What Makes Me A Musician?

I just spent a wonderful weekend taking a visual art journal class and making journal pages at Catherine Anderson’s studio. We talked about her journey to becoming an artist, and how for a long time she didn’t consider herself an artist because she didn’t draw or paint. And of course, you have to be able to draw and paint in order to be a “real” artist.

I realize that I have that same sort of story about considering myself a musician. In my mind, “real” musicians know how to play the piano. Even if they now play other instruments, “real” musicians had piano lessons and learned how to play the piano first. I never had piano lessons and I don’t know how to play the piano. Therefore, I can’t possibly be a “real” musician.

I don’t know how or when or why I decided that to be a “real” musician you have to play the piano. Maybe it’s that I only saw people playing the piano when I was a small child. I just know that’s the definition of a musician that has been hiding out in my head all this time. That’s the definition of a musician that’s kept me stuck in some “musician-wanna-be” no-man’s land. That’s the definition of a musician that makes me look around for whoever my recorder teacher is really talking to when she says to me, “You don’t know how good a musician you are,” because I know that she certainly couldn’t be talking to me.

So I’ve been asking myself, does being unable to play the piano keep me from playing my harp or my recorders? Does it keep me from singing?  If I’m not a musician because I don’t play the piano, then what exactly am I doing when I play my harp, or when I play my recorder in our ensemble? What exactly was I doing this spring when I was in the chorus and singing the Verdi Requiem?

Can I really believe that knowing how to play the piano is the essential knowledge, the one and only password, that will admit me into the musicians’ guild? Can I really believe that I must know how to play the piano to feel worthy to call myself a musician?

There’s more debate in my head: What about medieval and Renaissance composers and players? The piano hadn’t been invented when these long ago people were creating and playing the music I love so much.  And what about all the people who’ve learned to play instruments and traditional tunes by ear, or by listening to and sitting at the feet of their elders, learning directly from the music’s source? What about those people I’ve met (and envied) who can play anything that has frets and strings, without lessons, without reading music, and without being able to play the piano? I call all of these people musicians, with nary a piano or a piano lesson in sight.

This musician definition has been lurking around, unrecognized and unnamed, for too long. It’s been powerful stuff, making me unable to claim that I am a musician for a long time now. But today, that definition is kind of like the “Fresh Meat for Baby Owls” copperhead that trapped itself in my garden netting – it’s out in the open, tangled up and unable to reach me to strike. I might have to poke this old definition around a few more times, see more of what it looks like and think more about what kind of damage it can do. But I expect I’ll be taking my loppers to it soon.

The Sight-Reading Saga: Part Two – A Small Triumph

Sometime and somewhere in the last six months, I read that musicians who are not very good at sight-reading tend to memorize their music. They do not follow the music with their eyes as they practice or play. That’s true for me. Once I learn the notes and fingerings, I rarely distract myself by looking at the black dots. As a result, I often have hiccups in playing caused by my memory glitches rather than by my fingers getting caught in technical foul-ups.

I’m working on a piece that’s not too difficult – lots of repeating ascending triads in root position, with a final section of descending arpeggios. But my right hand has to quickly land  in one of four positions after playing the last high note. In the last section of the piece, my left hand has to land on three different spots while the right hand descends. Memorizing and then remembering where to land kept tripping me up, so I when I practiced yesterday, I experimented with actually using the music while I played the piece.

I found that I had to slow way down to play while looking at the music. But when I played slowly enough to really see and comprehend the notes on my music stand, I was much more relaxed and at ease. I didn’t know how much stress I experienced with trying to play a not-quite-yet-memorized piece until there wasn’t any tension associated with remembering what came next. I could just look at the music and see what the next notes were supposed to be.

My hands already know how to do these repeated arpeggios, so I didn’t have to spend a lot of time looking at either my fingers or the strings. My eyes were free to look ahead in the music, were free to recognize where my hands needed to land.

Although I was playing the piece much more slowly than usual, for the first time I felt an easy coordination between eyes, ears, fingers and brain. I could use what I was seeing, what I was hearing, and what I was remembering about the structure of the piece in order to play it. For the first time, I was able to glance back and forth between the music and the strings without my eyes getting lost and then seeing neither. I ended up playing significantly fewer unintended notes.

Trying to sight-read usually makes me panic: everything is happening too fast, everything feels out of control, I can’t find my place in the music or on the strings, my eyes quit seeing or understanding anything and everything in front of them, my hands become immobilized. I’ve not felt everything working together like this, not felt eyes, ears, and fingers coordinated like this, ever before. This ease of playing while reading my music was exciting and gratifying – doubly so as I’ve doubted that sight-reading and sight-playing would ever click for me. But now there is this moment of the process actually working, and with that, a small glimmer of hope.

Books For The Journey: The Art Of Practicing-A Guide To Making Music From The Heart

About two years after starting harp lessons, I picked up The Art of Practicing-A Guide to Making Music From the Heart, by Madeline Bruser (New York: Bell Tower, 1997.) I was trying to figure out how to practice in a way that was deeper than my simple, and boring, repetitions of a couple of measures of music at a time. I knew how to work on small chunks of material and build them into bigger chunks. What I didn’t know was how to take the small chunk of me that was trying to be a musician and build that into a bigger chunk.

Mindfulness practice meets music practice – that’s this book in a very small nutshell. But the concepts about practice and performance that Madeline Bruser introduces have expanded my thinking about music, about practice, about performance, and about my place in all of these activities, far beyond this simple description.

This book is hard to write about, because the author describes it so perfectly. Here’s her description of her ten-step approach to practicing:

The Art of Practicing is a step-by-step approach that integrates movement principles with meditative discipline, which consists of focusing on sounds, sensations, emotions, and thoughts in the present moment. It cultivates a free and relaxed mind, an open heart, free and natural movement, and vivid, joyful listening.  . . .  Above all, I wish to encourage musicians to trust their experience of their own bodies and minds, and to believe that within their struggle and confusion lie the passion and intelligence that are the keys to joyful, productive practicing and powerful performing. 

Her ten steps define a path for the journey to becoming fully present with your music practice, your music and yourself. Each step is explained in its own chapter, with multiple examples taken from the author’s performing and teaching career. While she teaches piano, she relates the practice steps to the study of other instruments.

Bruser brings the same concepts of mindfulness to memorizing music and to performing. She sees performing as the opportunity to share with the audience not only your music, but also your energy and yourself. Her ideas about performance anxiety resonate with me, given the shaking and quaking that playing my harp can inspire. Rather than sharing tricks to avoid it, she reframes performance anxiety as a “courageous act” that is an avenue to personal transformation:

Every courageous act we commit in life transforms us in some way. When we take our place onstage shaking with fear and dare to make music, we re-create not only a musical composition but also ourselves. We give in to the power of life, which is bigger than we are, and become bigger through that surrender. . . . Each time you confront fear head on and let the adrenaline flood your body, you liberate the energy of fear and make it available for creative action.

I’ve read and reread this book several times now – it truly is a companion on my journey. And each time, it reminds me that the most important step I can take towards being a musician is to be present, in this moment, in this life.

Being Worthy To Play

There’s a Mary Oliver poem I love, Wild Geese, that begins:

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

   love what it loves. 

In last week’s conversation about my ongoing dance with performance anxiety, my harp teacher told me, “You can’t hide in your room, playing alone and unheard, refusing to play for others because you fear making a mistake. You do not have to play perfectly to be worthy to play.”

I grew up with no such allowances for mistakes. Nothing other than perfect was acceptable. There were no successive approximations of success, no room for less than perfect attempts when learning something new, no tolerance for expressing that some never-before-tried task was difficult to learn and hard to do. I was 40 before I realized that I didn’t have to already know how to do something before I could try doing it, and 52 before I dared to stand strong with compassion for becoming a beginner, and being inept, so I could begin harp lessons, so I could learn to play this instrument of my dreams.

But now, my harp teacher is telling me, that yes, we strive for the perfect performance, we work towards that ideal, but that the most important part of performing is connecting and communicating with others by sharing our music, by playing the very best we can play at that moment, on that day, no matter how imperfectly.

“You do not have to play perfectly to be worthy to play,” my teacher said. “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves,” and share that which you love with others.

We had our last recorder ensemble class last Tuesday night – our traditional pot luck dinner at our teacher’s home, and one last playing of the semester’s music. One of our ensemble members is gravely ill. She’s refused aggressive treatment, and instead chosen palliative care; it’s more than likely that this evening will be the last time we play together.

When I walked into the recorder ensemble class two years ago I felt an immediate connection with her, as though our souls already knew each other. Her warmth and wit and spirit have cheered me on as I’ve inexpertly tweedled and tooted my way through the past four semesters. She’s often asked me when she was going to hear me play my harp, and I’ve always laughed her question away as something much too improbable to consider.

I arrived early that Tuesday night, and she arrived not long afterwards. We spent a long moment together on the steps, with the looking into each others eyes saying all that we did not have words for. Then as she got settled in the den, I got my recorder teacher’s harp from its corner of the living room, sat down across from my friend, and played.

I played two Scottish tunes I love, two tunes that express grief and longing and bravery in the face of leaving one’s home for an unknown shore. My fingers slipped a time or two, and my left hand played a new chord progression in the place of the one I always practice. But this performance, at this moment, on this night, was perfect.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.*

[*The complete poem, Wild Geese, is in the collection Dream Work, by Mary Oliver. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986.]

My Recorder Ensemble Concert: “I Can’t Wait To Get Out There!”

I recently read a quote in Madeline Bruser’s book, The Art of Practicing, attributed to the late cellist Jacqueline du Pre. When asked how she felt before she walked onstage, she responded, “I can’t wait to get out there.”

I remember feeling like that before school plays and pageants, before 8th-grade talent shows and Children’s Theater productions. I remember the excitement of waiting behind the tiny school stage while parents settled into chairs in what a few hours before had been the school cafeteria. I remember giggly anticipation waiting in the wings for an entrance cue backstage at the Little Theater. All the weeks of work spent learning new songs and dialogue, all the hours spent rehearsing, were for this almost-upon-me moment when the lights dimmed, the music started and the show began.

I had classmates for whom every school program, every class music concert, was pure torture. It was called stage fright then, no words as gentle as “performance anxiety” had been invented. And fright it was, or outright terror, that left them pale and shaking, unable to speak or sing when forced to take their place on the stage.

But not me. I loved doing every cheesy Christmas play, every chorus performance, every opportunity to sing or act and be on stage. I couldn’t wait for the show to start, for the first notes of the music to sound, for the stage lights to brighten, couldn’t wait for the joy and elation of giving a good performance and receiving the audience’s applause. But with college my performance opportunities ended, along with whatever ability I once had that enabled me to surf performance-inspired waves of adrenaline and feel it all as giggly excitement.

Anticipating my end-of-semester recorder ensemble concert, I spoke with my teacher about my current performance path that, as often as not, travels through adrenaline-fueled quicksand that sucks motor control, memory and confidence out my pores as it drags me under the mud, gasping for breath. While I’ve made it through previous recorder concerts without the same intensity of out-of-body experiences that harp performances inspire, I’ve produced enough shaking hands and misplayed, squawking-goose notes to know that quicksand still lurks on that recital hall stage.

“Performing,” she said, “is all about connecting and communicating with other human beings. Whether I am playing for one person or a whole auditorium full of people, I remember that I am there to connect with them and share the beauty of the music.”

Backstage Tuesday night, I remembered my teacher’s words about communicating and connecting with people by performing and sharing beautiful music. I remembered a forgotten young self brimming with confidence and chutzpah, for whom being on stage was natural and easy. I remembered those long-ago years when I “couldn’t wait to get out there.” And it worked. Saying to myself, “I can’t wait to get out there,” and thinking about the glorious music that we learned this semester and were now there to share with our audience, worked.

I took my seat onstage, raised my recorder to my lips and awaited the two-measure count into O Lusty May. The whole program was delightful. Our entrances were timed perfectly, our endings were in unison, and all four recorder voices were perfectly in tune. Our audience responded with enthusiastic applause and heart-felt compliments following our final piece. And no quicksand menaced that recital hall stage on this Tuesday night.

I Didn’t Go to a Harp Workshop

Last Sunday there was a free harp workshop at a local Highland Games event, and I didn’t go. That’s a first for me. I’ve always felt compelled to go to anything harp-ish I could get myself to, always felt that if I didn’t go, I’d miss some trick that would make this process of learning to play the harp easier, always hoped that the next workshop would be the one where the esoteric secrets of harp playing and performing, the secrets known only by harp workshop presenters, would at last be revealed.

But as I prepared to stuff my harp into its case and load it into my car, and then schlep the harp across a rutted pasture from my car to the workshop tent, I realized that I just didn’t need to do all that. Because I get it now, in my bones: There aren’t any secrets, there aren’t any tricks.

There’s just sitting on the harp bench, doing the work, for however long it takes to coordinate eyes, hands, brain and heart. And then doing it again the next day, and the one after that, and for the weeks and months and years it may take for my thumbs to stay up and my fingers to close because muscles and tendons and the brain that controls them can no longer do anything else. There’s just the one-day-after-another of allowing my hands, that last week played a passage in Danza de Luzma no faster than 66 beats to the quarter note, to play the same passage successfully each time I increase the metronome setting by one beat per minute. There’s just the everyday-ness of my heart hearing the strings I pluck so that notes may be transformed into music.

Last Sunday, I knew what turnarounds in Nocturne still needed to be smoother, knew what octave reach in Danza still was iffy. Neither problem was as novel or as interesting as a workshop at the Highland Games could be. But that was the work in front of me – without secrets, without tricks, and without shortcuts – and that was the work I did.

Books for the Journey: “Making Music for the Joy of It”

Making Music for the Joy of It: Enhancing Creativity, Skills and Musical Confidence, by Stephanie Judy (Los Angeles, Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc,. 1990) is the book I most wish I had discovered when I started taking harp lessons, instead of four years later. Not because it ended up being less valuable to me then, but because as I started down the path of becoming a musician, I so needed to be told the following:

Feeling at ease with music making is, perhaps, the most important thing that an adult beginner can learn. . . . How then, do you learn to feel at ease? Many adult beginners blame their lack of ease on the physical challenges that accompany taking up an instrument or learning to sing. However, feeling at ease has more to do with clearing away self-doubts than it has to do with learning how to hold an instrument, how to move your lips or fingers, how to sit or stand, or how to breathe. Once you are rid of doubts about your musical self, you clear the path for progress.

What really determines musical aptitude is, therefore, desire. . . . So, musical potential comes to a matter of training your muscles and opening your heart.

In addition to supporting one’s decision to become a musician as an adult, this book covers all the topics that a new musician will find helpful. There are chapters on ways to learn to play an instrument, the different musical skills to be learned, how to practice, how to memorize, playing with ensembles, performing, and managing stagefright. The author interviewed both professional and amateur musicians for this project, and their experiences and suggestions are quoted throughout the text and in the sidebars. Reading the quotes from other adult music students, I felt like I found friendly colleagues who understood exactly what I was going through as an adult harp student.

The book was published pre-internet, so the resources mentioned do not include anything available on-line. And it shows its age by suggesting using video and cassette tapes. But the information about how to become a musician, and how to make music joyfully, is timeless.

Clearing A Space

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what happens when you say yes to what you truly and deeply love. What comes into your life, and what drops away? My life has changed so much since saying yes to the harp and beginning harp lessons. Many things have dropped away, in what John Holt in Never Too Late calls “clearing a space.” He writes:

“Adults who want to learn to make music well are going to have to clear a space. They are going to have to stop doing many things they have been doing, including many things they liked. To make more time for music, I have had to give up many pleasures I have enjoyed for years. This is no complaint; I am lucky to have surplus pleasures I can give up.”

He describes giving up attending the ballet, the theater and most concerts, outdoor recreational activities, playing sports, most travel, and even listening to great quantities of recorded music, in order to clear a space for lessons, practicing, and playing with other musicians.

It turns out that I also had many “surplus pleasures”: Watching television, reading fiction and going to the movies – I just can’t seem to get interested any longer in the imaginary dramas of imaginary people’s lives. The gym membership, and my workouts on the elliptical machine and in spin classes – replaced with $0 cost early morning walks with my dog up and down hills in my neighborhood, walks that also warm me up for harp practice. Riding my bike – I used to ride about 50 miles a week; the bike hasn’t been out of the basement in the last two years. Making books – I used to create books by hand, loved experimenting with Coptic and medieval binding stitches; the same three waiting-to-be-sewn journals have been on my work table for about three years now.

Shopping – now consists of brief forays to get what is essential for life support. I can’t make myself spend time cruising big box stores or malls. The only clothes I’ve purchased this past year have been two shirts for performances. Black pants fortunately don’t go out of style, and I have enough “work clothes” to reach the end of my days without buying anything else to wear.  Even when I see something I like, I end up comparing how many harp lessons or voice lessons or recorder classes I could pay for instead. The lessons and classes win.

Vacations – now scheduled around classes, lessons, and the beginning and ending of the harp ensemble and recorder ensemble semesters. I’ve never been one to travel in the heat of summer. But I can’t miss the last recorder class and playing the semester’s repertoire together one last time, so the beach trip will start a week later than usual. I can’t miss the first class of the new semester, can’t miss our first reading of music that will be our companion for the next 16 weeks, so vacation travel will be over by mid-August.

Socializing – old friends are no longer surprised that their “meet me for coffee” and “let’s have dinner” invitations are often met with “sorry, I have to practice/have a lesson/have class.” It’s my musician friends who understand that I’d rather be playing or practicing than do most activities I’m invited to be a part of.  And it’s only my musician friends who know my secret – that I’ll try to drop everything and rush right over if they ask me to come make music with them.

Over the last six years I’ve watched lots of adults become enchanted with the harp, start lessons with my teacher, be thrilled and enthusiastic for six months or so, and then drop by the wayside, saying “I don’t have time to schedule lessons,” or more frequently, “I don’t have time to practice.” They tried to squeeze harp lessons and daily practice into an already cramped and hectic life, and couldn’t find room for them.

I knew when I started lessons that I’d have to find time to practice, and that the only way to get that to happen was to practice before work. Which meant getting up earlier, which led to going to bed earlier, which led to the gradual lessening of evening entertainment and recreation. Weekends became the days to relish practicing longer than the 30 minutes I managed on a work day, the days I could work on tricky fingerings and hard passages as long as I wanted to.

I didn’t wake up one day and decide that I wasn’t reading or shopping or riding my bike or having coffee with friends anymore, just so I could play my harp. Instead, that which I loved doing the most became that which I wanted to spend time doing more than anything else. The harp claimed my heart, music became the path I followed, and the space cleared itself. Grace in action, once again.

Books for the Journey: “Never Too Late”

When I first started harp lessons, I knew absolutely nothing about the process of being a music student. I’d never studied an instrument, never had private music lessons. I had no clue about how to work with my teacher, what to expect in my lessons, or how to practice. And I felt totally alone with the thoughts, feelings, memories, and changes that emerged from the process of studying harp. A journal entry from that time reads, “Becoming a musician is turning me inside out.”

Nor did I know anyone else who was embarking upon trying to learn an instrument as an adult. My lesson was scheduled after a high school student and before a nine-year old, so I did not meet other adult harp students at my teacher’s studio. My friends had no musical interests, and looked at me with a “she might be a bit more off in her head than we realized” sort of glance when I told them I was both buying a harp and then paying for weekly lessons to learn how to play it.

What’s a woman alone in this situation to do? Why, hit the library and the bookstores, of course. I knew that somewhere, someone else had made the same incomprehensible decision to, seemingly out of the blue, learn to play an instrument, and that at least one of these people undoubtedly wrote a book about it. And so I began gathering books that became my companions for the journey to learn to play the harp.

I didn’t find any books written by adult harp students, but the experiences described by authors who were learning to play other instruments echoed my own, and gave me a sweet sense that I was not the only person on this path, and that I was not the only person whose life was so rapidly changed by the decision to study an instrument. In the pages of books I found that other adult students had the same thoughts and feelings, the same fears, and the same small triumphs that were bowling me over every week.

One of the first books I read was Never Too Late: my musical autobiography, by John Holt (Perseus Books, Reading, Massachusetts, 1978, 1991.) Holt was an educational reformer who decided at the age of 40 to learn to play the cello. This book details the story of his pre-music life, his choice to study cello,  and the life that emerged after that decision. The book is full of encouragement for an adult music student, no matter what instrument you fall in love with. He so accurately describes what happens in your head and in your heart when you start doing something that you know nothing about – playing an instrument – and that you are truly terrible at doing. And in the pages of this book, he encourages himself, and us, to continue to pursue this wild passion, no matter how bad we think we are.

I’ve printed out the following quote from the book and taped it to the front of all my music notebooks. There have been evenings after disastrous harp ensemble sight-reading attempts where these words were the only thing that kept me from giving up harp altogether.

“What I am slowly learning to do in my work with music is revive some of the resilient spirit of the exploring and learning baby. I have to accept at each moment, as a fact of life, my present skill or lack of skill, and do the best I can, without blaming myself for not being able to do better. I have to be aware of my mistakes and shortcomings without being ashamed of them. I have to keep in view the distant goal, without worrying about how far away it is or reproaching myself for not already being there. This is very hard for most adults. It is the main reason why we old dogs so often do find it so hard to learn new tricks, whether sports or languages or crafts or music. But if as we work on our skills we work on this weakness in ourselves, we can slowly get better at both.”

This book and all the others I’ve found and read during the past six years of harp lessons have been such boon companions that I’m starting a book list on my blog. The new page is called “Books for the Journey.” I’m not exactly sure yet what I’m going to do  – today my idea is to write a brief post about each of the books I put on the list, and this post is the first of those. I’ll see how that works out. I’ll include the publication information and the ISBN number so that anyone who wants to can find a listed book at their library or favorite used book store. And I’d love to hear about other books that helped you find your way on this music journey.

Staring Down Performance Anxiety, and Winning A Skirmish

I haven’t had to think about the shaking hands and racing heart that seems to be part and parcel of my playing for others since my final December performance. And I’ve been happy to put the whole topic of performing and its accompanying anxieties aside.

By the end of December, I was thoroughly tired of the drama of what would happen when I performed. It finally hit me that whether I play or don’t play – it just doesn’t matter. Either my hands shake and I fall off the strings, or they don’t – that doesn’t matter either. World peace does not depend on my playing my harp in front of others. The earth will keep turning on its axis either way.  Twenty minutes after I’ve finished, or even sooner, no one will be thinking about what I played or how well I played it, no one will remember whether I screwed up or was spot on. Everyone who was in the audience will by that time be engrossed in their very own personal dramas.

My steadfast refusal to think about performing enabled me to keep my teacher’s pronouncement that I should play Nocturne for next Monday’s harp ensemble off of my current list of anxieties. My work on the piece has gone well, the tune is solidly in my fingers, my phrasing and dynamics are turning the piece into real music. And February 28th has seemed a long way away. . . .

Until my lesson this past Monday. I was working on refining a crescendo in one of the final measures when my teacher invited her next student into the practice room. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said all too cheerfully, “Now we can be the audience while Janet plays her piece.”

Maybe it was the suddenness of it, and the total lack of time to think about performing. Maybe it was that I’d spent the last 30 minutes working on the piece. Maybe it was my telling myself at that moment, “These people are my friends. They’re on my side and they want me to be successful.” Whatever it was, I took a deep breath, exhaled as my hands plucked the first strings, and played.

There was none of my typical internal performance-chatter, whose sole purpose seems to be to derail me while I am playing.  The things I did say to myself were positive and encouraging. I made a couple of mistakes but kept playing and thought, “You’re ok, just keep going. You know this piece.”

Somehow I could focus on and hear the music I was making as I was playing, while also hearing the music in my head the way I wanted it to sound, just a nano-second before I played it. It was bizarre, this internal hearing what I wanted a note to sound like, while also hearing what my hands had just played. Perhaps this is what left no room for the usual monkey-mind performance-chatter. But it worked. I played the whole piece without shaking hands or a racing heart.

My teacher said that she heard some lovely music making, and that I played with confidence. Amazingly, I felt confident. I felt strong, and capable. I felt as though I had slipped inside some invisible armor that protected me against self-doubt and fear. This so-very-different experience is a new template for how I can feel in my body while I am performing, one that I hope I will be able to find and use again. This template contains the possibility that performing could be something to be enjoyed instead of something to be dreaded. And the existence of that possibility is such a gift; a gift I doubted that I would ever receive.