Practicing is like brushing my teeth after a long day of coffee, almond butter, yogurt, and kale. The foods that stain, get stuck on my gumbs, lodged between my teeth; the nut butter that builds into clumps in the back of my mouth. I spend ten minutes after I eat poking at it with my tongue until I’ve broken it down enough to finally swallow. Yogurt coating my teeth with a thin film–the feeling I know after 20 years of playing music. The same film that coats my psyche, only scrubbed clean until I practice. I know what it sounds like to be right. To play the right notes, to have the right technique, and to execute the right rhythm. I know what it feels like to floss, pulling loose the kale that is healthy going down, but harmful when it stays. I know the Vitamin K of practicing, but the rot that stays behind.
Improving the tiniest of feats, eliminating a soft accent on the first note of a double stroke using my arms to lift the stick while letting gravity take control of my arms’ descent. Yet, even having let gravity take control, the first stroke is still under control. Somehow I have made an alliance with the forces of nature, no longer an amateur. It’s the practice of every artist of every medium: defying nature, gravity, evolution; making the body do what can’t actually be done. Then focusing on that impossibility until it disrupts nature itself. Like climate change. Practicing, musicianship, is climate change.
Double strokes, triple strokes, quadruple strokes and multiple bounces are all a negotiation between my physiology and the physics written in natural stone. I can’t change those laws, but I have to train my body to manipulate them. While I’ve been taught how to dominate the equations, I can’t be taught how to dominate my body. It’s what every musician, every artist, spends a lifetime learning. The domination of their own body, defying its natural state of being, as every orchestral percussionist has had to learn.
I’ve never had a panic attack while brushing my teeth. Not yet anyway. But today, practicing my drum, my snare drum, my drum named so aptly as to make it clear that I am trapped, chained and in bondage–I had a panic attack. When I think about it, the attack happened before I knew it had started. I moved through exercises faster than my body could register how to improve upon them.
The dumbbells I might use to exercise, the way in which doing two or three sets allows my muscles to first break down before they can rebuild even stronger. All I did with my snare drum exercises was break down. There was no rebuilding, no repetitive motions at predetermined intervals to ensure that my muscles got stronger. Just a breaking. Just a spiral downward.
I called a number of percussionists, New York Philharmonic here, Cleveland Orchestra there, past teachers and former colleagues, asking them all the same question: has this happened to you? What did you do? What do you do?
And yet I know the answer is the same. That teaching my body to defy gravity is only found in me knowing my own body. The weight on my arm, and in my head, will never be the same as the white men I have learned from and talk to about my panic attack. What they had to learn about the movement of their bodies was in a world of privilege, absent racism and sexism. They were bred to defy gravity. They were taught their physics lessons knowing that those laws were made by people like them, and also that those laws didn’t contain them.
But I panic. I panic knowing that the title “snare drum” is merely a name to them, but a state of being for me.
Look: Evolve 