An unusual, elegant approach to understanding performance anxiety (present-day and past reflections, Boston and Denver): In this thought-provoking, fascinating, and melancholy memoir, Natalie Hodges, a classical violinist, takes us into the intellectual and emotional experiences she went through to make a brave, life-changing decision to give up her professional dreams of becoming a solo violinist.
In Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time, she twists the title with her uncommon memoir, elevating her personal stumbling block to higher ground in the form of scientific and scholarly inquiries in chapters that feel more essayist than memoiristic.
Common measure is a musical term for the most common time signature in which the rhythm of the music beats 1, 2, 3, 4. (See Hodges explain this in an interview.) The concept of common time, she writes, meshes with “communal time, in which the self can be in sync with others.” Part of that idea is that music is a universal language, so when we sit in an auditorium or concert hall we feel in sync with the audience sharing the music’s emotions.
This interpretation relates to the fundamental issue she struggles with: not feeling at one with others she performs with and unable to lose herself in the music along with the audience. Instead, she cannot breakthrough her “self-absorbed, interior time” – her self-consciousness and anxiety that she’ll “mess up” so “nothing flows.”
Although she’s performed on stages in the US, Paris, and Italy attaining technical mastery as a classical violinist, this wasn’t enough to be a solo artist. When you’ve spent practically your whole life practicing and loving the violin and the music, her emotions and professional judgments are profound. Between the beauty of her prose and the beauty of her passion for the music, we feel for her because she’s amazingly disciplined and committed.
Uncommonly too, her purpose comes across as not trying to pull our heartstrings, seeking our sympathy. Rather, as a Harvard trained musicologist she seeks a deeper understanding how the brain connects to music, time, and flow to advance her insight into what keeps happening to her. By writing it down, she’s making sense of her performance anxiety for herself, and then for us to apply to any endeavor, musical or not, which demands intense focus. In the process, she’s also experimenting with her dual interest: a literary life. With this memoir, she’s established herself as an independent and creative thinker with a writing future.
I don’t pretend to understand the science and theories – neuroscience, theoretical physics, and quantum mechanics – nor, as a non-musician, the musicology. You don’t have to, and, interestingly, it contributes to why you’re drawn to the writing, marveling at the difficult path she took to try to “break out” of her self-fears and make an extremely difficult and honest decision after devoting twenty years to her artistry since she was a young girl practicing five, six hours a day, eight before a performance.
Hodges lets us into the mind of a perfectionist, intellectually and psychologically. We can’t help but be awed by her ability to play the most complex of musical compositions for the violin, to such a degree that she precisely knows when and where she’ll falter on stage. She’s her worst enemy. Her predictions become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Her acute self-awareness overwhelms her ability to rely on “muscle memory” to get into the flow.
The concept of flow first came on the scene in 1990 when Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. It’s a word you hear in educational circles describing gifted kids who can focus intensely for hours on end.
Hodges doesn’t cite the “Father of Flow.” Instead, she digs deeper and more specific, introducing us to another psychologist and neuroscientist at Tufts University who’s influenced her thinking, Dr. Aniruddh D. Patel. He uses the cognitive concept of “entrainment” to explain being in sync with music. Defined as “the ability to synchronize the body’s movements with a beat” – not just that we “hear beats” but we “feel beats” – his research has turned “human entrainment into a theory of perception.” You can listen to a trailer to his 18-part lecture series, one of The Great Courses, here: Music and the Brain.
Hodges calls her second chapter “Untrainment” reflecting how she’s not been able to get lost in those beats. In chapter three, she introduces us to a classical pianist from Venezuela who’s so in sync with the music she can improvise complicated compositions spontaneously without missing a beat, Gabriela Montero. In awe of her “sixth sense,” Montero calls this phenomenon the “dual implications of helplessness and power.” Power signifying what’s written down in the music for eternity versus the impassioned musician performing with so much spontaneity.
Time, as the title indicates, is examined from many angles starting with the “Prelude,” another clever play on the common term Prologue. “Music itself embodies time, shaping our sense of its passage through patterns of rhythm and harmony, melody and form.”
It’s not until we reach Chapter four, page 79 (a slender memoir at under 200-pages, with another thirty interesting references), that the memoir and the prose becomes more self-focused, philosophical, and poetic as she looks back on her childhood filled with violin music her mother taught her how to play.
“Uhmma” emigrated from Seoul, South Korea but PLEASE don’t think of the author as the victim of a harsh style of parenting Asian writer Amy Chua brought into modern language in her memoir Hymns to a Tiger Mother. Besides the dangers of labeling and contributing to rising anti-Asian sentiments, nothing could be further from the truth. Hodges loves her mother dearly and appreciates the gift she’s given her (all of her four children play a musical instrument). She reminds us that a characteristic of immigrant families who come to America is wanting “to give your children what you did not have yourself.”
Though she doesn’t dwell on her Texas father’s Asian stereotyping and awful abuse, having gone to South Korea to find himself a subservient wife to start a family in Denver, this is also a story about racism and abuse. How her mother sacrificed so much for her children, counterbalancing the darkness by making sure their home “was music, and music was color.” Music expanded and enriched Hodges’ world immeasurably. That’s not to imply she doesn’t briefly consider whether spending all those formative years practicing might have been wasted time. You can guess how she comes out on that question.
What also makes her memoir so unusual is that while her mother was being violently abused, in addition to the psychic abuse of racism, to the point that her father once hit Uhmma so hard her stitches from a Caesarean delivery “burst,” Hodges felt so much joy growing up in a house of music.
One reason, perhaps, Hodges’ journey doesn’t start off chronologically as commonly done. “Don’t write it like a sob story,” her mother advised. Through her uncommon approach, she hasn’t.
Lorraine