All my (stress) dreams are coming true
Sharon's Weekly Head Dump
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.”
“Oh, we’re hoping to get this wrapped by end of next week,” he responded.
WRAPPED. BY END OF NEXT WEEK.
NEXT WEEK.
Kids, cover your eyes, my thoughts and feelings about this can only be expressed by Roy Kent:
After my heart rate came back down to something approximating a normal range, I canceled appointments and sent “sorry I need an extension” emails to people and proceeded to frantic-practice. “This is what you trained for,” I keep telling myself.
I know I can do this, but I also can’t help but wonder, is this the universe’s idea of a sick joke? How many years have I been practicing pieces, polishing them lovingly and obsessively for hundreds of hours, only to play them for itty-bitty audiences (shoutout to the people reading this newsletter who have been there when I played for an audience of 3), and when I finally am asked to play for an enormous audience on national radio, it’s with a piece I haven’t even learned yet???
My dreams are coming true, but unfortunately for me, they’re the stress dreams.
Is this musicology
If the anxiety about having to have excerpts in playable-for-national-radio mode in a few days wasn’t enough, I had another very specific anxiety: in talking about Fantasie Nègre No. 1, I’m going to have to pronounce the French word “nègre.”
I’ve studied French. I watch French TV shows, I listen to French music, I can read not-advanced French passably well and know how it should sound in my head. I am, however, terrible at speaking French, and I have an about 50% success rate with the French R. The problem is that as my palate really struggles to get comfortable with the shape of French, it sometimes helpfully substitutes R sounds from other languages: the Spanish “errrrr”, the German “EHggghhr”, even the Chinese 兒.
Usually when this happens I just sound like a dumb but well-meaning American, but when my French R misfires while saying the word “nègre” it sounds………..
uh,
erm.
It sounds…like a………word I really don’t plan on ever saying. And I don’t want to remotely sound like I’m saying this word on national radio, you know?
I did the only thing anyone can do in a situation like this; I frantically messaged an expert who would understand. And guess who that was?
If you guessed “a French teacher” or “vocal coach,” HA! You are so wrong! Why would I do that? I messaged a prominent musicologist, who totally didn’t have better things to do. After reading through my panicked texts (“help I have to say ‘Fantasie Nègre’ on the radio, I COULD say ‘neh-gray’ but then I’m worried I’ll get condescending mansplainers in my inbox”) they offered several options for me and we workshopped them until we discovered that if I say “nayg” and just really emphasize the G it somehow magically sounds like a decent French R, more so than if I tried to pronounce the French R in the first place.
So I am now walking around my house saying “Fantasy nayg, fantasy nayg, fantasy nayg (go slowly, Sharon, go slowly!)” out loud like a Francophilic village idiot. If you wonder what musicologists do, this is it. Yeah, they do painstaking research that leads to groundbreaking discoveries in music, and they write books and publish articles in academic journals and major news publications, and they teach the musicians and scholars of tomorrow in prestigious schools across the globe, but the most critical thing they do is save panicked pianists from pronouncing a French word wrong.
What’s in a word count
You may recall that last week’s newsletter was very short because I was focusing on writing an article for VAN, and you may be wondering what came of that! Well, my editor asked for an 1800 word article, and after I put my head down and clippity-clopped on my keyboard so much I broke the T key, I turned in…
…over 7500 words.
7500, if you are not great at math, is more than 1800. A lot more. More than 4 times, actually.
I sort of hoped that maybe my editor wouldn’t notice (???) but he sent me a very diplomatic email saying that 7500 is quite a bit more than 1800 and could I please cut it down? He said I could tackle it in the new year, which is great, except it means I will be starting 2024 (??????) needing to slash this thing like I’m a school board member and it’s an arts program. (Explanation for my non-American readers: this is a funny joke because here in the US our priorities are all screwed up and we don’t think there’s any benefit to children having an arts education, so we’re always cutting arts and music from school budgets.)
I may, in future newsletters, include chunks of my original article, as I suspect there are entire sections that won’t survive the cuts.
A reading recommendation
I’m in a bit of a hurry so I don’t have time to do my usual excerpting, but I thoroughly recommend this op-ed Lydia Polgreen wrote in the New York Times. (It’s frankly surprising that this is in the NYT, given their hmmm track record depicting trans issues.) At first I thought it was your usual well-intended-but-not-great thinkpiece in which a cisgender person tries too hard to perform allyship, but as it goes on it reveals itself to be a beautiful meditation on humanity and a well-reasoned plea to allow people the grace for regret and discovery.
Florence Price really is that girl
To get in the zone while doing all this Florence Price-related work (she might be my new Clara Schumann, in that yelling about her and how great she is just is part of my personality now) I related to a bunch of her music, particularly recordings by people I know and have talked to. At least 40% of my soul is basically just Tahani Al-Jamil and I love pointing to music/books/movies/etc. and going “That’s my dear friend!” even if “friend” is a real stretch.
After interviewing John Jeter, I am now extra-fond of his Florence Price recordings. I’ve had this album with Symphonies 1 and 4 on repeat and it’s so good! I would totally say it’s so good even if it wasn’t conducted by my friend a tenuous connection I interviewed for professional purposes!
The more I listen to Florence Price, the more I absolutely adore her. She really is that girl! I keep meaning to listen to Symphonies 2 and 3 but I just can’t-stop-won’t-stop listening to 1 and 4.
This might be a Florence Price fan newsletter now, oops. 🎹