Stewart in Queen Anne writes:
This whole Joshua Bell experiment in the D.C. Metro is huge music news! ["Pearls before Breakfast," Washington Post, April 8, 2007] What I got thinking about was the stage fright. I mean, here's a guy who sells out Carnegie Hall, and the D.C. Metro gives him butterflies! Do these pros even get stage fright? Also, I wonder if Mr. Bell had been playing one of my favorites, would I have stopped?
Stewart, from the explosion this story caused on the classical music blogosphere, and the number of e-mails I personally got just for bringing it up on the air, I agree, this story was definitely a button-pusher! This monster experiment lurked for years, you can be sure, until someone fed it: put a celebrity musician in street clothes in a busy subway stop during rush hour, have him play time-tested music from Bach and record with a hidden video camera to see if anybody noticed, or even stopped. While the bigger question about beauty winning out over the mundane stole the spotlight, you were caught by the issue of Bell's nervousness. He had to win over a new audience - one that didn't ask (or even know) of his presence.
Do the pros get stage fright? Try throbbing headaches, cold sweaty hands that slip off the keys, racing heartbeats louder than the music, incontinence ... the works! Piano god Vladimir Horowitz, for all his fear-some technique, had to take a 12-year break from the stage. When he re-turned, he had to be physically pushed onto the stage of Carnegie Hall. As if to confirm his monster, the first notes off his fingers that night were flubs. Damage done, however, he relaxed. This was a lifelong pattern for Horowitz. The master of Rachmaninoff's frightful finger frenzies failed at fight-or-flight!
Hypnosis, meditation, yoga, heavy metal and other creative nostrums against stage meltdown are out there. As you read this, a performing artist somewhere on the globe is praying backstage with a glass of water and a prescription vial of beta blockers. Pop, pop, in they go, and ... presto! the imminent death waiting on stage has just been softened to a promised, but manageable, humiliation.
Beta-blockers work on your heart, to get the rhythm under control. That's justification enough for a musician. After all, without a solid beat from your ticker, where's your reference? Breathing and meditation work for mild sufferers of stage fright. I found my cure as a teenager, when the solution fit the hormonal profile: loud heavy metal music backstage, enjoyed minutes before the concert, through good, warm-sounding German headphones. I think it was my way of telling my cardiac muscle who was boss. Because a Bach fugue requires me to have about five different heartbeats going simultaneously, I had better lay down the master track, the reference. I think that's what I told myself. Also, the musicians in my headphones were probably wearing leather pants and had 17 girlfriends each, and that was an amusing thought to carry out on stage as I adjusted my boutonnière. Life was so serious then.
So Joshua Bell goes busking for coins in the Washington, D.C., metro, and almost nobody notices.
I'll call your bluff and say you would have stopped if you tell me what piece would have floated off Joshua Bell's 1713 Stradivarius to freeze you in your tracks, OK? KING FM is broadcasting listener's favorites this month, so now's your chance - e-mail your requests. If it's a violin piece, we very likely have Joshua Bell performing it!
Your questions? E-mail me at SeanM@King.orgSean MacLean can be heard weekdays from 3 to 7 p.m. on www.king.org and 98.1 KING-FM.
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