Playing Scared (10 page)

Sara playing piano at San Jose International Airport
(Shmuel Thaler)

After three months of weekly Skype sessions, Kageyama suggested it was time to dial up to number eight on the adventure scale. At his urging, I signed up for the Sonata Workshop, a piano camp in a sprawling Bennington, Vermont, manor house that had once been a nuns’ convent and now held a piano in every room. Over eight days, I would cycle through almost every one of those pianos, practicing in linen closets, bedrooms, a laundry room, the basement, and the living room. The place was filled with piano-obsessed people, all pursuing their passion with unique single-mindedness, playing piano, listening to piano, and talking piano from the moment they woke up till the time they went to bed. “What kind of pianist are you?” one competitive guy demanded at breakfast early in the week. I must have looked perplexed because he clarified and threw out the names of other campers for comparison purposes: “On a scale of one to ten, where two is a beginner, five is a Carolyn, and nine is a Keith, where are you?” I stared at him, wondering if I had unwittingly set myself up for yet another music competition.

One of my roommates was a twenty-eight-year-old woman who had never before played the piano. Fatimah Muhammad grew up homeless in New Jersey. She lived on the streets and in shelters with her brother and mother, who was determined that her children get an education. In 2006, Muhammad graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania. A few months before arriving at the Sonata Workshop, she had come within four hundred votes of unseating a twenty-seven-year incumbent in the Democratic primary for a seat in the Pennsylvania State Senate. She had a powerful gospel-tinged voice, and she had toured India, Malaysia, and China, singing jazz and blues before thousands. Her mother had recently died of breast cancer, and a couple of times that week I woke in the middle of the night to the sound of her sobs. She said she didn’t know what exactly she wanted to do with her life, except that whatever it was, it would involve music. When she performed on the last night, it was to accompany herself in a song she had composed. She was nervous (she’d actually thrown up before going on), and she touched her hand to her heart “to check in” before belting out a glorious number. I watched as she arched a hand above the keys, the gesture of a confident pianist, and I decided that her vulnerability was actually a mask that concealed great strength.

A lot of people at the camp had powerful stories. One, Tony Cicoria, was already famous, having been profiled by the neurologist Oliver Sacks in the
New Yorker
as the man who at forty-two years of age developed an insatiable appetite for classical piano music after being struck by lightning. An orthopedic surgeon in a small city in upstate New York, he
was talking on a pay phone in 1994 when a flash of electricity burst out of the receiver and hit him in the face. The next thing he knew, he was getting CPR from the woman who had been next in line. A bluish-white light bathed him, and he was hovering over his own body, overcome with a feeling of peace and well-being. Then, with a
whoosh
, he was back on the ground, covered with burns on his face and feet.

For the next few weeks, he was sluggish and forgetful. Medical tests found nothing amiss, however, and he resumed his life as a doctor and family man until one morning he woke up and felt an inexplicable desire to hear classical music. Before the lightning strike, he had had no such interest; if he listened to anything, it was rock. He began to buy recordings of classical pianists—Vladimir Ashkenazy was his favorite—and listened obsessively. When his son’s babysitter moved away, she stored her piano, “a nice little upright,” in Cicoria’s house. Cicoria began to take lessons and play whenever he had a few minutes to spare. Music was a constant presence in his head, like an audio file, which he could stop and start on command. When I met him, he seemed a man obsessed, attacking the keys with alarming ferocity whether he was playing Beethoven’s
Moonlight
Sonata or the piano concerto he had recently composed. It was called
The Lightning Concerto
and it was very intense.

Another of my roommates was a California nursing professor who on first impression seemed brash and outgoing. As I soon discovered, she was as terrified of performing as I was. Irene Larsen promised she would sign up for a master class if I did. “Why not?” she said with a toss of her head. “It’s
the things you don’t buy, the things you don’t say, the people you don’t tell to fuck off—those are the regrets in life.” She never did sign up for the master class. But without allowing myself to think about it, I added my name to the list.

This meant that I would have to play before all twenty-six pianists in attendance, after which my playing would be dissected, in public, by Polly van der Linde, the camp director. She was pure energy. An excellent pianist, she could sight-read almost anything that was put in front of her. She could also read people. She had an uncanny way of zeroing in on the strengths and weaknesses of their playing, without ever talking down or seeming to compromise her own standards.

The afternoon of my master class, I took a long walk on a country road, past picturesque farmhouses and rolling hills. Drivers tore past me, one nearly brushing me. I saw myself struck dead, a piece of roadkill as cars whizzed past my lifeless body. At least I wouldn’t have to play in the master class, I considered, a thought that brought to mind a story about Pablo Casals. When the cellist visited San Francisco in 1901, he suffered a serious injury to his bowing hand during a hike up Mount Tamalpais, the highest point in Marin County, just across the Golden Gate Bridge. A large rock had fallen on his hand, crushing several fingers. The first thought that came to his mind, Casals later said, was, “Thank God, I’ll never have to play the cello again!”

I returned to the house unharmed, without any excuse to keep me from playing the Brahms rhapsody that evening. That was a pity. After six bars, I broke down and went back to
the beginning. Remembering Kageyama, I took a slow breath and started over, trying to focus on the good things: my tone, my passion—my formidable energy. I played accurately for another page or two, and then—
kaboom
—I flubbed the ending. When it was over, I sat on the bench trying not to cry, awaiting van der Linde’s decree. It didn’t take her long. “You can handle the piano,” she said. “You just can’t handle yourself at the piano.” My fellow students laughed, some a little nervously, but at that moment I felt like throwing my arms around her. I was thrilled to be called out as an emotional mess; I just couldn’t stand being dismissed as a pianist.

Later, she told me about one of her longtime students, an older man named George who many years earlier had given up all hope of a music career. He attended the Oberlin Conservatory but quit performing because of his stage fright and instead spent his life as a corporate executive. The piano bug never left him, however, and every year he came to the Sonata Workshop, where, predictably, he was overcome by nerves. Once, van der Linde coaxed him onstage with a bit of humor; she placed a huge sombrero on his head. It helped. Another time, she shared with him her own past experiences in a chamber group: how, before a performance, she and the other players, all scared stiff, huddled backstage like players on a football team. “We’re great, yeah, yeah, yeah! Merry Christmas and fuck you!”

George listened attentively. The next evening, he walked onstage, bowed to his audience, and let loose a scroll—like a court jester in a Monty Python movie—that announced in big block letters: FUCK YOU! He played brilliantly.

I decided to go for broke at the final recital and wrote down a series of commandments that I studied like a tip sheet for a test.

Breathe. Don’t stop!

Don’t hunch shoulders

Loosen mouth

Focus—If drift, STOP!

Play from the heart

Listening to my fellow pianists that night, I was aware of the rise and fall of the breath beneath their back muscles and shoulders, the tapping of their feet, their bopping heads, the clunky playing of one, the gentle music of another, the boldness and confidence of a few. It was like finding oneself in the middle of a nudist colony, surrounded by the diversity of human bodies: the poking ribs, the rolls of fat, the solid thighs. I loved these people! And as I began my own piece, Debussy’s
Reflets dans l’eau (Reflections in the Water
), I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it. It was a demanding piece that had to sound ephemeral, like flowing water, a river of music: gushing, rippling, eddying. I’d been playing it for about two months, not long enough for my fingers to be entirely comfortable with Debussy’s cascading runs. Yet as I played that night in Vermont, I had a vision of the way
Reflets
could sound—and there were times when my playing felt alive, matching the vision. There were even passages that seemed easy: I had found my zone, however briefly. Afterward, people told me I had played beautifully, that I had created
magic for long minutes. I didn’t know the name of the piece, one woman said, but it sounded like water. Another woman urged me to enter the Seattle International Piano Festival & Competition, of which she was an organizer. “I don’t know what your standards of success are, Sara,” van der Linde told me, “but in my book you succeeded. You played right from the heart.”

Naturally, I was thrilled. But a couple of weeks later, I listened to a recording of myself from that evening and was disturbed. I could hear the tension in my body, the held breath, the panic that communicated its way from my lungs, through my arm muscles, down to my fingers, and into the key bed. At that moment, as I heard that playback, my goal changed. It no longer was about perfection. I could live with a missed note, a botched leap, a second’s hesitation. What I couldn’t live with was that tight little sound that crept into my playing. Fear makes one pull back and close in on oneself. It’s a universal that the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön identifies even in sea anemones, whose soft bodies close in on themselves the instant we touch them with our fingers. “It’s not a terrible thing that we feel fear when faced with the unknown,” she writes. “It is part of being alive, something we all share. We react against the possibility of loneliness, of death, of not having anything to hold on to. Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.”

The next time I Skyped with Kageyama, I told him about my experiences in Vermont—a ten on the adventure scale. I also confided my unexpected disappointment. He nodded. “It’s more about self-discovery and mastery than anything
else,” he said. He was reminded of
Jiro Dreams of Sushi
, a documentary about an eighty-five-year-old sushi chef whose ten-seat, $300-a-plate restaurant was legendary among foodies the world over. While all the other sushi chefs in Tokyo massaged their octopi for a mere ten minutes, Jiro insisted that his be massaged for forty minutes—or he wouldn’t serve them. “It’s about how you have to love to massage the octopus before you serve it,” Kageyama concluded.

I looked at the calendar. It was already September. Another eight months before my final recital. Suddenly, it no longer seemed like a lot of time. But at that moment, I felt that change was afoot: I was massaging the octopus.

Fear: it begins with urgent motor impulses from the brain to the adrenal glands, which respond by dumping adrenaline into the bloodstream and putting the body on alert. The heart beats harder and faster. Breathing grows rapid to increase oxygen levels. Eyes dilate to bring more light to the retina, heightening visual acuity. Blood flow is redirected from hands and feet to the large muscles in the upper torso, arms, and legs. Hands and fingers turn cold and clammy. Sweat glands shift into overdrive. Digestion shuts down, and waves of nausea ripple through the gut. Hair follicles tighten, prompting individual hairs to bristle—an effect that likely made our hirsute Neanderthal ancestors appear larger and more menacing to predators.

It was the philosopher and psychologist William James who, in the 1880s, posed the first serious questions about the origins of fear: Do we run because we are afraid? Or are we afraid because we run? Which comes first? Does a person have time to contemplate whether something is frightening, or does the response to fear precede the thought? James had more
than a passing interest in this chicken-or-egg conundrum. He was an anxiety-ridden insomniac (he regularly used chloroform to put himself to sleep)
¹
and social phobic who, like many psychologists then and now, pursued a line of research that is sometimes only half-jokingly referred to as “me search.” His conclusion was that emotion stems from the unconscious mind’s perception of bodily changes—the adrenaline rush, the pounding heartbeat, the rapid breathing. In other words, action precedes consciousness. We are afraid because we run. To illustrate, he asked his readers to imagine an encounter with a bear: When we see a bear, we don’t fear it and then run. We see it, run, and fear it—in that order.
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It would take more than a century for this insight to be confirmed in the laboratory, where Joseph LeDoux, a neuroscientist at New York University, mapped the circuitry of fear in lab rats, tracing it to the amygdala, an almond-shaped organ buried deep in the temporal lobe of the brain. LeDoux didn’t go looking for the amygdala; he was looking for whatever region in the rat’s auditory system was required for fear conditioning. He began his search by pairing a tone with an electric shock—a paradigm that has shaped the course of science experiments ever since Ivan Pavlov trained dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell. Once the rats were conditioned to associate the two, LeDoux dropped the shock and just sounded the tone. Again, classic: The rats froze in place the instant they heard the sound. It was their learned response to a tone that signaled danger.

Now LeDoux began cutting into the rodents’ auditory cortex—the part of the auditory pathway associated with higher, rational thinking. The animals still froze whenever he
sounded the tone; they were now terrified of a nonexistent electric shock and a noise they no longer consciously heard. LeDoux recognized that the auditory information must have split in the thalamus, a region in the lower brain that acts as a switching center for virtually all sensory information. But then what? Clearly, it traveled to some other part of the rat’s brain, a part of the subconscious that could still process the tone. To find where, he injected a tracer chemical into the thalamus and waited for it to piggyback on molecules traveling onward to the mysterious terminus. When he dissected the rat’s brain the next day, he laid it out under a microscope and found a stain of bright orange particles with streams and speckles against a dark blue-gray background. It was, he wrote, “like looking into a strange world of inner space. It was incredibly beautiful and I stayed glued to the microscope for hours.”
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