Sarah's Story

A South Carolina newspaper ran a very nice profile of our Ms. Hicks this past weekend, in advance of concerts she'll be conducting there this week. I suspect that she's far too modest to post it herself, but I wanted to call attention to it for a couple of reasons.

The first is that the article talks openly about the fact that Sarah is a candidate for the music directorship of the orchestra she's conducting, the South Carolina Philharmonic. This is highly unusual: orchestras usually treat music director searches as covert operations which risk disaster if anyone in the general public even knows who the candidates are. (Osmo Vänskä was virtually unknown to Minnesota audiences when we announced him as our tenth music director in 2002, partly because we wanted to be sure that we snapped him up before any other American orchestras started sniffing around and beat us to him.) The SCP is taking a very different approach, announcing its seven finalists for the job (The Magnificent Seven - hee!), and inviting the public to hear them each conduct over the course of the current season. I would imagine that this ups the pressure on the candidates considerably, of course, but it's also a great way to get the audience involved with the orchestra and impart a sense of real civic ownership to the community.

My second reason for highlighting the article is that it includes a story Sarah told at one of our post-concert Q&A sessions last November, about how she came to take up conducting after being dealt a devastating physical blow in her quest to become a concert pianist.

"She developed tendinitis, a chronic inflammation of the cords that attaches muscles to bones. The condition often affects pianists — but usually not at 17. It was unclear what she should do.

Then her father took her aside and said, 'You can still hold a baton, you’re musical, you’re organized.'" - The State (Columbia, SC)

Tendonitis and carpal tunnel syndrome, often dismissed as minor ailments suffered by cubicle drones and typists, are actually some of the most widespread and career-threatening conditions encountered by musicians. It makes sense when you consider the physical nature of what we really do for a living, which is to repeat the same small muscle motions thousands of times in a row, at an abnormally high rate of speed. It is a rare musician who hasn't experienced some level of pain while playing, and a majority of us will become injured enough to prevent us from playing at all at some point during our careers. The specific nature of the injuries varies from instrument to instrument - cellists are famous for developing back and neck problems, violists get a lot of shoulder injuries, and wind players have a whole range of mouth-related problems to contend with - but the risk is always there, and few orchestras go a season without a few players hitting the injured reserve list, as it were.

What makes Sarah's case different, particularly for such a young musician as she was when her tendinitis took hold, is that she stayed in the business. Most of us who play music for a living never really wanted to do anything else, and our training forces us to zero in, laser-like, on that goal. So when something as frightening and potentially life-altering as a performance injury is suddenly staring you in the face, it's a natural reaction to want to turn away from the business completely. One very talented violist I went to college with was stricken with severe tendinitis in grad school, and changed gears completely to become a graphic designer. One former Minnesota Orchestra cellist went back to school after injuries ended her performing career, and is now a practicing lawyer. After all, if you can't do the thing that you believe you were born to do, why would you want to seek a job on the periphery of the same profession, forever reminding yourself of what might have been?

Sarah didn't do that, though. I'm sure that when she got hurt, she felt the same bone-deep terror we all feel the first time we have to miss a concert because our bodies have suddenly stopped working the way they're supposed to, and I'm sure she entertained plenty of thoughts about what else she might do with her life besides play the piano. But she chose not only to stick with music, but to take a stab at a job which is far, far more difficult in every way than that of any instrumentalist. I'm sure she's cringing to read this, but it's true: not many of us would have the fortitude or the confidence to make the decision she did, and even fewer of us would have had the personal and musical strength to succeed at it. It's a remarkable story, if you ask me, and one that Sarah tells completely cavalierly, as if everyone had at some point in their life had their dreams ripped away from them and then replaced them with bigger ones. I'd like to think I'd have had the same sense of commitment in her place, but I know better than to assume that I would have.

Postscript for anyone I freaked out back in the second paragraph: It would be entirely possible for Sarah to become music director of an orchestra in South Carolina and remain on our staff (and in her role with Inside the Classics) at the same time. You may feel free to root for her without fear of it coming back to bite you. (Besides, she's under contract in Minneapolis for a few years yet...)