Month: October 2004

Are performance-enhancing drugs becoming a problem in the classical music world?

Ms. McClain is hardly the only musician to rely on beta blockers, which, taken in small dosages, can quell anxiety without apparent side effects. The little secret in the classical music world – dirty or not – is that the drugs have become nearly ubiquitous. So ubiquitous, in fact, that their use is starting to become a source of worry. Are the drugs a godsend or a crutch? Is there something artificial about the music they help produce? Isn’t anxiety a natural part of performance? And could classical music someday join the Olympics and other athletic organizations in scandals involving performance-enhancing drugs?

But is it a bad thing?

Even the most skillful and experienced musicians can experience this fear. Legendary artists like the pianists Vladimir Horowitz and Glenn Gould curtailed their careers because of anxiety, and the cellist Pablo Casals endured a thumping heart, shortness of breath and shakiness even as he performed into his 90’s. Before the advent of beta blockers, artists found other, often more eccentric means of calming themselves. In 1942, a New York pianist charged his peers 75 cents to attend the Society for Timid Souls, a salon in which participants distracted one another during mock performances. Others resorted to superstitious ritual, drink or tranquilizers. The pianist Samuel Sanders told an interviewer in 1980 that taking Valium before a performance would bring him down from wild panic to mild hysteria.

[…] “Before propranolol, I saw a lot of musicians using alcohol or Valium,” said Mitchell Kahn, director of the Miller Health Care Institute for the Performing Arts, describing 25 years of work with the Metropolitan Opera orchestra and other groups. “I believe beta blockers are far more beneficial than deleterious and have no qualms about prescribing them.”

The “problem” is — if it is, indeed, a problem — there’s not only an effect on the player, but on the performance.

Indeed, the effect of the drugs does seem magical. Beta blockers don’t merely calm musicians; they actually seem to improve their performances on a technical level. In the late 1970’s, Charles Brantigan, a vascular surgeon in Denver, began researching classical musicians’ use of Inderal. By replicating performance conditions in studies at the Juilliard School and the Eastman School in Rochester, he showed that the drug not only lowered heart rates and blood pressure but also led to performances that musical judges deemed superior to those fueled with a placebo. In 1980, Dr. Brantigan, who plays tuba with the Denver Brass, sent his findings to Kenneth Mirkin, a frustrated Juilliard student who had written to him for help.

“I was the kid who had always sat last-chair viola,” said Mr. Mirkin, whose bow bounced from audition nerves. Two years later, he won a spot in the New York Philharmonic, where he has played for 22 years. “I never would have had a career in music without Inderal,” said Mr. Mirkin, who, an hour before his tryout, took 10 milligrams.

Aside from concerns about musicians self-medicating on beta-blocker, some folks think it has a negative effect on music (and on the art).

But some performers object to beta blockers on musical rather than medical grounds. “If you have to take a drug to do your job, then go get another job,” said Sara Sant’Ambrogio, who plays cello in the Eroica Trio. Chemically assisted performances can be soulless and inauthentic, say detractors like Barry Green, the author of “The Inner Game of Music,” and Don Greene, a former Olympic diving coach who teaches Juilliard students to overcome their stage fight naturally. The sound may be technically correct, but it’s somewhat deadened, both men say. Angella Ahn, a violinist and a member of the Ahn Trio, remembers that fellow students at Juilliard who took beta blockers “lost a little bit of the intensity,” she said. Ms. Ahn doesn’t use the drugs, she said: “I want to be there 100 percent.”

Indeed, the high stakes involved in live performance are part of what makes it so thrilling, for both performers and audiences. A little onstage anxiety may be a good thing: one function of adrenaline is to provide extra energy in a threatening or challenging situation, and that energy can be harnessed to produce a particularly exciting musical performance. Performance anxiety tends to push musicians to rehearse more and to confront their anxieties about their work; beta blockers mask these musical and emotional obstacles.

The question becomes, are such drugs a cheat that need to be monitored.

“If you look at the logic of why we ban drugs in sport, the same should apply to music auditions,” said Charles Yesalis, a professor at Pennsylvania State University who studies performance-enhancing drugs. But the issue receives little attention because, unlike athletes, classical musicians are seldom called on to represent big business ventures. “If Nike offered musicians ad contracts,” Dr. Yesalis said, “more people would pay attention.”

[…] But Dr. Miller, the Harvard physician, points out that beta blockers differ significantly from steroids, which use testosterone to increase muscle mass, strength and speed. Inderal enables rather than enhances, by removing debilitating physical symptoms; it cannot improve tone, technique or musicianship, or compensate for inadequate preparation.

Better living through chemistry? If it’s okay to medicate to correct an illness or other physical condition that might prevent a good performance (cold meds to stop sneezing, ibuprofin to deal with arthritis), should it be somehow wrong to medicate to deal with something like stage fright?

(via Cronaca)