Playing Music, Hearing a New Song

From FAWCO Magazin November 2022

I grew up in a suburb of New York City. When I was six, I started studying with an incredibly inspiring pianist, Charles Milgrim. He gave me an insight into a world completely different from the suburban life I was otherwise living. I’ll never forget the day he brought a score of J.S. Bach to our lesson, ceremoniously placed it on the piano, and indicated that life would never be the same after diving into this miraculous music. Although he could be a bit scary to my smaller self, he was also tender-hearted and would occasionally tear-up when he heard or spoke about the music of Chopin or Schumann. I worked with him twice a week for over 90 minutes for several years and regard him as a second father. He was inspiring, demanding, loving and a beautiful model for living a musician's life.

After leaving home

After studies, I began working as a musician, moved for a year to Paris, then back to New York, right after 9/11. That was such a strange year, I decided to get the hell out of there and move to Berlin with my husband. We stayed in Berlin for 13 years. I had a good and challenging career as a musician based in Berlin until 2010. During that time I played solo concerts and worked as an ensemble musician throughout the world. Some memorable concerts were in Moscow in October 2002 during a hostage stand-off (luckily the theater I was in was not affected, but the director of my theater was constantly on the phone with musicians in the occupied theater); concerts and masterclasses in China; a series of benefit concerts in Jordan; collaborations with dancers in Hungary and France; and many many more wonderful experiences.

Life Changes

In the latter stages of my career, hand and arm injuries intensified and became chronic, making it difficult for me to continue working as a musician. Pain was almost always present while playing, and what had been a supremely enjoyable activity (daily work at the piano) became an enormous burden. After years of visits to so many doctors and various therapists, I decided that the only sensible thing left to do was to leave my
professional work as a musician behind and start another course of study. I went back to school at age 37 as a bachelor's degree student at the Freie Universität in Berlin. It was really an exercise in “Beginner’s Mind” because all the skills and accolades I may have collected in my life as a musician had very little weight there. I had to get tutored by a 19 year old who was a statistics wizard, since I was god-awful at statistics. It was an exercise in humility as I limped through very difficult courses in psychology, experimental design, statistics and probability.

After completing my bachelors degree, we decided to move back to the USA in 2015. My husband and I both worked at the Eastman School of Music for four years, but decided during those tumultuous years in the USA that Germany would be a better environment for us to raise our daughter. We moved to Düsseldorf in 2019. In 2020 I founded a center supporting performing artists: TGR The Green Room in Cologne-Nippes.

Involvement in a "new profession"

My calling now is to assist performing artists as a psychological counselor and director of a center dedicated to artists’ holistic health. I find this work enormously gratifying. Since March of 2022, we have focused on helping Ukrainian performers find their foothold in Germany. The relationships formed with Ukrainian artists and Russian dissident artists have been inspiring. My work in this field was precipitated by a difficult experience (chonic injury and the loss of my initial life trajectory), but I am so grateful to have found an outlet for those experiences, especially if it eases the difficulties for others experiencing similar things.

Training and education

I went back to school and started from the beginning, as a undergraduate student, and eventually got my master’s degree in Health and Prevention Psychology. I’m currently working towards becoming a Systemic Arts Therapist. In my "second-life" training, I really missed having intensive mentorship relationships. When you study music, so often your primary teacher plays an essential role in your development. There was not any equivalent to this in my new studies, but I did draw on the help of other students: especially older women. We called ourselves the Alte Geiste (Old Souls) and were a group of bachelor’s degree students in our 30s and 40s who had previously done something else: a former midwife, a photographer, a film director, an actress, etc.

Taking it to the next level

The first step was to just give up and admit defeat. I had been clinging onto my old role as
a pianist for many years because it provided a framework for my core identity, and it was very scary to leave this behind. But my body was screaming at me: "Stop with this! I can’t do it any longer!" So, I had no choice. For many years there was a difficult process of finding out who I was, without the cloak of a musician to hide behind. Although the process was difficult and painful, I’m so glad I went through it. No one is "just" a musician, or "just" anything for that matter, and I’m glad I got to know myself independent from that highly entrenched and very fixed source of identity. My new profession is quite challenging. There are very few psychologists specialized in work with performing artists, and even fewer centers devoted to the mission of assisting performers. This means that the professional work often needs to be carved out "of nothing." There are few precedents. There’s a strong need to justify the urgency of this work in attracting funding from people (many times people from the financial, policy and banking sectors) who believe that the performer’s life is just a dream-come-true, or a charmed exercise in turning a hobby into a profession. It’s a challenge to let people know about the dangers and risks associated with the professional lives of performing artists. Since I began intensively working with refugee Ukrainian artists and dissident Russian artists following the
outbreak of the war, I sense possibilities for a wider contribution. Unfortunately, the world currently appears to be headed for greater social instability and forced migration. Artists often occupy public and exposed platforms, in which any statements they make critical of the oppressive regimes might lead to dangerous personal and professional situations. I believe that a large part of my work in the future will be devoted to helping refugee and dissident performing artists settle into Germany and begin their professional lives here.