Playing Scared

by Sara Solovitch

  By the time I called him, he had been shuttling back and forth between music and sports for the past fifteen years. One of his sports success stories was Brigitte Foster-Hylton, the Jamaican track star who suffered a series of disappointing performances in the 100-meter hurdles. When Greene met her, she was already thirty-four, practically a senior citizen in a sport like the hurdles. She was training to compete in the 2009 World Championships in Berlin, and Greene’s first impression of her was typically blunt: “In spite of her college degree and years competing at the highest levels in her event for many years, she didn’t know how to use her mind to win.” But he was impressed by her motivation and work ethic. He trained with her in New York and Kingston, Jamaica, where she ran on a track littered with weeds and trash. That was where he spotted a problematic behavior. Whenever she approached the hurdle, her eyes dropped and focused on the ground in front. Though she didn’t realize it, it was throwing off her body position and stride. Under Greene’s guidance, she changed her posture, learning to keep her head up and eyes focused on the space above the next hurdle. He gave her the handouts that by then he had developed for his Juilliard students, explaining how to focus, visualize, and move back and forth between left and right brain. They worked on breathing, centering, and prerace routines. A couple of months later in Berlin, she became the world champion and went on to win seven more major competitions at the unheard-of age of thirty-five.

  But while Greene guided Foster-Hylton and others to victory, he berated himself for what he termed his “two big failures” of recent memory. The first happened when he was trying to sell his house in California. Thinking to save himself some money by selling it independently, he went to a meeting where he was invited to pitch potential home buyers about the sale. He choked. The second time happened at Juilliard, when he was asked to explain his coaching style in a two-minute presentation before faculty and students. He had been busy all week and didn’t prepare. “It was terrible,” he remembered. “I was very embarrassed, uncomfortable to the point where I have trouble talking about it even now.”

  “I can relate,” I began to confide, but he was on a roll. Performance wasn’t about being comfortable. If you want to be comfortable, stay home and play your piano in a soundproofed room. But learn to channel your adrenaline flow and you’ll give a high-energy performance. Dismissively, he said that all the young musicians he met were either meditating or medicating away their anxiety.

  “That’s what I’ve been doing,” I blurted.

  He didn’t seem surprised. “I want my people to have high energy,” he said flatly. “Everybody else is trying to relax and calm themselves with beta-blockers. Not my students.”

  “But how do you learn to get past that?” I asked.

  “Do you really want to know how?” he asked. “I’ll teach you.”

  Chapter 13

  TEST DRIVE

  I began working with sport psychologist Don Greene in early May, ten days before my solo recital at the downtown library. I had committed to this recital months earlier, imagining it as a dress rehearsal for the real deal. Now, as it approached, I worried that I’d underestimated the event. It was part of a monthly series presenting local musicians, both professional and semiprofessional. Lots of people would show up. It was advertised on the radio and drew a devoted following of retirees, office workers, and fellow musicians. If anything, I was beginning to think that this recital was the litmus test. I had underplayed its import, in part because of its cheesy name, Munching with Mozart, but also because the library, any library, to me represented a safe haven. I’d spent so many hours inside this one that I knew most of the librarians and recognized quite a few of the homeless people who read and napped at its tables.

  As I explained all this to Greene, he cut me off. “Let me prepare you for this fight,” he said. “So you don’t go into the ring and get beat up.” Clearly, I was now under the tutelage of a sport psychologist and the metaphors had changed. I had found Greene in San Diego, where he’d recently moved to work with the USA Track & Field Team. Not all the athletes were buying what he had to teach, however, and it would be weeks before the International Olympic Committee decided whether it wanted what he was selling: the performance inventory he’d staked his life on. While he was waiting for the verdict (a resounding yes), he would amuse himself with me. But first I had to fill out his inventory, his Bible, the version he adapted for musicians. I had filled out something similar for Noa Kageyama nearly a year earlier, but Greene was insistent that he consider my profile through fresh eyes.

  It took about an hour to complete, but I could tell at once that my responses had changed in the past year. I’d been toughened by all those trial runs: the evening soirees at my house, the master classes, the piano teacher recitals, piano camp recitals, and airport recitals. After months of demanding lessons and four- and five-hour daily practice sessions, my musical confidence was higher than it had ever been. Sometimes, as I heard myself at the piano, I felt pretty pleased with myself. So while I didn’t anticipate it was going to be a slam dunk, I was taken aback when Greene called with the results.

  “Your left brain is alive and well,” he announced in his clipped Long Island accent. “Unfortunately, this performance is a right brain activity. You’re setting yourself up for a left brain show.” I’d been thinking so much about the details—articulation, dynamics, voicing, pedaling—that I was in overthink. Once, at my lesson, when I complained about lack of focus, my teacher had stared at me and told me my problem was hyperfocus. I knew, of course, that an active left brain meant tighter muscles and a louder internal critic, but Greene put it to me in stark terms. “It means that you can do quite well for some period of time. But with a feeling of danger, a slip in focus—you make a mistake and the committee’s going to come in.” My own panel of judges, he meant. “And you won’t recover.” The key to performance, he declared, was all in the right brain.

  I wondered aloud if I even had a right brain, which he found funny. But in truth, my body was filled with clues of left brain dominance. At the piano, I was most definitely a righty player. After years of practicing yoga, my right leg was still a fraction longer than the left, and the right side of my back was significantly stronger. Such lopsidedness is far from uncommon. There is a whole science dedicated to the asymmetry of body and brain. According to one evolutionary theory, the predilection for right-handedness can be traced to ancient times, when women, the primary hunters, carried their babies in their left arms, where the sound of the heart soothed and quieted the infant. Ultrasound studies have found a strong preference for right-handedness (that is, left brain dominance) in the womb. From fifteen weeks of gestation, the typical fetus sucks on the right thumb; from thirty-eight weeks of gestation, it shows a preference for turning its head to the right. A whole body of research identifies “pathological left-handedness” as a consequence of prenatal stress. Studies, some discredited, have found that left-handed people were more likely to suffer from immune disorders, dyslexia, epilepsy, autism, and schizophrenia. More recent studies suggest that left-handedness may actually confer intellectual advantage. A sample of elementary school children found a correlation between left-handedness and high IQ scores. A 2013 review of research into handedness and cognition found that the main predictor of cognitive performance isn’t whether an individual is left-handed or right-handed. It is determined by the strength of the preference. The more ambidextrous one is, the more communication there is between the brain’s hemispheres, leading to better intellectual performance.

  I was never going to be a lefty, but I realized that Greene was correct: I needed to find a way to switch to the right brain—and stay there—throughout the performance. He was telling me exactly what Kageyama had told me. It was all about centering. “Never again—not in your sleep, not in your thoughts—are you to sit down at the piano without first forming an intent and centering. Center before your lesson. Center before you begin to practice. Center before the library recit
al.”

  In construction, centering refers to the temporary wooden framework used to build an arch or dome; it’s responsible for the integrity of the structure. At the potter’s wheel, centering is that process from which all growth and potential arise in the clay. Psychologists use the word centering to describe the act of coming into a state where the mind is focused yet relaxed. Yoga teachers talk about a centered state of balance between body and mind, while folklorists talk about the navel of the world. In a 1985 interview, Joseph Campbell, de facto expert on the world’s mythology, put it this way: “The function of mythological symbols is to give you a sense of ‘Aha! Yes. I know what it is, it’s myself.’ This is what it’s all about, and then you feel a kind of centering, centering, centering all the time.”

  Greene cited research that found an increase of alpha waves almost always precedes a fully centered peak performance. It was all rather confusing. The biofeedback program I played with months before had measured beta waves, which are associated with active thinking and concentration. Richard Davidson, the neuroscientist, extolled the benefit of gamma waves for changing brain function and improving attentiveness. Now here was Greene talking about alpha waves, which he called “the gateway to the subconscious.” According to one study he quoted, elite golfers produce a burst of alpha waves before hitting their best shots. The left brain goes into hibernation; verbal thought comes to a grinding halt; the right brain takes over.

  As we began to work—one hour every morning by phone—it would take me thirty or forty seconds to locate my center, and even then I wouldn’t be sure I’d really found it. Standing up, I would imagine a Hula-Hoop rotating around my hips. I would try to sense where it lay, two inches below the navel and two inches deep inside me, according to Greene. “But pinpointing its precise location is not as important as getting out of your head and focusing your energy down.” After a few days, I could find it in five or ten seconds—sitting at the piano, gaze focused just below eye level. If your eyes move upward, it usually means you’re engaging in left brain thinking.

  I centered at the kitchen table while looking over the piano score and playing the music in my head. (“If you make a mistake, stop the ‘tape,’ rewind, and do it again,” Greene advised.) I centered while playing my scales. (“Slowly, like a new student. Imagine a concert stage, a huge Steinway, and this elephant comes walking out in a purple polka-dot bathing suit, sits down at the piano, adjusts the pedal, and starts playing Rachmaninoff flawlessly. If you can imagine that, you’re in right brain.”) I centered before my lesson. (“There’s no reason for you to play until you’re ready to play. And that means centering. Switch to right brain, hear the first few bars, and play. Feel it. See it. Hear it.”)

  Don Greene (Courtesy of Larny Mack)

  All those years of military training, at West Point, in the U.S. Army, as a Green Beret, had given Greene a commanding manner, and he gave instructions like orders. I welcomed the imperative. His style grounded the trendy spirituality that lay at the heart of his teachings. Though his advice wasn’t new, I sometimes felt as if I were hearing it for the first time. Centering would give me the ability to play freely, not perfectly. Perfection was an illusion, I reminded myself. Besides, in and of itself, it was boring. I’d attended so many boring concerts over the years, concerts that were exercises in perfection. As a listener, I craved excitement and discovery. It’s our faults and mistakes that provide guideposts to our higher capabilities. “People want to hear excitement,” Greene agreed. “They want to hear energy. When you play it safe, when every detail is perfect, chances are it isn’t exciting. It’s like a tennis player who makes every serve. They’re not playing at the edge of their capabilities. Until they start faulting, they don’t know how much range they have for faster serves.”

  Take risks. Push the edge. Wondering what it would take to jar me out of my comfort zone, I thought of what had happened to my friend Mary, who in her twenties was dining at a fancy restaurant when she choked on a piece of meat. Her face swelled and turned beet red as she gagged for breath. Her date stared at her, frozen. She gestured down at her rib cage: Didn’t he know the Heimlich maneuver? He reached across, as if waking from a dream, and grabbed her by the breasts. Mary gasped in shock, and the chunk of meat flew out of her mouth and across the table. Somehow I, too, needed to be saved.

  “No more negative self-talk,” Greene ordered. “What you think is what you get. What you fear is what you attract.” Nobody needed to convince me about the power of the mind, but when Greene warned me that my fear could manifest its very object, something in me fought back. “Banish all doubt!” he advised, to which I mutely answered, “Ye who enter here.”

  “You’ve been watching the same negative horror films for too long,” he insisted. “Burn them. Let them go.”

  Day after day we talked, and as the library recital got closer, the conversations got longer. The process was repetitive and exhausting, and I sometimes wondered whether my time would be better spent at the piano. Greene sensed my doubts. “I’m used to resistance,” he said. “There are two things holding you back, and that’s fear and negative thinking.”

  That was hard to argue. All I had learned and practiced over the past year—the psychological insights, the meditation, not to mention the Brahms, the Bach, and the Debussy—hardly mattered if I couldn’t break through my wall of fear. I had to believe in myself enough to stand before an assembly and demand its attention. To say, Listen to me as I speak through this music. To assert, I have something to say.

  I had, for the first time in my life, begun reading self-help books. The Magic of Thinking Big. The Tools. Live Your Truth. The Power of Intention. I began each one thinking it might have something unique to tell me, some nugget I was missing and hadn’t understood: a secret truth that would be as eye-opening and revelatory as a grab for the breasts.

  None of them helped me as much as one of my last conversations with Greene. “How many years have you been playing?” he asked as we approached the ten-day mark. “How many lessons have you had? You’re well trained. You’re a good student. With my help, with Noa’s help, it’s going to go well. You can do anything you set your mind to. If you took up rock climbing, I’m sure you’d figure that out. But my money’s on you with the piano. Say it with conviction: It’s going to go well.”

  That was what he said to me the day before my recital, but the words that stuck were: “You can do anything you set your mind to.” I recognized those words. They were the very words my mother said to me throughout my childhood, into my adulthood, and well into her senility. They were the words that brought me full circle.

  The night before the library recital, I scribbled a detailed description of how I wanted it to go. No, not “wanted.” Intended. Want, as Greene informed me, was a dysfunctional word. “Wanting creates more wanting. Life is not a discovery. It’s a creation.” There was a time I would have dismissed this as just another platitude, but now I embraced it as a motto, another good-luck charm for my growing stockpile. My most important charm was the blurry black-and-white photograph of my late aunty Maddy—my quintessential audience—that I kept on the piano rack. Now a little wooden totem sat next to it. I placed it there after attending a workshop by Margret Elson, a pianist and psychotherapist in Oakland, California, who specialized in the problems of artists and performers. I liked her integrative approach and the way she used both physical prompts and meditation to help overcome stage fright. When she suggested that we use a cue or physical prompt to enter into a state of relaxation—hers was a polished green stone—I immediately recalled the totem that my best friend, Kathie, gave me in high school. For years, I wore it around my neck like an amulet. As soon as the workshop was done, I went home, found it in an old shoebox, and added it to my stockpile of talismans.

  The morning of the library recital, my hands were cold and unresponsive as I warmed up at home. As I played slowly through my pieces, the errors mounted, and I was grateful that Greene had insisted on
scheduling a final phone session. “It’s going to go well,” he assured me. “And no matter what happens, keep playing. If the legs of the piano fall off, keep playing. Never stop playing.” I thought of Vladimir Horowitz’s injunction as he accompanied the young Gitta Gradova to a solo performance with the New York Philharmonic. “No matter what happens, don’t stop playing!” the famously jittery Horowitz told her on the cab ride to Carnegie Hall. “Remember, no matter what happens, keep on going! Don’t stop! It’s prowincial to stop!”1 The last thing I wanted was to be provincial.

  Picture of Aunty Maddy that Sara kept on her piano (Author’s family photo)

  “I can do anything I set my mind to,” I muttered as I climbed the stairs to the library’s recital room, my husband, Rich, and son Max in tow. They’d been hearing a lot of these affirmations over the past few days and offered some of their own. “I love to play with you, Mom,” Max said. He was joining me for a Haydn violin sonata, the first piece on the program. “It’s going to go well,” I said to myself, sounding a little grim. The recital room was adjacent to the children’s room, where I’d spent so many contented hours, searching (unobserved, I now remembered wistfully) for books, with Max, then a toddler, curling up in my lap at story time. I stared at the piano, a decent upright that I had tried out a couple of days earlier to get a feel for the keys and the acoustics of the room. Now as I sat down to warm up, half a dozen mothers and children wandered in to listen. It made a nice first audience. Rich set up his iPad to record the recital, and when I looked up a moment later, there was Lynn Kidder, my erstwhile coach. She wore a huge smile. She had heard me play through my pieces a few days before and, if anything, was more positive than Don Greene. I was a different pianist from the one she had met a year ago, she said. Rich, of course, had told me the same, but he was my husband and I wasn’t sure I could believe him.