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Okay.

As an orchestral musician for over 35 years, I can only admit that I've never, ever heard of anything like this. Seeing a shrink over Mahler? Um, it seems to me there may be causes of musicians' anxiety that go just a little bit deeper than what we played last week.

As a member of an orchestra that specializes in Mahler (for 25+ years) I can tell you what musicians--the ones who aren't seeing a shrink, at least--think about playing his music: "Oh yeah! Let's go!"

Mahler wrote music that is extremely challenging to play, both in the individual and collective sense. When you accomplish a good performance (and perhaps make a little music along the way) it is therefore extremely gratifying. Mahler also wrote some of the most idiomatic parts of any composer: as one who conducted orchestras his entire composing career, he had an ear for sonority and an intimate knowledge of what instruments could do and what makes them sound good together. That makes him even more fun to play.

Yes, I do find that some music is "unsettling." Thank goodness! What do you think, music is supposed to be all powdered wigs and frilly collars? Sometimes Bach is profoundly unsettling. Sometimes Beethoven, sometimes Stravinsky, oftentimes Shostakovich--as well as a lot of paintings, plays, novels, and films. Sometimes art is supposed to unsettle you. Mahler can be "unsettling," and he can also be joyous, innocent, glorious, inspiring, naive, loving, sarcastic, tormented, serene . . . do the musicians who see you complain about all those things, too?

Frankly there are a lot of folks out there these days who will never experience the thrill, the sheer aliveness of being unsettled, because they're loaded up with trendy chemical "settling aids" freely dispensed by the psychiatric community, who have long since given up trying to see what's eating people and instead throw up their hands and "treat" the "chemical imbalance" in their brains.

The only thing in music that could "throw me over the parapet" is the knowledge that I'm about to perform my 357th show of "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat." If there are musicians who can't handle performing a Mahler symphony--and Schumann, fer heaven's sake!--then they're in the wrong line of work.

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