If I am not for myself . . .

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?

Hillel the Elder is well known for this bit of wisdom, which can be interpreted and applied in many ways. One application has to do with self care versus selfishness. Another has to do with not waiting for a time when it is convenient to stand up for yourself (or for others).

I have been thinking about this in relation to people promoting the creative work that they do. The idea of "self-promotion" has never  been attractive to me. Perhaps it’s because I came of musical age in a world where people I encountered would spend a lot of time letting me know how well they played and how great their career was progressing.

I came up with the phrase, "Play it, don't say it," when I was at Juilliard in the 1970s. I rarely said it out loud, but I often found myself thinking it about when engaging socially with many of my fellow instrumentalists. 

I preferred to spend time with people who showed their artistic qualities through their playing, but those were often people who had little time for socializing because they were usually practicing.

I have learned over the decades that nobody will pay attention to me or my work if they don’t have any idea who I am or what I do. And since I do not have (or do not hire) a professional person to promote my work, I am left to do it myself. That means I have to engage in some sort of self-promotion, something I have come to accept as necessary if I want to play in the musical world. 

Fairly recently (before I stopped using Facebook) I got a response from a moderator of a forum after sharing a link to a piece of music in the IMSLP that I thought would be of interest to the group.  The moderator (or bot) said that self-promotion was not acceptable in this forum, a forum that had previously encouraged the sharing of new music and transcriptions. 

In the Meta world is "self promotion" now the opposite of "paid promotion?" I wonder. 

Now that Facebook has effectively replaced the public square, the pathways towards constructing musical communities that involve people who don't live in cities (where they can participate in real time with multiple networks of musicians) are hard to find and even harder to create for adults who are not connected with universities or other musical institutions.