Patti Niemi - Sticking it out: from Juilliard to the orchestra pit, a percussionist’s memoir

For those of us who began in the fall of 1983, our formal introduction to Juilliard took place in the schools recital hall on a soggy September morning. Onstage was acting president Gideon Waldrop, standing in for last years president, Peter Mennin, who had recently dropped dead. This, to paraphrase, was our orientation:

Whether its playing music, acting, or dancing, you are what you do. We dont care about your private life. Make the school look good.

Welcome to Juilliard. Now go practice.

And practice I did relentlessly, persistently. Quantity mattered; there was no time to waste. For all the practicing I would do over the years, I never went at it as desperately as I did those first few weeks at Juilliard.

It would be reasonable to guess that getting accepted to Juilliard might make me relax for a while. I could walk the hallowed halls with their orange wallpaper and think, Im attending the most famous music school in the world. This is where I will learn how to win an audition. Reasonable, but wrong. My thoughts were about math: there were about 50 orchestras in the country in which one could earn a living, three or four percussionists per orchestra, and, at any given audition, about 75 others like me who would show up for one opening. I waited with my fellow vultures around the country for death or retirement to make room for us.

The truth was, most of the students Id been sitting with at orientation would not get jobs in music. We were beginning a long, winnowing process those who ran out of time, money, stamina, or courage would fall by the roadside. This knowledge filled me with a creeping dread. I was a walking piece of anxiety-filled meat, and the only offensive against that fear was to practice.

So I practiced. Unlike music itself, there was no romance here learning to play an instrument was the point at which art collided with sport. You had to be comfortable with solitary confinement and endless, mind-numbing repetition. Imagine an uninitiated apartment dweller hearing that a violinist is moving in next door. He might be expecting beautiful music to accompany lifes mundane activities, maybe a nice Bach sonata while washing the dishes. What hell get instead is scales, three octaves up and three back down, major then minor, slowly, and then arpeggios, followed by some technical tudes. Just about the time the neighbor is ready to open the window and leap to his death, the musician might finally begin learning one of those beautiful Bach sonatas, excruciatingly slowly, with missteps for weeks before it becomes a polished product. Next day, start again with the scales.

Finding a place to practice was a sport all its own. There were 20 other drummers crowding the halls with me that fall too many for the number of available jobs or practice rooms. We had only two studios dedicated to us: big windowless rooms anchoring each end of our hallway and filled with the odd tools of a percussionists trade: xylophones, timpani, marimbas, bells, chimes, snare drums, tom-toms, music stands. There was nothing on the white walls no pictures or posters, no diplomas or artwork, no distractions. We could sign up for only six hours a week in these rooms. Six hours a day wouldnt have been enough, so I sought out every empty hollow that squat little building had to offer. I took a tambourine up to the roof and practiced while watching a man run laps on the roof of the Chinese embassy across 66th Street. When the artificial light took over from the sun, I could see Broadway slice the crosstown streets, one blazing X after another. There were four floors of basement, so I took the elevator down with my snare drum and camped out in whatever cinder-block corridor happened to be deserted. Sometimes three or four of us would practice in the hallway in front of our studios, standing ten feet apart and trying to ignore each other.

Except for eight a.m., there were very few times when I got to school and stepped off the elevator on the third floor and didnt hear practicing going on. I would return from picking up some dinner, and by the time I came around the corner and passed the harp studio, I could hear xylophone or timpani or tambourine in the hallway. I knew it wasnt the same person practicing all the time, but it didnt matter it was a reminder that someone was practicing and I wasnt. If I went for lunch or dinner, someone was still upstairs practicing. If I went to class, if I went to the bathroom, if I spent five minutes trying to clean up my locker, someone else was spending that time practicing.