About those wrong notes...

Item: postlude at the All Saints’ Day service (Fantasia on Sine Nomine, by Craig Phillips). I came apart during a passage about three pages from the end.

Item: postlude on November 19 (Toccata: “St. David’s Day”, by Ralph Vaughan Williams). I lost it at the top of the final page.

Item: postlude on Thanksgiving Day (Nun danket alle Gott, by J. S. Bach, from the Leipzig Chorales). I came apart at the top of the final page.

All three of these were serious mishaps, where I lost control of the playing for a measure or more. All were in fairly difficult passages, which I had thoroughly practiced and considered well-prepared. It was the Bach that scares me, for that is a piece I have performed scores of times. After the liturgy, I got back on the bench and played the piece perfectly, with complete comfort. It is always challenging and needs preparation, but I am confident that I can play it.

Until now.

If I were a golfer, I would start muttering about “the yips.” A bit of poking around finds that yes, the condition affects musicians as well as golfers and other athletes. It is described in places as a “focal task-specific dystonia.” It most often affects experienced players who have been doing the same thing for decades. It afflicts 1% to 2% of musicians at some point in their careers, men more than women. One article lists some common triggers, among them “a sudden increase in playing/practice.” That could be it, for I pushed hard through the latter part of October to prepare for the week that included All Saints and Choral Evensong.

There is no cure. Intensified practice, the musician’s (and athlete’s) first impulse when something is not right, is not helpful. There are treatments, such as Botox injections; I am not going there. There are “tricks” of various sorts, some of which I will try. It is going to take some experimentation, maybe a lot of it. And perhaps it is nothing, just a string of wrong notes. But three times in a month seems a bit much, and this feels different from the thousands of wrong notes I have played over the years.

For the present, I think that I will do the following:
- Quit playing repertoire of the sort that has triggered these collapses.
- Probably quit playing Evensong preludes. Excepting the principal feasts, this is the only occasion where I play “big” repertoire. At the least, I have crossed out the “Great” C minor prelude and fugue scheduled for January, a repeat of the Vaughan Williams Prelude and Fugue scheduled for February, and the Mendelssohn Fourth Sonata scheduled for March. I might try improvisations for evensong instead of playing repertoire.
- Avoid difficult music for the Eucharistic voluntaries on routine Sundays.
- Focus more of my practicing on improvisation, and do more of it in service playing.

That leaves some areas of concern: what am I going to do with anthem accompaniments? There are several of them which are difficult for me in the next few weeks, starting with a Michael Haydn anthem for Lessons and Carols, December 3. So far, I have had no problems of this sort with accompaniments, even the difficult ones, so I will hope that my brain considers this enough of a different task so as to be completely separate.

And what about the principal feasts? We’ll have to take them as they come, and lean toward easier music rather than more difficult. For example, I am done with the Phillips piece that I played on All Saints: never again.

I gather that the condition comes and goes unpredictably. That gives reason to occasionally dip my foot back into the deep water and see how it goes.

Steven Pressfield writes: “For the professional, the stakes are high and real.” This is my paid employment, and I am now considerably less fit for it than I was a year ago. “A musician is only as good as his last performance,” as they say. For now, I think that I can still earn my keep; I can play the hymns, train the choirs, do the other parts of my job. When you get down to it, playing organ literature is the least important part of what I do.

For a while now, a photo of Keith Jarrett has been on my “door.” It is there mostly because I seek to emulate his long-form piano improvisations, but now I have another reason: he has overcome a disorder that kept him from playing – even privately, at home – for years.

I have been blessed with good health and no serious injuries or physical problems with my playing. Most everyone who does this professionally runs into one thing or another somewhere along the line. Now it is my turn.