What If It Wasn’t Nerves?

So, I never been nervous when I performed a concert. That is, until a noon recital during my first year as a music major in college.

I was about to go out and play the F major Beethoven Romance, but just before I walked out, the person holding the stage door looked at me and asked, Are you nervous? I was a little surprised by the question, but I looked and said, No.

They smiled and said, That's really good.

Then I asked why they had asked, and they said, Well, most students get nervous playing in front of their teachers and peers.

They then added, But you're not, so good for you.

With that, they opened the stage door and I stepped out onto the middle of the stage.

As I was bowing, that's when I noticed that what they had said was true.

All the teachers, my friends, my classmates, they were all there looking at me and waiting for me to start playing.

So I put my bow on the string and started to play, but at that moment it started bouncing uncontrollably.

I couldn't believe it.

I tried as hard as I could to control it, but I just couldn't.

That's when I knew that for the first time in my life I was nervous.

I was so angry with myself that after I finished, I walked around the building and found an open dance studio. I stood in the middle of the room and then angrily launched my rosinetta wall, shattering it, but that didn't help calm what I was feeling inside.

So from that day on, whenever I played in front of someone, my bow would shake.

It didn't matter if I was playing in an orchestra, a quartet, anywhere, my bow shook when I started to play.

It made me think that my career was over before it had even begun.

I mean, no way could I have a performance career if I kept getting nervous like this every time I played.

Over the years, though, after a lot of exploring, I found ways to manage it.

The nerves would hit me when I started playing, but after a few moments I could get things under control.

It was annoying, but it wasn't enough to keep me from performing 60, sometimes 70, concerts a year. So in the end, it never stopped me from performing.

After moving to France, I was playing a lot, but still I needed to manage my nerves. And then one day, because of a doctor, everything started to change.

You see, my wife had been hospitalized with a respiratory problem, and as I was entering her room, a doctor passed by me, then stopped and asked if I smoked.

I said yes, and he then spent the next 30 minutes passionately, one might say aggressively, explaining to me why I was going to quit.

He didn't talk to me about why I could quit or how I could quit.

It was all about the fact that I was going to quit.

Well, because of that encounter, I decided to do it. I decided to stop smoking.

Not with a patch or anything else, just cold turkey.

You see, at the time, I was smoking one to two packs a day. I even used to smoke right before going on stage. It was a big part of my physical and mental identity, but somehow, despite this, I managed to stop.

It wasn't easy. I was cranky.

I annoyed everyone around me, especially my wife.

But I stuck with it, and amazingly, she didn't divorce me.

A few months later, I had a concert in a very prestigious hall in Paris.

I played two solo pieces with orchestra, Ravel's Tzigane and Sarasate's Zigeunerweisen.

It went well.

I got a standing ovation.

I even joked with a colleague on stage. As I walked by, he asked if I would be playing an encore, and I said, I'd just play two.

But it wasn't until I got back to the dressing room and started reliving the performance that it struck me.

My bow hadn't shaken.

I was shocked.

I started asking myself, why? And then suddenly realized that this was the first concert I had played without smoking.

It had been over three months since I'd had my last cigarette.

That made me realize that all those years, all that shaking might not have been because of nerves.

That those first minutes of my bow shaking was probably me going through a kind of nicotine withdrawal.

I couldn't believe it.

For the last 35 years, I had been dealing with the effects of a physical addiction, and I never realized it.

On top of it, I only figured this out because of a random encounter.

I couldn't help but ask myself why I didn't see what was happening before. But when you do something every day for years, it just feels normal.

It just feels too normal to question.

So you don't challenge it. You just keep your head buried in the sand.

So I guess we are what we continue to do. But does this perseverance sometimes get in the way of change? Well sometimes we don't change until something, or in my case someone, makes us stop and take a real hard look at what we've been doing.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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