I guess I have settled into writing these every 3 months. When I started in 2020, I didn’t set a schedule for myself because I knew the rate of musing cannot be tinkered with. This particular one has been swirling for a while - arguably for over a decade. I am also aware of the fact that it really has nothing to do with food, in this public journal under the guise of a food blog. But, really, I do think that my draw to food, and likely your draw to this writing space, comes from this search for a clearer cypher to our senses. I hope this gives you some more words and not-words for yours.
I wear night-time contact lens. In layman’s terms, they are a thicker slab of hard plastic that, when worn overnight, molds your cornea into perfect vision for up to 72 hours. Wild right? I’ve used them since maybe the third grade, and while they complicate nonchalant sleepovers and possess a frustratingly inverse relationship between price and durability, I am grateful for their powers.
An unexpected side effect has been a disarming, recurring dream: still groggy from sleep, I take each lens out and place them into their respective L or R holders. But upon looking down again, I discover two lenses in the R side. I fish my index finger into the solution, slide them apart gingerly, but a third appears. The panic mounts for only a moment, and then I wake up, correct contacts still nestled under my closed lids.
The dream visited again recently, and I always shake my head in amusement. If I were to psychoanalyze myself, I could say I have an obsessive need for control, so extreme that I am paranoid about my one reliably fixed mechanism to wrench myself into literal clarity. Perhaps I am upset by the prospect of not always being my best self, at having only a short window of peak precision. Am I afraid of losing the ability to properly sharpen my senses? Or is it this very fixation that truncates my aperture? I know. I’m exhausting.
Lately, I have been thinking about this relationship between clarity and control, intensity and power. I tell my friends that I miss the too-much feeling, the mania of an immovable, unstoppable agenda. But I simultaneously know that unintentional momentum, under the guise of a clear vision, has left me ultimately disillusioned in the past.
I’ve been a professional flutist for two decades. I cannot innumerate the hours I’ve spent in a basement practice room, in a rehearsal studio, or on a lit stage. But now I’ve entered the first year of my life without a programmed professional gig ahead. I’ve graduated from my booking manager, and I don’t have immediate plans to play. I am not particularly terrified or sad or regretful, but I do feel like I am standing at the edge of a cliff peering down. What awaits me now that I’m here? Will I find that intensity of experience in something else? And perhaps most terrifying, will I slowly lose the ability to play - this portal into feeling more - my once-daily-oiled gears rusted to a halt?
At the core of this web of confusion, I see one of those kindergarten sticky-felt boards with the words CONTROL, INTENSITY, POWER, and CLARITY gripping for dear life. If I can just move them in my mind’s eye, I might quantify the fuzzy source of my discomfort. POWER sticks to CONTROL: a regimented performance schedule makes me feel like I’m still musically relevant, making strides. CLARITY drifts to the top of the chart: having something I wake up for in the morning will give me a sense of purpose. Or is that actually INTENSITY? What am I looking for? Why do I care so much?
Thinking back, flute always gave me structure, a step-by-step guide to constant improvement - technically, artistically, and somehow, even morally. I was getting better. And I was obsessed with getting better. I didn’t realize at the time that while this obsession originally came from a place of love, it was also a way to stoke my anxieties outside of the flute. Whenever I was overwhelmed about classes, I played. When I had an argument with my mom, I slammed the bedroom door shut and played. In college, overcome by a bout of sadness, I played. When a mentor passed, I didn’t even cry until after I picked up the flute. By diving into an artistic balm, I could simultaneously feel in control of myself and deeply detached.
In some ways, the most emotive tool in my life was how I escaped my own feelings. Instead of confronting them, I could release into the world of another sonic tale. A premade map for which I simply needed to uncover the cypher. I decoded the dynamics of sorrow, the pacing of heartbreak, or the timbre of ecstasy. Even now, it is difficult to understand the relationship between that clarity and control of expression and the cap on processing my own personal life, whether it helped or hindered.
One of the year’s buzziest movies is Tár, depicting the fall from grace of conductor Lydia Tár who not only controls the sounds of the Berlin Philharmonic, but every last element of her life. Her terseness, rocket straight posture, slicked back low pony, and prepared talking points – they are all manicured for an airtight power play. Of course, until things begin to fall apart at the seams. Some musicians I know have taken to social media to express their distaste that a rare movie spotlighting classical music chose to focus on the questionable behavior and downfall of a woman-conductor, pointing out the reality that no such position within New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, or Berlin has ever been held by one. Tár’s predatory behavior is largely associated with actual men in actual posts, and these men have frequently just taken a quiet backseat for a season, if that. Why air out the laundry of a fictitious woman, one who in this field as it stands, probably would never have been given a chance in the first place?
On initial glance, it may seem that the film transplants a woman into a man’s role, but it’s this exact not-quite-right discomfort which makes it work. My mom, sister, and I had a lively discussion following our screening that if Tár were a man, the story would be a rather basic profile of the archetypical toxic man. We might say, “Of course this man would do that! Another one we saw coming!” PATRIARCHY felt-grips atop POWER and CONTROL such that we lose the clarity to see them in a larger web. With Lydia, we might ask, had no one noticed yellow flags before? Why hadn’t institutions done anything to prevent misconduct?
Lydia Tár is keenly aware of the lineage she comes from. She’s calculates everything. The suits. The interviews. The firing and the hiring – it’s all to keep her where she is. And yet, her funders and mentors – all men – seem carefree in their interactions, slouching in their armchairs, waving their hands at trouble, and unconcerned about legitimacy in their rapid-fire musical analyses. Lydia still has to prove herself unceasingly, even with her resumé, even with an undeniable intelligence and talent. She’s not someone to admire in this film, but I think it’s less a movie about gender than it is about power, its inextricable bond with gender, and how institutions and entire fields, by virtue of how they are built – with let’s say audition panels that aren’t so anonymous or funders with certain agendas – will continue to perpetuate their structures. A simple swap at the top isn’t enough to untangle an entire ecosystem.
My long-winded film analysis is all to say that this world of classical music is one that I know well, and honestly, one I thought accurately found itself on screen, if not dramatized. These conversations are niche; auditions can be closed to open applications; and preferences are sometimes arbitrary. Some people will win and some people won’t, and it is not a system that can be easily changed just because you are talented and powerful and aware because you have likely played along with it for a while too. I am not blaming the industry completely, nor am I truthful when I say I am not a bit starry-eyed at my peers who made it. Who climbed through each trial and tribulation and emerged with tenure and health insurance, and remained kind and humble. I think I would do the same if I could. But really, the anxiety of it all – my own unraveling – was not worth it to me.
I decided long ago that I didn’t want to take another audition. My mom used to laugh because other moms would secretly reach out to ask if I was competing in the year’s circuits, planning on prematurely retracting their candidacy if it were the case. When I joined one of the top management rosters in the U.S., I was the youngest ever at nineteen. Sophomore year of college, I won the flute competition featuring all the region’s music schools. But there were countless rejections. I applied to another management competition three times. To certain summer camps enough that I just threw in the towel. At a certain level, I knew it was a luck-and-numbers game, and I just had to keep at it, but there was this growing thought of to-what-end. I started sensing that the temptation of striving for betterment, that tough but caring space away from the anxieties, had become the actual grounds for my flourishing insecurities. Once the powers-that-be had the keys to my success, defined by standards I didn’t always meet or even agree with, each hour in the practice room settled into a shadow of bitterness. I could see myself locked up for years, conjured up the image of a disinterested panel, rejected year about year because my overthinking brain counted the rests a little too fast for comfort – all the way until my love for the instrument had entirely faded. Maybe it wouldn’t have taken so long if I just gritted my teeth, or maybe it’s this exact anxiety that would have prevented success, but I wasn’t going to wait to find out.
Throughout the movie, Tár is haunted by a mounting ticking. The sense of foreboding is suffocating, and to me, it’s the perfect click-click-click to illustrate the time-bomb of wedging yourself into a structure whose ground is not secure. At the end of the film, she is back in presumably her childhood home, and she’s watching a classic Lenny Bernstein lecture-concert. He says that where words fail, music comes in. It gives shape to what otherwise cannot be expressed, contains the space for what we love most. At this, Tár sobs. Perhaps because she realizes that the grounds upon which she has built her career have been subsumed by the enticing entanglements of power, control, intensity – and at what cost?
For me, music started as a place to hold something I couldn’t hold. Feelings I squashed down or didn’t know existed. As I developed the craft, I formed a voice, and my bond with the instrument deepened. It has taken the years away from school, away from auditions, away from judging eyes – my own included – to realize that flute also became the expression of anxieties separate from its origin story. It became mired with the power structures of an entire field, of a way of making a living, with the exhaustion of proving that I was a worthy person.
I know that I need to peel the felted layers from each other, pry them apart, with the understanding that even though each word will still stick to the giant board, perhaps I can learn to decenter them. I’ve found the breakup with a full-fledged professional life in music, or at least what I thought it was, to be one of the most prolonged in my life. When I meet anyone who does music along with another career, I cling to their every word with extreme fervor, hoping for the secret to satisfaction. Because I never feel satisfied. I crave that mélange of intensity and clarity, knowing that it comes with the curse of power and control. The best advice I’ve gotten is that, money aside, our own balance of fulfillment changes as we grow. One year, the balance may lean towards music, the next towards something else. Our task is to listen to that whisper, to that pull – like the constant tick and siren in Lydia’s periphery – and actually act on it. Make a change before we wake up one day and both contact lenses are gone, before we don’t recognize ourselves.
Ironically, my entire college thesis was about balance. I explored what it means to be the agent of your own unique balance – between specificity and abstraction, words and music, the feminine and masculine. How one should never subsume the other, and that this complicated cocktail was the engine for expressive freedom. I taught an entire course called “Finding the Words” about using language as a means for understanding how to make expressive musical choices. It feels almost laughable that this month I’m thinking about how I may have avoided finding the words for what I personally have been feeling. Because while having words to express the mechanics of an artform is helpful, ultimately, I know what Bernstein is saying in my bones. It makes me sob like Lydia.
He’s talking about the feeling of my brain finally shutting up when I take a breath in. Of everything igniting as I reach the end of a phrase. How the flow of a line sways me from my toes to my eyebrows. The inexplicable delight I feel at the flute’s silvery and bright sound, richly vertical with overtones. The physical expansion in my lungs after practicing a few hours, how each open inhale pulls like molasses. The power of imagining myself as the puppeteer of time, stealing a second here and gifting a moment there so that a soaring phrase can ever so slightly teeter at the precipice before careening back into place. The folding into myself - so focused on bars and beats, dynamic markings and breaths, phrase trajectories and harmonic shifts that I don’t notice the light long seeped away from the horizon. Or the ball of tension at the base of my skull that releases when I feel a note reverberating inside of me, then refracted in the resonance of a hall. This mix of intellect and determination it takes to pause and play hundreds of voice memos to scientifically decipher the exact sonic workings of a feeling. And the truly divine energy of performing for a crowd. Looking up from my stand, crystalizing hours of contemplation into a space, a vibration never to be repeated.
I still don’t know what role I want music to play in 2023. Perhaps I can rewrite the narrative of flute being my escape from myself into my curated expression of me. It can become my reclaiming, my pride in overcoming the anxieties of the unknown, of feeling out of control. It might be time for me to think about what music makes me feel and to let that become the intensity in my life. Music feels like screaming. It feels like Julie Andrews bounding from behind the hills, arms outstretched. It feels like nothing else I’ve ever done. I guess it feels like love.
There’s a newsletter by pastry chef and food writer Lisa Donovan I like. This week she wrote about her same desire to recenter. She defined it as devotion and practice, finding a way to understand and cultivate that which is holy to you. If I were to define my calling, it is perhaps translating feelings into something else – a composer’s score into a concert; my thoughts about flute or food into writing. Of course, this is predicated on a practice of actually understanding my own feelings. I commit myself this year to answering this call. This need to express, woven into a practice of self-reflection and deep feeling. How blessed really, that I might devote myself to being more grounded in me. That feels like Control. Intensity. Clarity - Power.
This winter break, I went on a family vacation, and I insisted on swimming in a watering hole with a waterfall. We found one, and I stripped down, hobbled over the rocks, and sank into the clear hole. Instantly, my breath caught in my throat. It was so frigid that an involuntary smile plastered across my face, my shoulders flown to my ears. I sunk to my neck and focused on dog-paddling to the waterfall. In and out, I commanded my lungs, because the rest of my body was screaming for me to get out. I clenched to the slippery cliff rocks at the falls, dipped my head under, and barely felt the thrashing on my skull before throwing a huge thumbs-up into the sky. When I wrapped myself in a towel, my entire body was a-buzz, but my mind was suddenly vast, clear, and alert. Like every cell in my body was vibrating in synergy.
I don’t think I want to fling myself off this cliff. I want to sit under the waterfall. I want to trust that when everything screams no, I will be aligned enough to listen to a whisper of yes. This time I’m okay. This time I choose to be here on my own terms. Music and flute don’t have to exist within anxiety anymore. I’ve gifted myself the time to recalibrate, rebalance, and maybe this year, I want to tip the scale back towards music a bit more, with some grace, and see what space I can carve out for myself.
Last week, I played a piece that has forever evaded me, the Bach Partita for flute. I learned it with my very first flute teacher who told me it was like sitting under the light of the moon. It is a piece that I failed an audition with, got hate comment-ed on YouTube from, cried in middle school about (You get the point). But I was determined to give it another try. I played the first movement, and with each undulating repeated gesture, I let another tension go. I imagined myself in a dark field, a single ray of light warming me from within. By the second page, tears had welled in my eyes. This is what it felt like to sit under the waterfall. I let the anxieties scream and then felt them flow away. Felt the air, my hands, my mind – so used to this way of speaking – carry forth how I was feeling. The last note melted into my tiny apartment, and I looked up into the mirror in front of the music stand.
I saw myself beaming.
Leave me a comment if you have one. This blog is my flinging-into-the-void, and having something bounce back is always welcome.
Beautiful heartfelt essay, Annie. I adore your playing and your writing!
I have been holding off watching Tar fearing it would be too suspenseful, triggering for me.