Playing Scared (6 page)

How true. Seated at the piano, attempting to play some vast piece from memory, without a score, one might as well be perched on the high wire without a net. The thin margin of safety depends on absolute precision. Every note, every step, carries a search for balance over a fixed point on the wire. The analogy of the tightrope is one so often raised by classical musicians that I wondered what a real tightrope walker would say about it.

I found Pete Sweet, a circus artist originally from Berkeley, California, studying at a school for clowns in Florence, Italy. We spoke a few times over Skype—long, rambling conversations following his long days of juggling and slack-rope walking. Then thirty-nine, Sweet had learned to juggle while a student at Berkeley High. His parents were free-minded religious scholars, ex-hippies who took their three kids out of school to travel the world for a year, then settled for a time in central Java to start a school. It was in Indonesia, when he was seventeen, where Sweet first tied a rope between a coconut tree and the porch of his father’s house and teetered across. He went on to study Indonesian at the University of Wisconsin, playing in a gamelan, a traditional Indonesian orchestra, and practicing his juggling. He had walked the tight wire several
years before discovering the slack rope. It offered up a whole other challenge. As its name states, the tightrope is taut and relatively stationary, while the slack rope is always moving, undulating beneath one’s feet. “Of course the center is always in yourself, but on the tightrope you keep your center
above
the wire,” Sweet explained. In other words, your center stays fixed. But in slack, your center—that balance point—is elusive: “In slack, you move the rope
underneath
you. It’s like being able to move the ground. It’s moving, but you also move, so in some way you’re influencing and controlling it, and in other ways it’s influencing you; you’re not at all in control.” It sounded like playing the piano.

Falling off the tightrope is like falling off a log, he continued, while falling off the slack rope is like having a carpet pulled out from under you: “My teacher says that falling is like death. It’s something we all know is going to happen; we just don’t know how it’s going to happen.” Over the years, Sweet has walked tightropes and slack ropes in troupes across Europe; he was part of a vaudeville-style circus act, singing and dancing for thousands of spectators. But it wasn’t until he attended a workshop in Paris, where he was challenged to imagine himself on the high wire—while still very much grounded on terra firma—that Sweet experienced his first and only panic attack. The experience shocked him; until that moment, he hadn’t realized how afraid he actually felt. “I read an article by a big wave surfer who said that nobody’s fearless when they surf big waves unless they’re certifiably insane. You can’t be fearless out there, you can only be panicless. I think I had maintained my own poise for years by being numb to my
fear. The fact that I was continually putting myself in scary situations and asking myself that I be poised and not panicked—it was much easier to do that without being aware of my fear,” he said. The panic experience at the workshop inspired his next show: a performance of Maximilian, a clown with a bad case of stage fright walking the slack rope.

Sweet quoted Fritz Perls, the German-born founder of Gestalt therapy, who defined fear as excitement without breath. When we’re in a state of fear and panic, our breath gets shallow. Our abdomen fills with butterflies because normal digestion shuts down. The tension causes numbness. Our body retracts; we numb the fear. The most important thing Sweet learned was breathing—whether he was walking the slack rope up in the air or walking on his hands on solid ground. Breathing—so autonomic, so much a function of the reptilian brain—is so easy to forget.

“Part of the training has been to focus on the technique and hone it so it’s precise,” Sweet said. “With every step, I first touch the side of the rope with my foot. Then I transfer my weight onto the foot, setting it on the rope, which is moving all the time. And that’s what I do with each step: First I feel the side of the rope—like the side of a pencil. It becomes so innate you do it very quickly. That’s something I focus on, but once I do that, I will intentionally distract myself and look from side to side, do things with my hand.”

I’d been half listening to this discourse on the mechanics of slack-rope footwork, when I suddenly recognized the similarity to what I was learning at the piano. As I practiced my scales and arpeggios each day, I often tried to distract myself,
to move my head from side to side and up and down, as a way of freeing myself from the very precision I was working so hard to achieve. We were in parallel worlds, Pete Sweet on his slack rope, I at my piano—both of us searching for the place where fear evaporates long enough for freedom and joy to reach the surface.

Sweet was a classic autodidact whose years of study in juggling, dance, clowning, mime, and breath work amounted to a self-directed Ph.D. program. Listening to him, it became apparent that I had to design my own course of action, one requiring that I undergo the kind of exposure therapy with which claustrophobics, arachnophobics, and other neurotics typically are treated. I had heard reports of claustrophobics shut away in car trunks and coffins by their therapists, of arachnophobics cajoled into playing with tarantulas.

The equivalent for me was to confront an audience. So without allowing myself too much time to think about it, I went ahead and scheduled a solo recital for June 30, 2013, the day before my sixtieth birthday. It was now early June 2012. That left me just over a year to prepare, to “expose” myself; I imagined it as a round of inoculations, a series of graduated steps. As the year progressed, they would serve as my road map. In the first few months, I would perform in retirement homes and hospitals. I would attend a nine-day piano camp in Bennington, Vermont, sign up for master classes at which I would play before other piano students and be critiqued by a teacher. I would routinely drop by the closest major airport to perform on a piano that sat, invitingly, just outside of the baggage claim area. In the last few months of my campaign—
my year of living dangerously—I would organize a series of informal evening “soirees,” inviting small groups of friends and acquaintances to my house for music and wine. My teacher would arrange for me to play before several top pianists in the San Francisco Bay Area. Then, in May 2013, I would perform a half-hour solo recital at the local public library. After all that, I told myself, I would be ready to play before fifty or more invited guests in a public hall—my grand performance. But first, I had to touch a few tarantulas.

My concert was still nearly a year away, but the thought of it was already disturbing my dreams, reigning over my nights, plunging me deep into Emily Dickinson country, where, as she said, you don’t have to be a house to be haunted. I felt haunted, wondering at my own recklessness. Why was I doing this to myself? Was it too late to change my mind? How was I ever going to pull it off? When I did sleep, my dreams were piano possessed. In one, I laid my fingers on the keyboard and then couldn’t pry them off. They were superglued to the keys. In another dream, I looked down at my belly, saw that I was pregnant, and opened my mouth just as two small hands fluttered out of it, waving delicately in the air before my eyes. They were just a baby’s hands, I noted, but the fingers were long and graceful and I congratulated myself on the fact that this child of mine was going to be born with piano hands.

Some of my apprehension stemmed from the fact that I found myself without a teacher. I had an almost religious belief in the power of a great teacher. Throughout my life, I’d
been inspired by numerous teachers and in recent years had seen what the right ones could accomplish with my sons. One in particular stood out. Mary Lou Galen became my son’s violin teacher soon after he entered high school. Max was innately musical, but stubborn and resistant to instruction. His previous teacher couldn’t get through to him; he had developed a way of looking through her and closing his ears to almost everything she said. When Galen took him on, she did so on the condition that I sit through the lessons and take notes. I was taken aback; I had always spent the kids’ lesson times running errands, meeting friends for coffee, making a deadline, or catching up on my reading. Now, in addition to all my other responsibilities, I was being asked to take on the job of stenographer.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that I’d been admitted into what amounted to an exclusive lecture series, a year’s worth of master classes with a master teacher. Galen, a former concertmaster with the San Jose Symphony Orchestra, had suffered repetitive stress injury and no longer played the violin. Unable to demonstrate technique, tone, or style, she had learned to communicate by using story and metaphor.

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.