[F_MINOR] Drugging in the classical music world

[Mary Jo Watts <mwatts@EDEN.RUTGERS.EDU>]

Did I just hear GG from the grave urging "Dispense betablockers
forthwith!" -MJ


   New York Times Better Playing Through Chemistry

*By BLAIR TINDALL*

Published: October 17, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/arts/music/17tind.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all&position=
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/arts/music/17tind.html?oref=login&pagewanted=all&position=>

RUTH ANN McCLAIN, a flutist from Memphis, used to suffer from
debilitating onstage jitters.

"My hands were so cold and wet, I thought I'd drop my flute," Ms.
McClain said recently, remembering a performance at the National Flute
Convention in the late 1980's. Her heart thumped loudly in her chest,
she added; her mind would not focus, and her head felt as if it were on
fire. She tried to hide her nervousness, but her quivering lips kept her
from performing with sensitivity and nuance.

.....
Ms. McClain is hardly the only musician to rely on beta blockers, which,
taken in small dosages, can quell anxiety without apparent side effects.
The little secret in the classical music world - dirty or not - is that
the drugs have become nearly ubiquitous. So ubiquitous, in fact, that
their use is starting to become a source of worry. Are the drugs a
godsend or a crutch? Is there something artificial about the music they
help produce? Isn't anxiety a natural part of performance? And could
classical music someday join the Olympics and other athletic
organizations in scandals involving performance-enhancing drugs?

...

Even the most skillful and experienced musicians can experience this
fear. Legendary artists like the pianists Vladimir Horowitz and Glenn
Gould curtailed their careers because of anxiety, and the cellist Pablo
Casals endured a thumping heart, shortness of breath and shakiness even
as he performed into his 90's. Before the advent of beta blockers,
artists found other, often more eccentric means of calming themselves.
In 1942, a New York pianist charged his peers 75 cents to attend the
Society for Timid Souls, a salon in which participants distracted one
another during mock performances. Others resorted to superstitious
ritual, drink or tranquilizers. The pianist Samuel Sanders told an
interviewer in 1980 that taking Valium before a performance would bring
him down from wild panic to mild hysteria.

Musicians quietly began to embrace beta blockers after their application
to stage fright was first recognized in The Lancet, a British medical
journal, in 1976. By 1987, a survey conducted by the International
Conference of Symphony Orchestra Musicians, which represents the 51
largest orchestras in the United States, revealed that 27 percent of its
musicians had used the drugs. Psychiatrists estimate that the number is
now much higher.

....

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Mary Jo
listowner, f_minor

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