by Joanna Soh

 

January cold desolate;

February all dripping wet;

March wind ranges;

April changes;

Birds sing in tune

To flowers of May,

And sunny June

Brings longest day;

In scorched July

The storm—clouds fly

Lightning—torn;

August bears corn,

September fruit;

In rough October

Earth must disrobe her;

Stars fall and shoot

In keen November;

And night is long

And cold is strong

In bleak December.

Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894)

—

January cold desolate.

“Put your hands on your arms like this,” Mom says. She crosses her arms and exaggerates a shiver. “This line means that the month of January is very cold and very dark. You can show this feeling to the audience.”

January isn’t really that cold. Only if you go into San Francisco, where 好婆 (special term adopted by my family to address mother’s mother; originally in Shanghainese, translated into Cantonese), 舅父 (uncle; mother’s brother), 妗母 (aunt; mother’s brother’s wife), and 表哥 (older male cousin; mother’s side) live. 

Adults say the darndest things.

Oh well. I cross my arms and shiver in the sweltering California heat. “January cold desolate,” I say quietly.

“Good!” Mom says, even though I’m nowhere near loud enough to be heard clearly. She smiles, radiant. I like it when she smiles.

February all dripping wet.

This one I know. It rains here sometimes, but only in December. I can pretend it rains in February.

Mom mimes the sprinkling of rain with her fingers, wiggling them lightly as she raises and lowers her arms.

I wiggle my fingers. “February all dripping wet,” I say, a little louder.

“Good!” she says. Her smile grows wider. “Let’s combine it with the first line now. Ready?”

January cold desolate, shiver!

February all dripping wet, finger rain!

“Good job!” Mom claps her hands. She’s beaming. “The audience will be able to follow what you’re talking about now! When you perform something like this, you always want to make sure the audience can understand you.”

Oh.

My favourite Sunday school teacher was a little old lady who made homemade slime called Gak. We would mix all the colours together until we created an awful grey, slimy mass, and then we’d fling it at each other and get it in everyone’s hair. All the mixing and flinging and laughing somehow convinced me that what she said every week was right: God loves me and all my friends, no matter if we’re red, white, yellow, black, brown, or green.

Now that I think about it, no other teacher had been able to convey this to me.

“You don’t have to look right at the audience though,” Mom says after a moment. “好婆 taught me a good trick. She says that when you speak, look right above the heads of the people in the last row. The audience will think you’re looking at them, but you’re not, so you can concentrate on what you need to say next.”

Okay. That’s doable. I’m not sure why, but it sounds really fun.

“Now,” she says, and she’s smiling again, “from the top again, okay?”

I nod and look over my mom’s head, cross my arms, and prepare to shiver.

The door creaks open just wide enough for Mom to gently nudge me in. A gust of cold air blasts my face, unnervingly artificial and stale. Crumbly white walls climb up, up, up to crusty white ceiling tiles, across blinding white fluorescent lights, and back down, down, down to scuffed, squeaky white floors. It’s hard to keep my eyes open in the face of so much white.

A stark black piano sits in the centre of the room. On the other side of it, a pale man in a crisp grey suit sits at a lone desk. The inner corners of his muted brown brows lift just slightly.

He says nothing.

Thank God I’m reading sheet music. I don’t want to look over his unnervingly pale head.

I bring the flute to my lips. It’s cold. Very cold.

Flute cold desolate, I find myself thinking, a little bitter, a little desperate. It feels strange, because I’ve only ever felt it warm and alive.

Maybe that's what my teacher meant by, Don't forget to warm up, but I’m already halfway through the first phrase.

Whatever happens, everyone says, don’t stop when you’re performing. The show must go on.

I'm not sure why it has to, or if this is even a proper show, so does this event count?

My lip is trembling hard. I’ve clean forgotten what a flute embouchure even feels like. But I don’t make the rules, so I keep blowing.

High E’s take much more air than I remember. Every crescendo completely winds me; there’s no dynamic difference no matter how hard I try. Each gulp of air feels smaller than the last, and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.

Jesus, take the wheel, I try to pray because I’m a good Christian girl, but even Jesus doesn’t seem interested.

So much for thanking Him for sheet music.

I don’t recall getting to the end, nor putting my flute down, but I suddenly realize I’ve been standing silently for some time now while Pale Man mumbles something about playing with more dynamics, breathing more deeply, and intonation.

Ah, right, my teacher has been hounding me on that last one for a while. Not that I have any idea what it means, how to listen for it, or what I need to correct. It’s apparently just something I’m bad at, and even though I think I sound fine, apparently I sound out of tune? Not sure how that works. This guy isn’t exactly explaining how to hear what’s wrong either, so maybe it’s just an adult thing. Maybe I’ll grow into it.

That must be it. I nod to myself. That’s a problem for future-me.

For now, I just need to wait until Pale Man finishes talking, and then, I can get out of here.

“Nerves are just energy—extra energy we don’t normally have. You can channel it into positive output. It’s what makes a performance exciting and fun.”

I blink down at my piano teacher’s keyboard. The presence of extra energy does make a plausible explanation for my panic-induced memory loop at the piano studio recital last week. I had repeated the same phrase at least five times before I gave up and had my sheet music handed to me.

Thank God for sheet music, I guess.

I had wanted the piano bench to swallow me up. Or maybe the piano itself. I’d fit in there more comfortably.

“If we’re not careful, though,” she continues, keeping her voice low and warm, “and we don’t think about it ahead of time, it can turn into negative output. That’s when you start to doubt yourself, and you start to worry about what people will think of you, if you remember the music. If you think about it, all those worries and doubts don’t really do anything for the performance. In fact, it can tear your performance down.”

I look up at her. She smiles back, gentle.

“If we don’t do anything about it and let the energy spiral, that’s where our sweaty hands come from, the heart palpitations, the hyperventilation, the memory skips.”

I nod.

“But we can do something about it, if we think of it as energy and not nervousness. We have simply converted the energy to nervousness, so that means we have the ability to convert that same energy into something else.”

She waits a beat. I nod again.

“That same energy can be converted into dynamics,” and with a flourish, her deft fingers rip a lightning fast ascending arpeggio. It crescendos so loud that the last note continues to ring long after her hand leaves the keyboard.

“It can be converted into expression,” and here she scoots further into the piano bench, gently slides my small frame a little to the side. She places both of her strong, weathered hands onto the keys. Under her fingers, a soaring melody glides gracefully over rich, deep chords, an eagle soaring up and gliding down over a rich, deep blue sea.

“This energy,” she says after she lets the end of the phrase hang suspended for a moment, “is what makes a performance a performance. We don’t have this energy when we’re just practicing. It only ever happens when we perform.”

A sparkle of light dances in her eyes, though there’s no light source in the room for them to reflect such a twinkle.

“Harness this energy every time you perform. Don’t let it control you. You have more control over it than you think. Make it make your performance. It’s what will make each performance special.”

Suddenly, the memory loop feels like a distant memory, and I find myself nodding and smiling back at her.

The flute slips out of my hand mid-phrase. For a moment, I wonder if I’m in one of those nightmares—the ones where I drop my flute in a puddle and watch the pads float out into the water.

Time slows down. Convenient.

This is the first round of the first real competition I’ve ever participated in. Every other competition I’d ever done had been more like festivals. We would receive grades and comments on how we did, but there never was a singular winner. There certainly weren’t multiple rounds to clear like a true tournament.

This is it. I’m here.

And I’m about to botch it.

How inconvenient is it to have nerves that insist on presenting as persistently sweaty fingers? Very. How inconvenient is it to combine that with closed hole keys? Yes.

Fingers all dripping wet, I think ruefully to myself.

It occurs to me that I have two options here: I can either botch the performance, or I can botch both the performance and my flute.

One option is decidedly more expensive than the other. So I shoot my hand out and make a desperate swipe as I watch my flute sail away mid-air.

I catch it.

With it safely back in my hand, it then occurs to me that my piano accompanist is still playing.

I see. I’m back to two options, but with a new Option B: I can either botch the performance, or I can botch it less by continuing to play.

I continue to play.

Energy, I think to myself while I proceed to botch measures 192 to 207. Maybe that’s what this is.

Too much of it.

“You did great!” Mom says when I find her after I bumble my way backstage. She hugs me tightly and doesn’t seem to mind that my back is all dripping wet from sweating so much.

“Can I give you a quick piece of advice before you do the next round?” she asks. She always asks. Years of working as a pastor’s family has jaded all four of us.

You shouldn’t preach about that, they’d tell my dad because they don’t want the youth to talk about sex.

You should teach Sunday school, they’d tell my mom with every intention of not paying her because they already don’t pay her to play the piano.

You should become a lawyer, they’d tell my brother when they’d take him out for coffee for career advice he never asked for.

You should play the flute at church, they’d tell me because I’d avoided telling them anything else about myself. 

Mom never says “should”.

“Okay,” I say, and I steel myself for the answer.

I had looked over the audience’s heads. There was definitely some shivering. Considering the general luxuriousness and frivolity of the piece, I guess it wasn’t exactly the correct thing to express, so that was probably just energy. Which, after all these years, I still don’t know how to channel into “positive output,” whatever that means.

Alright, so I got one thing right at least.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Mom says. “I really want to help you, and I believe you can do better, alright?”

I nod.

“When you came out on stage,” she pauses for a beat, “you looked… constipated.”

I—what?

She says nothing as she stares right back at me, wide-eyed and waiting. I’ve never seen her look so apprehensive.

Huh.

I suppose all that energy has to go somewhere. Well, that’s new. Or maybe it isn’t.

You always want to make sure the audience can understand you.

And Mom managed to get constipation from a piece that’s supposed to sound luxurious and frivolous.

That’s another thing I got wrong, then.

“Did—” I say, stumbling a bit because my mind is still swimming, “did you not notice that I dropped my flute?”

She blinks at me.

Huh.

“You looked mad,” she continues as if I hadn’t said anything. It makes me wonder if she even heard me. “But I know you’re not like that. I just want other people to know how much you enjoy playing the flute.”

“Oh,” I say because I can’t think of anything else to say.

And then suddenly, I think of everything all at once.

January cold desolate, shiver!

February all dripping wet, finger rain!

How radiant Mom looked when she coached me all those years back. That huge smile on her face that I always chased to create again and again.

The slimy grey Gak, the bright look on that sweet old lady’s face as she told us that it didn’t matter who we were and what we looked like—God loves us all the same. She was beaming, glowing, bright and beautiful as the morning sun, and so I believed everything she told us.

The contagious twinkle in my piano teacher’s eyes. The way it would turn into a sharp flash when she struck the keyboard. How the corners of her mouth would twitch upward as she charged the air with tension—only letting it release when she deigned to resolve the chord. What a strange power, invisible and yet so, so tangible, bent to her will with pure, unadulterated joy.

Joy.

I tend to procrastinate practicing real, serious music. I probably should have practiced good old measures 192 to 207 from the impressively, generically named Fantasie by flutist-favourite Fauré a lot more, but my brain usually supplies the helpful thought of, Well, Fauré is dead, and I end up playing themes from my favourite movies instead.

The only people who know about it are my family, who are subjected nearly every day to an endless loop of Concerning Hobbits from The Lord of the Rings. My round, Classical sound just doesn’t cut it; I want to sound like the Irish flute I hear in the soundtrack. My flute must be able to produce a similar sound—I know it. I need it.

So I dive in, down and down and down into terrifying new realms of tone colour I’d never given myself the permission to explore. Light, airy, sweet, hollow, earthy, woodsy. Colours I’d normally get in trouble for. I imagine hobbit children chasing fireworks, raucous dancing under a giant tree, rolling hills of hobbit-holes that mean comfort.

And then, I find it.

I can make myself sound like this? I play it again to make sure.

Oh my God, I can.

And I play it again. And again, and again.

I discover that I am embarrassingly masochistic. I spend weeks toiling over Silver Leaves from Treasure Planet. At long last, I finally hit those elusive high E’s, F#’s, and G#’s with just the right, light ping. Whistle-like, mournful, and terribly, terribly addicting. I learn that it's terrifyingly easy to get drunk on the ability to sound like anything you want.

Today, I’m a soaring, tragic tin whistle, sailing away into the unreachable depths of space. On to my next adventure while I tear my heart in two and leave half of it at home. I feel so much that I feel like I’m bursting, but I’m so drunk that I don’t care. I keep wallowing in it, basking in it, reliving it. I do it over, and over again.

The first time I hear Tumnus’s Lullaby from the Chronicles of Narnia, I fall in love. I drill and drill and drill the melody, searching, unearthing, hunting, until, at last, I find a colour that matches that gloriously haunting instrument—a duduk, I learn many years later. Reedy, ominous, and some other deep, heart-wrenching feeling I don’t really know how to describe. I don’t have to sound like a Classical flute, and it makes me feel dirty.

Even so—or maybe because of it—I can’t help letting myself play like that just one more time. Then, I always promise myself, I’ll go back to flutist-favourite Fauré.

I never do.

I’ve filled a hole in my heart, found a way to express something I never knew I needed to express, and my God, I feel whole, complete, full.

Why would I ever stop?

Again! So I play it again.

Again! And again!

And Mom wants me to perform like that?

It's positively mortifying to think about exposing this very private part of my life—this thing I do behind closed doors and never when I should do it. It feels akin to walking out on stage in my underwear, and that is not what good pastor’s daughters do.

I never mention it to my teachers. I don’t want them to know that I wasn’t practicing real, serious music. I cannot bear to be labeled as the bad student who doesn’t practice. I'm not sure how I would explain myself, even though that is exactly what I am. And worst of all, I don’t want to admit that I don’t know how to play this expressively on real, serious music.

The only logical conclusion is that I don’t feel the same joy in real, serious music.

Is that wrong?

We don’t say anything for a few more beats. Then, Mom peers at me more closely.

“You dropped your flute?”

I start from one side of the stage and begin walking. One step, and then another.

I look at the wooden floor, up the walls, to the ceiling. Then I look toward the empty seats. Rows and rows and rows of no one.

I imagine taking my heart out of my chest and watching it unfurl in my hand. A flower that blossoms and blossoms, until the petals fall and float away to fill the empty seats with me, me, me.

The audience will sit on these invisible petals, breathe in the fragrance of my exposed, beating heart. For one hour, they will become a part of me, because I have invited them in.

My skin begins to buzz. Energy. For the first time in my life, I’m excited to feel it.

A couple months ago, I had decided to browse the flute section of the music library. Hidden on the bottom shelf was a copy of Chen Yi’s The Golden Flute. A marriage of the Western flute and the Chinese dizi. This is me, I had thought to myself, hands shaking. This is real. This is serious. I immediately checked it out, brought it home, and programmed it into my Third-Year recital.

It’s hard, unlike anything I’ve ever studied. Unfamiliar finger patterns, pitch bends, flutter tonguing, bursts of high flourishes. I dip into those colours I’ve never brought into the light of day before. My heart soars when the piece bursts into life under my lips, under my fingers. I’m flying, floating, and then falling, because everything else seems dull by comparison.

I decide it isn’t fair to dump this blinding energy blast of a piece onto my church and high school friends, who I’ve invited because I’m a through and through nerd with hilariously limited social circles, without some sort of explanation. So I talk about it. I tell them to listen for the reedy sound and mournful pitch bends of the dizi, to expect the colourful bursts of high notes and the changing speed and depth of vibrato on the low notes.

It all feels so warmly familiar.

January cold desolate, shiver!

February all dripping wet, finger rain!

I can’t stop smiling.

I don’t exactly follow what 好婆 suggests. I look at them straight in the eyes. I look from face to face to face. I watch as understanding slowly dawns on all their faces. I see twinkles, widening eyes, broadening smiles. 

It’s like looking into a mirror.

The buzz under my skin doubles. As I continue looking at them, talking to them, it doubles again. And again. And again.

By the time I play the piece, I play the force of a thousand me’s. I drag out the silences, bend the pitches lower, scream the high flourishes louder, roll my tongue harder.

Nerves are just energy; it’s what makes a performance a performance.

We don’t have this energy when we’re just practicing.

It only ever happens when we perform.

But most of all:

It is joy.

 

--

Watch Joanna and Kristen's livestream talking about performance anxiety here!