Noa Kageyama (Courtesy of Ahlin Min)
Like his mentor Don Greene, Kageyama considers himself a sport psychologist—though one who works specifically with musicians, athletes of the small motor muscles. In that capacity, he initiated our sessions by having me complete an Inventory of Performance Skills, a questionnaire of eighty-four statements designed to gauge a musician’s anxiety level. My answers underlined what I already knew about myself: “Going into performances, I expect to do well.” (Not true.) “I feel bold onstage.” (Hardly.) “I talk to myself in a positive way.” (Not very true.) “I wish I could manage my nerves better.” (Duh.) Overall, my scores showed me to be fearful and anxious, running away from whatever I found difficult or scary. Fear of failure left me tentative, hesitant, and inclined to play it safe, shying away from bold musical gestures and expressiveness. Not surprisingly, I scored low on resilience, revealing myself as someone who became so distracted by a slipup that I had trouble continuing with the music.
It was, Kageyama acknowledged months later, “one of the more extreme profiles” he had seen. How bad was it? I prodded. He smiled, looking as if he were about to crack a joke on late-night TV, then caught himself and offered up the word challenging. I did my best, he told me, when I wasn’t completely calm. I thrived on some excitement, some adrenaline. I wasn’t happy at ninety miles an hour, but it was also clear that I didn’t function at thirty. I was a just-under-the-speed-limit pianist—forty-five miles an hour. There were a lot of problems in my profile: I lacked confidence, I avoided opportunities, I had difficulty focusing my mind on the music. On the other hand, I was capable of summoning my resources in a pinch and showed great determination.
Act and think like the person you want to be, he urged. Record your playing every day and then listen to it intently without critiquing or analyzing the music. Learn to really listen. Sing along while playing, as Glenn Gould used to do. (If you listen carefully—and sometimes not so carefully—you can hear him, humming along on his recordings in a low, near constant drone.) Kageyama called it “singing brain.”
These were the tools of cognitive behavior therapy, a psychodynamic approach aimed at driving home emotional insights with clear goal-oriented targets. Kageyama wasn’t interested in why I had stage fright; as far as he was concerned, everybody had it. The key, he said, was learning how to “center,” how to better cultivate a sense of interior calm. When I figured out how to do that, the anxiety of performing would melt away. He himself learned how to do it when he was a student at Juilliard, preparing for an international competition. As usual, he hadn’t prepared nearly enough. He was nervously pacing his apartment when he came upon a brochure about the powers of centering. As he studied it, he recalled the visualization exercises and other mental games his mother had instilled, and he quickly figured out what he needed to do. When he played at the competition, the result surprised him. “I wasn’t even prepared, but given my level of preparation I hit it out of the park—way beyond where I had any right to.” He made it to the second round, then realized that if he made it any further, he would have to disqualify himself. He hadn’t bothered to learn the required repertoire.
By this point, though, it didn’t matter. He had just been introduced to “the zone,” and it was all he cared about. “Once you get there and you realize what it feels like, you don’t ever want to perform anywhere else than that,” he said. “Because it’s just too nerve-racking to do so. Once you figure out where your ideal zone is, what you’re paying attention to, that’s the only thing that ends up mattering. When there were times I couldn’t get there for some reason, how I played actually mattered less to me than getting to that place where I knew I could play well.”
Kageyama had ideas about how to help me find my own zone, but first he wanted me to write up an identity statement, a short mantra that would couple my greatest strength with my aspirations. It would be a way of linking something that was already true with something I hoped to make true. When, at our next session, I read my statement aloud (“My energy is formidable and I am the most magnetic amateur pianist in the Bay Area”), I could barely deliver it with a straight face. I was instructed to print it out, tape it to the bathroom mirror, and repeat it aloud every time I looked in the mirror. It will be your mantra, he told me, a personal affirmation that will drive you forward. The thought of seeing such silliness posted on my bathroom mirror made me cringe.
“We have this idea of who we think we are, and it’s not correct,” Kageyama went on, and assigned me to draw up a list of my top ten courageous moments. “If you look at that list, you’ll see what you’re capable of.”
I fretted over this second assignment, trying to come up with items that were worthy of inclusion. I considered the act of natural childbirth, which I’d managed to pull off three times, but crossed it off when I realized that both my grandmothers had accomplished the same and neither would have called herself courageous for doing so. Other occasions came to mind: moving to Italy to work as an au pair when I could barely speak Italian, hitchhiking across the United Kingdom, hauling lobsters in Scotland. But including them struck me as cheating: In my late teens and early twenties, these escapades had been taken as larks. Everyone I’d met on my summer swings through Europe had been kind and solicitous—one old Scotswoman going so far as to invite me into her house, where she drew up a hot bath and set out an enormous breakfast of fried kippers and haggis. These were stories I told to give my life a certain flair.
But there was one story I didn’t tell, mostly because forty years after the fact, I still felt ashamed of my part in it. It happened when I was sixteen, hitchhiking from the summer camp in northern Ontario where I was a counselor to Toronto. The man who picked me up appeared pleasant and nonthreatening. He told me he had been driving all night from Sault Ste. Marie, a city far to the north. He was willing to take me all the way into Toronto, but first he wanted to stop off at his house in the suburbs, say hello to his wife and kids, and change his shirt. When I heard that he had a wife, I imagined I was safe and agreed. Of course, there was no one in the house. He made me a sandwich (roast beef with ketchup on Wonder Bread) and made a phone call to someone named Paul. Then, as I was finishing up my sandwich, he locked the kitchen door and dragged me through the hall, past the photographs of his children in their school uniforms, and into his bedroom. I opened my mouth to scream and nothing came out. My vocal cords were frozen. I was frozen. He threw me on the bed and I managed to whisper, “I have a boyfriend.” It was a ridiculous thing to say; in fact, I didn’t have a boyfriend, I’d never had a boyfriend, and even if I had, why would it make any difference? He took off his shirt and rolled on top of me. I caught a glimpse of a framed photograph of his wife in her wedding dress, and I squeaked out the only question that made sense in the moment: How can you do this to your wife? I’m not doing it to her, he said, I’m doing it to you. He said it almost grimly, but with humor—as if he were getting to a chore that he’d put off much too long but that really wasn’t so bad. His words hit me like a bucket of ice water. I instantly came to life and did the only thing left to me: I sank my teeth deep into his arm, as far as they could sink. Sometimes even now, when I close my eyes, I can remember the taste of that flaccid, pink flesh and recall the way he howled and fell away, leaving me to jump up and make my escape.
Yes, I thought, that was courageous. I would give myself that. I had walked away, moved on, and pushed myself out into the world—traveling, working, taking risks without excessive fear for my physical safety. Why, then, whenever I sat down at the piano to play for an audience, no matter how small, did I tremble like a cornered animal? My heart pounded as wildly as if I were being attacked—but the one time I was attacked, I’d risen to the occasion. The girl who could save herself from being raped, with no weapon other than her teeth, was surely capable of summoning up some reserve of courage at the piano.
The existential psychologist Rollo May defined anxiety as “a threat to some value that the individu
al holds essential to his existence as a personality.” That definition is hard to apply to a fear of spiders, snakes, heights, or bridges, but it is central to a fear of performance. Asking myself which of my own essential values were threatened, I saw the answer: There sat my mother in the audience. I’d swallowed her values whole. For years, she had conveyed that music was the best part of me. If I failed at the piano, what did that signify?
Kageyama said I should do something every day that was outside my comfort zone. We would rate the activities on a scale of one to ten, beginning on a three and working my way up from there. We would structure them into an adventure. Ever since my first airport “recital” with Ellen Chen, I had begun dropping by Terminal B in San Jose. “My energy is formidable and I am the most magnetic amateur pianist in the Bay Area,” I whispered to myself as I laid out my books of music: Bach, Brahms, Debussy, Tcherepnin, and Piazzolla. Kageyama deemed it a seven on the adventure scale.
After a few of these performances, I occasionally forgot about my mantra. Sometimes, a small audience of skycaps, baggage handlers, and travelers with time to kill grew around me, and as they sipped their Peet’s coffees, I played my heart out. Once, when I stood up and gathered my things, they actually applauded and called out their thanks. I thought of my mantra, which suddenly seemed all wrong. I went home and wrote up another: “I am someone who has begun to overcome her fears and I enjoy playing for people and bringing them beautiful music.” It wasn’t much better, but it didn’t make me cringe.
Sara playing piano at San Jose International Airport (Shmuel Thaler)
After three months of weekly Skype sessions, Kageyama suggested it was time to dial up to number eight on the adventure scale. At his urging, I signed up for the Sonata Workshop, a piano camp in a sprawling Bennington, Vermont, manor house that had once been a nuns’ convent and now held a piano in every room. Over eight days, I would cycle through almost every one of those pianos, practicing in linen closets, bedrooms, a laundry room, the basement, and the living room. The place was filled with piano-obsessed people, all pursuing their passion with unique single-mindedness, playing piano, listening to piano, and talking piano from the moment they woke up till the time they went to bed. “What kind of pianist are you?” one competitive guy demanded at breakfast early in the week. I must have looked perplexed because he clarified and threw out the names of other campers for comparison purposes: “On a scale of one to ten, where two is a beginner, five is a Carolyn, and nine is a Keith, where are you?” I stared at him, wondering if I had unwittingly set myself up for yet another music competition.
One of my roommates was a twenty-eight-year-old woman who had never before played the piano. Fatimah Muhammad grew up homeless in New Jersey. She lived on the streets and in shelters with her brother and mother, who was determined that her children get an education. In 2006, Muhammad graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania. A few months before arriving at the Sonata Workshop, she had come within four hundred votes of unseating a twenty-seven-year incumbent in the Democratic primary for a seat in the Pennsylvania State Senate. She had a powerful gospel-tinged voice, and she had toured India, Malaysia, and China, singing jazz and blues before thousands. Her mother had recently died of breast cancer, and a couple of times that week I woke in the middle of the night to the sound of her sobs. She said she didn’t know what exactly she wanted to do with her life, except that whatever it was, it would involve music. When she performed on the last night, it was to accompany herself in a song she had composed. She was nervous (she’d actually thrown up before going on), and she touched her hand to her heart “to check in” before belting out a glorious number. I watched as she arched a hand above the keys, the gesture of a confident pianist, and I decided that her vulnerability was actually a mask that concealed great strength.
A lot of people at the camp had powerful stories. One, Tony Cicoria, was already famous, having been profiled by the neurologist Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker as the man who at forty-two years of age developed an insatiable appetite for classical piano music after being struck by lightning. An orthopedic surgeon in a small city in upstate New York, he was talking on a pay phone in 1994 when a flash of electricity burst out of the receiver and hit him in the face. The next thing he knew, he was getting CPR from the woman who had been next in line. A bluish-white light bathed him, and he was hovering over his own body, overcome with a feeling of peace and well-being. Then, with a whoosh, he was back on the ground, covered with burns on his face and feet.
For the next few weeks, he was sluggish and forgetful. Medical tests found nothing amiss, however, and he resumed his life as a doctor and family man until one morning he woke up and felt an inexplicable desire to hear classical music. Before the lightning strike, he had had no such interest; if he listened to anything, it was rock. He began to buy recordings of classical pianists—Vladimir Ashkenazy was his favorite—and listened obsessively. When his son’s babysitter moved away, she stored her piano, “a nice little upright,” in Cicoria’s house. Cicoria began to take lessons and play whenever he had a few minutes to spare. Music was a constant presence in his head, like an audio file, which he could stop and start on command. When I met him, he seemed a man obsessed, attacking the keys with alarming ferocity whether he was playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata or the piano concerto he had recently composed. It was called The Lightning Concerto and it was very intense.
Another of my roommates was a California nursing professor who on first impression seemed brash and outgoing. As I soon discovered, she was as terrified of performing as I was. Irene Larsen promised she would sign up for a master class if I did. “Why not?” she said with a toss of her head. “It’s the things you don’t buy, the things you don’t say, the people you don’t tell to fuck off—those are the regrets in life.” She never did sign up for the master class. But without allowing myself to think about it, I added my name to the list.
This meant that I would have to play before all twenty-six pianists in attendance, after which my playing would be dissected, in public, by Polly van der Linde, the camp director. She was pure energy. An excellent pianist, she could sight-read almost anything that was put in front of her. She could also read people. She had an uncanny way of zeroing in on the strengths and weaknesses of their playing, without ever talking down or seeming to compromise her own standards.
The afternoon of my master class, I took a long walk on a country road, past picturesque farmhouses and rolling hills. Drivers tore past me, one nearly brushing me. I saw myself struck dead, a piece of roadkill as cars whizzed past my lifeless body. At least I wouldn’t have to play in the master class, I considered, a thought that brought to mind a story about Pablo Casals. When the cellist visited San Francisco in 1901, he suffered a serious injury to his bowing hand during a hike up Mount Tamalpais, the highest point in Marin County, just across the Golden Gate Bridge. A large rock had fallen on his hand, crushing several fingers. The first thought that came to his mind, Casals later said, was, “Thank God, I’ll never have to play the cello again!”
I returned to the house unharmed, without any excuse to keep me from playing the Brahms rhapsody that evening. That was a pity. After six bars, I broke down and went back to the beginning. Remembering Kageyama, I took a slow breath and started over, trying to focus on the good things: my tone, my passion—my formidable energy. I played accurately for another page or two, and then—kaboom—I flubbed the ending. When it was over, I sat on the bench trying not to cry, awaiting van der Linde’s decree. It didn’t take her long. “You can handle the piano,” she said. “You just can’t handle yourself at the piano.” My fellow students laughed, some a little nervously, but at that moment I felt like throwing my arms around her. I was thrilled to be called out as an emotional mess; I just couldn’t stand being dismissed as a pianist.
Later, she told me about one of her longtime students, an older man named George who many years earlier had given up all hope of a music career. He attended
the Oberlin Conservatory but quit performing because of his stage fright and instead spent his life as a corporate executive. The piano bug never left him, however, and every year he came to the Sonata Workshop, where, predictably, he was overcome by nerves. Once, van der Linde coaxed him onstage with a bit of humor; she placed a huge sombrero on his head. It helped. Another time, she shared with him her own past experiences in a chamber group: how, before a performance, she and the other players, all scared stiff, huddled backstage like players on a football team. “We’re great, yeah, yeah, yeah! Merry Christmas and fuck you!”
George listened attentively. The next evening, he walked onstage, bowed to his audience, and let loose a scroll—like a court jester in a Monty Python movie—that announced in big block letters: FUCK YOU! He played brilliantly.
I decided to go for broke at the final recital and wrote down a series of commandments that I studied like a tip sheet for a test.
Breathe. Don’t stop!
Don’t hunch shoulders
Loosen mouth
Focus—If drift, STOP!
Play from the heart
Listening to my fellow pianists that night, I was aware of the rise and fall of the breath beneath their back muscles and shoulders, the tapping of their feet, their bopping heads, the clunky playing of one, the gentle music of another, the boldness and confidence of a few. It was like finding oneself in the middle of a nudist colony, surrounded by the diversity of human bodies: the poking ribs, the rolls of fat, the solid thighs. I loved these people! And as I began my own piece, Debussy’s Reflets dans l’eau (Reflections in the Water), I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it. It was a demanding piece that had to sound ephemeral, like flowing water, a river of music: gushing, rippling, eddying. I’d been playing it for about two months, not long enough for my fingers to be entirely comfortable with Debussy’s cascading runs. Yet as I played that night in Vermont, I had a vision of the way Reflets could sound—and there were times when my playing felt alive, matching the vision. There were even passages that seemed easy: I had found my zone, however briefly. Afterward, people told me I had played beautifully, that I had created magic for long minutes. I didn’t know the name of the piece, one woman said, but it sounded like water. Another woman urged me to enter the Seattle International Piano Festival & Competition, of which she was an organizer. “I don’t know what your standards of success are, Sara,” van der Linde told me, “but in my book you succeeded. You played right from the heart.”
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