from sharing your work with a self-selected, targeted audience.
Fascinating , David—some terrific (and, as you say, counterintuitive) insights here. Really enjoyed this.