“Sitzfleisch” is the German word for, well, sitting on your ass – long enough, in fact, to get something done. It means persistence, discipline, stick-to-itiveness, and it’s something that I do not have.
My brother has it. Or, more to the point, he found it eventually. You may not know this, but my first instrument was the piano, and I started playing at the age of 12, after being harangued by my parents for the previous six years, mostly because “The Sting” had come out and I’d fallen in love with ragtime. And my brother was starting piano lessons, and so I thought, what the hell. And for the first year, the only sitzfleisch I encountered was my brother’s lap, because he kept sliding in underneath me every time I made a move toward the piano bench to practice. But he, himself, lacking the sitzfleisch at that point, quit after that first year, and then took up the violin and quit, and then took up the clarinet and quit – I’m not exactly clear on the order here, I’m just aware of a lot of trying and quitting. And then one day he took up the bass guitar, and now he has a doctorate in modern classical composition. Because, mostly, of the sitzfleisch.
My father lacked the sitzfleisch, or, more to the point, he thought he lacked it – he bemoaned his inability to practice the piano for more than an hour at a time, which, to me, sounds like real dedication, but his ambitions for himself outstripped his engineering-encrusted soul, since he loved music but somehow lacked both an ear and any real sense of rhythm or dynamic variation. (He was qualified to build complex medical imaging devices, but shockingly, when it came time to fix the sofa in the living room, his solution was to replace one of the legs with his automobile jack, and I am not joking. My song “The Handyman’s Waltz” was for him, or about him, or at him, or something.)
I, however, have no misconceptions about my sitzfleisch, nor can I boast of any late-in-life discovery of latent sitzfleisch lurking beneath my lazy-ass surface. I simply lack it entirely. My curse is that I’m a good musician – good enough not to have to practice much. So I don’t. And I never have. Sure, once in a while I’ll be inspired to learn a piece on one of the three instruments I’ve studied, and I’ll practice diligently for a few days, and get somewhere, and while, for some people that might be a sign from heaven that, well, maybe they should practice more because it pays off, I, on the other hand, draw the conclusion that I’ve done enough work. True story: once upon a time, near the end of my self-imposed classical music career, after a couple years of neglect, I sat down one summer and re-learned Bach’s Chromatic Fugue in F, which is an ungodly difficult piece, with I have no idea how many melodic voices popping up like mushrooms everywhere you turn, and I went back to my piano teacher and played it and he told me that my technique was as good as it’s ever been, and the lesson I took away from that was, hell, I can get as good as I want to be in six weeks, I don’t need to do this anymore. And that’s the last piano lesson I ever took.
My singing teacher, Ruth Harcovitz (shout-out!), has been very patient with all of this. I mean, I pay her, and that must be some consolation, but apparently, the homeopathic amounts of practicing I’ve been doing over the last 25 years have kept her from dismissing me, as she has told me more than once. (And, yes, it must be sort of like being Woody Allen’s therapist, but it’s her bed to lie in, after all.) But while I’ve been reasonably pleased with the discovery that I can actually sing, things took a decided turn for the worse after the summer of 2016, when I released my last album and promptly left on a two-month trip around the country. And eventually, it turned out that (a) my acid reflux was getting a lot worse, and (b) the medication I was on for it was causing side effects that meant I had to stop taking it entirely. And at that point, I could barely sing competently at all.
I don’t think German has a word for “throat terror”, but that’s where I was. And the only thing that gave me any hope was – shudder – the prospect of bearing down and actually mastering my singing technique, finally. And what I’m finding, after a few years of slightly less homeopathic amounts of practicing, is that my voice is actually better! I can control it better, and the reflux doesn’t bother me, and, well, I’ve actually learned something. And I worked at it, and it paid off.
So now I can quit. Nope, just kidding. Bach’s Chromatic Fugue doesn’t feed my ego like you lovely folks do.