Random Thoughts by Daniel Morganstern

The person who had the greatest influence over my thinking permanently was Dr. Albert Ellis.

One of the unfortunate side effects of my second Alice Tully Hall concert was a severe and debilitating case of tendonitis in my right arm. This condition plagued me for the next several years, and had it not been for the psychological help given to me by Albert Ellis, my career could have come to an end at age 31.

There was no tenure at the American Ballet Theatre, and I did not want anyone to know that I was experiencing numbness in both my bow arm and my left hand. I had many solos to play and the uncertainty of whether or not, or how, they were going to go was extremely troubling. At the suggestion of Laura Curtis, a great patron of the arts who hosted many play-through recitals for me in her home, I contacted Dr. Albert Ellis.

Dr. Ellis (1913-2007) was the chief psychologist for the state of New Jersey in 1950, but because he published many books on human sexuality, served as the American editor for the International Journal of Sexology, and was a known advocate for sexual freedom (he was the first prominent psychologist to advocate gay liberation), he was unable to find a teaching position in New York. He thereby had to make his whole income from private practice. He charged $25 for a half-hour session (far less than other New York psychotherapists of the time), and streamlined his approach so that those 30 minutes would really count for his clients.

He saw so many clients that he could make note of characteristics he saw in the basically “neurotic” but otherwise non-mentally-ill people who came to him for help. He observed that most unhappy people are handicapped by irrational and rigid thinking, and that most people are fully aware of it, but they hold onto their beliefs even if those beliefs continue to make them unhappy. He combined this observation with the teachings of Stoic philosophers (like Marcus Aurelius), and taught his clients that all neurotic emotions come from a person’s view of a particular situation and not from the situation itself. Dr. Ellis also delighted in being as iconoclastic as possible, and he used curse words as liberally as he could think them up.

Dr. Ellis explained, during our first meeting, that my number one problem was interpreting the events of my life as awful. Awful, he explained, hasn’t any limit. Bad, you can deal with.

The first item in my litany of woe was that my arm was driving me crazy. He responded by telling me, “No! You’re driving you crazy. Your arm just hurts. Now, what’s the problem?” I told him that I had an extensive solo to play that night at the ballet, and I wasn’t sure if my arm was going to crap out on me. He asked how long the solo lasted, to which I responded that it was about two minutes long. He asked me how much I had played so far today, and I told him that I had played about two hours, and he said, “It’s hardly likely that you couldn’t play for two minutes if you have already played for two hours, and even if you couldn’t, don’t you have an assistant who you could alert to cover for you? And even if you were to play badly, you imagine your colleagues will think that you’ve crashed and burned, when in reality they’ll just think that you’re having a bad day.”

That evening I played that solo and many other solos perfectly well, and I was surprised that my level of playing was actually better than it had been, mostly because of the increased amount of focus I brought to bear at the moment of truth.

Another session concerned my fears about playing the very difficult cello parts in Wagner’s Die Walkure and in Berg’s Wozzeck. I was afraid that with the large amount of rehearsal time we had the conductors might spend a lot of time taking things apart. I was worried that if they found me substandard they would do everything in their power to humiliate me. I also told him about my dyslexia, and how hard it was for me to read and figure out difficult music quickly.

He responded, “My dear, you are the principal cellist of this opera company. It’s your job to play those notes, and if you don’t, it’s their job to make you feel bad about it. Furthermore, is there any reason why between now and next week you couldn’t put in two hours a day figuring out this music? You might even find that after you start, a certain automaticity will set in, and the work will go a lot faster.”

This turned out to be exactly the case. I did the work, and made an excellent impression when I returned to the Lyric Opera. His advice effectively changed the way I thought about myself. Before seeing Dr. Ellis I felt like a victim, and I was afraid that conductors were dead-set on humiliating me and criticizing me. After considering Dr. Ellis’s explanation that conductors were just doing their job, the same way I was just doing my job, I felt much less afraid to go into a rehearsal. I knew that I had a choice to make: do my job, or accept the fact that if I didn’t, the conductor would have to do his job.

Among other things, Dr. Ellis insisted that I record all these sessions so, as he put it, “I don’t have to keep saying the same thing over and over again.” He gave me a “present” to take to Chicago. It goes like this:

Something is bothering me. I wonder what it is.

I know what it is, but is it true?

If it is true, what’s the evidence to support it? If it isn’t true, what stake do I have in believing something which is untrue?

My friends all thought I was crazy when I told them that after being the principal cellist at the opera for five years I was still nervous about how to do the job. They thought that it was impossible not to be able to do a job that I had been doing successfully for five years. Dr. Ellis’s response was different. He told me that there were all kinds of things that he couldn’t do, and would never be able to do well. He gave the example of statistics, which is a necessary part of the study of psychology. He told me that he just had to deal with it, and that he did the best he could without that particular expertise. He told me that you can compensate for your liabilities to a degree, but you only need to compensate for them to the degree that gets you over the top of what you want to do, and that the rest of the time, you can play your strengths to the hilt.

Once I came in complaining that I had played something really badly. He asked me why I didn’t enjoy playing badly, and went on to say that if you have an instrument in your hands and music to play, and things aren’t going well, you can always listen to what other people are doing. He told me that I can do the best that I can do, and that I can enjoy the process of transforming something bad (i.e. my playing that day) into something good.

In response to my complaint about having to ingratiate myself to people I didn’t respect in order to safeguard myself (there was no tenure at the ballet), he asked me why I should feel bad about it. He told me that I didn’t make the rules, and suggested that if I was playing by the rules, the rules are the game. He told me that if I was playing the game to win, following them doesn’t say anything about me except that I can keep my job and make money.

Sometimes his advice was extremely practical. When I told him I had been engaged to do a summer festival between the ballet season and the next opera seasons, he told me to get a substitute for the summer festival because I needed to harbor my strength, time, and energy for the opera season, which is much more important.

These sessions helped to sustain me for the next three years when I had to play at a high level while being physically handicapped. Dr. Ellis taught me that I could deal with reality, but not with fantasies of disaster. He liked to say that it’s not what happens to you, but your opinion of what happens to you that will determine how you feel and how you act. I even went with June to Dr. Ellis so that he could help us work out some “issues” we had when we first began to work together in the American Chamber Trio. June felt that I was being too rough on her, and I felt that it was my job to bring her up to snuff. Dr. Ellis told June that if she were to go out on a stage and be criticized by the people hearing her play, she should do as much as possible to sound good. He convinced me that I should make her sound as good as possible, but I should do it in a way that addressed musical and technical issues without getting personal about it. We spent two hours with Dr. Ellis, and it was the best $100.00 investment I ever made in my life.

When my dearest friend Bill Ryden was in the final stages of terminal cancer a most enlightened doctor brought him a big bottle of Maker’s Mark and told him, “This will do you more good than any medicine I could give you.”

I had been in touch with Bill two or three times a week during the entirety of his illness, but when we decided that we would have cocktail hours the level of communication, love, and high spirits dominated those last few weeks.

Bill was not only a wonderful composer but an inspired one. His main genre were rags and I don’t think that even Scott Joplin would have had an easy time keeping up with the saucy and sentimental music that Bill wrote. For many years June and I played his music where ever we played, and it was always Bill’s music that got the greatest response from the audience, even when Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky were on the program. We premiered six of his rags in concerts in Carnegie Recital Hall and recorded 11 of them on a disc called “Rags, Spells, and Tangos” and three duos for violin and cello which were appropriately placed between the Kodaly and the Ravel duos. Strangely enough right after Bill died we were listening to our recording of the Ravel, because our edition for International Music Co. was going into print. Right after the Ravel the three rags of Bill Ryden came on, and both June and I were surprised by what a refreshing change it was.

During the next three weeks Bill and I talked six times with drink in hand. During these talks he told me about the great satisfactions in his life. Strangely they centered more on taking high school age singers who worked in his community theatre to the Met and a fine dinner at a French restaurant and a limousine to take them to and fro. He was so pleased with how some of them turned out when they became professional. We often talked during these times about a young lady named Lisa who was probably 6,7, or 8 when Bill was writing music for the Electric Company and Sesame Street. She was so charming and lovely that Bill wrote a rag called “Lisa’s Spell” which enchanted everybody who heard it, at least as much as Lisa enchanted Bill. When we premiered “Lisa’s Spell” in 2007, Lisa actually came to the performance and we met her. Unfortunately, she wasn’t 6,7, or 8 anymore, so the who she was will remain encoded in Bill’s music.

Bill spent a great deal of time working with the community theatre in Forest Hills, Queens. He composed the music, auditioned the singers, taught the marginal ones how to get up to snuff, and played the piano. One of these was based on Alice and Wonderland, and we had the privilege of editing three Wonderland Rags for Master’s Music. From the time they went into our repertoire in 2007 we played them on every program often positioned between Dvorak Dumky Trio and Mendelssohn D Minor, and during these talks Bill delighted in hearing about the many successes that we had with our audiences.

To me Bill’s vast knowledge of all musical forms was somewhat intimidating. Among other things that he gave me was a biography of Mozart written in the early 1800’s with interviews from many people who knew Mozart personally. We had wonderful discussions about the magic of Mozart. I would always mention the” Dissonant” Quartet and the A Major Quartet . Bill’s favorites were the G Minor 2 Viola Quintet and we both swooned over the Clarinet Concerto and the Requiem. We spent a good several minutes talking about Strauss and particularly the significance of Salome and Elektra. Being a total romantic Bill preferred Rosenkavalier to everything else Strauss had wrote, and considered the beautiful trio at the end of the third act to be one of the greatest moments in music. As we spoke about these things this terminally ill man fueled by his newly acquired bottle of Maker’s Mark came to life with such enthusiasm and love that I felt privileged to be in his company for those precious few hours. ­

I first met Bill when I suggested that International Music Company (of which Bill was the editorial director) publish a compilation of cello solos from the operatic and ballet repertoire. My teacher Leonard Rose edited three books of orchestral excerpts for IMC, and they also published Strauss and Wagner excerpt books, but those books didn’t include the very important opera and ballet repertoire. Since I had studied with Leonard Rose, and had been principal cellist of both a major ballet and a major opera company for many decades, Bill embraced the project and published the book in 1999, the year that Puccini’s music entered the public domain.  When a review came out two years later in the American Record Guide of my trio’s recording of the complete Brahms trios for violin, cello, and piano, Bill asked us to make editions of these trios for IMC. This was most unusual, since IMC already published unedited editions of all three trios. With Bill’s help and encouragement, I made editions of concertos by Boccherini, two Haydn’s, Saint-Saens, Schumann, Dvorak, Lalo, Elgar, and Tchaikovsky.

His music has always and will continue to bring a smile to my lips and tears to my eyes. During our cocktail hours we became as one in our love and enthusiasm. I will always miss him and yet he will always be with me, and my gratitude to the wonderful doctor who put kindness over competence is boundless.