(((JULIA AND OD)))) Thank you so much for your suggestion and support, it is excellent.
To answer your question, B was always extremely encouraging and supportive to me as performer, and I'm not sure I would be where I am if I hadn't had his help and guidance. But we only played together a few times, and in sort of weird circumstances. In 2003, a few months after we started dating, my gamelan performed with his conservatory's orchestra, so we were on stage together, but both of us were part of giant ensembles. Then right before I went to Bali in 2005 he and his brother read through a piano trio with me when I visited his parents' house in California to help me prepare to play it at a festival. As a cellist, I am so much better than I used to be, but I still feel like I am not "in his league" as a performer, because he is a professional and performing all the time with all these different people, and I feel like I'm fresh out of school with "no connections" and "no experience". But it's funny, one of my friends suggested to me that to help myself decide where to move to next, I should try to go somewhere where I either love the place, or where there are lots of people I'd want to work with musically. And I was ruminating on that, and it popped into my mind that I would love to collaborate with B--not even as a DB move, just as a human artist move. Watching his solo bluegrass/improv show last summer was seriously one of the most inspiring things I've ever seen... along with my friend in nyc whose having her opera premiered, and my balinese composer/mentor friend, B is one of the people I actually already KNOW that I'd really like to work with (as opposed to people whose work I love but have never met or they are unapproachably famous). I'm not sure how it would happen, though. But it would be a TOTAL AND COMPLETE 180 FOR ME!!! And be approaching the challenge of how to connect with him from a completely different direction.
I also have a sort of crazy fantasy.... for the past few years B has spent part of the summer at a summer chamber music festival with his quartet. In august they have a 3 week mini-festival for people more my age. I have this fantasy that at the last minute they'll suddenly need a cellist and for some reason he'll suggest that they call me and then I get to go and DB him 24/7 for 3 whole weeks (and more importantly play with awesome musicians). But that is sort of a weird fantasy because it seems to involve some element of "turf invasion" and is also dependent on multiple factors beyond my control. It would probably be a lot easier just to ask him to write a song with me or something. The funny thing is that I always fantasized of having a partner who also created with me artistically/musically, but I think you have to be CRAZILY well differentiated to pull it off. This would be an amazing goal though.
It's also possible that I could just do something really amazing on my own musically and then he might want to be part of it because it was so awesome. I think Essie suggested something along these lines a while back.
