June 21, 2024

On fuss and awkward feelings

Last week I was back in the studio to record Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 and Florence Price’s Fantasie Nègre No. 1—the piece that turned into its own story before I’d even finished learning it. I’m now a lot less freaked out being in the recording studio, but this session was a whole new beast, because it was [ominous Jurassic-Park-style sounds] a video recording.

It's totally necessary though—the most recent video of me playing solo is this very echo-y one of a single Beethoven sonata movement, from 2017. That was more than one pandemic, one teacher, and multiple hairstyle changes ago.

With the prospect of being on camera, I had a whole other dimension of worries to contend with as a result; typically in the studio I have the luxury of dressing for comfort and not worrying what I look like. I’ll wear sweatpants and comfortable sneakers and have my hair pulled back in the world’s most unflattering ponytail. In a visual medium, though, appearances matter, not least because we live in the real world and also I’m a girl.

Which is why the day before the studio session, I was doing my hair and makeup, trying on outfits, and making test videos on my phone to see how things looked. My mom has always fretted about my hair being in my face when I play, which I chalked up to her just being such a mom about things, but then I watched my videos back and realized that she totally has a point.

So I grabbed one of the few hair clips I own, which is a giant sparkly headpiece (what can I say, I really don’t own a lot of hair things—until recently I didn’t even own a hairbrush), and used it to clip my hair back.

It was an improvement, but then I remembered that the last time I wore this hair clip on stage, for my junior recital in undergrad, several student reviewers wrote that said sparkly hair clip under the stage lights was so blinding that it distracted from whatever I was playing.

I mean, yeah, I see it.

In the end I just made a note to bring some bobby pins and hope for the best.

I also had intended to wear a relatively practical dress for the session, but found the day before that it was 1) not entirely comfortable and 2) not entirely photogenic from every angle, which was why I ended up arriving to the recording session hauling my tried-and-true performing gown, which requires two hangers for transportation, in a giant garment bag.

Believe it or not, this baby packs down real small into my carry-on.

When I showed up to the studio, garment bag and shoes in hand, I saw that the studio walls were all draped in dark fabric and there were cameras and spotlights rigged up everywhere. (Me: “How long did it take you to set this all up?” The engineer: “Always longer than I think it should. It’s better to not keep track.”) There was a whole rig on the ceiling just to get an overhead shot of my hands.

I sat down to warm up, and the sound engineer and assistant rushed in and started adjusting everything: moving lights to point straight at my face, rearranging cameras to get clearer shots of me. They showed me a whole bank of monitors hooked up to some ten 4K cameras all pointed at me. Later in conversation I learned that each camera cost over $4,000, and in the moment I did the math and thought about the fact that there was $40,000 worth of camera equipment rigged up that day for the sake of filming me, and that wasn’t counting all the audio equipment and the beautiful Steinway which had been freshly tuned just for me to bang it right back out of tune again… Suddenly it all seemed like an awful lot of effort for little old me, who had done nothing to merit all this, and I wanted to crawl into the giant garment bag I’d brought and hide from the knowledge of all this effort.

(I wonder if this is how high-profile figures feel with people running about, rearranging the world for them. I wonder if this is how the pope feels, with all the events and the motorcades. I wonder why I’m comparing myself to the pope.)

When we got started, I flung the skirt of my gown behind me and settled in. Immediately the studio assistant rushed in and began smoothing out the skirt on the floor around me. “Oh, it’s fine, you can just leave it,” I said, feeling that specific flavor of awkwardness that always comes with unexpectedly looking down at someone who is on their knees in front of you. “We have to arrange the skirt the same way each time,” the engineer called from the other room. “It’s got to look consistent between takes.”

Why did I have to wear this dress, I thought.

Because it looks fabulous, that’s why.

For more than four hours, as I huffed and headbanged and flung my increasingly tired arms into the keyboard, my recording team did their actual recording jobs and so much more. They rearranged my skirt so many times I lost count. They gracefully notified me when my face got shiny and I had to blot my face with a tissue. They gently fixed my hair, a Sisyphean task, as we all found that no number of bobby pins are any match for the power of my flailing head. Since there was no place at the piano for me to keep a reference copy of the score, and my getting up from the bench would necessitate more Skirt Arranging, the studio assistant would run out to me between takes, holding the score, to show me which measure they wanted me to start a specific take. (She definitely got her steps in that day.)

I felt bad that a couple of highly trained technical experts had to be tasked with tending to sweaty little me in my high-maintenance skirt. But I wasn’t there to feel bad, I was there to record some damn Chopin and Price, so I got on with my job, and they got on with theirs.

I did take after take after take, for more than four hours. Since this was all being recorded on video, we needed longer takes for the sake of having longer stretches of footage to work with, so I did more run-throughs than I typically do in an audio-only session. Playing a couple of pieces once through at full capacity in live performance is exhausting, and I played these pieces over and over and over again, giving my all every time. Some three hours in, I could feel the muscles in my arms literally start to give out, to the point that I started losing motor control. (I recently learned that athletes call this—and I’m not making this up—bonking. Why are athletes so unserious.) There were a couple of takes near the end where I sounded like I was playing with the hot dog fingers from Everything Everywhere All at Once. I took longer and longer breaks in between takes, but was cognizant about being on the (very expensive) clock, and so I didn’t dare take too long of a break.

Later, with arms so worn out I could feel my right deep flexor muscle twinging two days later, I reflected on why, when I was there to focus on playing, I felt so awkward and embarrassed about being fussed over so much.

The first and obvious answer is that whoever wired my brain left “feeling bad” on as the default setting. Thanks, whoever did that. The second, more thoughtful answer, is that the teachers who shaped me the most taught me that my role is fundamentally to be in service to the music. Everything I do has to be for the sake of the music and the composer’s intentions: it’s not about me. There is, of course, something a little problematic about internalizing the idea that your purpose is to be a vessel for something (o hai there, debates about bodily autonomy), but there is also something comforting, and, dare I say it, freeing about acting in service of a greater purpose (o hai there, religious ideals with your chokehold on society).

When I'm practicing by myself, it’s easy to kill my ego. All the drilling and iterating I do, day after day, is for the sake of something beyond myself. It’s jarring, then, to be in situations where it feels like people are acting in service of me. Unnatural, even. You can’t be panting on a bench while a Grammy-winning audio engineer is hunting through your hair for the bobby pin lost in its depths without thinking, how on earth did we get here, and how do I make this stop?

Because, okay, here’s a silly little secret: I get really embarrassed when people go to a lot of effort and make a lot of fuss over me. That is, people other than my parents, who were tasked when I was growing up with chauffeuring me to lessons, workshops, auditions, recitals, etc., making sure I was fed and well-rested, and making sure I was dressed and polished (“Oh my god, Mom, leave my hair alone, it’s FINE”)—but that’s what they signed up for when they enrolled their quiet little weirdo in piano lessons. And my husband, who has more or less taken on that role now, but that’s what he signed up for when he married me, muahaha. (Hi babe, I love you.) It feels different, though, when people who aren’t responsible for my health insurance are involved.

I have no idea if other musicians feel this way, or if this awkwardness is something that wears off once you’ve leveled up. Every time I get a chance to talk to big shot pianists I absolutely fumble the bag and never get to a point where I can be like, “Hey, is it weird when this thing happens, or is that just me?”

What I have to remind myself is that everyone involved is acting in service of the music too, and it’s not really about me. When others are tending to me, they’re doing so for the sake of the music, for something bigger than both of us. That…that right there is how people justify abuses of power, argh.

Excuse me while I climb into a garment bag.

Happy concertoversary

Upon finishing the recording session I immediately collapsed and freed my brain from having to think about things like “time” and “what day it is” so it was startling when Patricia messaged me last week to say “Happy one-year anniversary of the Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel concerto!”

Holy crap! That was a year ago! Time really does fly, doesn’t it.

In other news

If you haven’t already seen, the Donne Foundation released their report for 2024 on the state of diversity in classical orchestral repertoire. It’s worth a read, but the TLDR is that in the past year, there’s actually been decreased representation of women composers and composers of color.

There are thorny and genuinely complex debates to be had about the classical music canon, the value of diversification and representation, and the (often uncompensated) labor required to make change, but I’m mostly just grateful that there are people out here crunching the actual data and producing numbers and analysis for us to see, because an embarrassing amount of discussion of such things is based purely on vibes.

A lot of people, regardless of how they feel about such things, have a tendency to evaluate the state of representation through the prism of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon; we (and I include myself in this “we”) think that Florence Price is everywhere because we’re noticing her name popping up a whole bunch of places. It's super easy to go "Well, I'd never really heard of Florence Price before, and now three orchestras I know of are playing stuff by her, so wow things have really changed!" Programming decisions are made on the strength of vibes like these.

In reality Price was only played 26 times to Mozart’s 1060 in the programs Donne surveyed.

So. Data > vibes.

That's my emotional support dramedy

When I first started watching HBO's Hacks, I couldn't tell if it was a good show or if I even liked it, but then it became my new "I identify way too hard with the people on this show" show.

You'd think I'd have nothing in common with the leads of Hacks (a washed-up but fabulously wealthy comedian and a scrappy comedy writer who continually makes poor life decisions) but what the show really excels at is depicting aspects of performing that I grapple with all the time: the way performing is an addiction of sorts, the way creative ambition is quietly monstrous in its demands, the sheer vulnerability of want.

In much the same way that watching Drive to Survive last year helped me process the weight of preparing to perform the concerto on which so much pressure rested, Hacks this year gave me a surprising amount of emotional support processing my own feelings about the selfishness, vulnerability, and invisible toil involved in writing and performing.

It did not, however, teach me how to somehow become my-walk-in-closet-is-a-warehouse levels of successful. I'm still working on that.

In other "I see my experience reflected on TV" news:

Link

(It's too bad they just couldn't go all the way and actually depict the right notes being played.)

I swear I had deeper and more eloquent thoughts about making music in me but this is what came out today instead: an account of awkward feelings, and bunch of photos and GIFs of myself. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Ah well, see you all next time. 🎹