Playing Scared Read online

  When the sisters were together, everyone else was excluded. The two of them would disappear upstairs and sit on Maddy’s bed, poring over her treasures of gold and diamonds that she kept locked away in a brown leather traveler’s bag inside her closet. With the doors closed and the curtains drawn, the two sisters sealed off the world. They had grown up poor; their father had lost everything in the Depression, and my mother had combed the hills when she was a young girl, gathering dandelion greens for dinner. But Maddy, who was the oldest, had always had a penchant for making money. Whenever she babysat her little sister, she made a game of searching out pennies and nickels below the curbs and trapped beneath the street grates. Maddy had luck, and she was generous with it. My mother, Polly, revered her. Though the move to Hornell clearly fulfilled her deepest wish, to be with her sister, it also suited her musical ambitions for me. For Maddy announced that she intended to send me to Eastman’s preparatory department. I was to be given opportunities I would never have had if we stayed in Port Colborne.

  Before the beginning of the school year, my mother called Eastman and asked to speak to Mr. Weiss, reminding him of my performance a couple of years earlier in St. Catharines. Yes, he said, he did in fact remember it. He remembered me. And he agreed to take me on as a student. Which meant that every Saturday morning, I would leave Aunty Maddy’s house at seven o’clock, catch the bus in front of the little Greyhound storefront a block away, change buses in Dansville twenty miles away, and arrive in Rochester by ten. My lesson began at eleven, and when I knocked on Mr. Weiss’s studio door, he greeted me in his neat gray suit with a polite wave of the hand.

  One of the first things he said when I walked into his studio, swinging the stiff calfskin “music case” that my aunt had bought me, was that my days of competition were over. For the next two years, until I turned eighteen and went off to college, I would spend Saturdays taking lessons, studying music history, theory, counterpoint, and harmony, participating in school recitals, playing in Eastman’s grand concert hall, and giving the occasional demonstration to visiting piano teachers in his studio.

  Mr. Weiss emphasized technique. He could easily devote half the lesson to drilling me on scales, arpeggios, and diminished sevenths, and I practiced them at home at least an hour every day. My fingers flew. His ban on competition had eased some of my anxiety. There were annual evaluations before the head of the preparatory department and recitals in the grand concert hall, but these were low-key affairs compared with the frenzied competitions of my childhood. I liked to wander through the conservatory’s basement, listening to the din of scales, fugues, sonatas, and études that filtered out of the practice rooms and into the hallway. I could usually find an empty room where I, too, could practice or, more likely, crack open Dombey and Son or whatever Dickens novel I was reading at the time.

  The last performance I ever gave was at my graduation recital in May 1971. It was a program of all the preparatory students, each of us required to play just one piece. Mine was Brahms’s Intermezzo in A Major, a dark and introspective work. From Brahms to Dickens, I loved everything to do with the nineteenth century, and I played well. When it was over, I relaxed in my seat. A violinist was now onstage, someone I recognized from my music appreciation class. She was playing a Mozart violin sonata, and I knew at once that her playing—her tone, her phrasing, her passion—was on a different order of magnitude from mine. I was reminded of Kiran, the pianist who had made such an enormous impression four years earlier. I knew in an instant that I could never play like this girl, no matter how much I practiced or how flawlessly I executed. That instant of comprehension was both transformative and distressing.

  Father, Mother, and Aunty Maddy (Author’s family photo)

  I had played well enough to reignite the two sisters’ ambitions, however. For as soon as I left the recital hall, I saw them in a huddle with Mr. Weiss in the middle of the lobby. My mother motioned me over. “Would you like to go to Eastman’s instead of university?” she asked. “Mr. Weiss thinks—”

  I didn’t wait to hear the rest. “Absolutely not,” I said. I had my own plans. I was going to become a writer. At that moment, I didn’t care if I ever played the piano again. It felt final—like leaving the church, turning away from the faith, and becoming a lapsed Catholic or nonobservant Jew. It was years before I understood how deeply music had permeated my identity, years before I recognized that the word practice had a wider meaning than time spent at the piano. It was almost an epiphany when, as an adult, I realized that the word was commonly used in connection with religion. But now I was eighteen and could worship—or not—wherever and whatever I chose.

  Chapter 2

  BLINDED BY THE LIGHT: A SHORT HISTORY

  In my senior year of college, I lived across the hall from a guy who wore desert boots and bright-colored T-shirts under his denim button-downs. I could always tell when he was around by the loud jazz that wafted out of his room. When I finally got up my nerve to knock on his door and ask about the record he was playing (Don Pullen’s Solo Piano Album), we became friends. I quickly learned that he was a music obsessive who had gone to Columbia College for one reason: to work at the university radio station, WKCR-FM, the beacon of New York City’s progressive jazz scene. When we met, Rich was its president.

  He and his compatriots at the station were like political revolutionaries, except that their cause was jazz. They saw themselves as deliverers of the truth, changing the world through the music of underappreciated geniuses such as Charles Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Sam Rivers, McCoy Tyner, and scores of others. Rich spent his four years at college hosting jazz shows, presenting live concerts, organizing on-air festivals, and interviewing musicians. His classwork was secondary. After I began accompanying him to concerts, I was sometimes disquieted by the extent of his immersion. When the music began, he fell through a looking glass into another world. It seemed to leave him in a daze. He had an unerring ear; just one note of a recording and he instantly recognized the musician. I’d never known anybody who could do that. One day before the end of the final semester, he walked in on me as I was playing Debussy’s The Girl with the Flaxen Hair in an empty room on campus. I, too, was totally immersed. That was the moment, he says, he knew I was the one.

  When I graduated that spring, Aunty Maddy gave me a Baldwin upright. Over the years, I lugged it around from Brooklyn to Buffalo, Washington, and Philadelphia, before landing in Santa Cruz, California. The instrument was a part of my identity. I had stopped thinking of myself as any kind of pianist. I’d whited out that part of me; months and sometimes years went by when I hardly touched the keyboard. But though I had never considered becoming a professional musician—I wasn’t good enough, I didn’t want to work that hard—I took it as a given that the piano would remain a part of my life.

  Music was a constant presence in our house. Rich—we married a few years after college—went on to become a newspaper music critic. All three of our sons were musically gifted, with perfect or relative pitch. Yet my own musical life ebbed away; I returned to the piano ever more infrequently, and usually only when my family cleared out and I had a few moments to myself. That’s when I would try to find my way back to an old piece, like one of the Mozart sonatas I used to love. I was playing the A minor K. 310, one day when Rich and the kids burst in from some outing. Max, who was then about six, rushed to the piano and flung his arms around my waist, buried his head in my lap, and cried, “Oh, Mommy, that is so beautiful! Why don’t you always play for us?”

  Why indeed? Why was it so painful to play before a modest little audience—my family, say—when I could speak before large groups of people? Why did it feel as though my whole being were laid out on the piano’s soundboard for everyone to pick at? What was really at stake here?

  To my relief, none of my sons exhibited any fear onstage. Two of them would go on to become professional musicians—one a classical violinist, the other a jazz saxophonist. For years, I attended their recitals, at first anxious and
then bemused, proud, and maybe a little envious of their natural stage presence. They seemed to come alive and play best while performing. When Max was seven years old and hardly more than a beginner on the violin, he played with such intensity at a student recital that two fathers sought him out afterward to thank him and share, almost shyly, that he had made them cry.

  Ben, Rich, Sara, Max, and Jesse (in front) (Author’s family photo)

  I used to get nervous just waiting for the boys to play in public, but after a while their aplomb lulled me into a state of confidence. Then, one day, I attended a recital of first-place winners for the local music teachers’ association. Max was playing Fritz Kreisler’s Praeludium and Allegro, but before he had his turn, a girl of twelve or thirteen went onstage to play a Bach prelude and fugue. From the moment she sat down at the keyboard, she began having serious memory lapses, staring blank-eyed into the piano’s guts before resuming and failing again. All my old fears came flooding back. I grabbed the seat of my chair and clung tight, as if I were on a carnival ride. I didn’t know where to put my eyes; I felt as though I had swallowed a chicken bone. I imagined, when I allowed myself to look, that she even resembled the adolescent me: braids, glasses, gawky. I didn’t feel sorry for her; I wanted her to disappear. Get her off the stage, I wanted to scream at her parents. How dare she do this? When the recital ended and we were getting out of our seats, I debated whether I should go up to her and her family and say something, share my own history of terrible performances, and assure her that it wasn’t the end of the world. There was a little group of well-wishers gathered around her, but I couldn’t bring myself to join them. I didn’t want to be within touching distance. Max had played with his usual insouciance, and I wanted to associate myself with him, to pretend that I couldn’t imagine what it was like to be anything but confident in oneself.

  But even that wasn’t to last forever. When Max was almost through college, having majored in French and literature, he announced—late for a violinist—that he wanted to pursue a career in classical music. He graduated, moved back home, and resumed his studies with his beloved violin teacher, practicing six and seven hours a day in an effort to catch up with the conservatory students who had committed themselves to this path from a young age. He managed to get into a good conservatory—the Glenn Gould School in Toronto—but almost overnight his confidence disappeared, supplanted by a fear that overpowered him even at his weekly lessons. Now that he actually cared, that he had some skin in the game, he was no longer nonchalant. For the next two years, as I watched and listened to him agonize about this sudden new intimacy with stage fright, I felt as though I had passed on a bad gene.

  The oldest account of stage fright on record has to be the story of Moses, who expressed understandable anxiety when asked by God to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. He wasn’t the man for the job, he protested. Who would listen to him? He was a poor speaker. He stuttered. “Slow of speech and of a slow tongue,” he described himself in that first conversation at the burning bush. God wasn’t buying. “Who gave you a mouth to talk with,” He pointedly asked, before relenting: “Isn’t Aaron your brother? He’s pretty good with words.” Thus Aaron became the front man and Moses his ventriloquist.1

  Several thousand years went by before the next reported case of stage fright. According to a story told by Carl Jung, it took place in ancient Athens, where Socrates was grooming his protégé Alcibiades to be the most celebrated orator and statesman of his time. As a young man, Alcibiades was incapacitated by a fear of public speaking. Socrates accompanied him on long walks through the streets of Athens, introducing him first to a blacksmith, then to a shoemaker, asking if he was afraid of the one and then the other. When Alcibiades answered no and then no again, Socrates demanded, “Then why should you be afraid of the people of Athens? They consist of those people, they are nothing but faces.”2

  It was Mark Twain who coined the term stage fright, and though he claimed to have experienced it only once, it must have been a memorable experience, given the devastating portrayal in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The scene takes place at the end of the school year, when Tom is required to deliver the “Give me liberty or give me death” speech before an audience of parents, teachers, and students. The cocky boy is quickly reduced to a puddle of jelly:

  A ghastly stage-fright seized him, his legs quaked under him and he was like to choke. True, he had the manifest sympathy of the house but he had the house’s silence, too, which was even worse than its sympathy. The master frowned, and this completed the disaster. Tom struggled awhile and then retired, utterly defeated. There was a weak attempt at applause, but it died early.3

  The term stage fright has come under occasional challenge, since fear of the stage isn’t really the issue. A terror of performance can strike anywhere. But unlike other terms used to describe the condition—social phobia, cold feet, chicken heart, the jitters, glossophobia (fear of speaking in public), communication apprehension, paruresis (fear of urinating in the presence of others), the yips (in baseball, cricket, basketball, and tennis), dartitis (in darts), target panic (archery), the schneid (a losing streak in cards, sports, or dating), and the Thing, not to mention biting the apple and plain old performance anxiety—“stage fright” conveys that deer-in-the-headlights feeling that escorts people to the podium, the playing field, and the stage.

  Standing in the spotlight, one struggles to counter the feeling of being exposed, of feeling naked and alone. Hip-hop musician Jay-Z got to the heart of it in a 2010 interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, when host Terry Gross asked why rappers grab at their crotches. It was more than straight-out vulgarity, he responded. It was about young men onstage, often for the first time in their lives, looking out at an ocean of fans and feeling naked and scared to death. “So when you feel naked, what’s the first thing you do?” he said. “You cover yourself.”4

  In the twenty-first century’s age of anxiety, everything is performance: “Work, play, sex, and even [political] resistance—it’s all performance to us,” writes new media theorist Jon McKenzie in Perform or Else, a quasi-academic study that links artistic, organizational, and technological performances.5 Performance, he observes, is the filter through which we consider every imaginable product: “high performance” cars, stereos, lawn mowers, toilet paper, and missile systems. The world has become a “test site” in “an age of global performance,” from art and spectacle to Wall Street warfare and air fresheners. Anthropologists have analyzed the rituals of indigenous peoples as performance; sociologists have applied the word to describe everyday social interactions from the way one nods hello to a silent flirtation; cultural theorists have examined race, gender, and social politics in terms of performance.

  Contemporary culture presupposes performance, a put-up-or-shut-up mind-set in which virtually every activity, from the banal to the most intimate, is photographed, documented, videotaped, and evaluated. The zeitgeist begins with birth, an experience now often celebrated as a social event, with friends dropping in to offer encouragement, bear witness, record the delivery, tweet about it, and post it on Facebook. The conversation is no longer limited to how well the new mother is doing, but extends to how well she did. Back in the bedroom, Big Pharma awaits with its billion-dollar line of products for boosting sexual performance. Regardless of whether the anxiety strikes in the penis or at the piano, the same rule applies: You have to be in control of your instrument.

  Many performers eschew the subject. Studies have shown that up to 30 percent of orchestra musicians rely on beta-blockers to slow their autonomic nervous systems prior to a performance. Many of them willingly share their prescription stashes with their colleagues, but few care to delve into the problem that precipitates it. “It’s such a touchy topic,” a young pianist in New York told me, practically recoiling. “It seems like it would be bad luck to talk about it.” The American psychiatrist Glen Gabbard wrote about “an unspoken conspiracy of silence” among musicians and other performers about stage fright.6
Before a performance, he noted, “the experience of stage fright is seldom alluded to, as if the mere mention of it will cause the reaction to intensify.” It’s been said that every pianist’s anxiety is as unique as his or her fingerprints. One detects an almost existential dread of contamination, as if stage fright were as transmittable as a virus on a doorknob.

  And maybe they’re right to steer clear. Though anxiety contagion can’t be traced as systemically as bird flu, it shares some of the same qualities. That much was demonstrated in the spring of 2012, when a succession of Tourette-like cases ran through the small western New York town of Le Roy. A cluster of high school girls, many of them cheerleaders, had begun to exhibit uncontrolled tics, twitches, stutters, and jerks. It happened at the dinner table and in the classroom. TV news cameras raced to record the girls, their arms lurching, heads yanking, legs tottering like zombies in a B movie. Two cases jumped to eighteen, and parents grew convinced that there had been an undisclosed environmental disaster. Erin Brockovich, the environmental activist, was called in to investigate. In the end, the girls were diagnosed with a condition called “conversion disorder,” a mass psychogenic illness better known as mass hysteria. The neurologists who treated them concluded that they were subconsciously converting stress into physical symptoms.

  As it happens, cases of mass hysteria have more than once involved cheerleaders. In a New York Times Magazine story about the Le Roy case, reporter Susan Dominus suggested that it was the girls’ organizational unity that made them susceptible to influence.7 She cited a 2002 incident in which ten students, five of them cheerleaders, from a rural town in North Carolina suffered nonepileptic seizures and fainting spells. In 1952, 165 members of a cheerleading squad in Monroe, Louisiana, fainted before halftime at a high school football game. Five ambulances raced across the field to attend to the stricken girls. “It looked like the racetrack at Indianapolis,” a spectator told the Associated Press. In Le Roy, doctors advised parents and school administrators to stop talking about it so publicly. The media attention was halted, and after a few months, the girls improved markedly, mostly after learning relaxation techniques and, in some cases, taking anxiety medication.