I recently saw an item about the Really Terrible Orchestra. What a hoot. This under-talented amateur group plays their music – just for the fun of it – and have a wow of a time doing so. The amazing thing is that other people gain a great deal of enjoyment from hearing them!
Watching some of their YouTubes, I laughed out loud – not at them, but with them. Strangely enough it was quite an uplifting experience watching some of these clips – especially the trumpet promenade. The sheer joy on the audience’s faces as they shared the moment was amazing. As one member of the audience said, they are not just playing music (badly) – they are celebrating life.
The Really Terrible Orchestra was formed in 1995 by Peter Stevenson, a businessman and Alexander McCall Smith, an author. Many of the members are doctors or other professionals who don’t have the time or inclination to practice very much, and others just aren’t very good at playing their instrument of choice. Fourteen years of regular concerts and appearances in the Edinburgh Fringe festivals culminated in a concert performed in front of 1,500 people in New York earlier this year. A documentary film made in 2006 won the Baillie Gifford Award for the best short Scottish documentary in the Scottish Film Festival!
We waste so much time on ‘what will people think if I…’, ‘I’m not good enough…’, ‘What if I don’t get it right and end up looking stupid?’ … Well, these folks have raised ‘looking stupid’ to an art form and they are thriving on it. While I’m all for excellence and being and doing the best that I am, I also want to make a place in my life for light-heartedness and regularly celebrating the ridiculous.
What do you do – just for sheer enjoyment?
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