Endings and Beginnings

by Heather O’Donnell

German version of this article published in Das Journal of the HfMT Köln.

My last recital as a professional pianist took place in 2010 at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin as part of MaerzMusik Festival. On the program: Frederic Rzewski’s hourlong “The People United will Never be Defeated”. I limped through this gorgeous and massive work, feeling utterly defeated. My pianistic tools were damaged and insufficient to sustain the challenges and demands of a career. Following years of struggle with injury and other health problems, the many resources I drew on to help me with injury-rehabilitation and piano-pedagogical retraining had not yet provided reliable solutions for the problems. These injuries metastasized into a triad of symptoms that fundamentally impacted my playing: chronic pain in the left wrist and right elbow, a lack of sensation in the fingertips, and a subtle but increasingly noticeable inability to control fine movements.

Such symptoms had emerged in my teens and were accompanied by other health problems, such as severe anemia and depression.

I think back in wonder that it was possible at all to build a career on such a shaky fundament.

I began piano lessons at age five, and soon after came in contact with a loving and respect-demanding teacher who, at age nine, put forth a fork in the road in the form of a decision-making process: Fork 1: ‘Piano-Track’; or Fork 2: ‘Piano-for-Fun’. ‘Piano Track’ meant three to five hours of practice per day, and two long lessons per week. ‘Piano-for-Fun’ meant... who knows? ... it wasn’t really a viable option.

The lessons with my teacher were engaging and wonderful. I still have a deep sense of gratitude for the time and care granted by an adult so distinguished from other adults in my vicinity. He was a fierce-hearted artist, who howled insults like “You... Philistines!” to teenagers in suburban New Jersey whose boomboxes were interrupting our lessons. He was also a gentle and beautiful spirit, wholly committed to music, emotionally present and communicative, all the while exacting and demanding. What could be a viable alternative to this? Especially for a nine-year-old?

Major life decisions reached at age nine, and disruptive health problems throughout the teens... a shaky foundation indeed.

Jumping forward to my mid-thirties: I had built a career different to that envisioned by my first teacher, but one that was challenging, fascinating, and forged through my own interests, concerns and beliefs: political and social activism expressed by composers like Frederic Rzewski and Charles Ives, a commitment to perpetual progressivism as expressed through music by Helmut Lachenmann, deeply personal visions of artistically utopic landscapes by composers like Walter Zimmermann and Oliver Schneller, never losing contact to my beloved roots: the music of Bach and Schumann. It was a good career: by external standards mildly successful, by my internal compass engaging and meaningful.

The problem was that my body was rebelling by my early 30s, any weight placed on my left forth finger would result in uncontrollable shaking, my right shoulder was visibly sagging, and I would have frequent bouts of extreme dizziness and a bone-deep exhaustion. The visits to the doctors were mostly inconclusive, the ailments seemed mysterious, and the word ‘psychosomatic’ was often thrown around, to my discomfort and frustration.

Though an exact dissemination of the causal factors that contributed to my health problems will never be known, probably feedback loops between biological factors (i.e. a then-undiagnosed auto-immune disease) and my own behavioral missteps (i.e. over- practicing, ignoring pain signals) contributed to creating a career-disrupting maelstrom. It became impossible to ignore the fact that I could not continue on this path.

After the MaerzMusik concert, I began the process of transition into a new career. But stepping outside of the primary and lifelong-consistent source of identity – that of being a musician – was destabilizing, to put it mildly. There were clumsy, under-reflected attempts at answering questions: If not piano, what then? Should I study something? What? What are my interests? What are my skills? Can I afford to make a change? How can I pay the bills?... I settled in on a path of study – psychology – and somehow won a spot at the Freie Universität as a first semester student, at the age of 37. The studies were eye-opening with regard to my abilities, interests and strengths, or lack thereof. I needed to learn to relinquish any pride from previous professional accomplishments. These accomplishments were a currency that had no value here. The only thing that mattered was whether I could navigate my coursework: a heady mix of experimental design, statistics, probability theory and investigations into numerous branches of psychology. These years were largely marked by confusion and self-doubt. Our beautiful daughter was born in the midst of it all.

As clumsy as the transition-process seemed to me at the time, there was an inherent logic in it, albeit one that was only possible to perceive in hindsight. I could now understand the term psychosomatic not as a pejorative, but rather as a reliable descriptor of complex realities. A person’s life consists of a constant interaction between psychological dispositions that engage with the environment. Life experiences are translated into a body which absorbs and processes these experiences, and these bodily translations of experience can further lead to new or solidified psychological states. Whereas many of the doctors I had worked with treated the body as a mechanical structure that could be ‘fixed’ via physical interventions (surgery, taping, massage, etc.), my studies indicated that the view of a mechanical body was of limited use. Bodies translate their messages into psychological signals, and psyches translate their messages through a receptive body. In other words: Life is complex. Injuries are complex. Recovery is complex. And that’s what psychosomatic means. And when the body, psyche, and environment interact in dangerous ways, a perfect storm - a maelstrom – can emerge which can derail any well-paved plans.

But what can interrupt this maelstrom? Perhaps an approach that is as diverse as the contributors to the maelstrom, one that address psychological, physical and social- environmental systems of support.

The Green Room

A green room is a space in a theater or concert space which provides basic support to artists before, during, and after on-stage activities. The concept of a ‘green room’ seemed like a fitting epithet for a new organization that seeks to support performing artists in developing and maintaining the resources needed to practice their art to their fullest potential. The mission of the center stems from my personal experiences, bolstered by over a decade of investigations into performers’ health. Some conclusions I’ve reached through the process of developing the offerings at The Green Room: most musicians, actors, and dancers express that they were largely unprepared to confront important aspects of their professional life. They had to learn skills indispensable to their professional life under fire and duress. They most often must navigate this disjunct between career-training and career-reality alone, and with limited support. Many performers also indicate that they are alone when a life circumstance derails them from their intended course, and they must carve out responses to this unwelcomed disruption by cobbling together their own resources. During this reorganization, they may feel unsupported and sometimes ostracized from their artist communities. And lastly: Performing artists do not enjoy the same types of support systems that other professionals who engage in high-performance activities do. Athletes, for example, have access to more options: resources that support their physical and mental health maintenance and assist them in recovery from professional crises. Professional derailments are, for many performing artists, a source of shame and are often responded to in secrecy.

The Green Room is now a space supporting artists in Cologne, Germany. More than that, it’s the culmination of the decades of experience as a musician-turned-psychologist, initially on a straight-arrow path towards a musical career, but thrown off of this path by unexpected life situations. In engaging with issues of health throughout the past decades, it’s become clear to me that the instrument a musician actually plays is not external to them, but rather within themselves. Their bodies and minds, psyches and spirits are their true instruments. The external instruments are just a mix of wood, metal, and plastic. If I

could, I would go back and tell this to my younger self. As it is, I am freed from regret and disappointment, and practice my new career with a passion and interest equaling that of my former career. I feel a deep sense of gratitude to have finally landed in my current life situation, even though the way here was rocky and frightening. My mission now is to assist artists find their own paths, especially when their own lives become rocky and frightening.

Photo Credit: Kai Bienert

Heather O’Donnell is a former concert pianist and the founding director of The Green Room, a center in Cologne, Germany, that supports performing artists in their psychosocial and physical needs.