the crash
I’ve wanted to quit the piano many times, and for many reasons. In college, it used to happen more often, usually when I had a jury or recital. Those were the times in which I faced, as my teacher called it, my “truth.” The truth of how I actually played, of how I actually knew my music. And I didn’t like that truth. Who would? So I’d flirt with quitting. I imagined myself amongst a fanciful list of other lives—a country music disc jockey, a soldier in the Army (I even saw a recruiter), but eventually the storm would pass and I’d return to the piano.
Life with its many paths doesn’t sprawl out before me like the blanket of possibility it once did. What color is your parachute? Black and white, it seems. And good! It’s a miracle to have carved out any life in music—I say it often, and I mean it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t often consider the idea that I don’t belong here. And usually this happens for the same trite reasons that it used to. I flub a passage I worked hard on, or feared, or didn’t work on and never feared, and then reel incredulously from the experience, furious and ashamed. Your job is to actually play that part, I tell myself. Your job is to do that thing. And you failed. Other people could, and they do. So you should quit.
A couple years ago, a presenter said to me at breakfast while we planned a concert at his museum, regarding audience: “You’re a draw.” Far from flattered, I found these words chilling. A draw? Me? When I did my fifty-state grassroots tour, America 88x50, over ten years ago, the capriciousness of attendance from show to show, state to state, was one of the fun and funny aspects of the tour. But now, all grown up, I’ve continued to play regularly for audiences of less than ten. And some of my best attended shows have been preceded, days before, by panicked emails from office administrators letting me know (unhelpfully) that only a fraction of the available tickets had been sold. I’m as delighted as anybody to play for a room teeming with people, but this doesn’t happen consistently, or formulaically. So much of this is, as Cage would say, “weather.”
A few days ago, a colleague’s show was cancelled last minute at a leading venue for lack of ticket sales. A few years ago I got into a viral brawl with a presenter for shortening a friend’s concert mid-performance when there were two people in attendance, including me. Yesterday, at my mid-afternoon Sunday performance in Brooklyn, there were three. Three people. I didn’t know two of them, so part of me feels like those two people count as ten, but… okay… three.
I hadn’t played for three people since that 50 state tour. Lexington, Kentucky, I believe, when three women showed up to my gallery show, and it was wonderful, actually. I think I also had three people in Watchung, New Jersey later that year, but in that case, the head of the series forgot about my concert and was only reminded that day when I called him from the dark and empty venue.
I say there’s no formula, but there are ways to get people to the show. They need, for one, to know about it. And I only alerted people, via Facebook and nothing else, about Sunday’s performance a couple days beforehand. I also had a gut feeling, when I agreed to it, that a 3pm concert on a sultry July Sunday might be a bad… here’s that word again, formula, but I went with it anyway for a bunch of reasons, one being the impulse to just say yes to the privilege of being asked. Meanwhile, a part of me also hesitated to hammer this event because I feel like I had just hammered one less than a month before (attendance 7), and also plan to hammer one for later this month, and one after that. In my mind, everyone’s sick of me.
But three people. Shit. I woke up earlier in the day, one of the hottest of the year, with some kind of food poisoning, and nonetheless spent the morning busy with errands. So as formulas go, this wasn’t the best. I arrived sore and weak and lethargic. “I’m not really charismatic today,” I apologized to the sound person as I shuffled around. Mid-show, while promising myself in a kind of internal loop to give these three people all that I had, a construction crew shouted outside, their machinery whirring, a truck’s reverse beep signal (a high E-flat, as it were) in an electro-acoustic duet with my Feldman. When it was over, my shirt sopping with sweat and body a tangle of aches, I wanted to disappear. Embarrassed and ashamed, and not at all happy with myself, I began gathering my things before those three people’s applause had barely dissipated. There wasn’t enough for a door split. Surely the venue had lost money. I felt guilty for that, too.
When I got home, my husband asked how it went. I told him coldly that three people had come, and then simply said that I was going to bed. I stayed there from 4:30 yesterday afternoon until 10 this morning. Before falling asleep, horizontal and exhausted on a Sunday afternoon, I thought of the previous few months and how it all led to what was fittingly, in that moment, something of a crash. Every time I rolled over into a new position, I felt indeed more peaceful than the last. This was perfect. I wanted to stay right there, depressed and mad and euphorically comfortable and thinking I should quit. I dreamed a hundred dreams, seeing friends in them that I hadn’t seen in years, rousing only to use the restroom and for a bowl of cornflakes. This was my hard reset. A good fifteen hour shut-down.
Still, in the wee hours, I would torture myself by looking at my phone, a voyeur unto the successes of others, thinking that if I can’t compel more than three people in this city, formulas and timing aside, to see me play, maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. And if I can’t make it through such-and-such part of such-and-such piece without falling on my face, maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. And if I’m sad and mad after I play, maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. I ignored any evidence that would contradict my evil narrative. Like how in Berkeley a few nights ago, after a performance, someone asked, “How do you feel?” And I told them that I actually felt pretty great. I’d gotten closer to my ideal for certain pieces than I had ever come before, and figured that maybe the audience made me feel safe and supported, so that afterward their gratitude became my gratitude. Who knows, but mistakes and flubs seemed really unimportant in the face of such love, and the profound gift of having the opportunity to share music with others. It’s a sacred, powerful, precious thing.
But anyway, I’m eating again. I think I’ll clean the house a little and organize my room. I took a bath. Had a phone conference. Paid bills. Took out the trash. Got a parking ticket. I need to call my mom. And indeed, I’m going to practice.
A couple months ago, a pianist friend told me he hesitated to program concerts because he didn’t want to compromise himself by playing smaller venues and lesser known series. Also, he added, “What if only forty people come?” I couldn’t help but laugh at the time, and it makes me chuckle still. Only forty? Maybe he should quit.
