Vivaldi Weeping in His Grave

Ruminating lately about stage fright reminds me of the most terrifying performance of my life, fairly soon after I had started playing again as an adult. My esteemed teacher of that era, Lauraine Carpenter, now Principal Trumpet in the Toledo Symphony, had two promising students and thought it would be nice—right, nice for her!—if we played the Vivaldi Double Trumpet Concerto at a Community Women’s Orchestra concert.

(Two of my former trumpet teachers are in the Toledo Symphony; so is Mel Harsh, my very first trumpet teacher. I didn’t study with either of them in Toledo. I had a crush on Mel Harsh. He was handsome. He drove a little dark-green Pinto. He told me all the time to play more quietly.)

All too soon the dreaded moment arrived, and Dev and I rose from our seats. I had actually considered, briefly, breaking one of my own fingers with a hammer to avoid having to do it.

Disaster ensued immediately. Then a cold clarity set in: Is it too late to get out of this? Yes, unless the earth swallowed us that very second. In the end, we hit a good percentage of right notes, and the audience, which was in fact very warm and supportive, loved it and our teacher was happy and we were happy.

Afterwards, a friend who was there said, astonishingly, that she couldn’t tell I was scared! The only time I was more scared was in telephone-pole-climbing school when I worked for PG&E.

I guess the performer is most acutely aware of any fear, and of anything that goes wrong. If you don’t signal that something is amiss, a lot of people won’t notice. My friend Paul Trupin, who played guitar in Pray for Rain but who is now dead, once told me, “No matter what happens, I always act like, ‘I totally mastered that.’”

If something very obviously goes wrong but you keep going—if you think, “Oh, well,” instead of falling on the floor and crying—I think most people are understanding and even sympathetic.

In Eloise Ristad’s book A Soprano on Her Head: Right-Side-Up Reflections on Life and Other Performances, she says to observe the physical manifestations of nervousness and will them to increase. A hundred butterflies in the stomach? Go for two hundred.

Sooner or later the symptoms will reach an extreme and naturally abate, whereas resistance prolongs them.

Lauraine advised visualizing the performance beforehand over and over, to let the anxiety well up and pass many times, to kind of wring it all out in advance.

When I was in music school, John Clayton, the bassist and bandleader, came to do a master class. Someone asked about stage fright. As I recall, his answer was kind of harsh: “What are you doing thinking about yourself? That’s your ego.”

But, put more kindly, I think that’s exactly right.

The number-one most helpful thing for me is, right before starting, to hear the first phrase in my head and to take a big breath and just play the first note. Very often, the fear washes away immediately.

Yet, it can always happen that in the last split-second, the mean trumpet gremlin whispers urgently, “I think you’re going to miss the first—” SPLAT! So you never know. Plus some days the overall conditions aren’t favorable. Some days you just sound good and some days you don’t.

But assuming you don’t actually die, the worst that can happen is that the conductor/bandleader stops the performance and screams “Get off the stage and never come back!” Then you would just have to find some group to play with who’d never heard of you.

For years I’ve thought it was too bad that I feel I have to play so quietly in my current apartment, due to the presence of the building manager below. It seemed like it took a lot of the fun out of it. Then I saw someone’s remark online that being forced to play quietly in a similar situation had done great things for his tone and control, and since then it has been fine.

I also have had this idea that when I do jazz improvisation, it should be extremely exciting and I should sound like Dizzy Gillespie, with lots of high notes and fast runs, even though that’s not my favorite thing to listen to.

Before I played at the café a few weeks ago, I decided to try for beautiful and lyrical rather than exciting, and it felt much better.

Maybe the way I’m supposed to do things is the way I like to do them rather than the way I think someone else wants me to do them.

Writing is the same. For many years, I thought, “I should write a novel,” ignoring the fact that this would be a backbreaking strain, since I have zero ability in that area. I really just like to write about my life! Finally it dawned on me, oh, maybe I should just write about my life.