Arts Blog

The Calm Before the Storm

It’s coming up to the last few weeks of summer, and I’m doing all I can to get ready for a busy concert season beginning in the fall. The more I can prepare now, the smoother the coming season will be. My kitchen wall is a mess of printed-out monthly calendar pages haphazardly taped with blue painter’s tape between historic railroad maps of Oregon and an embroidery of my deceased guinea pig. I have written my event dates (about 100 so far), my husband’s concerts (Jason is an incredible cellist and conducts the Corvallis Youth Symphony), and key events for our teenage daughters, who have concerts and competitions of their own.

This year is my busiest since leaving Germany, where I was a member of the Artemis String Quartet. The Artemis kept a robust international touring schedule, with seven managers in seven countries, publicist, and a personal secretary. Beyond a touring schedule of around seventy concerts, we were making recordings and serving as professors at the Universität der Künste Berlin and Master Teachers at the Queen Elizabeth in Brussels.

I felt, during those years, that my feet never actually touched the earth. Such a whirlwind of travel, rehearsal, teaching, and high-pressure concerts! Our kids were small, and I missed out on so much. Birthdays, school events. To this day, Jason and the girls banter about things they did or saw, things I’ll never know about or be able to share. But that’s the trade-off for being an obsessed classical musician. The curse of practicing so much and succeeding in a way that looks, from the outside, like an enviable career, is the distance it creates to the people that matter the most. What’s the point of coming home from tour if you have no one to come home to?

In the years since returning from Germany, I’ve been chasing that illusive work/life balance. That’s a particularly tough one for a musician, especially if you don’t have a stable job in education or orchestra. The tradeoff for my unconventional, erratic life is tremendous satisfaction, personal choice, and crafting a life of excitement, travel, and variety.

I’ve been concentrating on being a mom to two teenagers, building my Oregon music life, and finding the right balance of in-state and out-of-town activities. For out-of-country tours, I’ll only play if Jason’s in my group and we can bring the kids. That is one tour to Germany every year, and one other fun place. All of this depends, naturally, on what my kids need of me, how much support Jason can give me, and what I need for myself. It’s an interconnected spiderweb of a life, and I love every minute of it!

Looking at my packed schedule, it’s going to require a surgeon’s precision to manage my every minute. These days, I have four chamber groups touring, a book coming out, concertos and solo appearances, a radio residency, a music academy, and book events such as festivals and readings. I’m serving as Ambassador for the Oregon chapter of the American String Teacher’s Association and I have 30 students. And I’m deep into writing my second book. I have a great team helping me out – a manager, a literary agent, publisher, publicist, handful of employees for my summer camps, and two assistants. And two guinea pigs. They keep me grounded.

So, how’s it all going to work, you ask? My first job is to line up my repertoire for the year, then decide when I need to be concert-ready on each piece, and how long that will take per project. In classical music, there is no such thing as procrastination. We all know the fear, the public humiliation of a concert under-prepared. That’s just not going to happen.

I did, once, underestimate my practice. It was when I was in that hazy time in life, when you are both a student and starting to make a career. Half child, half adult. I no longer had someone checking on my progress, making sure I was ready. And this particular concert was my Kennedy Center debut. Bach Chaconne: one of the most demanding pieces for solo violin, both technically and emotionally. It didn’t occur to me until I was standing in the wings that I was terribly underprepared and could potentially fall flat on my face. My entire body felt like someone had poured ice cold water into my veins, and I was seeing spots. My feet felt glued to the floor, and as the applause started, the stagehand nudged me to go out. It’s not like I didn’t know the piece or hadn’t practiced. I’d been playing it for more than ten years, had practiced it hundreds of hours. But I was just coming off a huge tour to Central Asia where I hadn’t had enough time by myself to practice, and I had massive jetlag. I was ready for a small concert. Just not this big stage, this big expectation.

In the end, all was well. But I’ll never forget that feeling. Like waking up from a nightmare about being in high school and you forgot to go to a class all semester and you are staring at a test that you can’t possibly comprehend. But it wasn’t a dream. It was real. And I’ll never repeat that experience. I’ll always have a year’s worth of calendar taped to my wall, sticky notes on my window, a family to check in on me, and guinea pigs to ground the entire experience.