Category Archives: performance anxiety

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall…

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When I was around 6, I never felt that any of the images I saw in the mirror, twirling around in my powder blue party dress, school bound in my navy blue jumper with the gold buttons, or lounging in my light cotton pants and Danskin turtle-necks was really me. Other children in my class looked like themselves–in and out of the mirror–but I could barely recognize myself as a body with a face and curls and skinny limbs. Who was that apparition that stared back at me? It didn’t look anything like the way I envisioned myself. What did I–whoever I was–really look like? When I ran the “me card” in my mind, there was no face or body. “Me” was a wispy, invisible thing rooted in my brain’s fuzz: airy and intangible. And even after decades of body-grounding practices, that little germ of me is still that flighty, fuzzy thing, nearly impossible to see.

So, for this reason, I’ve always been wary of mirrors, or any item like video or audio recorders, that attempts to cast some aspect of myself back at me. It’s hard for me to watch images of myself in motion or listen to myself speak. When I taught my classes on Public Speaking, I told my students that while recording themselves could be helpful in noting areas they could improve on, it would be better not to record if they didn’t have the stomach for stepping out of their own self-perceptions and seeing themselves as others saw them.

Over the years, I’ve grown more immune to this schism in self-perception. Now, when I look into a mirror, I have an expectation of what I’m going to see, and the resulting reflection doesn’t surprise me, even as my aging body is becoming more angular, my hair slowly more gray. I can laugh when I see interviews of myself using my hands when I talk, and enjoy listening to myself reading poems. While I still don’t like my voice, which seems to be growing grainier and more old-ladyish by the minute, its New Yorker inflections continuing to underly my roots despite 40 years out of the homeland, I can appreciate my expressiveness as well as the echoes of my family legacy–poignant inflections that sound so much like my mother and grandmother.

But last night, I took a big step into the void between self-perception and reality. I recorded myself singing.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I completely lost my ability to sing without croaking a few years ago, and it took a year of lessons before I could get my voice back. This felt like a big investment because didn’t have a strong solo voice that felt worth preserving. But I missed being able to sing in choruses or community gatherings so much, it felt essential to my mental health. One of the most fun things about voice lessons was practicing solo songs, so since then, I try to devote a couple of evenings a week to doing vocal exercises and singing along to Karaoke tracks or accompanying myself on the piano. It’s a blast!

Truth be told, when I think of myself as a singer, I’m kind of like that picture of a cat who looks in the mirror and sees a lion. At least, that’s what the wishy part of me wants to see. Mirror, mirror on the wall, whose the fairest singer of them all? I knew that recording myself might quickly put a pin in my inflated self-perception, but I felt that it was finally time to do what many public speakers do: listen to themselves with minimal self-deprecating judgment, but a clear focus on what they can improve.

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So I turned on my cellphone recorder and hit play, totally prepared to delete the recordings if they were too painful to listen to.

What did I hear? Yes, my grainy, New York, old lady voice. But good breath control and good vibrato. On pitch nearly all the time with just a few flat notes I could work on.

Did I sound like someone I’d want to listen to on Spotify? No. Could I sing competently in a group, or lead a song if I wanted to? Absolutely.

And that’s what I used to tell my public speaking students. You may never speak like Martin Luther King, but that’s not the point. You can get to a place where you feel more competent, more confident, and hopefully begin to like what you’re doing.

Truth: I did delete the recordings after I listened to them. But not because I was ashamed. I think I just wanted to hold onto the illusion of the cat seeing the lion in the mirror. Better than the little girl who couldn’t see herself, even when she was dancing.

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Sounds Like Me

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I’ve taken two significant piano plunges this week–actually, make that three.

(1) A piano-playing friend of mine invited me to choose a duet piece to play with her. I picked Handel’s Arrival of the Queen of Sheba because that was a crazy-fun duet I used to play on the Cornell Chimes, which involved running around each other to get to our notes. My friend expressed some concern that the piece would be too fast and therefore, too hard, but I assured her I was totally happy to play it as slowly as we both needed to (way more slowly than in this video–LOL). I told her my aunt (whom she knows) had a chamber music group that they called The Trio Lento, because no matter what the piece was, they played it at “lento” (slow) speed. The important thing was that they had fun.

A few days ago we ran through the piece for the first time. Lento. And we had fun.

lecates, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Since my friend had most of the chords at the bottom and wasn’t familiar with the melody, since hadn’t played the piece before, she had more trouble than I did getting things to fit together. So, I offered to make a recording of the melody part–at lento speed. I have a tendency to rush when I’m enjoying the music I’m playing; so, this was a good lesson for me to pay close attention to the rhythm we’d set.

(2) Making the recording inspired me to record one of the pieces I was playing to see what I thought of it. I have TOTALLY AVOIDED doing this in the four years that I’ve returned to the piano, terrified that I’ll absolutely hate whatever I hear myself playing and fall back into an unescapable abyss of self-judgment, resurrecting all the negative messages about my musicianship that have haunted me all my life. But I’ve been feeling more confident, lately. So, I figured I’d give it a try.

To make it easier on myself, I chose a slow piece–the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata, whose speed is marked adagio–only slightly faster than lento. It’s a piece I’ve been playing for years and know well, so I could focus on the expression and mostly forget about my cell phone recorder. Still, I did feel just a bit jittery when I pressed the button to play it back.

What stood out most wasn’t the mistakes, which I knew I had made, even as I managed to smooth them over and keep on going. The big surprise was that my playing SOUNDED LIKE ME! Something about how I was choosing to accent notes and how I flowed in the rhythm reminded me of that inner voice inside, the same voice that hears the words I write and tinkers until I have exactly the cadence I want.

Was it the best rendition of the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata that I’ve ever heard? Far from it! But it was “in the ballpark.” And it was mine!

(3) This gave me confidence today to do something I’ve wanted, but have been too scared to do for at least a year–call the local community music center and ask about joining an adult chamber group. I had a lovely conversation with the person in charge of that project, and now I’m feeling giddy at the prospect of playing with other people in a more formal and challenging setting.

Stay tuned!

Poem Wrestling

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Today I completed Poem #30 for the 30 Poems in November fundraiser for the Center for New Americans–a day ahead of schedule, Whew!

Since tomorrow is still November, I may attempt a final poem. Usually, I like to write a cento (a collage poem using lines from other poems) from all the poems offered as prompts over the month. That will enable me to drop a poem that’s not working when I compile my collection of 30, kind of like having the option to eliminate the lowest grade on a series of quizzes!

Of course, at this point, many of these baby poem-drafts aren’t working too well, and getting rid of only one won’t solve that problem. That’s where poem-wrestling comes in. My December writing focus will be on honing these poems into a shape I can share with those who donated to the fundraiser without being too embarrassed about them, even though most of them will still be far from my perfectionist standards.

But perhaps, part of this practice is also about being more comfortable showing my flaws in public–as I did, last weekend when I was asked to be part of the rotation of family musicians and play five minutes of background music on the piano for the appetizer hour of my nephew’s wedding celebration. I NEVER play the piano in front of other people, as those who are familiar my journey back to claiming my piano-playing past (which I wrote about in my not-yet-published memoir, Imperfect Pitch) already know. But I said yes, because I’m loyal to my family and my brother assured me no one would be listening. So, here I was, first on the list of the family players approaching the ivory among the (thank heavens) rising din of chatter. I pretended I was alone and played the pieces I’d prepared, even adding a little klezmer-inspired tune I’d composed on the spot the day before when humming to my grandchild to get him to take a nap.

I actually had fun, because I really was able to play as if I were alone in the room. And I think that’s what I’m going to have to do as I wrestle these 30 poems–pretend I’m alone in the room and see where they want to go without thinking too much about the added pressure of having to share them.

What will poem wrestling entail? Many things, but briefly–zeroing in on what the poem is really about and then thinking about whether each image builds on that or feels like a random aside. Also, looking closely at language and form: how do the words sound on the page. I play a lot with rhythm and repetition of sound patterns. I also look for places I can improve enjambments or use space more strategically.

And because I’m a perfectionist, I’m often writing 3 or 4 or 5 versions of each poem, then letting a version sit for a couple of days before reviewing it. Sometimes I’m so bemused by what I’ve done as in that funny Christine Lavin song, What Was I Thinking, I go back to an earlier version.

And as the days of December wane and my deadline for sending the poems to donors looms, like the cat hesitating at the open door, (an image in the poem I wrote today) I’ll just have to go bravely into the headwind.

 

 

Vulnerability, Writer’s Block, and Performance Anxiety

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I’ve fallen in love with a new Chopin Nocturne I’m learning, Op. 9, No. 2. There are a few different versions of this on youtube, but my favorite is this one by Tiffany Poon. Sometimes it’s hard to listen to professional pianists play the pieces I’m learning, as they remind me, even after I get the basics down, how far away I am from ever playing with such fluidity and ease.

A friend of mine who is co-authoring a book I’m editing writes about his past experience with writers block: I labored under the mistaken notion that writing was a gift from the muse, he says. You either had that gift or you didn’t–and obviously and sadly, I wasn’t one of the chosen few. This is how I feel about piano, except that when I was a child my parents and extended family led me to believe that because I had perfect pitch, I was one of the chosen few. But I couldn’t actualize “that gift” because my fingers were never as good as my ear, especially in a performance setting. I played exactly one piano recital when I was nine–a special concert for “teachers’ best pupils” in a fancy hall in New York City–and it was an unqualified disaster, as I wrote about in detail in an earlier post: Reframing a Past Mess-Up.

I want to feel that spending the last three years returning to piano, a process that has required not only frequent practicing but also a deep dive into my family history in order to decode and defuse a long line of harmful generational messages, would put me past some of my performance anxiety. However, I don’t play the piano if anyone other than my husband, Shel, is in the house. (And if he went out more, I’d probably wait until he was gone, as well.) Even as I’ve managed to turn the screech of my inner music critic down to a low murmur and generate enjoyment from my own flawed renditions, I’m terrified of anyone else’s judgment. So, it was an odd leap of faith to impulsively ask my visiting younger child, Raf–who is a professional musician, nonetheless–if they wanted to hear this new piece I loved and was in the middle of learning. I could do this–even if it made me more vulnerable, I told myself.

How wrong I was.

Man sitting on a chair covering his ears. Earworm concept, also know as brainworm, sticky music, or stuck song syndrome. <a href=”https://depositphotos.com/vector-images/places.html”>Earworm Concept. Man Sitting on a Chair Covering His Ears. – depositphotos.com</a>

Even though I could already play the piece decently with just a few rough spots, knowing Raf was listening made me miss the easy notes as well as the hard ones. My baseline totally fell apart and it seemed to be a matter of chance as to whether I was going to hit the right chords or the wrong ones. Keep playing! I told myself, even as I could barely breathe. Focus on the expression–why you love this piece. Somehow, I managed to finesse the melody, finally landing pianissimo on the last few chords, their soft reverberations calming my shaky insides.

It will be a long time before I do that again, I said to myself. But something had shifted. Unlike the time I was nine, the minute I stood up and walked away from the piano bench, I left the incident behind me. My inner critic didn’t take this little blip as a chance to screech with delight. It stayed at its current murmuring level, which I could easily drown out the next time I tackled the Chopin.

My friend writes about writers’ block, Now I accept without pain that I am a reasonably competent writer. I don’t need to be special in order to enjoy the writing I produce. While I prefer to use “aspiring,” rather than “reasonably competent” to describe my musicianship, the last sentence rings true. I don’t need to be special in order to enjoy my piano playing. Even if I may not be ready to play for others very often–or at all; for myself, I can play well enough to express what’s in my heart. And in any art we might pursue at whatever level we might be at, that’s what should matter–whether or not we choose to make ourselves vulnerable by sharing.

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