My cousin Adina, a comedian and raconteur, passed along something she heard from another storyteller: there are good experiences, and there are good stories.
One nice thing about this project is that every performance is both a thing in itself, and something to write about. If it goes great, great! If not, it gives me something to blog or put into the concert writeup.
At each concert (and online, and in conversation) I ask people if they know of places with a nice—or anyhow playable—piano in as-yet-unscheduled towns. I don’t get tons of suggestions from any one concert, and many end up recommending the same few good but also fairly obvious venues in larger towns. Overall, though, crowdsourcing is a significant source of bookings.
Then there’s browsing and cruising. Browsing is mostly online (Google maps is some kind of wonder). Cruising involves trying, in the face of life’s many counter-pressures, to leave early enough to have time en route to concerts to peer into church windows,* go out of our way to the off-route villages, or talk to general storekeepers, librarians, or the person weeding the flower bed in front of the town hall, all while flipping through the Vermont Atlas and Gazetteer (also a wonder).
Sometimes these modes converge in delightful serendipity. Yesterday, on our way to the First Unitarian Church of Chester, we passed an astonishing number of markers for Coolidge sites—Coolidge State Forest, Coolidge State Park, Coolidge Range—and eventually one for the Calvin Coolidge Historic Site. “I should play the Plymouth concert on Grace Coolidge’s 1895 piano!” I exclaimed. “Grace Coolidge had an 1895 piano?” my wife asked. I admitted I did not actually know this. But I figured that as an educated turn-of-the-century upper-middle-class woman, she played. I wasn’t unserious—I really did plan to follow up—but I wasn’t confident of the odds that the homestead had kept the hypothetical family piano, let alone maintained it.
A couple of hours later I was making my usual appeal for venues at the Chester concert. Less than 24 hours after that, concert attendee Judie Raffety sent me this:
The Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site in Plymouth Notch has a beautiful piano owned by Grace Coolidge who was a pianist. In the museum there, it is located in a lovely performance room (with terrific acoustics) overlooking the mountains. The site is closed now until May, but I'm sure they would be delighted to host one of your concerts during their Centennial Year in 2023.
The Coolidge Historic Site refers to the instrument as “the famous Grace Coolidge piano” and it turns out it’s a cut above the old family upright I had imagined. But I won’t divulge any more just now, so as not to spoil the eventual “about the piano” feature for the Plymouth concert write-up.
*“I really need to print some business cards”, I said to myself around the third time someone asked “can I help you?” with some combination of sincerity and suspicion.
There isn’t a strong correlation between how I feel ahead of a concert and how well it goes. Observing this is liberating. I can let myself experience whatever mood I’m experiencing without going into second-order mind games worrying about how it might affect my performance.
Arriving in a new town, entering an unfamiliar venue, working an unknown piano, embarking on a first-time collaboration, and playing to a novel audience all make for an adventure impossible to anticipate. Something like a skier encountering a race course, maybe. You can train, hone your skills, but you can’t know what the course will be like until you run it. So no point in trying!
One thing that’s pretty determinative, though, is how well-rested I am the day or two going into a concert.
Casting light on the relation between ego and nerves…
Of the 16 concerts so far, exactly half have been in churches. Three were in galleries or multi-use art spaces. I’ve played one school auditorium, one senior center, and one Grange. Our first library and town hall are coming up soon, and we’re looking at some interesting one-off locations in the uninhabited and barely inhabited towns.
These venues have diverse setups, sometimes including a stage, but always with the piano in close proximity to the audience and a clear sense that we are all sharing a single space.
Only two performances have been in dedicated concert halls: the launch concert at UVM, and concert 15 at the Chandler Music Hall in Randolph. Compared to less formal spaces, the concert halls have larger, higher stages that separate the performer and audience. The isolation and elevation can be intensified by lighting: in Chandler, I was lit with the light of a hundred thousand lumens, while the house was completely dark. It was hard to feel communion with an audience I couldn’t see, while my hypervisibility shouted that the show was All About Me. Months of adjusting my attitude to look on performance as a community act went out the window.
And sure enough, for only the second time this project, I properly lost my place. Early into the concert, near the start of the Bach Partita, in the Allemande. It lasted only a couple of measures, during which I fumbled along convincingly enough, but it was enough to knock me back and keep me self-conscious and second-guessing for the rest of the first half. The other time I got lost? Concert no. 1…in the UVM Recital Hall.
Fortunately, the other thing these two performances had in common was an intermission, giving me a chance to reset. (In all the intervening concerts, in less formal settings, I’d been playing and talking for 70-80 minutes without leaving the piano.) Then, in the second half, singer Jennifer Grout encouraged the audience to follow the translations in the program. This was basically impossible the way the lighting was set, so I asked the good tech crew to bring up the house a bit.
I could see people! That, and working in concert with Jennifer, rescued me from my self. No longer marooned in a sea of darkness on my island of light, now buoyed by the community, I could give myself up to the music and give the music to them.
Here’s the Sheldon concert write-up. It was hosted by lovely people in an unusual church on an unusual piano with a lovely story.
As I note there, it was also the warmest November day in Vermont history.
The dramatic improvement in my performance ease at concert no. 10 would have come even sooner if not for a countervailing factor: the reduction in airflow occasioned by high-filtration face masks.
I already have to work on breathing when concentrating or nervous. It’s not just a physical tension response. When negative thoughts creep in—doubts about memory or technical control—I tend to hold my breath because, apparently, I think that if I breathe right then I might lose focus. (Obviously, the opposite is more likely.)
Meanwhile, I keep masking more than the social norm, because I think Covid is still pandemic and still potentially seriously bad. And KN95 masks reduce air intake. Even when I’m conscious of breathing with appropriate depth and frequency, I often find myself having a hard time staying focused about 50 minutes into a concert. (Most of the concerts on this tour have been without intermission, 70-80 minutes of uninterrupted playing and talking.) When I practice, I can go two or three times as long without that feeling. I think the main difference is not that I’m performing, but that I’m masked.
At concert no. 8, in Strafford, I felt well prepared and at ease going in, but got tired early on. (It was still fine, but the noticeable step change in my comfort level came a couple of concerts later.) It was a particularly warm and humid evening. My dancer daughter tells me humidity is a big factor, that dancers change their masks several times in the course of a performance because air passes through a dry mask more easily. Gotta try this next time.
I tend to overthink. In particular, if I’ve lived with an impairment for a long time, there’s an impulse to think that the reasons for it must be complicated. It’s a matter of pride: if the solution were simple, surely I would have overcome the problem by now.
All of the nuances of performance anxiety I’ve discussed—its multiple causes and the diverse ways this project will address them—it’s all true. But that said, my ease on stage and my ability to perform at my potential has already gotten about 75% better from simple desensitization. You want to get comfortable performing, just perform a bunch.
The surprising thing to me is that the change was so dramatic not after dozens and dozens of performances, but around concert number ten.
In connection with yesterday’s post about ego and anxiety in solo vs. ensemble performance, it’s interesting to note the contrasting connotations and derivations of the terms concert and recital.
While people sometimes use “concert” to describe a solo performance, it more properly refers to a group effort. The etymology is a little obscure: it could derive from con+cantare, to sing together, or from con+certare, which means to contend with—the latter a bit odd until you realize that “contend” might be used collaboratively as well as oppositionally (as in the dual meanings of “to fight with”). In any case, it clearly has to do with more than one person.
“Recital”, if you think about it, is not an obvious term for a musical performance. It was coined by Franz Liszt, who also pioneered the concept of the solo show. Prior to Liszt, even a concert that featured a star pianist would comprise multiple acts: it might include a symphony, arias from currently popular operas with orchestral accompaniment, and a concerto in addition to solo keyboard numbers. Liszt at first called his one-man shows “soliloquys”; then in 1840, he billed two London performances as “Liszt’s Pianoforte Recitals”—suggesting, in true Romantic fashion, the idea that the performer of wordless instrumental music is a kind of poet.
Liszt was also Western music’s second-ever “rock star” (modeling himself after the trailblazing violin virtuoso Paganini), attracting thousands to his concerts and inspiring an unprecedented degree of mass adulation that the poet and music critic Heinrich Heine dubbed “Lisztomania”.
Describing his new invention to a friend, Liszt invoked the absolute monarchy of Louis IV and quipped “Le concert, c’est moi.” Obviously tongue in cheek—but still, from its inception, the recital has been bound up with the egomaniacal cult of the performer.
I find it somehow heartening to realize that as a modern recitalist attempting to dampen my ego, I am not only bucking human nature but also pushing back against an almost 200-year-old tradition.
Performance anxiety is mostly rooted in focus on the self. Much of the standard advice about overcoming it centers on muting the ego, on allowing the music to flow through you, becoming a vessel for the music, which is after all the main thing.
As obvious as this sounds, over-concern with oneself and one’s “performance” in an evaluative, judgmental sense, remains a default mindset for many musicians. For one thing, the desire to show off and to be admired is part of most performers’ personality profile, part of what attracted them to public performance in the first place. It can be stubbornly persistent on a visceral level even for musicians who strive to focus on audience communication or on the music itself in their intentional outlook.
Then, much of the culture around music concentrates attention on the performer more than “the music”. In classical music, the narrowing of the mainstream repertoire to a couple dozen composers and their selected masterworks makes for a peculiar obsession with minute differences in interpretation of music that is already well known to much of its audience—what pianist Peter Serkin called “that harping by musicians and critics on how you play, as if that’s the central issue.”
Given the strong connection between egotism and anxiety, it makes sense that performing with other feels very different from performing solo. Playing collaboratively, I am less inclined to be nervous, and I never experience the overwhelming, almost panicked distress of my worst solo performance moments. Performing with others, it is self-evident that it is not “all about me”. I have to pay attention to my partners, which derails obsessive solipsism from the get-go; and from a starting point not entirely in my own head, it’s that much easier to let go and give myself over to the music.
Playing new music has a similar effect. When I perform Beethoven, I’m comparing myself to Schnabel and Barenboim and Goode. And their performances are easily found online, which sometimes makes me ask why anyone should come hear me, or what purpose there is in adding to the hundreds of interpretations on YouTube alone. But when I play the music of my deceased composition teacher, or a new piece by a student, the focus is again on the music, not the realization. And at the same time I am clearly doing a service by realizing the music—literally, making it real—for listeners who might otherwise never hear it.
In this project, I try hard to have a piece or two in every show with a local collaborator or by a local composer. I’ve managed this in all but four instances so far. Comparing the all-solo recitals to the others, it’s interesting to note that the ego-muting effect of collaborative playing tends to extend to the entire concert, so that I feel less self-conscious and judgmental in my solo playing, even if it’s 80% of the program.
I posted a clip from my Randolph collaboration with Jennifer Grout to my YouTube channel. Jennifer, who has a shall we say somewhat larger public, asked if she could re-post the video on her channel, and this was the result less than a day later.
When I first conceived the project, I envisioned the write-ups as utilitarian, not much more than a web-based program archive, maybe with a pic of me standing before each venue to document my presence and thus the project’s reality.
Then I remembered that I don’t remember anything. That’s when I realized the write-ups could serve as a more substantive record of the project, with pictures, clips, description, and also the “about the piano” feature. (The last was my life partner Annelies McVoy’s idea, and has become the most popular feature of the write-ups. She said “every piano has a story” and so far that's checked out.)
In a way, the site, particularly the concert page, is the project for me, or at least its tangible, organic, integral manifestation. Which is good, because just the write-ups take about a full day of work each—selecting and editing the clips and photos, mostly. Since the start of this project, I haven’t been composing at all (other than to plan out the semi-improvised, ever-lengthening Scarlatti intros). Right now the site feels like my creative work.
From the inception, people have asked me if I was planning a long-form documentary film or a book. A documentary, maybe. But the book idea strikes me as last-century. If I find myself with that kind of time or energy or support, I would sooner bring the website to the next level of finesse and navigability than create a dead-trees edition.
