contemplating incipient sea change

Last New Year’s Eve, I found myself at the piano after a 20-year absence. As a direct result, I am now faced with the largely self-inflicted terror of playing a Bach prelude at a recital.

The recital takes place in the beautiful chapel of a stately old mansion, one of the “seven castles” of Clifton — now a nursing home. Fortunately this means that much of the audience cannot hear. However, I cannot help but recall the debut of my younger daughter Marla’s choir at an Alzheimer’s unit when one of the residents yelled out angrily,

“Y’all suck!”

I believe he also threw something, but that could just be me embellishing.

And while even I can see the humor of being dangled out as unwilling bait to an audience that may lack the inhibition necessary to give a kind reception, I am alternately quaking and cursing at the prospect.

Still, this travesty (see definition below) occurs Saturday unless weather cooperates in my rescue with a blizzard.

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
trav·es·ty [trav-uh-stee] noun, plural -ties, verb, -tied, -ty·ing.

1. a literary or artistic burlesque of a serious work or subject, characterized by grotesque or ludicrous incongruity of style, treatment, or subject matter.
2. A literary or artistic composition so inferior in quality as to be merely a grotesque imitation of its model.

* * *

It’s not that I can’t play. I’m competent. The piano has been part of me since the age of five – but life intruded, and although I have a sweet little spinet, obtained fifteen years ago by serendipity and delivered to my house by generous helpers, it had sat silent.

Last December 31, my eldest daughter Élise and friends Karen and Richard Floeckher came to celebrate New Year’s Eve at my house. I had known from Élise that Richard is a musicologist and philosopher, teaches piano and plays beautifully. Richard, Élise said, really cannot walk past a piano without wanting to play it – much the way I feel myself even though my actions would seem to indicate otherwise.

So, in the faint and hesitant hope that this might turn out to be true, I placed in plain sight next to the piano a pile of dog-eared books of wonderful arrangements for one piano, four hands. By 11:00 Richard had generously acquiesced in my ploy and we were happily ensconced in the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony .

Fast forward through the recital last May where we played it, to the recital this Saturday where I am slated, despite my mutinous response, to play said Bach prelude – on my own.

* * *

My family and friends, Richard in particular, are (perhaps painfully) aware that I have been puzzling over – no, struggling over – this recital. Why on earth would I (or anyone!) choose to enter into a situation that causes so much seemingly unnecessary stress?

By last week, I’d even come up with my own definition:

re-ci’-tal: me trying to play something that others can do better in front of an audience that knows it

However, I have wanted very much to transcend that perspective. I hope that my thoughts about this will be of some use to you.

* * *

It occurred to me a few nights ago that as someone with a certain nostalgia around baseball, I choose very pointedly to attend the minor league games of the Dayton Dragons, having no interest whatsoever in the Cincinnati Reds. Yet the Reds clearly play with a higher level of competence and, perhaps, innate ability.

What I realized is that my pleasure in watching is not about perfection – there’s no definition for that in sports, really. It’s actually about feeling a part of a game for which I have a natural fondness, as the players act in the moment, and take joy in both the physical delivery of the strategy and in the results. It’s about feeling inspired by the efforts of each of those young men to come together as a team and move fluidly to achieve a result. It’s about their personal strength as they learn to recover in the space of a blink from their mistakes. It’s about each of their reasons for being there, their stories, their efforts to gain mastery in an area of importance to them. It is much the same joy and inspiration I take in my daughter Marla’s beautiful singing.

It seemed to me then that this is the power of The Recital.

A recital is about the journey of each of us and how that journey has brought us into the room –

–and here is why my path has brought me here – first, to Richard’s studio, a powerful space that he creates with his person and his knowledge and his love of musical sound; and then, to the recitals he painstakingly arranges for his students:

I think I was offered this intensive retreat in my own story so that I could reclaim:

• the piano, my seat in front of it, my fingers speaking through the keys
• the right to be taught without being harmed
• the right take joy in something without being brilliant at it
• the right to be joyfully imperfect, less than gifted, my right to simply be and to play and to have fun – without being judged either by myself or by anyone else. As my friend Ed pointed out, it is perhaps not without reason that it is called “playing.”

A recital is about sharing your very best when your very best is unremarkable, and being able to feel spectacular about having come so far and take pleasure in exercising your capacity to learn. And, as Ed said, maybe performing is about trusting others to receive us generously and to even be enchanted by our presence and by our effort, by our sharing a part of our hearts.

Perhaps it’s about the unique joys inherent in being a student of something. Not a master, not a performer – but the fascination and awe and utter delight that one experiences by entering into the vastness of a foreign and complex world accompanied by an inspired and inspiring guide who knows it well. The freedom, the license, to be a novice. What a gift! And yet, it is a gift that requires a more solid core than the gift of having innate genius for something.

It is about understanding that joy and perfection are not intertwined other than to take joy in the fact that we are perfect in our imperfection.

It’s about actually living the belief that “Imperfect trumps Undone” and allowing this experience of that principle to flow into other important areas of your life.

It is about distinguishing between the tension that naturally exists when there is but a single opportunity to deliver something you value to others – and the anxiety that painfully results from a perceived threat to self if it is not delivered in the way that you wish. It is about successfully dissolving that anxiety by finally comprehending that there is no true threat – and by doing so, making the space for fun. It is about knowing, once and for all, that no matter what happens, I’m going to be okay – with me.

It is about the guts and struggle of doing this.

And perhaps it isn’t reclaiming until it’s done publicly. Perhaps none of this can be accomplished in one’s own company. As Karen brilliantly observed last night, you can’t “sin boldly” alone in your room.

Too, it is about taking the risk of rejection that is implicit in offering a gift of oneself –

So, here is what I would like to offer as my own path crosses other paths, something of mine that I would like to share some small way on Saturday – and with you, now:

I would like to share with you my love of the notes

and my joy in touching the keys, in making the sound;

I would like to invite you into that joy.

Perhaps my doing so will give you permission to play (or work) at something yourself; perhaps just pleasure in the sound — or vicarious pleasure in my attempt to take notes on a page and approximate an ideal –

It occurs to me that something doesn’t have to be flawless to be entertaining. The music of Bach certainly stands on its own, even in my hands, as does the personality of the one through whom it (more or less) flows. Perhaps this is part of what Richard meant when he said that a performance (if one is willing to “sin boldly”) can have flaws and still have grace and elegance. I think how often I have hung on to a beautiful recording that has some skips in it while putting aside its bland, but unscratched, twin. So, perhaps on one level or another, I will be able to be entertaining after all.

* * *

To bring these pieces together within the space of this recital, these beliefs about life and accomplishment and personal worth – and love, is what I wish to do. It is this, and not perfection in the notes, that will denote success for me; it is a powerful shift, in short, sea change.