Uncommon Measure by Natalie Hodges

This is an unusual memoir that has taken me a while to write about, which means that I have been thinking a lot about just what to write. I got it because it was the electronic version of The Community Reads, meaning that my library had unlimited e-books to take out and while it is pretty rare for me to love these books, I usually at least like them and they are always something that I wouldn't have discovered on my own--this book fits that bill. The author was a concert violinist who stopped working as a professional musician because she developed performance anxiety. In the quest to make sense of her life as a musician and the experiences she was having, she has examined it through the twin portals of neuroscience and quantum physics. Rather than dwelling on the purely emotional aspect of dealing with crushingly high personal expectations, she steps outside of herself and looks at how music informs our experience of time, and whether she as musicians was living in time, or whether time lives within her. She doesn't ignore the anxiety and where it comes from for her, and exactly how her anxiety manifests. It would start typically by fixating obsessively on a particular passage that never seemed to go exactly as she wanted, so much so that the actual performance would become temporally distorted. In addition to the temporal dichotomy performers are familiar with – the coexistence of ‘real’ time ‘out there’ and the music’s internal temporal flow – she would experience a sense of accelerating uncontrollably towards the ‘doomed place’, and then at the point of arrival would feel as if time had stopped. I couldn't relate to much of what she was describing about her experience, but it is pretty mesmerizing to read, nonetheless.