What would Jessica do? + A Teacher’s Betrayal by Ernestine Whitman

https://open.spotify.com/episode/1bKmdGi98yHTSe70pLcbyf?si=0cf963dc6d5546a7

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Older women rock! Have you ever watched “Murder She Wrote,” the TV mystery series starring Angela Lansbury? It first aired from 1984 to 1996 (not counting four movie versions released between 1997 and 2002), yet I’ve only recently discovered the huge uplift of Angela Lansbury playing Jessica (J.B.) Fletcher. Jessica, like me (more on my books here), is a writer, one who got her lucky break later in life.

Angela Lansbury achieved acting success in her youth, but by 58-years-old, her career had slowed. The role of Jessica soared Angela back to fame! The show’s opening changed throughout the years, but it always showed her vibrantly jogging, biking, and fishing here, there, and everywhere. This is the very first version…

Today’s guest blog post is authored by Ernestine Whitman. At 20, she began her career as a professional flutist, the youngest and one of few women in the Atlanta Symphony. For the next 33 years, she was a professor at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. At 60, she took up martial arts and earned two black belts in her sixties. At 70, she started writing.

She says, “I do believe the older you get, the more important it is to take risks — reasonable ones.”

Her first book, Countermelodies: A Memoir in Sonata Form, comes out in September 2024. She describes it this way: “My memoir is about a mentor who turns into a tormentor when I become his colleague in the flute section of the Atlanta Symphony. The narrative centers around my need for male approval, caused by, as usual, a distant father. Trigger warnings: the story includes rape and two suicide attempts, though I could focus the podcast solely on the intense bonding that often occurs between a student and her private music teacher.”

Here’s a sample…

A Teacher’s Betrayal by Ernestine Whitman

I’ve been depressed several times, and the two worst times led to suicide attempts. As I describe in the memoir Countermelodies, the ups and downs of my emotional roller coaster are all about two things—my struggle to become a musician, and my longing for the male approval my father never gave me. The themes are intertwined, because playing the flute well was my way to get male attention. 

At twenty I became the youngest member of the Atlanta Symphony, where I sat beside my charismatic flute teacher Warren, the man who had believed in my musical abilities and was proud of my achievements. When he betrayed me, my second year, I was devastated. During rehearsals, Warren muttered insults to undermine my confidence. If we had prominent duet passages, Warren would play poorly so we’d sound terrible, then scowl at me so I got blamed. When I became depressed, I found a therapist who was inexpensive because he was training to be a psychoanalyst. This excerpt shows my frustration with the therapist who doesn’t understand my dilemma, and also describes what rehearsals in a professional orchestra are like. The scene begins two days before a performance of a piece where Warren and I are soloists with a guest pianist (Peter Serkin) in a Bach Brandenburg Concerto. The conductor is Robert Shaw.

“I don’t know how I’m going to get through these performances,” I said to Dr. Norton on Tuesday. “Today’s rehearsal was awful. Warren kept hissing at me to be softer, Shaw kept telling me to play louder. Can you give me something to calm me down for the first concert?” I begged. 

Silence. 

“Look, maybe psychoanalysis doesn’t usually involve drugs, but surely there are exceptions.” 

“You haven’t asked before,” Dr. Norton said. 

“I’ve never been a featured soloist with Warren before. 

“How would a pill help?”
“Nerves make it harder to breathe deeply. Can’t you, just this once, prescribe something to at least take the edge off?” 

He wouldn’t do it. I left frustrated, angry, and very worried about the concert. 

At the beginning of the concert Thursday night, my breathing was shallow and my fingers trembled. The Brandenburg was second on the program, after Wagner’s Die Meistersinger overture. Maestro Shaw had programmed the spare, delicate Brandenburg to follow Wagner’s triumphant, boisterous piece. I liked that order. Playing the Wagner calmed me down. 

After the overture, players took a quick break while stagehands moved the piano and changed the set-up for the smaller Bach orchestra. 

“I’ve really enjoyed working with you two,” Peter Serkin said, as we were waiting backstage. He made a point of looking at me as well as at Warren. 

“It’s been an honor to play with you,” I said, surprising myself. We then walked on stage and took a bow. Before the flutes’ first entrance, I had a wonderful insight: because we were at the front of the stage, in the spotlight, Warren couldn’t harass me during the performances. With that reassuring thought, I relaxed and played well, all three performances. 

At our first rehearsal the next week, I felt pretty confident. Despite Warren’s efforts to unnerve me, I’d played well. But right before the rehearsal started, Warren shattered my good mood with a devastating comment. 

“I’m going to get you fired, and if you even think about filing an appeal with the union board, remember, I am the president.” Warren was a powerful person in the Atlanta music community; I took his threat seriously. 

The Atlanta Symphony rehearsals were two-and-a-half to three hours long. Each week we had five rehearsals and three performances, so a typical week included about thirteen hours of rehearsals and six to seven hours of concerts. It may not sound like a lot, but each of those hours I sat less than two feet from Warren. Every week I considered quitting. The dream job had become a nightmare.

The unrelenting problems with Warren would have been easier to handle if I’d had a more understanding therapist, or a trusted friend to confide in, or even better, a loving relationship. The destruction of my confidence as a musician seeped into my self-assurance as a woman: I may have thought I wanted a loving relationship, but deep down I felt unworthy of one. Instead, I had one-night stands with a couple of men in the orchestra and a few I met at the apartment complex—men who sensed my willingness to have a casual sexual encounter. Physically satisfying sex left me feeling desolate, triggering only partly controlled weeping. Perhaps the physical release brought a sudden, sharp awareness of how meaningless, how unloving the sex was, and how degraded it made me feel. I quickly learned to postpone the weeping until I was, again, alone. 

When cheap sex and Warren’s abuse threatened to overwhelm me, I turned to Robert Shaw’s recording of a piece that expressed my angst, the Agnus Dei from Bach’s Mass in B Minor, with Florence Kopleff singing the poignant text. I played it over and over, sobbing, and pleading with a God I didn’t believe in to take away my misery.

Click here for Ernestine Whitman’s website.

Trick question: What age do you think is too old to pursue one’s dreams?