BY ELIZABETH WOLFF | Last August I was asked to participate in a very special summer camp project that involved teenagers from Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, and the United States. The camp, called Seeds of Peace, is now in its fifth year of what is a heroic effort to achieve peaceful coexistence through continual dialogue. The participants are all 14-year-olds who are carefully chosen for their enthusiastic and energetic desire to spread harmony among their Mideast countries.
Located in Maine and founded and directed by journalist John Wallach, the camp is truly an amazing “seed” for what could make for strong roots of lasting peace. All 150 campers learn to eat together, play together, and live together. They also learn to respectfully observe and/or participate in each others’ weekly and daily religious rituals. What for me was most amazing is that, with the supervision of trained facilitators, they learn how to talk openly and safely about personally sensitive issues as well as about their larger, more complex national—and historically volatile—feelings and thoughts.
My reason for participating at Seeds of Peace was to initiate a music program as adjunct to the sports and arts programs. As a pianist who spends most of my own life in virtual isolation with so much solo repertoire, as well as with years of one-on-one teaching, this was a very real challenge. Hopefully I was able to rise to it, but I have a feeling that I learned more from the campers than the other way around. I learned about being in a group: about assertion, compromise, empathy, patience and acceptance. And by extension, I also learned how truly isolated my life had been. For when I was not involved in an activity, when I was no longer useful or being used, I felt alone, frightened, abandoned. That was ten months ago and still, today, I can practically touch the fear of those scary, structureless times. But in remembering the very dichotomy of feeling safe among 150 youth one minute and feeling real terror in being alone the next, I have been given insightful direction on behalf of the practicing pianist … or, at least, this pianist.
The life of the musician has always been somewhat of a solitary one, but it seems the pianist has even more tallied isolation time than other re-creative musicians. Practicing many hours alone in relation to his instrumental colleagues; finding himself alone on stage performing what I call the “QE2,” or again alone backstage trying to remember the feel of that particular QE2 in hand, head, and heart; or alone with a master score of a chamber piece; or financially alone with no union or other means to help clarify and verify legitimate earning needs … and the list could go on and on. All increase the very real isolation and subsequent feelings of festering self doubt. And this quickly turns into very generic, larger-than-life fear. With little input and reassurance of inherent worth, the psyche can indeed shut down.
The youth at Seeds of Peace were learning peaceful coexistence through dialogue. DIALOGUE is the operative word. We pianists can actually learn a pervasive fear simply because we have such minimal dialogue. “How am I doing?” is asked to the wall, if at all, and our fragile egos can quickly answer: “Not well enough.” Where are OUR facilitators to tell us otherwise? Nowhere to be found. So we do what we think will be the antidote: We practice longer and harder. And the longer we go without a human voice, the more we take comfort in our sounds of music. Unfortunately, this antidote of more practice can produce real and harmful isolation, as well as a deceptively comfortable substitute for necessary human contact. Here is the ultimate irony! We practice to communicate, but we end up frozen in self-contained monologue. This immobilizing fear may even lead to substance addictions—the bleakest type of isolation, since isolation is exactly what addictions mask.
What has changed since my experience at Seeds of Peace? I know, at least, that I am learning to let go of the monologue, and of the insidious fear that it produces. I can now accept solitude, but not isolation. I accept aloneness, not loneliness. I accept and seek out colleagues for meaningful dialogue (as was demonstrated so beautifully by the Seeds of Peace campers and staff). And I understand the importance of living in, and with, balance. Balance is not yet natural or comfortable—but seeking it is bringing me peace because it allows the process, not the self, to be the champion.
Pianist Elizabeth Wolff (MS ’67) is director of Music at Lake Willoughby, a summer chamber music festival in Vermont.