On things you only experience performing and SF Symphony drama
I’ve been performing long enough that I’ve started recognizing certain repeat sensations that only happen when I’m performing for an audience (aka these are not things you experience in the practice room). It occurred to me the other day that it would be kind of nice to start cataloguing these feelings, sort of a Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows thing but only for solo performing classical pianists. I really know how to hit on ideas with innate mass appeal.
The problem is that keeping a list of things that only happen to you in performance is near-impossible. For one thing, I can't stop in the middle of playing a piece to write something down. (Can you imagine that? If I were to pause, mid-cadence, and yell "Sorry everyone! I just felt a thing! Give me a minute to grab my notebook and jot it down, and then I'll go back to the recapitulation.")
The other thing is that I can't even mentally track things as they're happening in performance. The moment you attach your brain to something that has already happened, you die. (Okay, you don't actually die, but it sure feels like it.) In performance all of your mental computing power is split between managing things in the moment and preparing for the next thing; there's no room for dwelling on things you've already done, and doing so will screw you up. You see this all the time with students of all ages and levels: they make a mistake, the light goes out of their eyes, they stop trying, more mistakes happen.
This happens even with things that aren't mistakes; if I go "Wow! I really nailed that double-thirds passage! Go me, I'm awesome!" then guaranteed something I'm about to do is going to be off, because I wasted precious brainpower focusing on a thing that didn't need my attention because it already happened. This is partially why recording is such a fraught process: I have to catalog passages that did or didn't go well, so I can flag them to the engineer afterwards ("Hey, I split a note in the first section, we need another take," or "I'm happy with that one, can we use that in the final edit") but mentally keeping that list makes it infinitely more difficult to play in the moment.
All of that is to say that there is no easy way for me to faithfully write down the things I feel while performing, because as soon as I feel something that might be worth cataloguing, I have no choice but to let it go and toss it into the wind. The best I can do is to replay my very imperfect memory of a performance and see if I can remember certain sensations as they happened, which is how I made the following list.
Sensations I have had only while performing
The floor is gone
There is a certain feeling of groundedness that is so fundamental to playing the piano that you don't even feel it anymore. It's like how most people walk around taking the solidity of the ground for granted. Sometimes in performance I experience these horrible, horrible moments where it feels like the floor is gone underneath my fingers. My hands are still going but they're not "inside" the keys anymore; they feel like they're scrabbling in the air with nothing to grab onto, and suddenly I don't know the piece I'm playing anymore because the physical sensation is so fundamentally changed that it's like I never learned it.
I can't tell when I'm ready
The audience has applauded, I've bowed, I've spoken a few entertaining words about what I'm going to play, I've sat down and...I don't know when to start. The silent is so expectant, and everyone's waiting for me, and I realize that I never practiced feeling ready. How am I supposed to know when I'm ready to start? Have I ever been ready?
Oftentimes what I do is just dive straight into the piece before I've decided I'm ready and ended up feeling a sense of shock that I'm in it; it's kind of like when you just jump into water and before you can register that something has happened, you're freezing and there's water up your nose.
The blackout
There are always passages in pieces that are Extremely Critical and you practice the absolute shit out of them. You know what those passages are; every piece has at least one. You practice and practice until you can play them ten million different ways, you have recovery tactics for when things go wrong, and you know them inside and out.
Sometimes, though, I get to one of these passages in the heat of performance and just...black out. Not literally, of course, but it's like suddenly a wire between my brain and my hands gets cut: all of a sudden I have no control over what's going on. I barely know what's happening, I'm unable to make adjustments or changes in the moment, and I'm just watching this all happen from a great distance. When the passage is over and my brain wakes back up, I have no idea what just happened; all I know is that I couldn't do anything about it.
I didn't realize it would be over so soon
I usually feel this when I'm through the first section of a piece (the exposition of something in sonata form, the initial outing of a theme, etc.), but sometimes it hits me when I get to the coda. It's the feeling that this went by way too quickly, more quickly than I could process it, and I missed my chance to treasure a moment before it was time for the next thing. ("I love playing that theme for the first time, and I didn't get to enjoy it!") It's a strange sensation of mourning that's often completely at odds with whatever is actually happening in the music.
The trained dogs
Sometimes I have moments when I overthink what I'm doing, psych myself out, and then realize I have no idea what to do. "What's the next note," I'll think in a panic, "I think it's...a B? Yes, it's probably a B. I'll go for the B." Then, like trained dogs, my hands will move entirely of their own accord towards the E, while I think "No! Bad hands! We were going for the B, what are you doing, that's not—" and then I strike the E and realize my hands were right all the time,.
"Isn't that just muscle memory?" you might say, to which I insist, no, this feels completely different. Normal muscle memory can be overridden, and in my own experience, the second I start overthinking, all muscle memory flies out the window. What this sensation is—and I swear, it's different from muscle memory—is when I actively direct my hands to do something and they move as if possessed against my wishes, yanking me like the idiot I am, to where they know they belong on the keyboard.
Adopt-an-audience-member
Generally when I perform I'm feeling the overall vibe the audience is giving me, but every once in a while my brain will just randomly adopt a single person in the audience. There's no rhyme or reason to it; it doesn't seem to have anything to do with where they're sitting, what they look like, or whether I know them: some little imp in my mind just goes, them! and for the rest of the performance, that's my pet audience member.
I feel their presence, even though I can't see or hear them while I'm playing. I feel their tension and anticipation when I draw out a note or rest, I can land on a tender little sigh of a note and feel it touch something inside of them. There's something so precious and magical about this temporary line of communication I've opened up—and of course when I'm done and people are applauding, the line is dead, and they're just another face in the crowd.
How not to do arts journalism
You may recall that there is drama afoot at the SF Symphony, and while those of us who aren't in the room where it happens can't know for sure what is going down, it's safe to assume that if one of the most highly regarded and respected music directors in the world abruptly leaves, citing Board Leadership Problems, you've probably got Board Leadership Problems.
A disappointingly milquetoast interview landed in the SF Chronicle this week (sneaky link if you get paywalled), clearly intended to assure the public that there are no Board Leadership Problems, and, well.
I don't mean to dunk on journalists who are probably perfectly lovely people, but...what is this? This isn't an interview so much as it is a published Word doc of bland buzzwords that the SFS board leadership figured would make them look good. Having been on both ends of the press process, I can confirm that it's pretty standard for the interviewer to ask follow-up questions ("What do you mean by that," "Can you elaborate further," "You said you'll do XYZ but XYZ hasn't worked for you in the past, so how is this different," etc.) and it's extremely noticeable how the piece doesn't have any of that. In fact, it looks less like a real interview and more like that time a scammy content farm reached out to me and had me fill out an online questionnaire which they then published as an interview.
Luckily Emily Hogstad was on it and wrote a fabulous post that is part analysis, part takedown of the unfortunate SF Chronicle piece which you absolutely must read. It's smart, it's funny, and it asks the hard questions that the original interviewers didn't bother to.
Lest we forget, the headline of this piece is: “How will S.F. Symphony navigate through crisis? Its leaders discuss the future in first interview.” Guys, you can like it or not, but Esa-Pekka Salonen is the San Francisco Symphony’s leader, and involved in navigating the crisis. He should be here.
I’m curious, did the reporters ask why he wasn’t? Did they leave an empty podium? An empty chair? Did they set a place setting for him at coffee? I’ve heard he’ll drink coffee without cream.
If you normally don’t follow orchestras, I cannot underline to you enough how weird it is for a music director to be absent from a high-profile article about the orchestra’s future. Sure, he’s a lame duck, but he’s the duck with the baton! And healthy orchestras respect their ducks, even when they’re lame! This metaphor is getting away from me.
Anyway. I'd love to be proven wrong about this, but all the signs point to the SF Symphony entering its flop era. All we can do right now is get the popcorn and be ready to say "We told you so!!!" in several years.
2023 in Books
I post to my actual blog so infrequently these days that you'd be forgiven for forgetting it exists, but it does! And I posted to it!
More specifically, I posted "2023 in Books," my annual roundup of all the books I read last year and my thoughts on reading. Yes, I know it's June. Better late than never, right?
Because I am apparently Lady Reads-a-lot, a bunch of friends checked in with me at the end of 2023 to ask how many books I’d read, and I started to become very, very sheepish and embarrassed, because 2023 turned out to be the year I read the least number of books ever since I started tracking such things.
I read a scant 55 books last year. FIFTY-FIVE. That’s barely more than a book a week! Revoke my title and confiscate my lands, I’m basically illiterate now.
Poster's Madness
There are a myriad of complex psychological reasons why people choose certain instruments, but ngl, it was pretty simple for me:
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[inhales deeply and sharply]
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Catty Clara Schumann is my favorite:
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Join the trumpet haters club, we have snacks:
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AI really has gotten out of hand:
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Coming up
I'm heading into the recording studio again next week—Chopin and Florence Price are on the docket, and for the first time I'm recording in video! Ooh, ahh. I'm not sure if I'll post next week or not (it kind of depends on how wiped out I'll be).
For now, you can read the thoughts I jotted down last time I came out of the studio. And, if you somehow can't get enough, you weirdo, the thoughts I wrote out the session before that.
Until next time! 🎹