Playing Scared
Authors: Sara Solovitch
For Rich
The music ain’t worth nothing if you can’t lay it on the public.
—Louis Armstrong
Chapter 1:
The Agony of My Ecstasy
Chapter 2:
Blinded by the Light: A Short History
Chapter 3:
Touching a Tarantula
Chapter 5:
Massaging the Octopus
Chapter 6:
Revenge of the Amygdala
Chapter 9:
So Much for Perfection
Chapter 11:
Cultural Artifacts of Fear
INTRODUCTION
For most of my adult life, virtually no one—not even my closest friends—knew I played the piano. And that was how I wanted it. Playing the piano had once defined me, but so, too, had my stage fright. I was the kind of pianist who played well when there was nothing at stake: in my parents’ house, at my lesson, behind closed doors. But put me in front of an audience and my hands would ice over while some invisible spigot let loose a burst of sweat that soaked my palms and fingers. When I quit at nineteen, my parents protested that I was giving up the best part of myself. You’ll go back to it one day, they predicted. When I finally did, more than thirty years had passed. Word got around; my husband bragged about it at the office, and one winter evening in 2011, I found myself at a cheery holiday party, being exhorted to play something, anything, on the host’s baby grand. I demurred. The host jovially insisted. I declined. The other guests cajoled. I said no. After opening the piano bench, the host pulled out a book of Bach inventions. How about this, he said. Yes, yes, play that, the others chanted. Jump! Jump! was what I heard.
In that moment, I realized nothing had changed. I was fifty-six years old and my stage fright was as fearsome and powerful as when I was fourteen—maybe more so. If I had just sat down and played, it would have been a forgettable moment. Nobody would have cared if I had made a mistake. Instead, their pleas and my refusals lasted longer than a two-page invention.
Stage fright, or performance anxiety, is both utterly mysterious, an act of mutiny by the mind against the body, and ludicrously commonplace, as ordinary as the common cold. It is the kind of condition for which people inevitably trot out the names of famous sufferers, the way they do for Asperger syndrome or bipolar disorder. As if to say … what, exactly? That a diagnosis is not the end of the world? That you or your loved one is in good company? A
Who’s Who of Stage Fright
makes for an imposing roster, one that includes Hugh Grant (who’s considered quitting acting), Paul McCartney (who once said he “nearly gave up the Beatles” because of it), and Adele (who has projectile vomited onstage). The guitarist Andrés Segovia confessed that his very bones shook before a concert. He told himself that stage fright was a sign of talent and quoted no less an authority than Sarah Bernhardt. The world’s most acclaimed actress was a self-described
traqueuse
—someone prone to attacks of
le trac
, or stage fright. So too was the pianist Vladimir Horowitz, who once took a twelve-year break from concertizing. To tame his stage fright, he maintained a rigid regimen on performance days, always eating the same meal of Dover sole and asparagus, which often had to be specially flown in. By one
account, three burly men were required to drag him from his dressing room as he fought, begged, and screamed, before literally tossing him onto the stage. Horowitz reportedly gave some of his finest performances under such circumstances.
1
The list goes on: Barbra Streisand, Laurence Olivier, Bette Midler, Maria Callas, Stephen Fry, Ella Fitzgerald, Jesse Eisenberg, Enrico Caruso, Rod Stewart, Mel Gibson, Luciano Pavarotti, Brian Wilson, Carol Burnett.
2
Mention stage fright and chances are good that someone will cite a 1973 survey, first reported in the London
Sunday Times
, that identified public speaking as the most common fear in America.
3
Respondents said they would rather be plagued by insects and suffer financial ruin than stand before an audience, open their mouths, and talk. The survey became a source for late-night comedy routines and took on a life of its own. When Jerry Seinfeld joked that more people at a funeral would rather be in the coffin than give the eulogy, that’s what people remembered. It lodged itself in the collective unconscious, where it’s remained ever since, to be summoned up and quoted as if it were a fact of life.
Stage fright is the great leveler, cutting down prophets, presidents, musicians, actors, dancers, lawyers, athletes, preachers, rabbis, teachers, CEOs, salesmen, advertising reps—anyone who has ever had to stand up in front of a group and
do
something.
It demanded some kind of reckoning, I found myself thinking as I picked my way through a Bach prelude one evening in May 2012. If I could give myself a year to research the science
and psychology of stage fright, try out various therapies, and persuade performance coaches and sport psychologists to work with me, maybe I could beat this thing. I would find a teacher who would not only train me as a pianist, but also help me as a performer. I would practice hours every day, quash my fears, and at the end of the year play a recital for an audience of fifty or more people. The idea emerged full-blown, like Athena from Zeus’s head. It terrified me, but I couldn’t turn away from it.
Sara at twenty-one months old
(Author’s family photo)
This book chronicles my quest to understand and overcome a lifetime of stage fright. I have practiced meditation (fitfully) and yoga (faithfully). I have explored a variety of therapies: exposure therapy, cognitive behavior therapy, biofeedback, EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), breathing coordination, hypnosis, and (that mainstay of musicians) the Alexander technique. I’ve read what Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Joseph Weiss had to say about performance anxiety and tried to glean a few of the rewards. I’ve interviewed neuroscientists about their research into fear and the brain—specifically, how the brain can be retrained to excise fear, that most primal of emotions. Scientists today understand the workings of fear better than any other emotion. They know where it is sparked in the brain and how to elicit it in athletes, students, test takers, and anyone willing to enter the lab and receive an unpleasant but harmless electric shock. Yet it’s the simple beta-blocker, first marketed in 1962 for the treatment of angina and heart disease, that remains the standby for so many of us with performance anxiety. When I asked my doctor for a prescription, her response was one of immediate recognition: “Oh, the public-speaking pill!” Turned out she used it herself.
Along the way, I met other performance-haunted people who steadied me, cautioned me, inspired me, and shared their tales: the major league second baseman who couldn’t find first base; the Baptist preacher for whom every week was a countdown to Sunday; the lawyer who feared she was getting lockjaw whenever she stood to give a speech; the onetime
child star from the New York stage who moved to Los Angeles for a role in a 1970s TV sitcom, then froze on camera, unable to remember his character’s name. Anyone whose hands have turned wet with sweat or whose voice has cracked and faltered when standing before an audience can relate.
THE AGONY OF MY ECSTASY
At the annual music festival in Port Colborne, the small Ontario town where I grew up, my fellow competitors knew me as the one who could be counted on to crash and burn. My piano teacher, Mrs. Wolfenden, was convinced otherwise. Each spring, starting when I was ten, she plotted which Bach invention or Mozart sonata I should perform, promising that I was sure to get over my nerves now that I was a whole year older. My mother, for her part, didn’t need any convincing. According to her, all I needed to do was practice more.
It never occurred to me that I could refuse, even when I was fourteen and Mrs. Wolfenden declared that I was ready for a more serious competition, requiring a forty-minute drive to the neighboring city of St. Catharines. This time, I told myself, it was going to be different. My fingers knew the music so cold, it wouldn’t matter what I thought about or if I thought at all. Waiting my turn in the front row—that no-man’s-land between performer and audience—I affected interest in the pianist onstage, closed my eyes, and tapped out
the opening bars of the Mozart Sonata no. 8 in A Minor. But as the simple triad shifted to a four-note chord, I grew aware that the bottoms of my thighs had gone clammy and my palms were already getting wet. I rubbed them into my jumper, but—just my luck—I was wearing wool, a natural water repellent. Now the audience was clapping and, looking up, I saw the girl taking her bow, moving confidently toward the stairs. I knew her, or, more accurately, I knew her piano playing. Her name was Nancy, and she never missed a note. But she played woodenly—like a cold brick, my mother said, though I suspected she admired the girl’s cool demeanor. I glanced behind me, trying to search out my mother in the crowd. There was a blur of faces, all aimed in my direction.
Pushing myself out of my chair, I felt my thighs cling to the wood. I brushed past Nancy on the stairs and tried to smile, but my mouth was dry. And now, I realized, my hands were sopping wet. When I sat on the piano bench, I became aware that my knees were knocking and my feet were shaking.
I waited for the shaking to die, and when it didn’t, I closed my eyes and tried to conjure up what my piano teacher once suggested: an image of myself playing for a barnyard full of animals. The room had grown silent. I looked down at my hands, which, for a fourteen-year-old, were unusually muscular, the result of years of practicing scales, Hanon and Czerny exercises, and Bach inventions. But the hands were small, too small for many of the larger chords in the music I was starting to play, and sometimes I hated them the way other girls my age hated their small breasts. They were peasant hands, short-fingered, like those of my father and everyone on his side of the
family. It didn’t help that I regularly bit my fingernails down to the quick. I also gnawed at my cuticles and chewed on the ends of pencils, a habit that earned me the school-yard epithet Eager Beaver. Lately, I had been picking away at the skin around the fourth finger of my left hand. It had gotten infected and a throbbing abscess developed, so that every time I touched a key the pain sounded an alarm, warning me to stay away. Just a few days earlier, my mother had sent me to our family doctor, who lanced the boil, releasing a spray of mustard-yellow pus.
My last thought, as I lifted my hands, was that the finger had almost fully healed. And then I leaned in and, with a grace note slur from D sharp to E, jumped into what I liked to think of as a horse race. Some music waits to unfold and lets you slowly wrap your mind around it, but not this piece. As my left hand played the triad like a steady canter, I let myself hum along to the melody—a low drone just loud enough to quell the shaking. My brain was jumping as fast as my fingers and my hands knew the rules and miraculously obeyed. It sounded good, I realized, maybe better than good. If I could keep playing at this speed, the air might even dry my hands.