Playing Scared

by Sara Solovitch

  As a young violinist, she had been mentored by Raphael Bronstein (“Mr. Bronstein,” as she always referred to him), a Russian pedagogue who taught at the Manhattan School of Music in New York. She kept his framed photograph—bald head, eagle nose—on prominent display in her studio and quoted him at least once every lesson. Trained in the Russian School, a style of virtuoso violin technique that’s been passed down for more than 150 years, Galen demanded precision as well as a rich, warm tone. She could not abide anything less than perfect intonation; in every orchestra she ever played in, she said, there were seasoned violinists who played out of tune. It drove her crazy. During the first few months of Max’s lessons, she devoted each entire session to a single scale, working it note by note, assiduously, so slowly that the hour typically ran out before Max made it back down to the bottom. To my astonishment, he accepted her constant, grueling critiques. At home, he started keeping a practice log and I could hear him after school, practicing behind his bedroom door with a new discipline inspired by her counsel: “When you practice, you’re a cold-blooded scientist. When you perform, you play for yourself and for God.”

  My youngest son had a different relationship to music. At thirteen, Jesse was becoming passionate about jazz; his great ambition was to be the next Benny Goodman. He had started off on the clarinet a few years earlier and was now begging us to buy him a tenor saxophone, presumably so he could become the next John Coltrane. We didn’t take him very seriously. He was a boy of serial obsessions who from the age of seven had moved from baseball to dirt bike riding, tae kwon do, and karate. When he was nine, he began spending three hours a day, six days a week, at the neighborhood dojo, working out with teenagers and adults, plotting his path to the Olympics. He talked me into joining him there, and after months of resistance I found myself throwing punches and kicks, urged on by a traditional Korean instructor. Master Song gave long lectures, during which he admonished the few women in the class to replace our natural proclivity for gossip with kicking. “Yes, sir!” the students shouted at his every pause. He promised that tae kwon do would immunize us against breast cancer and other maladies if we would just learn to breathe deeply. In one lecture, he assured us that criminals were all, without exception, shallow breathers. If one were to conduct a study of inmates at San Quentin or any other prison, he asserted, one would find a population of shallow breathers. Did he really say that? we’d later demand on our way out the door. Still, he was a formidable teacher and a ninth-degree black belt. The men in the class revered him; the women occasionally rolled their eyes but respected him. He could put his finger on every student’s weakness and call him on it before a roomful of spectators. He once told me, during a test for a new color belt, that I allowed my emotions to get in the way of whatever I sought to accomplish. It was humiliating. It was true.

  One day, after dragging me to the dojo for two years, Jesse announced that the Olympics no longer played a part in his foreseeable future. He was going to be a musician and I was to be his accompanist—at least until he could find someone else. The year was 2002, and once again my protestations fell flat. Jesse by now was going on thirteen, and I realized that his desire to involve me in his life would soon come to an end. After a few months of delay, I replaced Master Song with Landis Gwynn, my piano-playing, tech-writer acquaintance.

  Landis had grown up in a Connecticut suburb, the son of an English professor who had been one of the foremost experts on William Faulkner. He began taking piano lessons when he was six years old and showed an early affinity for music. He adored his teacher, Doris Lehnert, a vivacious young woman who was “the real deal”: small, but with large, powerful hands and a ferocious technique. At the age of eleven, he performed with a local orchestra, playing the slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 23 in A Major. It appeared that he was headed for a life in music.

  But when he was thirteen, catastrophe struck. It happened during a ski trip to Killington, Vermont. Just a moment after passing his father on the slopes, a skier caught up with him and told him that his dad was in trouble up the mountain. The boy herringboned it back up and found his father lying face-up in the snow with a stranger bent over him, giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. A small helicopter whirred down and his father was rushed inside and flown away, declared dead before the chopper touched down at the nearest hospital. He was forty-nine and the cause of death was heart attack.

  As Landis recalled, there was never any discussion at home, just a tacit understanding that he would no longer play the piano. “No one knew what to do except, well, piano playing is supposed to be fun, but we were sad now. So we were not going to do that.” Landis didn’t touch the piano for the next five years. He made his way back to it as a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, where, miserable and for the first time overwhelmed by the enormity of his aloneness, he signed up for a music class and began recognizing snippets of symphonies and concertos, music he hadn’t heard in years. One afternoon, as he was listening, he recalled as in a dream that he too used to play the piano. He found a practice room in the music department, borrowed a few scores from the library, and relearned how to read music. He began studying in earnest, immersing himself in a life that had been snatched away from him.

  Though he didn’t pursue the piano upon graduation, Landis was someone who listened and analyzed with the ear and erudition of a scholar. He knew practically every note in all thirty-two Beethoven piano sonatas and could sing any one of the movements at random. We went to concerts together, met in coffee shops to hash over our lives, shared dinner with each other’s families. And as we became friends, I sometimes took advantage of his gentle demeanor. He once suggested that I learn a Brahms romanze, a piece ripe with the dense chords characteristic of the composer. It would, he suggested, be a good way to work on voicing, meaning the task of articulating specific notes within chords as a way of advancing the melodic line. I worked on the first page happily. But as soon as I began reading over the second section, I became flustered by a series of huge leaps that had to be played pianissimo, at softest volume. How could I possibly manage with these small hands, I objected, and tossed the music aside. When Landis laughed nervously in protest and acquiesced, I sensed the end of a chapter: I needed someone who would push me, someone I couldn’t push around. I needed a new teacher.

  I had recently become friendly with Mark Rothman (name changed at his request), a bear of a man with stout fingers that at first glance didn’t look as if they were designed for the piano. He was a transplanted New Yorker who loved music, food, and books—probably in that order. We met after he began playing music with my son Max, and I felt an instant camaraderie with him. After I became his student, I appreciated the way he talked about music. Don’t be coy, he once cautioned me on the way I ended a partita—applying the language and sensibility of Jane Austen to Johann Sebastian Bach. He had an affinity for Bach, and so did I. As we experimented with different articulations (legato versus detached) and debated the merits and drawbacks of pedaling, the hour-long lessons flew by.

  The last couple of years had been difficult for Rothman. The economy had taken a toll after the 2008 stock market crash, and he more than once confided his frustration that he, a pianist with impressive friends in the classical world, was now teaching children to read music. He himself had studied with a series of strong-minded teachers, the most memorable being “a Svengali” nicknamed “Sadie.” As boys, he and his older brother took three buses to her apartment at the other end of Brooklyn for Saturday lessons in clarinet, bassoon, and piano. They arrived early in the morning and returned home to their own flat well after midnight—having babysat Sadie’s children, gazed at the Impressionist prints on her walls, and gorged themselves on her imported cheeses. It was a different world from the working-class one they knew, and they worshipped her. It was years before either realized that their teacher lacked all interest in or knowledge of piano technique, so that by the time they reached high school they had acquired serious deficiencie
s.

  Rothman began slinking away for lessons at the Mannes College in Manhattan, then to a professor at Queens College. When he finally ’fessed up and told Sadie that he wanted to change teachers, she exiled him from her studio. A few years later, about to perform Bach’s Keyboard Concerto no. 1 in D Minor with the Queens College Orchestra, he called and left a ticket for her at the box office. She didn’t attend, and he never heard from her again. Decades later, the memory of it still made him cry.

  Rothman was a proponent of the Taubman Approach, a technique frequently embraced by pianists who have been injured. The Taubman method is an ergonomic way of playing that relies on changing body alignment and balance, using the laws of physiology to rewrite physical movement—a sort of yoga for piano. Advocates say it opens the door to an effortless technique. They hail it as a way to overcome technical limitations, as well as a cure for fatigue and playing-related injuries. Rothman had studied the Taubman method years before and incorporated one of its core components, circular wrist movement (a gentle rolling of the wrists), into his playing. He encouraged me to incorporate it, as it would help get rid of the tension that he identified in my arms and wrists. Whenever I became nervous, I tensed my arms, my muscles drew tight, and my playing turned brittle. The tension was subverting my music making. Rothman explained it like this: When a cat is at rest, it can pounce at any minute. A pianist’s muscles needed to be similarly at the ready. I was to use the wrist as a fulcrum, making a small circular motion of the hand as I played through a passage. He scribbled “CW,” short for circular wrist, throughout the scores of music I was playing. But try as I might, I wasn’t able to assimilate the technique. Maybe it was because we tried to change it in isolation, in small doses during the lesson, while continuing to work on Bach or Brahms. I would later learn that when pianists undertake the Taubman method, they typically stop playing altogether, sometimes for as long as a year, while they work on deconstructing and rebuilding their technique. Rothman wasn’t suggesting I do that, but my inability to incorporate his teaching was becoming a frustration to both of us.

  More important, Rothman had seen me trip up at several low-key student recitals, and I suspected that he had marked me as a poor performer, perhaps an incurably poor one. At one of his recitals, he welcomed the students and their guests, then asked who among us suffered the pangs of stage fright. All but the very youngest raised their hands. For the next several minutes, he ruminated on the causes and symptoms of performance anxiety—the rebellion of the fingers, he called it—and why it was so critical to face our terror. I wondered if I were being set up. By the time he finished talking, I was in a sweat. When my turn came, I played so badly—missing octave jumps, sliding into wrong notes, halting, forgetting, and crashing—that it sounded to my own ears as if I had never prepared. All those long hours of practice, wasted. As I stood and walked away from the piano, I saw Rothman bestow a look of pity on me. And suddenly I resented this beloved teacher. I was afraid he would always see me in that light, waiting for me to lose my way and stumble. That wasn’t what I needed. I needed a teacher who saw my faults but recognized my potential, too.

  In June 2012, around the time of the strange dreams, I began to search in a systematic way, auditioning for a handful of piano teachers within driving distance. Each audition was different: Some teachers sat beside me, almost touching, as they watched my hands and turned my pages; one sat far removed, like a member of an invisible audience. Yet another, a Russian pedagogue with a thick accent, directed me to a piano in a dark corner of his house. “You will play the Brahms,” he declared when I had finished playing through my repertoire. “You will not play this Bach fugue; you will play a different one.”

  In the Vedic tradition, the philosophy behind classical yoga, a person without a guru is an orphan. I yearned for a teacher who would serve as my guru, who would take me seriously, push me to be the best I could be, and not give up on me because I was middle-aged, because my hands were small, because I couldn’t do circular wrist. But all my effort at change had exposed me as a creature of habit. I had long prided myself on being an adventurous spirit, always ready to move to a new house, a new city, a new job. Wasn’t I the person who once underlined Jacques Lacan, the French neo-Freudian psychoanalyst, when he warned against “the armor of an alienating identity”? If we move through our lives with too strong a sense of our own identity, he said, we exclude other possibilities.

  But my possibilities at the piano seemed so limited. Whenever I tried to change my posture or even remind myself to keep breathing through a piece, I hit a wall. If I was being honest about it, I’d always been a slave to habit. Now, as I tried to draw back my shoulders and relax my wrists and forearms, I remembered sitting at my wooden desk in grade three, trying to learn how to hold a fountain pen. I had it wrapped under my thumb, covered with my pointer finger—making the kind of girl fist that will get your hand broken if you try to throw a punch. There was a hole for the inkwell in the upper right corner of the desk; we would not be permitted to graduate on to ballpoint until we had mastered the ability to write neatly with a fountain pen. And now the teacher was heading right for me. I was terrified of her, and for good reason. Miss Knisley regularly punished the boys for misdemeanors both great and small, like coming in late from recess. Once, as the class watched in silence, she lined up the culprits at the front of the class and flogged their hands with a supple inch-thick leather strap. But first, she made a great show of wetting down their hands, since, as she informed us with scientific detachment, pain and touch were more exquisite when the hands were lubricated. Other times, she locked girls and boys alike in the cloakroom, where she often forgot us, sometimes for the rest of the school day and once until evening, when Billy McBirnie’s parents called the principal to inquire where their son had gotten. Now, as she patrolled the aisles, examining our hand position, Miss Knisley slapped my hand and pulled the fingers apart. I adjusted my pen hold that day, but by the next day I was holding it in the same clenched manner. I hold it the same way to this day.

  If I couldn’t change my penmanship, how reasonable was it to think I could change my body’s response to terror? In practice sessions, I had been focusing on my wrists and arms, attempting to turn them into the relaxed muscles of a rag doll. I had tried going out for long runs, breathing through the music like a singer, loosening my mouth, jaw, and shoulders. None of it worked.

  Having staked out the next year as my piano year, I began finding pianists everywhere I went. It was like when I bought my first Volvo station wagon in 1989; suddenly, every other car on the road was a Volvo. Now, everybody I met was a pianist. A couple of them had even arranged recitals to celebrate their fiftieth or sixtieth birthdays. Originality, alas, was not to be mine.

  One of my new piano friends came recommended as a house sitter, willing to walk our dog in exchange for a decent piano to practice on. Lynn Kidder carried herself with an old-fashioned bearing. Unlike me, she rarely cursed; she exuded a ladylike reserve until she laughed, a big belly laugh that took no mind of what anybody else might think. She walked slowly, which was something I noticed but didn’t think much about until she mentioned that she was recovering from an eleven-year bout of chronic fatigue syndrome triggered by mercury poisoning. It began after a dentist replaced a gold crown with one that contained a different mix of metals. The new mix leached mercury from older, nearby amalgam fillings into her bloodstream, and within a few weeks Kidder could barely sit upright. She forgot how to read (music and English), lived on yogurt, bananas, and bagels, required a caretaker to do her shopping and simple household chores, and struggled to make a long-distance phone call. She went from working as a computer programmer, building and designing a database, to the point where, as she put it, she couldn’t add two plus three. It was four years before she got a diagnosis, at which point she had all her fillings removed and replaced with mercury-free compounds.

  She spent a year getting chelation therapy to remove the heavy metal from her
bloodstream, then languished for several more years with chronic fatigue syndrome before discovering neurolinguistic programming; amygdala retraining, she called it. When I met her, she was still recuperating and figured that she was about halfway back to her old self. I thought she was already extremely clever. A master knitter, she designed her own sweaters and knitted up intricate patterns for a boutique yarn shop, in exchange for fine and costly wool. She was an accomplished pianist who held a master’s degree in performance from the University of Washington. As a young woman, she had dreamed of a concertizing career. But she lacked the necessary technique and eventually stopped playing in her thirties, choosing instead to move into a Seattle spiritual community that was affiliated with the sustainability movement.

  Kidder, now in her fifties, was back in California and playing the piano again. Despite the fact that she lacked the energy to practice more than fifteen minutes at a time, she was determined to become a concert pianist and perform in every state west of the Rockies. I didn’t tell her I thought this even more far-fetched than my own goal of performing a full-length public recital. Later, when I heard her play the piano, I reconsidered. She was an emotional person who could bring herself to tears as she recalled the tortured life of Chopin. She played with a plush tone that was full of unplugged joy and feeling. Kidder had told me that technique wasn’t her strong suit, but I saw in an instant that it far surpassed my own.

  We began getting together just to play for each other. I tried out a Brahms intermezzo, a piece that for me was still a work in progress. “You are a wonderful pianist,” she told me. Her words took me by surprise; I was so startled by them, I began to cry. I felt like an impostor, I admitted. I was about to say more, but she stopped me, made me sit in a chair and touch the tip of my right thumb to the inner corner of my right eye. Now, she said, touch your fourth finger to the inner corner of your left eye, so that both fingertips are on either side of the bridge of your nose. Place the tip of your middle finger in between the two, above your eyebrows, and put your other hand on the back of your head, palm touching the head with thumb resting at the base of the skull. Repeating after her, I said, “I’ve had problems performing in the past, but I am a different person now.”