Inflection Point with Lauren Schiller; #65; How To Beat Perfectionism - Patti Niemi, SF Opera Orchestra

thull physically what it feels like is you're just gone off the rails about to lose your mind because if you think i'm being highly caffeinated you know multiply that times ten your heart is beating really fast that's patti niemi percussionist with the san francisco harbor orchestra or she's now been playing for twenty five years from kalw npr x this is inflection point i'm lauren shuler patti niemi has written a memoir about her experiences with anxiety and perfectionism as she pursued her dream to be a professional musician but the memoir is called sticking it out from juilliard to the orchestra pit stay tuned to hear how it rose about her years now to the top of the music world right after this you can or well physically what it feels like is you're just going off the rails i'm about to lose your mind because if you think of being highly

caffeinated you know multiply that times ten your heart is beating really fast your hands are shaking incredibly fast you know it's really like a panic attack with all the physical symptoms and then add to that the dialogue in your head which says you know i need to be perfect perfect therefore what to do back to i need to be perfect it sits along our dialogue perfection is the enemy of good and that anxiety is perfections best friends patti niemi had been at julliard for two years when she sat down at a rehearsal and suddenly realized she had no control over her hands she's a percussionist and having control all over your hands is lake really important one way putting down with her anxiety was to practice i got there at quarter to gain the morning school opened at eight so my best friend and i at the time she was a percussionist and she was doing the same thing we get their quarter they try to find a place to

practice which at the time we started with about twenty one percussionist my first year and we had to practice rooms so that meant we went into stairwells or hallway is where the roof ted is at the end of the day the goal is to get a job so the time right before the audition comes up let's say maybe six weeks to two months out from the audition it's hyper focus and you're practicing a list of things which have century so there's this incredible focus on just that list i mean i'm literally at times would practice eight to twelve hours a day imagine spending your whole life dedicated to one scale making it into and graduating from juilliard and in seeking a job are the only way to get hired someone retires or die for me i was a liberal arts major titles by anything for patty who described himself to me as previous cd after a

number of addition she almost one but didn't she finally lost yet here she is reading from her butt sticking out my room got missing i didn't care enough to clean it was practicing for the boston audition it had been filled with instruments now the floor space was covered with dirty clothes i like dishes sit in the sink until the silver were arrested a little white mouse appear from behind a bookcase one day i had been sitting at my table so immobile he probably assumed i was one of the chairs he darted away only one i screamed i'm just going to tell you right now that this story has a happy ending though patti niemi made it to the finals of many auditions which is why she felt so hard when she finally did break down she took one more addition and went on to become a percussionist with the san francisco opera orchestra for the last twenty five years she has been sticking out i talked with it about what it meant to rise to the top of the music world as well as to rise above the fears even when

things including overwhelming anxiety and we haven't even gotten to this party at the sexual advances of her older now a mentor award from kalw npr's lauren shuler to see you so what is that experience like in the performance where you're waiting for your moment it's pretty nerve wracking of people have different experiences with this and i happen to be someone who has a lot of performance anxiety and i would say the waiting is the hardest part i mean it's tom petty i couldn't agree more ads it's the moment into which you can insert a lot of fears like i know i have to be perfect in this moment and it has to happen when the

music says it's going to happen i can't wait for a better moment so there's a lot of performance anxiety that goes with it so when you hear it when you're in the moment and and your time comes where you can you can you just walk me through what that experience is likening that paint the picture there's a conductor there's the audience there's audio yeah so a big moment in the opera let's say there's a big symbol crash coming up just want a new habit three thousand pairs of eyes on you out in the audience and a one big set of eyes up on the podium and big stake is going out you so all your colleagues are surrounding him were generally at the back but the percussion at the back so i'm sitting there and let's say i have even ten minutes between entrances to ten minutes is a long time to sit and wait sitting there trying to keep track watching the singer's up on the stage and it's getting closer closer so finally i'm counting down and listening to the music i'm waiting for my moment my standup i take these big hundreds of men

on about the fling at one another and i wait for the moment and he lowers the baton and i quite so you've been doing this for over a couple of decades a fistfight correct any self feel anxiety i do and that's not to say i dont love music i don't love playing music i really do it's been a privilege all these years and i wouldn't have it any other way but i also just wanted to be honest especially in writing the book about how anxious i've been and how much i've tried to deal with performance anxiety because i think opening that discussion helps other musicians and it's helped me since writing the book in the in the last year i've heard from a lot of people saying need to and that's kind of a really for me i wish i'd done along the gulf so starting as a kid i understand from your bach music listening that you were really interested in and excited about him wanted to pursue know so i'm what what attracted you to music in the first place

fortunately when i was a kid so this is back in the mid seventies that music was still a part of public school education so that he didn't have to be apparent introducing into it now about fifth grade they said do you want playing instrument and i for some reason thought percussion was really cool because it was you know you can show off was very interesting to me so i signed up for and that's that was the extent of it at the time just being introduced in the public school and tell you are not wanting to show off i just i just always wanted to do that and i don't know why that was my personality at the time so i thought what what would be better than playing drums and you know having to sticks in your hand and getting to play on a drum that seemed really exciting to me so deeply as anything to do with being i am one of four children in the middle and out i actually think that's probably true competitive four girls were very competitive with one another so percussion and is more than just drones or a percussion is generally all the

instruments that you can shape or strike or rub your finger against the exclude timpani at this point because once you get to the professional level and even some time before those big kettle drums that's another player entirely they played timpani we play everything else and i actually don't know i've been trying to picture timpani i probably should've people that i think about the image that is it would describe the scene in that period generally a set of four and they have been copper bowls like like fudge mixing bowl the most but i'm quite a bit bigger or so the tennis sits behind this on a throne of for generally for a timpani and work to the sight of him playing saw the phone got pinched field bass drum symbols snare drum tambourine triangle it's a long list of instruments and so are there are there is generally are the instruments that percussion is comprised of yet unpacked it gets more exotic to go there are there are

different instruments if you go along the list there are more exotic ones as well i can happen is they said they sit behind him i generally always a guy it's far more common at this point i said that because our contestant our orchestra is a head and so as soon as as percussion anything that keeps the beat emulate academically perhaps part of it part of it is time keeping especially for drums if you're if you're keeping the beat like you said another party sort of exclamation you know putting exclamation point like symbols bass drum here's the end of something or hear is the beginning of something or this is where its loudest or adding color symbols are great for adding color different timbers of instruments can just be there for color so we get to do a lot so answer your focus is wendy's with you specifically play is you have as dead as seven cents that you play all the time right

that thing up when most of the orchestra as symbols there are a lot of operas that just have bass drum and symbols and usually if it's just based on symbols of mumbling symbols so that's what i do quite a bit of also mallet percussion which is meltzer that the state we called the disco meltzer they have something on the end like a piece of rubber or pc yarn so xylophone marimba glockenspiel fiber foam those are all now a keyboard instrument and you brought a tambourine i get gas so can you demonstrate harassed when some of the many things that one can do with a tambourine sure azar was saying that percussion is generally something you can shape or strike or rub your finger against so tambourine coming capsule aids all of that is just for the life that you can shake it in a more sustained weight for i just write it very loudly

i am i can play rhythm that's so fast that i can play with one hand i'm so i'll play it between my fist and my knee like this is for this is going to get one i didn't rub my thumb against the side of it and the virgin grade to sound like that show i really like that one i have any right to write just because i also have a little bit of room floor wax on it to keep to have been resistance and then i make it just the same resistance those are some of the things you can do on a tambourine and in general i would say that's come a percussion is striking shaking rubbing her finger

at the time and even tiger and see that to be the one practicing making the most noise yes so as far as ben that interest as a kid ten years old elementary school and then to be turning into a professional i'm really curious to haul you get from from that point as a child to that making this your profession so you clearly had music classes your parents or support there yes i'm a homage to that certain that momentum enough support for all verses it's feeling somehow inevitable that this is where eat your hat i think the support was just about everything i mean if he if i hadn't had parents who were supportive it and it might not go on any further than just taking lessons in school and i also happen to grow up in rochester new york where there's a huge music conservatory is the school of music but i start to have parents who said yet how we could take lessons there you know now we've done it in elementary school for a couple of years let's move on to a

bigger pie and so it's just women eastman school of music and i was introduced to a teacher there who became my mentor in does the most wonderful teacher for the next six years and was that was that where you were also getting your regular education was that an after school then after school place to go they it was called at the time was called a preparatory department now sometimes call pre college or you take a variety of classes like in addition to lessons i was doing music theory music history time to take beginning piano things like that but it's all in addition to regular school was that was that theory party that interesting to you or did you really just when it than i really want to bang on the drums bill that you can have to learn all that and it was all fascinating was all very interesting theory history yeah it's a real it's a very deep education into one small area what do you think about the outliers there the malcolm gladwell put forth in a book a few years ago about how ten thousand hours you an expert in anything and if

anything when it comes to use too you know and and and people who are professional professionally talented let's say how much of that is about that early education and does that intense enough practice verse is just unique talent and i think it's about ninety nine percent hard work honestly i talk about that a lot with friends a mining colleagues and it's funny cause i tried to define the word talent i'm not really sure what they're as i mean we can look around and see and i think the best i could come up with is that for some people it comes more quickly they put together those connections more quickly others take more time but really to me it's about passion if you're passionate about it you will work hard you will do it so i would never make the assumption that someone couldn't do something because oh they don't have this talent so i think if you look from the outside at a musician or a dancer or an artist it's very very little about talent it's really about passion and that hard work the very hard work digging the passengers from

and you have to enjoy it to be passionate about it enters into a yukon have to be good at it early start out with a level of i don't know i'm not sure where that for me the passion was music was really beautiful to listen to i like listening to it it made me feel something it brings up emotions and it was also really interesting puzzle like if i wanna get better how do i do that that's a fascinating puzzle for anything and and so i put together the idea that i was really passionate about music and again i mean i was ten i was really thinking this but in retrospect i think i was passionate about music and i started to put together the puzzle how do i get better at it so that probably would have happened in any area i was interested in what happened in the music and you're one of the few women percussionist writing professionally but also i can imagine back when you were a kid there weren't that many girls signing up for drums you know it's interesting because my teacher at

eastman was a woman so it didn't seem that unusual to me there were also my first year in armed youth orchestra which is separate from the high school orchestra it was like a collection of people in different high schools and rochester my first section was five when me and for other women so it didn't seem so unusual it still is it's its far fewer women than man but i don't think it really had any kind of effect on me and i didn't think too much about it at the time now in the future one i began to experience some harassment when i was in college that's the first time it occurred to me being a female in the midst of all these males that that's when it made a difference that when it got difficult and that's said that's at the juilliard school right and you do you write about that experience could quite candidly in your desk would you share that's now wet wet what happened sure it was about my last year at juilliard and the experience that

music schools you have a teacher who is very very important to you the teachers of the reason we go to schools you pick juilliard because you want a study with a certain teacher you pick any school because you want to study with one teacher and that's the teacher to whom you report once a week and spend an hour with alone behind closed door so you have sort of the perfect storm of ingredients here you have a very powerful mentor an hour a week alone and they have this power of you in that we do take auditions and they're blind auditions but a teacher can recommend you for certain audition if you were able to get into the audition on your resume when they still have a lot of power as far as jobs go so it just became clear to me because he said that so that he had an interest in me that was not a teacher student interest he said that he fell in love with me and that was really detrimental and very painful for me it was awful

in in the book you talk about how in inspired a feeling that way you still would go up from yale's right after after your lesson was over and and assertive try and talk you wait yeah so can you talk a bit about what you think was going on for you in cuenca perpetuating the relationship that year and that is a good question because i think i remember watching the anita hill and i talk about this watching the needy hill hearings and one of the things that was said to her was why would you continue communicating with someone who treated you this way or who was inappropriate with you and as soon as she said that i thought well i did the same thing it did and it didn't occur to me not too he was the one with the power in my mind and i thought well if i can just manage it i need to minimize this and i need to manage it because i felt that i had two choices to equally bad choices one was to say this is really

inappropriate tell him that i need to leave i need a different teacher and the second was to put up with it and i ended up putting up with it but i thought i could just minimize this weekend go out to dinner and we can just talk about anything else we talk about music it's gonna be fine but it was a fine it had a pretty strong effect on me physically i gotten all sir i had so much anxiety of the situation i just thought if i was going to make him mad he would retaliate and there is no mechanism at the school for you to share as going out an unarmed huh none whatsoever but it wasn't talked about and this was nineteen eighty seven eighty six eighty seven and it just wasn't talked about at all how was it to write about this looking back i mean did you did you pay to file it away until you set out to write a book or as is the obvious it's really been living with since that time that's how i view either compartmentalize said or how his hat has the effect of it manifest itself three are life since then pretty quickly afterwards by the

time i was out of school i had started writing about an old my experience is not just that because i just wanted to have them down in a journal so i wrote about it at the time but over the years of course it's changed my thinking on it has changed and like i said a lot of it changed when i watch the anita hill hearings that was just incredibly eye opening for me and the biggest thing that happened when i watched was wow it's not about sex it's about power because for me none of this with one or two exceptions it wasn't physical with this teacher he didn't try to physically assault me or attack me so i thought well ok does that mean there's nothing wrong i mean this is a twenty year old trying to figure this out on her own without any input because i was too afraid to tell anyone so i'm thinking to myself well there's nothing sexual years so i guess it's not wrong he's just saying things and then i watched what happened to a medieval i thought oh it's about power yes it wasn't good for me i knew that but it also wasn't right so we're at well where your practice sessions like

they and they got to the point where and this was in almost the end of my time at juilliard so was the last year and a half that i was there so fortunately for the first three years this was nothing but it it was very important for me to keep learning from him and also that like a sad minimize i'm going to try to minimize the so i would just come in full of questions like i always had full of how we get better at this and that was one way of minimizing it but that's also what i wanted from him and wanted to learn he's the teacher i wanted to learn from so i just kept going in with questions and more to play more to ask but it was pretty uncomfortable and you had the option and in a graduate program there and chose not to get it right i started as a master's program so i did my four years ago my bachelor's and i started a master's program mostly because living in the heart and not having a place to practice for percussion is very difficult so if i had just gone off our one way from school i would have have to find a place to practice have to find a teacher to keep me going so i

just kept going at school and after about a couple weeks i thought this was it was just to be too hard i was i was getting overwhelmed by the situation and then fortunately for me new world symphony came along so i got very lucky an annual survey leader and then as a percussionist and wright became became a member of the roving bands right when it was brand new at the time of the new world symphony now that his galaxy when did it start writing at eight so coming up on thirty years at the time it was brand new we were all just going down to miami beach and see what happened and so was going be three months at the time and it's turned it in nearly thirty years it's an incredible orchestra it's really the only full time training orchestra and the country ploughed say you are saved by the new wave gas still has do you have any idf this teacher has read your book that he's passed away it was quite a bit older so he does now that we got a while ago but there are plenty of people who read if you and i had a lot of fears about that that was what caused me the most anxiety in putting them about

is i don't mind revealing my own anxiety and such but this is someone that a lot of people really revered and what he did well he did really well was a great teacher in terms of passing on information and i try to be fair about that he did he did not have access to the information that people have now it still happens but now you're told very clearly these aligned you can't cross this is what you can do and to be fair to him he wasn't told that that's just not how it worked at the time so that's very kind put all that out there today i myself feel better about putting it out yeah i mean a lot has changed around the way we think and talk about sexual harassment it was something else edin and out something that is very much it's in the headlines people are getting fired all we all know that it's not ok and i really no excuse to be

committing it were or have to suffer on the other end of it so i understand that you recently spent some time with your all the sacking with their ten nine committee right it was the title nine steering committee and i felt like i had a pretty unique vision to give them about what it's like for musicians and why is that difference because we spend an hour a week behind closed door with one person and this one person is our mentor and that teacher becomes very powerful to you if your mentor it's someone who may or may not be able to help you out in the future with summer festivals or getting into an audition and they give you advice they give you everything i know about an instrument about music and it was incredible i got to you know tell him my story and say this is what happened to me it was thirty years ago how's it did for now and they had a lot of our good ideas about brain stems how are we changing this now wow everybody knows that it's wrong they also know what it is and what it isn't you know isn't making a

dirty joke won't i don't know maybe it's not if the person doesn't have power over you say no maybe not but is saying that you're in love with someone and appropriate when you have power of them yes even if you're not touching them but also what you do about that well one of the things i was thinking about when i was preparing to talk to them was i had these two bad choices at the time one of which was to stay in the situation and try to minimize it and the other was well what if i just say no i want to study with you anymore and he could perhaps retaliate that's what i thought would happen what would i do differently now and i couldn't come up with an answer except to say i don't like this reduces their book the head and when in the discussion that followed my top there they were telling me some of the things they've come up with for instance ok this is happening to someone in this department this woman has come to the department and said this is intolerable what can we do about it well there could be retraining for the whole department so that's someone wasn't

singled out in which case everybody would know perhaps who had done the singling out that to me sounded like a great solution like ok everybody has to go through this training the whole department because part of what i feared obviously was this retaliation and just the idea that i knew who i would be allowed to speak with us about and the other thing he told me was that it was very students entered the response was based on what does the student want to do about this because i would've been a concern of mine as well like whoa what if i go to them and they just they out him and they say you can't do that anymore here to be fired i would've been terrified tis i don't know what i wanted to happen i just wanted it to stop so the fact that they would have listened to my request my wishes what about a big help this is inflection point i learned schiller my guest is patti niemi percussionist with the san francisco opera orchestra will be right back it's i

learned schiller and this is inflection point i'm talking with patti niemi she's a percussionist with the seven sisko opera orchestra and has written a memoir called sticking out about how she handled her experiences with anxiety and perfectionism while at juilliard oh one one of the i mean there are there are many aspects of your book that completely fascinated me i am one of them another one of them is that the number of hours a day that you've devoted to practicing more more than i would just love for you to describe what a day at at juilliard was like for you in terms of where or practicing tae men were you did it how i knew you know is that what a visibly did your body because i actually i can't what a liberal arts college like we decide how to quiet it is there is a very foreign it can set into my personal experience i love frida just didn't share what that is like fortunately i love to practice especially at the time because it was leading to winning a job in my mind that's what i hoped so to me like as it was this

great big puzzle like how am i going to do this so we're practicing all day and everybody else is doing the same thing it's kind of like the toddler parallel play you don't feel left out i didn't feel like i was missing anything i got there at quarter to eight in the morning school opened at eight so my best friend and i at the time she was a percussionist and she was doing the same thing we get their quarter they show up try to find a place to practice which at the time we had we started with about twenty one the percussionist my first year and we had to practice rooms so that meant we went into stairwells or hallways or the rule if i went to it was that they didn't have the practice room thing that would settle because it has a lot of competition started that's right but that was ok it's like find yourself a place to practice and it kind of gets more intense around an audition so you're always practicing to get better but it gets very focused on an audition comes up and even in school or practicing for summer festival auditions or new world symphony audition so the time

right before the addition comes up let's say maybe six weeks to two months out from the audition it's hyper focused and you're practicing a list of things which they have sent you so either the summer festival or the orchestra send you a list of excerpt you're going to play for them so there's this incredible focus on just that list i mean i literally at times would practice eight to twelve hours a day and some instruments that's possible some it's not for percussion since we have so many different instruments it's possible because we're using different muscle groups something very very soft snare drummer soft tambourine or very very loud symbols i don't think you could practice i mean i have to have a horn player tell me this but i don't think he could practice horn for that many hours a day your lips would just give up or if you're just in one motion like milan i i don't know about that either but we have so many different little muscle groups and big muscle groups that it was possible and there were times that i did that and well well as their physical effect i knew without the practice i was

pretty lucky it didn't affect me except for just about one time there was one audition that i was practicing the most four it started to affect me like shoulder issues tendon issues but it won a way i got lucky this is inflection point i'm lauren shuler my guest is patti niemi percussionist with the seven sisko opera orchestra way back right after break the kinks became it's nice but nico

is bleak i'm lauren shuler and this is inflection point i'm talking with patti niemi percussionist with the san francisco opera orchestra and has written a memoir called sticking out about how she handled her experiences with anxiety and perfectionism with your descendants on twitter now many years behind the early eighties you probably are so happy to not only has so far i am at the time you're listening with a blind auditions or they could not actually see you was auditioning yes almost all of them were and are what they frequently do is have blind auditions for the first couple of rounds so the preliminaries where they're there could be a hundred

people come to an audition they all play behind a screen than let's say they cut that number down to fifteen for the semifinals generally those people still play behind a screen frequently in the finals they will take the screen down some by that point you have played two rounds behind a screen nobody knows who you are sometimes they leave the screen up for the finals sometimes i'll take it down and so much of your experience is about auditioning and not getting write the part right and i know you've talked about having this performance anxiety us could you describe what that feels like well physically what it feels like is you're just going off the rails i'm about to lose your mind because if you think of being highly caffeinated you know multiply that times ten your heart is beating really fast your hands are shaking incredibly fast all those things are just you know it's really like a panic attack it's not in this is this is my experience i can't speak for anybody else but it's it's like having an overwhelming panic attack with all the physical symptoms and

then add to that the dialogue in your head which says you know i need to be perfect i can't be for a fact therefore what i didn't do back to i need to be perfect it's it's a long hard dialogue and for me none of this happened in tell all of a sudden my second year of juilliard it became a problem because i went through high school just just find is performing and that's what that's what you need to do that the flow is yet outperform when you start to talk yourself and question your ability that's when you start to lose your mind a little bit so it was never a problem until all of a sudden it was and at that point i had heard about inderal which is a beta blocker that a lot of musicians use so when that and that stopped the physical symptoms that your heart will not be out of your chest your hands will shake and when you're trying to be very small motions with very fine muscles you need a lot of motor control and you don't need your hands shaking so it stops that from happening what it

doesn't do is calmer head down i mean you had to be a little bit calmer because i know my hands are going to shake but after a while that that doesn't help so much anymore and that's what happened to me after a while it stopped doing its job my hands were gonna shake but i still questioned my ability a lot do you still feel that way now i do that the conversation is different in my head because i'm not putting myself out there for big performances anymore i'm not taking auditions haven't taken my audition and twenty five years so that's no longer part of the conversation but it's still it's so hard i wanna be perfect ending perfect in live performance is pretty difficult so you're going to fail and it's how you handle the failure to be perfect that you have to manage what is perfect letter that's a good question i don't know i guess it says this this idea in your head or in my head that you know part of it not talk about this in the book is that there are

recordings that everybody can listen to so these we have these big war horses their operas that everybody knows or their symphonic works at everybody knows beethoven fifth everybody knows how that goes if you never heard of a recording of any classical music probably heard that so what happens where everybody knows how it you're supposed to play and the pressure is on you to recreate that and maybe re created better if that can mean anything that's a lot of pressure that's reinventing the wheel every time you do it so how do you manage that i don't know everybody has a lot of of ways to manage it but it's hard to do you think that would still happen if you're playing a piece that you had written your cell for that was not so well established it's much easier i still get nervous but if the piece is a contemporary would work that not everybody knows how it goes but the fear is so much more manageable nobody knows what i'm supposed to play so i'm free to just play it which is

interesting about that that really is how it feels to me do you do you know what the enbridge will cause of the and anxiety was even have it and so i mean i did i think i i felt like i suddenly got something to lose i was now at a music conservatory i was surrounded by amazing musicians that i was in competition with and suddenly i felt like i expected myself to play well all the time to really of course it was all still in my head but what crept into my head was why have something to lose now which is face i guess so yeah you write in the book about how you got to the pay with the draw of this within your own doctor leading out certain amounts of have it in and in preparation for an audition so that you could be in a place where you could perform your best rush would you explain what your methodology was not very much of a methodology i would say it was just a very personal to me like ok this is how i'm going to be in control and of course that just meant how i

think i'm going to be control of this and it just meant to our writing down what i did for each audition like let's say i'm going to take inderal two hours before and i'm going to take this much and then an hour before i'm going to take this much it can sound silly even you know what i'm saying it now but that helped me feeling control was liberated down so is the office of the town and taking too many and is it are you still using if i had something big to play absolutely i would use it still like i said i don't put myself in those situations anymore not taking auditions i generally don't have very big performances but if something comes out that at the upper that i think i'm going to be nervous for absolutely i will take it and is that something that your fellow musicians such as an accepted way of managing anxiety i think so i guess i can only speak for myself and now i'm open about it to people i never thought when i was in school it was so painful to me i thought oh i'm the only one doing this everybody else manages anxiety no problem no one gets nervous which of course wasn't the case but since i wasn't

talking about it i assumed of course this district and now i'm perfectly willing to talk about it and you know someone wants to come to me and talk about it i'd be delighted to but i do i still feel like there's a stigma so i'm i would certainly wouldn't try to push anybody on what they do if they did want to talk about it this is inflection point i'm lauren shuler my guest is patti niemi she's a percussionist with the san francisco opera orchestra coming up we talk about how she stuck it out in such a competitive profession he came to speak it's been he came to speak it's

been good i'm lauren shuler and this is inflection point i'm talking with patti niemi her memoir is called sticking it out from juilliard to the orchestra pit she's a percussionist with the seven sisko opera orchestra did you have moments where you ask yourself why why am i in a field that makes me feel like that's at the big moments i mean did you ever question whether you should stick with music that's interesting i never did i oh i always wanted to do it it was just hard and and the performance anxiety aspect was the hardest part for me but i never questioned whether i was going to do it it always felt like and i worry about that in the book is because i put so much emphasis on the hard parts of it would that come off sounding like i was ungrateful or i didn't appreciate this opportunity i had and that i have never felt i'm grateful i loved music and i love it and i was really lucky to fall into this opportunity so i hope it never came off that way it's just that i wanted to write about what's hard about it

the absolute way i mean it did the analogy that it is for me is that when people for certain crime a mount everest they didn't have oxygen another tool that helped him get to the top another duo right and that's like a doll artist omar still almost impossible for most people rate so right it's interesting though that just that what you would you tell yourself and what i told myself at the time was oh i'm cheating it felt like cheating and a spear a lot of that was because i didn't talk to anybody else about it so my assumption was that nobody had a problem no one's taking inderal i fell in a way like i was cheating and sometimes i still struggle without a little bit of look at the steroids controversy like oh well is that cheating clearly they decided it was so is taking inderal to think well is the difference that it's available to everyone and it doesn't make you play the excerpts well it just takes away the shaking so i don't know i guess i can

answer that one yet but that's what it felt like to me at the time well and with so much on the line right hand and also does not want to feel physically miserable just you do is you set out to daryl i think the best thing that helped me at the time was to think of it as an eye for other people say this is a marathon not a sprint so if you look at the whole taking auditions as a process this audition is not the end all it's part of a process and i did my best to look at it that way i thought okay here's one audition i look at it afterwards i've been rejected i sailed technically but look a look at that as a gift what did i learn from it and its part of a process i knew it wasn't going to be with rare exceptions it's a long process for everybody there are people who when they're first audition for a few and far between so i knew was going be a long process and that was the best gift i can give myself is to say what i learned from each of these failures failure so that there was a merman

when you did have quite such a positive attitude and that's the reason that felt so bad i think looking back now is that i had done really well at each audition i was improving and that's what i wanted to do was improve that each audition and then magically the next one was going to be the winner so i had been improving and then i got to this place where i was in the finals and i played absolutely as well as i could possibly play so i think looking back what happened in the after that was i said to myself oh there's nothing i can build on from this audition it's not like i got ninety five percent of the way there and then it was only just go that last five percent it was starting at the beginning again and i think that's what hit me in the face after that audition was i have to start at the beginning again each time i'm going to have to start at the beginning and it just seems so daunting an icon a lost it at that moment and fortunately one away and i started at the

beginning again but it was really daunting and it it did it fell pretty bad for a while what there is there's a discussion of that you're losing it in the tub with his fellow red and i was still feeling you in the moment i've never i guess i would you going to re of course we had that too at your hands i lost it it was my confidence my desire to get up in the morning and practice and the certainty that i would get a job maybe if there had been a break i would have been fine my lack of practicing would've made sense after the huge effort of the last few months time to concentrate on orchestra part time to let my shoulder he'll but there is no time to arrest another big audition had already been announced for the new york philharmonic suddenly i was faced with doing it all again tape prelims semis finals there was no building on the last audition not many concrete way i should have felt great in good shape from all the practicing and

i'm confident because i was playing in a very competitive level i sure felt like dad he was happy he had done so well in his fiance had decided they didn't wanna live in york city wouldn't be taking this audition but i wasn't thinking about having done well i had worked that hard and played that well and still lost i felt like a colossal failure failure as in failure not my former pollyanna definition of failure which i could've summed up with the speech i gave myself i just found another way that didn't work it's a marathon not a sprint failure is essential for success i'd always thought that having this attitude along with being unafraid of failure was a gift something i've always known and hadn't had to learn now i knew there was such a thing failure happened when you just stop caring so when you actually sat down to put this book together if somebody had been taking notes all along it right right and your experience isn't that time that it was just published within the

last year or so about a year or so to bring up issues that you had had wanted to forget her as you look through your notes we reminded of things that you had forgotten had happened really it was it was actually pretty exciting to write and i think the reason it took so long was because it's a long process learning how to write it was very similar to music find a passion which writing was always a passion for me keep at it and start getting better so just took me a really long time it was really exciting to write actually i had a good time doing it i've never seen a memo i've never seen or read a memoir like this and i felt like you really brought me inside the worlds that you've lived in and i learned so much about you and your experience in and probably is reflective of many other people's experience going through the world of music that was also really i add the league semi the things we've learned along the way we're put the ball to some like me who is not remotely a musician yeah i think there are many lessons for all of us you know being in the process of getting better at music you learn so

much and and one of the biggest hits is it deal with failure it deal with rejection and that's something everybody needs to know and it's when your career you have had all these amazing experiences you travel around the world with the new world symphony i was at that time was the new world symphony mountain around for many years and even businesses go up or our server over twenty years twenty five years five years so is this where you either the rest your life is it still exciting to plan a great colleagues listening to amazing singers from about ten feet away is the willing it's it's amazing it's fun to be a part of it so yes i'm very lucky to be there and do you want the wet what would you say to other musicians who are also aspiring to do you do it knowing that the chances of actually getting a job i mean that the entrance the citizenry to juilliard i visited out that like seven percent

of all people who apply and then those who actually don't get work i dont know what the percentage is but i imagine it just keeps getting when adam and winnowed it's pretty small yes so is the through line here just keep going or is there a point which is they don't i think you have to want it more than anything else i think if there's something else you're thinking you might want to do maybe that's a good idea i would probably tell a student that and indeed when i was in high school still my teacher took care to set me down for one lesson and just talk about it and say you have to know that this is a choice this is not something you're gonna fall into like no i think it'll be nice to auditions for juilliard what's causing that happens you have to she had to make it clear to me that it was a choice i was making two to follow this path because there is going to be probably more than the normal amount of rejection and failure and the possibility that it might never happen so she made it clear to me this is a joyce you're making and i think that that would be good advice to me if i

have students saying you have to be clear on what you're doing here but absolutely if that's what you want to do you gotta do it follow the passion paddy what is the best of a sleeve ever been given about continuing when it looks like there is no way you're about to get what you want i think the best advice that anybody gave to me and which i would pass on is rejection is a gift and it's a marathon not a sprint once you view it that way you can you can take the rejection and say what did i learn from this how do i keep going how i use it to keep going at what i want them and i will succeed if i keep doing that thank you so much thank you so much that was patti niemi percussionist with the san francisco opera orchestra and author of the memoir sticking out we have lots of conversations with women like i do know a few themes and you start to emerge and

certainly one of those that have consistently heard is about the pursuit of perfection chicken patties case it may be especially relevant for most of us when we think it's always relevant mr landis today we should start trying their best i do think we can let ourselves off the western ohio and in this case for patti niemi be able to talk about her desire for perfection and even her anxiety about it how women rise that this is unfortunate that's our inflection point for today is there are women changing the status quo you like to hear from lettuce know unfortunately radio dot org and while you're there and it become a patron of inflection point your contribution clubs bring the voices and views of powerful women to the ears of

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