Category Archives: piano

The Power of Not Giving Up

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Yesterday, I spent a grueling day flying from my home in New England to DC and back for the funeral of my aunt, Amy Loeserman.

I wasn’t close to my aunt. In fact, most of my strongest memories of her were mixed, at best. The one that stands out was when I was around nine. She was bragging that she was the best Monopoly player ever. So, more out of curiosity than bravado–because even then I rarely cared about winning or losing board games–I challenged her. The image of all my mortgaged properties spread out on my grandma’s gray rug as I tearfully handed over my last pink $5 bill is burned in my memory. I hadn’t merely lost. I had been humiliated. And she was gleeful about it.

For years after that, I was convinced she didn’t like me. Maybe that was true. She wasn’t what you would call, “a kid person” and her relationship with my mother, her only sibling, had–until their old age–always been bumpy. Despite being a kid, I could feel the reverberations.

In retrospect, I think this was one of those harmful assumptions we tend to make about unpleasant life events in order to put them in a palatable context. And that assumption, backed by a number of less-than-perfect interactions over the years that followed, prevented us from having more of a relationship.

But relationship or not, my relationships with my cousins (her children) are important to me, so I wanted to show up. And despite the grueling day, which started at 6am and ended at midnight, I’m glad I did. For one thing, I learned in my cousin’s eulogy that Amy’s ruthlessness at board games was not a personal vendetta against me. She was known for not letting her children or her grandchildren win, no matter how young they were. When I told the Monopoly story to my cousins and their children, they laughed out loud. “Classic!” they agreed.

I also learned things about Amy I never knew. She was one of only four women in her U. of Chicago law school class in 1959. Her original intent was to use law for social justice, but no social justice oriented law firms would hire women in those days. The only firm that was willing to hire her was involved with shipping law, so that became her field, and she even got to argue a case before the Supreme Court. She also volunteered for the ACLU and handled pro bono cases on racial and gender discrimination.

I’m sorry I didn’t know how much of an interest in social justice we had in common. But I’m thankful for the small ways we did bond around music. I appreciated her frank honesty in talking about her own musical journey and how it fit into our family dynamics when I interviewed her for my piano memoir–one of the best conversations I ever had with her. She talked about how hard she worked, since she didn’t believe she had much musical talent, and how her father (my grandfather), the family music god whom we all venerated but could never live up to, would be shouting out from the back of the house… higher… lower… when she couldn’t get exactly the right pitch on the violin. It got to the point where she couldn’t stand it any more and decided to play flute instead, as well as piano.

When I saw her for the last time, last month at a family Bat Mitzvah, I was glad to have a the common topic of piano to talk about. She had recently moved to assisted living where she had the opportunity to take piano lessons again. We asked each other about which pieces we were learning. Even at 89, she was still working hard, not giving up. In fact, Amy’s life was about not giving up. From dealing with gender discrimination in the legal field, to feeding her musical passion despite not thinking she was “talented,” to going to graduate school at age 54 and getting a Ph.D. in French literature 14 years later simply because she loved French, Amy was someone whose perseverance we could all learn from, even if at times this same trait manifested in useless arguments about honoring an expired coupon (another story told at the funeral).

In these tough and scary times in our world, I’m hoping I can carry some of Amy’s perseverance with me and be as willing as she was to work hard–even when it’s not easy. And to be as stubborn as she was about not giving up.

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Putting Your Work Away and Bringing It Back

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My daughter’s piano teacher used to tell her that when you put a piece away for a while and then bring it back, it comes back better.

I think this is also true for writing–at least it’s true for me.

Most recently, I “put away” my piano memoir, Imperfect Pitch, for several months. I had been shopping it around unsuccessfully for a couple of years, and then I was offered a consultation with an agent who told me she thought it would be more marketable if I turned it into a “self-help memoir.” So, last summer I added a bunch of short sections reflecting on the themes I’d raised and offering prompts and prescriptions people could use to tackle perfectionism and self-judgment while amplifying joy and forgiveness. I was excited to give that version to a few readers, but then disappointed when they uniformly said that the self-help voice was intrusive and detracted from the thread of the story.

I put the book away for a couple of months so I could read it fresh. But other than realizing that they were right, I couldn’t figure out what to do.

Then winter hit, along with the new administration and my father’s illness and death, and I was too depressed to do any substantive writing for a while. But the book was there at the back of my mind, niggling me. The project was too important to me to abandon. In fact, of all the things I’ve written, this is the book I most want people to read, because I believe its messages about creativity and mattering are essential to healing ourselves–both individually and as a culture. That was why I was going for an agent and the big publishing houses, rather than the small ones–and why I was willing to take this agent’s advice about so-called “marketability.”

But as the months passed and my writing fog started to clear, I realized it was ok for me to loosen my expectations on the marketability angle. I’ve always personally been an outlier when it comes to popular culture. So why should my book be any different? Yet, there was something in the added sections I liked–a wiser voice that could look back on the memoir incidents I wrote about and make sense of them. It was the poplike “you-too” voice that felt insincere and inauthentic to my newly attuned ears.

So, I took out that voice and shortened the reflections, making sure they all sounded like me–a wiser, calmer me than the me in the throes of wrestling all my musical baggage, but still me, without artifice. I hope they now feel like a cool wave momentarily breaking the heat. We’ll see. I’ve given the book to at least one more reader. And then, after what will likely be another round of revisions, it’s off to market one more time–perhaps no longer exclusively on the big press circuit. While I’ll continue to attempt to build my platform, I’m no longer interested in being anything less (or more) than who I am, whether or not my messaging ever gets popular enough to build a huge following.

Photo by Shel Horowitz

Incidentally, I also put away the Brahms Intermezzo I fell in love with and worked diligently on for two months. I got it down pretty well, but far from perfect. Which is ok, now that I’m no longer mentally beating myself up for piano imperfections. Still, I hope I’ll be able to make it way better when I pull it out again.

Have a listen here from pianist Jean Marc Luisada.

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You’re Supposed to Say, Bravo!

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My two-and-a-half-year-old grandchild, Manu, loves to play songs on the piano, which he does by pressing down on random groups of notes in the song’s rhythm. Often he sings along, eradicating any question I might have about what song he’s playing, Sometimes I sing with him, but mostly, what he wants me to do is listen–and then burst into wild applause as soon as he plays the final note.

But a few weeks ago, suddenly that wasn’t enough. He turned to me and said, “You’re supposed to say, bravo!”

“Bravo!” I willingly added.

“No!” he said. “Bra…Vo” emphasizing each syllable with equal force and leaving a breath of air in between.

“Bra…Vo!”

“No, Braah…..Vo…oh..”

“Braah….Vo..oh.”

We went through this a few times. Apparently I couldn’t say bravo exactly the way his babysitter said it, but after a while he let it go and went on to something else. Thank goodness for two-year-old attention spans.

But I’ve been thinking about the message, regardless of whether I can pronounce the word bravo to Manu’s liking. We could all use more bravo in our lives.

As some readers of this blog know, four and a half years ago I started playing the piano again after pretty much abandoning it for most of my adulthood. This required way more than beefing up my music reading and finger dexterity. It involved delving into and confronting baggage that had plagued me my entire life–my debilitating perfectionism and the resulting shame at not being able to live up to the standards enshrined in our family legacy of professional musicians.

But I slogged through, one note, one phrase, one piece at a time until I eventually got the minimal piano chops I’d had up to snuff. I only played by myself in the living room. I didn’t want a teacher, or even anyone in my family to hear me play. Yet, in the back of my mind, I wondered, was I competent enough to join a chamber group? My kids had loved doing chamber music when they were teenagers and I’d been so envious. It looked like so much fun.

It took a year between the time I first started thinking about it before I called the local community music center and then another six months (until last February) to find a group. I’d like to say that being in this chamber music group was a sublime experience and a dream come true, but it wasn’t. On the other hand, it wasn’t awful, either. On a scale of sweet/sour, it skewed acidic, but the tangy taste was at least somewhat pleasurable. I felt gratified that I could play the music, and even if the coach seemed to give me more direction than she gave others, she always addressed me in a kind and respectful way. The other players all seemed friendly and no one stood out as being way above or below the level of the others–or unable to do what the piece demanded. But I didn’t get much of a sense of who they were as people, which I think lessened our ability to connect musically. And I didn’t particularly feel like we got into the nuances and phrasing of the piece, which made the experience rather boring (though in all fairness, maybe it was enough that we learned how to play together).

For all these reasons, and because I still am highly judgmental when it comes to music (despite how hard I try not to be), I really did not want to play at the end of semester recital. But the other musicians did, and I certainly wasn’t going to sabotage them–even though I told my partner and my daughter very definitively that no, I did NOT want them to come.

So, last Sunday I sucked it up and drove through the foggy, drizzly rain to the performance venue, arriving half an hour early so we could get in one last run through. I noticed that without depending on the coach to tell us what to do that we were able to stop ourselves to talk about problem spots and address them, and this made me feel more connected to the other musicians. And I was pleased that our actual performance of the piece, while not perfect or wonderful or exciting, was better than we usually played it, despite the nerves of having to play in front of an audience.

No one said, bravo, or (bra… vo…) but that’s okay. I can say bravo to myself for my bravery.

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Routines

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My father lived by his routines. Breakfast was a daily ritual of muesli, blueberries, dates, and apples–eaten dry, since he didn’t like milk or yogurt, accompanied by glass of orange juice, and followed by a cup of green tea with several slices of lemon, steeped for exactly two minutes. The day would unfold with the New York Times, which he read in his chair, often nodding off between stories, and later–as his illness worsened–between sentences. Later: lunch (a can of soup), a Ken-Ken puzzle, a walk, snack-time (two cookies and an orange), and dinner. In the evenings he’d look up what had happened on that calendar day in various other years from the short daily summaries he’d been keeping for decades and read the highlights to my mother, until Alexa reminded him at exactly 10:30 pm that it was time to empty the dishwasher–a task that was followed by the 11 o’clock news and some novel reading before winding down into bed.

Even in his healthier years, routines kept him going. After retirement, he’d go for a mile-and-a-half walk around the neighborhood every day, a distance that decreased as he grew older, but still kept him healthy and vibrant. And before he developed “trigger finger,” he also made sure to practice violin each afternoon, not because he had any expectation of getting good at it–simply because he enjoyed the process.

During these early days of mourning him, I’ve been thinking about the role of routines in my life–both in keeping me going through these sad, hard times, and also how they’ve served me in my creative life. When I’ve given readings or book talks people often ask me what my writing routines are like, as if I’m aware of some kind of magic formula that can propel them into the world of words. Sorry, folks! If I had one, I’d be happy to share it. I will say that sometimes my attempts at routine trick me into sitting down at my computer at the prescribed time. For me, that’s generally after a short breath-work practice, a cardio or yoga video, and breakfast. (Like my dad I’m a cereal and fruit person, but my go-to is my homemade granola with yogurt and frozen or fresh berries from our yard, depending on the season.) However, getting the words to come out when I’m sitting at the computer seems to be a totally different process. Sometimes words flow easily and I’m in the groove. Often, I’m stuck. And when I’m stuck for too many days in a row, the routine starts to feel stale and boring.

What then? Sometimes it helps me to deliberately not follow the routine for a day or two. Instead of getting to my writing after breakfast, I’ll tackle an administrative task that I’d usually save for later in the day, or make a date with a friend, or go for walk–another routine I usually save for the afternoon. In the summer, I go to the garden, where my best ideas come from weeding.

Sometimes, this process of switching up a routine, which ultimately involves letting go of expectation that I’m going to “produce” anything, can be intensely freeing. But other times, like the present, where I’m still floundering in a foggy and disoriented state of grief and sadness, just makes me feel more adrift. So this is why I’m clinging to routines, sitting down at my computer on Wednesday morning, because Wednesday morning is usually my blogging day, and I’m too much of a school girl to want to break my Substack streak of blogging 49 weeks in a row. And knowing that breath-work and exercise are the first things I’m going to do gives me a reason to get up in the morning. And even as I’ve given myself far more permission to do nothing than I usually would, I’m grateful for my evening routines of Duolingo (another streak I don’t want to break), and voice and piano practice, which, when I abandon judgment, makes me feel transported into a place where I can feel my emotions without having to find words for them.

So, I’m grateful for routines, but also glad, that unlike my father, I’m more comfortable flitting in and out of them as needed. And once my latest batch of homemade granola is depleted, I’ll enjoy switching my breakfast routine to the several boxes of unopened muesli I brought home from New York, so I can keep remembering my father, whether or not I make it to the computer right afterwards.

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The Still Space

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Lately, I haven’t felt like talking very much.

And not talking has translated into not writing. Because writing is like talking–to some specified or unspecified audience out there, or simply to myself.

You can call it writer’s block or mild depression, both of which may be true, but I think it’s different. I feel suspended in “a still space,” a quiet kind of sadness like a sepia filter over a bright picture, muting the light into something eerie and unreachable.

Why am I sad? Why am I stymied? I’m about to lose a parent. And my country is transforming into a place where cruelty and greed are heightened, and glorified violence against those with less privilege due to race, gender, gender identity, economic status, citizenship status, etc. has risen to levels I wouldn’t have thought believable.

But it’s always been this way. I can hear the pundits, the activists, the social media bullhorns saying. The seeds have been sown years ago. Look at our history: enslavement, internment camps, lynchings, family separations, forced relocation of Native Americans, hate crimes against LGBTQ people… just a few of many examples.

Yet, there always seemed another way the lever could tilt–an opposing force that could right the wrongs.

Right now, correcting the angle of the lever seems to be a pretty heavy lift, despite the pundits, the activists, the social media cheerleaders telling us to suck it up and do it anyway.

Which I will. Because it matters. And because even in this still space, my schoolgirl self would never think of not doing her homework. So I’m going through the motions, slowly ticking off the activist tasks on my large to-do list. I can’t allow myself the privilege of wallowing when the lives of so many people who are much more vulnerable than I am are at stake.

And for my own personal sadness, I remind myself that my father is 93. He has been happy and healthy for nearly all of his long and well-lived life. The experience of losing a parent is excruciatingly hard, but it’s something most of us go through at some point. I’m lucky I’ve had 67 years before I’ve had to face it.

The last time I visited my father, about a month ago, he was in the hospital with the New York Times spread across his lap. He was still reading it back then, though in small snatches between nodding off. I’m scared of what’s going to happen after the inauguration, he said.

Now, he makes no pretense of reading the Times or watching the TV news. Now his life has been compressed to a few waking moments between a lot of nodding off, and his conversation has dwindled to silence. Perhaps, he, too, is entering a still space. I hope it’s still enough that he isn’t experiencing the fear many of the rest of us are feeling.

Surprisingly, the one creative thing I’ve been able to, and have been drawn to do, is play the piano. I’ve been focusing on the Bach fantasias (not the fugues that follow) in a minor and c minor–at a slightly slower and more soulful tempo than the way it’s played on the videos. Bach is my father’s favorite composer, so it feels like a way of honoring him. And it feels like a creative space I can be in–perhaps because it’s a space without words.

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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!

Grandmothers, Chopin, Cats

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I’ve been back at the piano nearly four years, and lately I’ve noticed that occasionally I can zone into what I want to express in a piece, rather than flounder around in the notes. It’s such a liberating feeling–like I’ve finally acquired some basic tools in my kit that I can use to deepen my experience of playing. I’m trusting my fingers more to do “the right thing,” giving my heart an opening to put in its own two cents.

Grandma Jeanne with baby Alana (my daughter) 1989. Photo by Shel Horowitz

This got me to thinking again about my Grandma Jeanne, who, in her eighties, still played the piano for at least three hours every day, re-visiting old pieces and learning new ones. In the hot, flat days of her retirement, where she rarely left her Florida condo, itt was piano that gave her days shape, made her life matter–until she developed severe arthritis and couldn’t play anymore.

One of the last times I visited her, she tried to play for me, anyway. Her face was hopeful as she positioned herself on the piano bench, set her hands with their bright red nail polish, straightened her back, took a sweeping glance at the music, a large breath, and placed her hands on the first chord. I watched her wince, as she tried to push through the pain. A few more chords. A run, and then she stopped. Banged her hands down on the piano. Closed the lid.

“You play!” The bark in her speech made it clear this was not a request. It was an order.

At the time, I didn’t have much in my repertoire, but I found her copy of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and began to read through it. She stopped me somewhere in the third line.

“Listen to the melody. These are the important notes. Play them with everything you’ve got! Everything!” Her thinning voice rose to a crescendo, as if she were my coach in one of those Hollywood sports movies, giving the Oscar-moment speech in the scene before the perpetual underdog was about to emerge victorious.

How much did I have to give these notes?

That’s what I think about now, as I play a Chopin Prelude. Instead of worrying so much about the individual notes, I’m focusing on the shapes of the phrases, the interplay of loud and soft. It’s kind of like thinking about the arc of a story. And I’m also thinking, as I often do when playing, about my grandmother cheering me on. “Yes, like that!” I could hear her exuberance as she leaned over close that day, marking the important notes.

I had a cat, Fudge, that died under the piano–a metaphor that seemed more than coincidental, though at the time of his life (and death) the piano was my daughter’s domain more than mine. But he clearly liked music and always seemed to slink into the living room whenever either of the kids were practicing. And while he has no connection to Grandma Jeanne, they somehow both ended up in a poem, that was recently published in Humana Obscura. Even more cool–someone I don’t know read the poem and made this video. (Not exactly what I might have done if I made videos, but I’m extremely touched that the poem affected her enough to do this–just more evidence that our creativity matters!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Revisiting “Finished” Work

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Yesterday, as an offering to alums of my MFA program, I had the opportunity to meet with a literary agent to talk about my piano memoir, Imperfect Pitch. I’d sent her some materials in advance–an overview/summary and some sample chapters, but I had no expectation that she would open the conversation by telling me she’d fallen in love with the book and was happily going to take it. Those pipe-dreaming days are long over, and the book has already been rejected by more than 30 agents. The few who took time to actually write back (rather than simply ghost me) all said the same thing. The issue wasn’t the writing–which was strong. The issue was the marketability.

So, not wanting to waste my precious 15 minutes searching for compliments or reassurance, I dived right in. What could I do to make this book more marketable?

Apparently–though not surprisingly–it’s extremely difficult to publish a memoir with a major publisher unless you are already a celebrity. Of course, more people would rather read about Taylor Swift than about me. I know this. The only reason I’ve been trying the “big-time channels” with this book is that I believe its underlying message will inspire and help people who’ve lost their creative north star, as I did in my music life, succumbing to the pressure of perfectionism and performance and losing all joy in the creative process. So I’d like the book to get greater circulation than it would from a smaller press.

“You need to position this more as a self-help book,” the agent told me. “Have more about the overall arc in the first chapter about what the reader will find out, and make it clear to readers that the ultimate payback will be getting permission to go back to something they cared about. Also include some instructions—make them broad, so they can apply to other arts.”

What? Give away the arc in the first chapter? My fiction-writer self is quaking at that comment, which goes against everything I’ve learned–both in my MFA program and way before. It’s hard enough to develop the darn arc. Why would anyone read a book if they already know what’s going to happen?

“In non-fiction, the journey is in the destination,” the agent said. She also suggested not being afraid of name-dropping if I knew anyone in the writing world that I could say would help promote the book. Ha! I know many people in the writing world, but most of them, like me, are not household names. In the music world, though, I do have only a couple of degrees of separation from Yo Yo Ma. I wrote about the time he guest-coached my younger child’s chamber group in the book–but likely he has better things to do, like call attention to repressive immigration policies by playing cello on the U.S./Mexico border.

Oh well, I’ll tackle that issue later. First, I’ll have to think about the reframing. I’ll keep the current version, just in case, but in general, I like revision, which I think of as re-visiting, rather than correcting something that was previously wrong. I’ve recently discovered that in my piano life, as I re-visit pieces I struggled so hard with four years ago, like Beethoven’s Pathetique, I have a lot more facility in bringing them back. Frequent practicing has made my fingers stronger and more flexible, and I can focus less on the notes and more on the shadings of a piece, how I want to express it, which gets to the soul of the creative process–especially as I’ve learned to let go of the expectation that I’ll play every note and every rhythm perfectly and without bumps.

I think this is also true for writing. As I’m working on several projects at once, I’ve become even more aware of the difference in my writing confidence and fluidity between slogging through a first draft of a new novel, and revising a poem or prose piece where I already “know the notes.”

So I’m willing to dive in and try. Maybe this rewrite will feel too loud and brash, or predictable, but maybe I can strike just the right balance between memoir and self-help to please both the publishing gods and my own creative vision–and feel jazzed by the discovery of what my fingers and brain can do.

Here’s pianist Daniel Barenboim playing the Pathetique. Enjoy!