Playing Scared (8 page)

As it happened, I was scheduled to audition for a teacher whom I had heard about through the music grapevine. Ellen Tryba Chen lived forty minutes away in Saratoga, across the mountain that locals call “the hill.” A former artistic director of the Bay Area’s Steinway Society, she knew all the best piano teachers in Silicon Valley. If she didn’t think she was the right teacher for me, she’d know who was. But first she needed to hear me play. It was a Sunday afternoon in late June when I pulled up to her house, and the sound of the piano—she was working on the Grieg sonata—filtered through windows sealed against the early summer heat. When she opened the door, she was impeccably dressed. I later recognized that she always appeared like this: hair coiffed, trousers creased, with a well-tailored, color-coordinated blouse. It was a style acquired during a long residence in Tokyo, where she took careful note of some of the best-dressed women in the world. She was determined that her students see her as a professional. Her husband, Otis, was an engineer-turned-businessman who had moved from the aerospace industry to semiconductors and
was now involved in renewable energy. He had just flown in over the weekend and lay crashed out in front of the TV at the other end of the house. I’d already heard they had a bicontinental marriage; he worked in Shanghai, where they had a condo and she visited several times a year. Occasionally, they met up in Germany, where one of their sons lived.

Ellen spilled over with ideas, often getting so excited by her thoughts that she would run off on a tangent. Stage fright! She knew all about stage fright. Did she mention that she used to break out in an allergic reaction after every performance in graduate school? An antihistamine breakdown: uncontrolled sneezing, running eyes, leaky nose. Did I have a technique for memorizing music? She would teach me her fail-safe method,
but not this time, another time. Ellen thought cosmically, saw connections, and seemed to read as much as I did. She typically taught until ten at night, after which she liked to relax over a Victorian novel by Anthony Trollope or Mrs. Gaskell. She asked me what I hoped to play at my concert, and when I mentioned the
Bagatelles
by Alexander Tcherepnin, she laughed with delight and told me she had played for Tcherepnin at a music festival in Wisconsin when she was seven years old. She loved his
Bagatelles
.

Ellen Chen
(Courtesy of Kenneth Quan)

Here was the Sancho Panza to my Don Quixote. I wasn’t just tilting at windmills, she assured me. She didn’t see any reason I shouldn’t succeed, she said, after hearing me play: Bach, then Brahms and Debussy. I was musical, I had a solid musical background, I had the tools. She wanted to go on this journey with me, and she was already brainstorming how to do it. I needed to practice performing in front of people, and one of the places I could do that was at the Mineta San Jose International Airport, where a baby grand sat just outside the edge of the Southwest Airlines baggage carousels. She was taking her young students to play there in a few weeks. Did I want to join them? And while she was thinking of it, there was also a concert grand in the ballroom at Filoli, a Georgian country estate with public gardens in nearby Woodside. She intended to find out if I could play it for visitors. Of course, she’d accompany me; we could take turns playing.

Sitting on the bench of one of her two side-by-side Mason & Hamlin seven-footers, I decided she was the most intense and demanding teacher I’d ever met. I was glad that I’d remembered to take a beta-blocker to quell my nerves. Now,
as I played some more, she perched herself across the room on a desk, following the music in her own score, sipping tea brewed in a Japanese pot. I would discover that was how she routinely conducted her lessons. Not bad, she’d say, articulating the words with a slurred, almost singsong phrase. It was one of her great compliments. In the months to come, it could send me into paroxysms of joy that I tried to contain, largely because I knew she would always have something more to add. I could practice a piece until I thought it was perfect, bring it to her, and realize with a hard letdown that we were just at the beginning of exploring its secrets. I had barely begun to understand it. Learning the notes and getting it up to speed, playing with the proper dynamics and feeling, figuring out the articulation—that was just the beginning. I had never gone this deeply into music, or anything for that matter, before meeting Ellen Tryba Chen. Other teachers had heard me play a Bach fugue or Brahms intermezzo and concluded that I was ready to move on to the next piece. Not Ellen. At first I felt dismayed, as if I had failed. Then I felt irked, and I told myself that I was being nitpicked to death. At the end of one intense session, a lesson lasting nearly two hours, I mentioned that I had spent a lot of time working on that Bach fugue; I hadn’t expected her to find so much wrong with it. She looked at me, her mouth open in surprise, for once slow to respond with words. In that moment, I knew that I had found exactly what I had gone searching for: a teacher who was willing to work with me as a serious student. Every musical phrase was up for analysis; no note was too minor to take for granted.

My biggest challenge, she informed me, was my tension. Rothman, of course, had told me the same. She said I had a fierce dedication to getting the notes right; it was getting in the way of my touch. Another time she chastised me for seeking her approval. Don’t look at me for approval, she scolded. Look to yourself. I felt like a child.

Mostly, I appreciated her for the intensity of her feelings. Once, after she saw András Schiff perform Bach’s
English Suites
from memory in San Francisco, she stood on her tiptoes in front of her piano, placed a hand on her heart, and said, “I felt the way you do with your own child, that if any harm came to him, I would lay down my life.” I understood that kind of passion, that reach for hyperbole when nothing else would do. It spoke to a depth of feeling that could also overwhelm me after a great, transformative performance.

Ellen soon became my biggest inspiration. After a couple of weeks of lessons, we met up at the airport in San Jose, where I found her in Terminal B, surrounded by schoolchildren, her students. Their parents sat in nearby plastic chairs, drinking coffee, reading books and newspapers. As travelers strode past, pulling suitcases and talking on cell phones, Ellen opened “the recital,” playing a Spanish dance by Enrique Granados. She was an exciting pianist to watch, not just technically excellent but full of verve. The piano had a tinny sound that was muffled by a barrage of public announcements, but she took no mind. The kids played next, and then it was my turn.

This had happened way too fast. I wasn’t ready. I forced myself to sit at the piano and play a Debussy prelude. Ellen later told me that I looked and sounded like a robot. As soon
as I finished, I began gathering up my things to say good-bye. “Where are you going?” she demanded. “You’ve just begun.” We kept at it all afternoon, as Ellen cycled us through our pieces. The children played, their parents clapped, and then it was my turn again. It got kind of boring. It was no big deal. I grew relaxed. Then, just when I thought that I could finally go home, Ellen announced that we were moving on to Terminal A, where a little upright piano stood in an alcove next to security. This piano was even worse than the other, but as we rotated through our pieces I realized that I was feeling as much at ease in this ugly corner of the airport as in my living room. I would have done anything for Ellen Chen at that moment. I began to thank her, but I couldn’t talk because I realized I was crying. So was she.

“The bulletproof musician” was one of the first items to pop up on my screen when I typed in the words
music performance anxiety
. It was the website of Noa Kageyama, a New York psychologist and violinist who works with musicians from around the world, coaching them for auditions, concerts, and competitions and training them in focus techniques and ways to cope with performance anxiety. Stage fright could not only be managed, he asserted; it could be turned into an asset: “The specific mental skills you develop will allow you to experience the satisfaction of performing up to your abilities—even when the lights are brightest …
Especially when the lights are brightest.
” The key was in learning to reprogram one’s response to stress, and he offered a
bulletproof
approach based on years of performance psychology research plus his own experience and training. When I learned that the Juilliard School, his alma mater, had hired him to teach this approach, I lost no time contacting him. He agreed to work with me almost at once, and by June 2012 we had begun meeting weekly via Skype—he from the hallway of his
Upper West Side apartment in Manhattan, I from my home office in California.

Kageyama told me he had been given his first violin, a Cracker Jack box fitted with a ruler for a fingerboard, when he was two years old. Though it was he who requested it, the instrument quickly became the focus of his mother’s ambitions. She read everything that Shinichi Suzuki, founder of the world-famous Suzuki method, had to say about teaching music to children. She was especially taken by one of his axioms—that practicing music was like eating. A person does not eat one big meal a week, Suzuki wrote. He needs to nourish himself every day. So, too, with practicing. The mother interpreted this to mean that if her son didn’t practice, he didn’t eat. There was at least one time the boy didn’t eat.

When Noa was five, she pulled him out of kindergarten in rural Ohio so they could fly to Matsumoto, Japan, to study directly with the master. After months of letters, telegrams, and international phone calls, Suzuki had agreed to accept him as a student. Kageyama remembers a large studio hazy with cigarette smoke and a kindly man in a pressed suit conducting an orchestra of three or four hundred child violinists, all sawing away at the same piece,
La Folia
by Arcangelo Corelli. During one performance, Suzuki became so animated that he stepped back and fell off the stage. “I forgot to wind myself up today,” Kageyama recalls the old man joking as he popped back up and performed a jig, like a wind-up doll, for the surprised children.

Mostly, Kageyama recalls the stress of working on the same challenging piece of music, day after day, during the six
months he lived in Japan. It wasn’t just the music. “It was very stressful being away from my culture, my language, and my father,” he says now. “My mother had invested so much time and money and effort to make it happen. It became very serious very quickly. When I came home, I knew this was work, a very serious thing. There were practice logs every single day, but instead of checklists my mom tried to make it fun with smiley faces.” The little boy wasn’t fooled, and there were many afternoons that he ran away, escaping into the cornfields behind his house. When he returned, the violin was always waiting.

Today, Kageyama can appreciate that his mother’s ambitions were more about her than him; as her only child, he just happened to be in the crosshairs. She was an
Issei
, a first-generation Japanese immigrant, who had been eclipsed in childhood by her sister. The older girl had been the beneficiary of all the family’s resources, the one who received art lessons and a top-notch education and who went on to become a visual artist of some repute in Japan. By the time his mother came along, the family’s resources had dried up. “I wonder,” he said to me, “if it was like that for your mom as well.”

The question took me by surprise.

While his mother’s outsize drive was out of proportion to anything I knew, there was something more than vaguely familiar about it. My mother was the third daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. Her oldest sister, Madeline, studied piano at Eastman while her other sister, Bessie, attended the University of Buffalo and dreamed of making it big in advertising. By the time my mother graduated from high school, the family had
gone broke in the Depression and she had to go to work to help support her parents.

When, as a child, I refused to practice, she used to chase me around the dining room table with a long-handled wooden spoon. She was fast on her feet, and she caught me so many times that it became a running joke. I don’t remember it hurting much, but I do remember that she broke a lot of spoons on me. Whenever she did, she’d call my father to matter-of-factly request that he pick up a new one on his way home. As other women might ask their husbands to stop off for a gallon of milk.

Kageyama’s mother took her zeal to another level. While he was still in elementary school, she had him read Anthony Robbins’s book
Awakening the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotion, Physical and Financial Destiny
. Every other week, she drove eight hours to Chicago in order for him to study with Roland and Almita Vamos, two of the top violin and viola teachers in the world. When he was fourteen, she accompanied him to the Aspen Music Festival, which he attended on a fellowship for the next nine summers.

He was unusually, preternaturally, gifted, but it was a gift he did not want. By the time he arrived at the Oberlin Conservatory in 1994, his first order of business was to cut loose from the school orchestra. Free of his mother’s oversight, he spent his days hanging out with friends, playing video games, and making his way to the practice room for maybe an hour or two in the evenings. In a world of striving young musicians, for whom five-hour practice logs are a daily
baseline, his take-it-or-leave-it attitude unnerved his fellow students. When in his senior year he won the school’s concerto competition, none of the judges knew who he was; in four years, he had never played in the orchestra.