Heart Strings

There is a difference between performing music and playing it.

On this particular night, Bronwyn Banerdt is playing. Her motions are balanced, fluid, the voice of her cello as natural and unfettered as her own.

She has been called by some a prodigy, a musician whose skills seem beyond her 12 years. Recently returned from touring Russia, Norway, Sweden and Finland with the New England Youth Symphony, she now sits onstage alongside author Mark Salzman, who has written a novel about prodigies.

Salzman’s eyes grip each note with a seriousness and tenacity that--somewhat surprisingly--are his nature when it comes to music and, in particular, Bach. His jaw is tight, his movements on the cello carefully measured.

After each piece, Salzman’s expression is one of wide-eyed glee, as if he were coasting to a stop, having somehow survived a whirlwind roller-coaster duet. The weight of his smile seems to push him back in his chair onstage at the Westwood United Methodist Church, the momentum forcing his right foot off the floor. At such times, it’s debatable which one’s the kid.

His exuberance prompts Bronwyn to scrunch her nose, pinch her eyes shut in laughter. Certainly she has played with more talented musicians, but usually it’s not this much fun. His joy becomes hers.

The recital, sponsored by the West Los Angeles Symphony to thank its supporters, is an intriguing mix with Bronwyn, a rising star, and Salzman, 36, twice nominated and once a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

In his book, “The Soloist” (Vintage, 1994), Salzman fictionalized about a former musical prodigy, washed up from concertizing by 18.

The book draws from Salzman’s own passion for music. He entered Yale as a music major before switching to Chinese language and literature and continues to practice the cello two to three hours a day. Music is a part of him seldom shared with the public.

Accompanying on piano is Michael Sushel, 39, a graduate of Julliard who by age 17 had performed with 11 orchestras, the result of winning competitions. He, too, was termed a prodigy.

“I was affected greatly by that word,” Sushel says. “I was somewhat atypical in that even though I was winning these competitions, I wanted to be out developing the other parts of my life, but it was the thing I was identified with so strongly that I pursued it anyway.”

Sushel never wanted to be a soloist, and he now works largely as an accompanist, primarily with young artists in competition and recital. To be holder of “the gift,” he will tell you, can be as much a curse as a blessing. Its momentum, if not checked or countered, can tilt all balance from life.

Bronwyn, whom he has known for three years, has handled it well. “I think she truly loves what she does and has a perspective of life beyond the cello. I wasn’t like that at her age.”

There is a sense of mystery surrounding those we label prodigies. How is it possible for people so young to master such precise motor skills, to interpret complex music with depth and passion, to constantly measure up to extraordinary expectations? And, yet, to remain children?

In “The Soloist,” Salzman describes how the pressures can be enormous. In examining his life, the central character poses the question, “Was I stricken or healed when my gift faded?”

The term “prodigy” has been placed upon Bronwyn in the same way brother Brendan, who entered college at 12, was labeled a genius, or, more commonly, a Doogie Howser.

The word, she says, creates distance between her and the rest of the world, building a wall where on one side there is most of life and on the other side, loneliness.

“It can be that way I think any time you do something unusual. I get it because I do all this traveling and playing music. Brendan gets it because he’s so smart. People are standoffish. They’re nervous to talk to you, and they don’t want to talk to you. It’s frustrating. I’m just a person like everybody else, no matter what I do with my cello.”

While she enjoys the attention, the spotlight, she wonders if it will always be there for her. Sometimes she questions whether it’s her age or her music that draws attention. When she’s older, she asks, will people still think she’s special?

“I don’t want to be known for being a 12-year-old,” she says. “It’s not something I’ve chosen. It’s a condition inflicted upon me by the world. Just because I’m 12 doesn’t make me a different person, because it’s not something I’ve chosen to be. I’ve chosen to be a cellist, and I like being called a cellist, but I don’t like being called a 12-year-old cellist. . . . I don’t even like being 12.”

Most 12-year-olds don’t. They long for an independent self-identity, freedom. If the gift becomes the sole identity, if requisite long hours of practice and dedication feel like chains, the gift becomes the burden.

Bronwyn isn’t particularly fond of practicing, and it isn’t forced upon her. Her parents, Mavonwe and Bruce Banerdt, say that if ever they see the joy missing from their daughter’s face while onstage, they will be the first to initiate consideration of new directions. So far, that hasn’t happened.

“We’re here to support her,” Mavonwe says, “not force her into something she doesn’t want.”

Bronwyn is principal cellist of the CSUN Philharmonic Youth Orchestra and this summer was principal cellist in Disney’s Young Musicians Symphony Orchestra. Music has attracted the interest of all three Banerdt children. Bronwyn received her first violin at 3 and settled on the cello at 4, only because there were no banjo teachers in Palmdale, where she lives.

Brendan, 18, is a violist and third year music student at Cal State Northridge after spending four years in the Early Entrance Program at Cal State Los Angeles. Bronwyn and Rhiannon, 9, who plays violin and piano, are home-schooled.

Discovering and addressing the needs of gifted children has been, at times, a complex journey. It was Brendan who suffered most as the Banerdts struggled to find a supportive school environment for him. Initially he attended public school, then private before the family started home-schooling.

“When you begin to talk about extraordinarily high intelligence, you’re talking about people who are fundamentally different,” Mavonwe says. “They perceive the world differently, yet at the same time, they’re just like everybody else. It’s a real mixed bag and there’s very little understanding of it in this society.”

Both Mavonwe, who has a master’s degree in geophysics, and Bruce, a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, remember loneliness as being a part of their own childhoods. They, too, were different from other children. Back then, it was largely ignored, endured without discussion.

But the Banerdts choose to confront it with their children. They encourage their children to resist conforming to the expectations of others, to, instead, search within for their own expectations. Still, there is loneliness. Music, their voice for what words can’t express, is also what sets them apart.

“It’s very frustrating,” Bronwyn says. “People don’t understand why I’d want to spend so much time playing and doing orchestra stuff and practicing and going to lessons. They don’t understand about music, and I sort of feel that they don’t understand anything about me. It’s hard to talk to kids and be friends with them when they don’t understand you.”

Music is a way to explore, she says. It’s disappointing that there are few new frontiers here on planet Earth. When she was younger, she wanted to be the first cellist to play on Mars.

And, even now, it is a thought that shines gloriously in her mind.

*

He may have been a musical prodigy himself, Salzman informs the audience, except for two limiting factors: a lack of talent and an unwillingness to work at music.

His wit and mastery of words provide a lighthearted tone to the evening. He’s no slouch on the cello, but neither is he a match for Bronwyn. Desperate for an area in which he can hold his own ground with her, he quips, “I can bench press more than you.”

There are times he wishes that music could have been his career. No one cheers, he notes, when you write a nice sentence.

While the prodigy is given an early option, the rest of us must search for and only hope to find a direction in life. As a child, Salzman’s search centered on the martial arts. When his parents denied his request to shave his head, he bought a bald wig, unable to contain long strands that strayed out the bottom. When they told him he couldn’t walk to school barefoot, he wore shoes with the soles cut out of them.

In 1982, upon graduating from Yale, he went to China to teach English and learn more about his beloved martial arts. He approached various masters, who asked him the same question, “Who are you?”

“I said, ‘I’m a person who wants to be like you,’ ” Salzman says.

Their reply: “Then you never will be. You want to do martial arts so it feels natural to you, so it feels like a natural expression of your being, but if you’re trying to be someone you’re not, you’re never going to feel that way. . . . You can’t become Chinese.”

Searching for one’s self is a familiar theme in Salzman’s writing and life. As a youngster he looked to music. “My real motivation with the music at that time was that I was hoping it would be the means to an adult identity. I wanted adolescence to end. I wanted to no longer be someone to whom adults would say, ‘I’m sure you’ll be very interesting when you grow up.’ ”

There is a common thread that runs through music, martial arts and writing, connecting them to his life. It has to do with revelation.

“In martial arts, the moment you feel it’s as natural as walking or in music after you struggle for months with a piece, where it’s just been notes, all the sudden there’s a leap of understanding, and things gel together. The same with writing. I’m a very slow worker with writing, and it’s a very painful process for me.

“I’m not an improviser. I take a very methodical, structured approach, which for the first two years of a novel is seemingly fruitless and frustrating, but then in the last year or two, suddenly out of all the fragments and research and drafts, a pattern appears, and that feeling, that search for the pattern, for the connection, the way to breathe life into something, for me, that’s such a fundamental human desire.”

That’s the gift he has learned to see. Within his passions, a pattern has emerged. Salzman couldn’t become someone else. He couldn’t become Chinese. He could only become himself.

Bronwyn is trying to do the same, and it seems the more she learns about music, the more she learns about herself. She would like someday to play professionally, but if it doesn’t work out, she says, there are always gigs the likes of weddings and anniversaries.

And maybe one of them will be on Mars.