All my (stress) dreams are coming true

Ever since I graduated from music school I’ve been plagued by very formulaic stress dreams, pretty much all of which go like this: I walk onto stage/into the studio to perform something, only to realize that I don’t know the piece and didn’t practice it.

It’s a not-very-original musical variant of the classic “taking an exam you didn’t study for” dream—with the added terror that comes from realizing that you are about to fail horrifically in front of an audience—and despite the fact that I have this dream all the freaking time, it never fails to send my poor sleeping body into a very real panic.

As you’ve been possibly aware, I started working on Florence Price’s Fantasie Nègre No. 1, only to find the only available edition of it riddled with horrible mistakes, and so learning to play it has been delayed by the fact that I’ve had to pour hours of work into cross-checking the manuscript and rewriting many passages by hand. My little journey caught the attention of a radio journalist over at This American Life, and this week plans to do a story on this little project came together.

I’d stopped working on the Price piece a few weeks ago because multiple other projects were more urgent and needed my attention, so I’ve been not fully there while the This American Life thing was being planned. The journalist texted me about finding studio time for me to play through excerpts of the Price and talk about it, and I felt miffed at the urgency. “What’s the timeline on this,” I texted, “since I’ll be busy with holiday plans with family the second half of the month and won’t be free til the new year.”