For two years, the stringing, tuning, and playing of my dust-covered harp as been gnawing from my list of “want to do’s”. Though parenting is inherently creative, stealing moments for other creative outlets is an elusive goal and, when it happens, a thrilling victory in the life of this kuntrywife.
My concert grand harp has been standing dormant and neglected for so long. It has gradually moved from the edge of the middle of the living room into a dead corner. Recently, it turned its back on our living space and huddled alone beneath a thickening coat of dusty despair. One, two, three, and finally four strings had broken under the stress of signficant temperature fluctuations and sprawled lifelessly on the sound board and beyond in loose and limply disorganized curves.
I’ll never play again, I’ve thought so many times. That thought often lead to the next thought…I’ll never be good again anyway. Creeping shortly behind came, I never was any good anyway. A little spiral of negative projection and self-defeat that supported the march of untouched dust on my former instrument’s gracefully carved wooden column.
I began taking harp lessons in the fourth grade. My first harp was a tiny rented lap harp. As I grew over the years, so did my harps. By high school, a parade of rented harps gave way to the purchase of an old and beautiful full size Lyon and Healy concert grand. Despite it’s magnificence, it had to compete with the other pulls of adolescent life … driving around, sneaking out of the house, theater rehearsal, track meets, keggers, homework, endless phone conversations, sleeping in, and boyfriends. My 1-2 hours of daily practice dwindled to just minutes each day, reluctantly squeezed in between perms and mowing the lawn. I continued with weekly lessons and played with the Bainbridge Symphony Orchestra for the U.S premier of an Erhu concerto by prominent Chinese composers. I didn’t like playing with an orchestra. It made me nervous and was a lonely experience. As the only harp, I sat alone and had to count what seemed like thousands of measures before my parts came up. I never liked counting for that long and struggled to stay calm and focused during these long anticipatory passages. When my parts did come around, there were no other musicians to look to or play with. As a somewhat shy teenager, this was a nightmare.
Though I think I was a moderately talented harpist with the benefit of 12 years of weekly lessons, I was terrible in front of other people. When I had to play in front of people, my hands would shake and sweat making it nearly impossible to play the correct notes in a moving, musical fashion. As I struggled to get through music I normally played well, my anxiety reaction increased making my hands shake more and my focus vanish in thick clouds of panic. It was a quick and vicious little cycle that made me dread and avoid all performance situations. What is the point of years of training and practice if not to perform? I think people just thought I was weird about it and I figured I must not be a great musician if I couldn’t perform calmly and successfully in front of an audience.
When I was a junior in high school, my harp teacher invited me to play in the Festival of Harps she was organizing for performance at the University of Washington. 25 acclaimed harpists from around the country would be flying in to join the performance. I was younger then all but one of the harpists by at least 10 years. I was in awe and thought at least with 27 harps on stage, if my hands shook and I missed a chord, no one would notice. I would not be the lone harpist.
On performance night, I waited backstage as the pros showed up. They all seemed so confident. Twenty minutes before the curtains were to open, ALL of them started popping tiny pills. All these performers I admired and aspired after were popping beta-blockers to counter stage fright. I felt like they were cheating while I had to sweat through my part of the performance feeling like a shaky pubescent loser while they sailed through under the medicated bliss of pharmeceutically induced peformance greatness.
When we all rolled the first chord together on stage, it was chilling. Drug haze and all, being part of harp army was inspiring.
I played through college with the same performance avoidance. I got roped into one symphony bit that was disastrous in all the familiar and sweaty ways. When I left college, I left my harp at my mom’s house in Ohio and began my serial habitation of small, cheap apartments in Seattle. Though I could have squeezed the harp in somewhere, I was over it. I wanted a break from the confines of my exlusively classical music training and felt a little resentful that I was completely incapable of improvising. I wished that my 12 years of work had earned me the ability to “jam” with other musicians or play something slightly social and interactive and fun. Instead, in my post-harp-break-up-early-twenties angst, I felt all I knew how to do was play someone else’s ideas accurately instead of playing something of my own creation.
Six years later, my dad died and I bought a house with the money he left me. With all that space and adulthood, there was no excuse not to accept my harp when it arrived in the moving truck my mom sent from her new home in Utah. It was good to see it again but things were still awkward between me and the harp.
Three years later, I married a musician. Enamored by my harp and the lore of my harping past, he incessantly encouraged me to play it. I incessantly resisted, giving in only to agree to a brief performance at our wedding with him. Though brief, it was a disaster. Thinking about it at all makes me cringe. Thank god, the microphone was pushed so far away from me that most people couldn’t hear my bridal musical massacre over the ocean breeze.
Two years later, he convinced me to play a Stevie Wonder tune with him at our friends’ wedding. This was my first positive performance experience. Perhaps it was the vicodin I was taking for my tooth abcess. Or maybe it was the welcoming environment of that gorgeous same sex wedding. It could have just been luck. Whatever it was, I enjoyed it. We did “You and I” with harp and vocals.
Thinking I was over my performance problem, we tried to repeat this at two more weddings. One of which required driving the harp all the way to California and carrying it down a steep rocky ledge to a cobbled river bed. The other involved a one hour rental harp in Malibu, CA. The former, was a poor performance but one that my self-esteem survived thanks to the help of beautiful surroundings and glasses of honey mead. The latter was an astounding disaster. I played without any warm up and almost no practicing for the preceding 3 months. I was wearing a bridesmaid dress that was unquestionably unflattering to my pearish figure. To top it off, I botched it all in front of lots of people I would have to see again and again for the rest of my life. Martin Sheen was there, too. After the disaster, one drunk cousin in law walked up to me and gave me consoling pat on the back and said, “it’s just not your instrument”. I didn’t have the stomach to tell him that it actually was my instrument. Just thinking about it now makes me want to eat a pan of brownies and change my name.
I guess I haven’t really played since then. Oh, except for one more wedding performance for a best friend. I planned ahead for that one arrived in steamy Connecticut bearing one small tablet, a beta-blocker. The doctor said tons of her patients take them to manage their fears of public speaking. Twenty minutes before the wedding, I guiltily decided to try it. I don’t actually know if it helped but the performance as ok.
So, for years, my harp has been neglected as has my inner musician. But, tonight, my two underslept and filthy daughters (we have had no water for much fo the past week.. but that’s for another post) and I, their even more underslept and filthy mother, played the harp together. Osh helped me string it and Nola chewed on the old strings while waiting for her spaghetti dinner. I did my best to tune it while they simultaneously bashed every instrument in our music basket for “band practice”. Then, with my 15 month old standing on the base of the harp, holding onto the column like it was the mast of a storm tossed ship while playing her kazoo, and my 3.25 year old accompanying me on tambourine, we played Variations on a theme by Haydn. Ossian made up some words and we all clanged and plucked and quacked together for my first musical moment in many years. It was divine. Maybe my harp and I can work it out and at least be friends again.
