In the past year or so, one question has popped up frequently in interviews I’ve given: “What advice would you give to a young musician?” The question makes me sort of uncomfortable. Have I really reached my wisdom-giving years? I was hoping to acquire some wisdom first…

But now I have an answer to the question: Young musicians, never, ever, place your faith in an alarm clock.

I learned this lesson, the hard way, a couple of weeks ago, in Hamburg. Even now, as I write this, I find it shocking that I would have to learn this lesson The Hard Way, given that I am so preternaturally neurotic and untrusting.  Typically, when taking a pre-concert nap, I have a three, or even four-tiered wake-up system: phone alarm clock, hotel alarm clock, hotel wake-up call, and on occasion, outside wake-up call. I realize this might seem a bit excessive, but with a little imagination, and a dash of paranoia, it becomes easy to see how each of these individual methods could fail.

(Briefly: Phone alarm - only useful if turned off, to avoid unplanned wake-ups. But how can the phone really know to turn itself on at a particular time? Sure, it has done so before, but come on! And what if it magically runs out of battery while off. Stranger things have happened - stonehenge, for instance. Hotel alarm - too many unknowns, too much room for human error. Why are there so many buttons, so many possibilities? Why are there two different ways to control volume? Why are there two alarms? Could the alarm clock be frightened by my overzealousness in setting both, and shut down completely? Stranger things have happened - think UFOs. Hotel wake-up call - now, if the hotel takes 12+ hours to deliver a message/fax, how reliable could they possibly be?  Plus, if the system is manual, the person could always take down the wrong information. And if it’s automated - really, who trusts an automated system? Outside wake-up - they rely on the hotel to place the call, a task that in certain countries proves surprisingly vexing. And plus, can an outsider really appreciate the gravity of the situation? You see?)

And even with these myriad wakeup sources, I hardly ever sleep soundly when taking a nap.  (Would you, if you knew what I knew?)

But in Hamburg, events took over, as they say. First of all, there was jetlag, which is probably the one element of my life I would eliminate if given a magic wish. (When I think of the man who spilled an entire cup of coffee on me one hour into a transatlantic flight this year, I’m forced to contemplate whether the jets themselves are worse than the jetlag - I’m sticking with the jetlag for the moment.) When I am awake, for the fifth consecutive hour, at 8 am, knowing that I have a concert to play and things to do during the day, I come just a little closer to understanding what dementia must feel like. And this was par for the course that week.

Add to that a nasty virus, which knocked me out, yet still failed to help me sleep at the appropriate times. By the time the afternoon came around each day, I was pretty well comatose, which made me considerably more relaxed than normal about the alarm-setting process.

Dear reader, it was a perfect storm. The day of my last concert, I got into bed at 3 in the afternoon, set my phone alarm for 6, and passed out. The idea that I would sleep three solid hours seemed so ludicrous, and the idea of being asleep immediately was so delightful, for once, I didn’t even set a secondary or tertiary (or… tetra-iary?) alarm.

The next thing I knew, the phone was ringing. It was a staff member from the NDR Symphony Orchestra, who asked politely where I was. (The concert was at 8.) I told her I was at the hotel, and asked her the time.

7:57.

To say that I leapt into action would be to underestimate the speed with which I moved, and to overestimate the efficiency. Given the length of Mozart’s Paris Symphony, which opened the program, I needed to be on stage at 8:25, and the hall was a short taxi ride away. Those 28 minutes are something of a blur, but certain moments do stand out, such as my moment of reckoning in the hotel elevator when I realized I had forgotten my coat (it was snowing outside), and the 15 Euro tip I gave the taxi driver, as I didn’t want to wait for change.

I walked into the hall, in street clothes, at 8:05. 20 minutes, and one incident of cheek mutilation (= shaving) later, I walked onstage, in concert clothes, wondering what on earth would happen when I started playing. To my amazement, playing felt almost entirely normal, suggesting that all my self-imposed rules about playing concerts - always be awake at least 2 hours prior, always be in the hall an hour prior to warm up - have far more to do with the psychological, rather than the physical, aspect of playing the piano. (Subject for another post.)

So it all turned out alright. Still, I do not recommend it. While complete panic turns out to be an effective substitute for cardiovascular exercise,  it’s not the sort of thing one should put oneself through on a regular basis.

Kids, never trust an alarm clock.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2008 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Blog, Performance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.