Ben Smith – Flutist & Music Journalist

A quick preface: while this is being published in 2025, I wrote these thoughts out last summer while I was home the month after graduating from Oberlin.

That is all. Enjoy!

June 27, 2024

I’ve been playing at a restaurant in my hometown in Georgia for about a month now; jazz arrangements, a couple of my own arrangements, and a few classical tunes here and there. I enjoy it a lot, especially since it’s reconnected me to some people who I haven’t seen in years since leaving for college. It’s the ideal job: playing music I enjoy and getting to paid to do it (not to mention dinner and wine)… it doesn’t get much better.

While the pay is very appreciated, it honestly was not my primary motivation for wanting the gig. Over the last six months, I was experiencing what I guess would best be described as burn out. I pushed myself a lot, so much so that I contemplated either taking a step back from music temporarily or quitting entirely and doing something else with my life. The last four years were a cluster of experiences and emotions. It felt a lot longer than four years.

Now that I’m back home, the ‘hero’s journey’ is laughably relatable. You know the story: the protagonist departs on an adventure, experiences life-changing events, gains some sort of knowledge about the world in the process, and returns home changed. Books, video games, movies–there’s so many stories based off this trope. While it makes for entertaining fiction, there’s an aspect of it that runs parallel to the reality of growing up.

The last four years made me pretty disillusioned to pursuing a life in classical music. The experiences that came as a result of pursuing my passion, as with most things in life, it wasn’t what I expected. I started asking myself all the big purpose questions: why am I still doing this / why do I think this is important / why do I enjoy this. My answers have evolved since I was a kid, but at the end of the day it’s still pretty simple: I love playing the flute.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think I will ever really quit playing should performing not be a huge part of my professional life. Not sure how much I believe in “callings,” but I do know that for some reason playing the flute is something I always sort of find my way back to. My 13 year-old self just wanted to make my life with music in it; there were no aspirations of being some ‘great classical flutist.’ Over the years, I have found fulfillment in pushing myself to be the best I can be, but my younger self was onto something: if my life is lucky enough to be filled with music, then that in and of itself is something to be grateful for every day.

I want to be able to perform knowing that I can be at one with my instrument, not having to fight it any way. Performance anxiety can interfere with that, but then again, even good ol’ fashion day-to-day anxiety can interfere with that. I’m not going to pretend performing is something I have a perfect relationship with. But, what I want to achieve is the ability to play and have it just feels like freedom, which I’ve come to the conclusion is a life-long goal of mine that I have no idea if I can reach. Ironically, I keep finding that the ~magic~ actually comes in sharing music with others, regardless of where I’m at in my progress.

So, all that to say… this is what I’ll continue trying to do as I move forward. I’m back to the drawing board as far as what this will all look like in the future–I guess I have a master’s degree worth of time to figure some of that out–but who knows, really.

Isn’t the adventure all about the journey anyway?