Susan Eddlemon found her voice in the violin. Then she lost it. Now she's found it again.
by Mike Gibson
Susan Eddlemon hadn't intended to strike such an inspirational chord when she pulled her 1913 Romeo Antoniazzi violin out of its case this afternoon at First Presbyterian Church. The chapel was empty when she entered, not a soul within earshot when she first laid bow across strings in preparation for an upcoming teaching session.
But when a visitor finally intrudes on the solitude of the moment, the image of this petite woman coaxing the velvet strains of Bottesini's "Grand Duo Concertante" out of the burnished instrument is as affecting as any contemplative Classical sculpture, as the most florid Renaissance brushstrokes. With sun from open shutters pouring into the shadowy chapel, Eddlemon plays in wordless supplication, touched by the diagonal fingers of light reaching gently into the darkest portions of the room.
That image—the musician playing sweetly, seeking the light of day in the darkened chambers of a holy place—is an apt metaphor for the life and career of the woman herself. A well-traveled and highly accomplished violinist, Eddlemon has struggled mightily with demons of self-doubt, with a suffocating performance anxiety that once threatened to snuff a rich and fulfilling career.
Through hard work, faith, and an ineffable spiritual comprehension of the music she plays, Eddlemon has gradually surmounted her adversities, having resumed her playing career and given of her talents to the local Community School for the Arts. The school is a performing and graphic arts outreach, providing private lessons for children across Knoxville whose family incomes would ordinarily preclude such instruction.
"It helps me as a musician to teach; in order to teach, you have to learn the subject matter better yourself," says Eddlemon. She's seated in the cushioned front pew of the chapel, her warm-up complete, and she has yet another 45 minutes before the arrival of the day's first student.
"Violin is a unique voice; it's the voice of the human soul. It takes a long time to master, but when you do, it speaks to our humanity in a way that can't be duplicated. And there's a unique satisfaction in bringing that voice to fruition in someone else."
Eddlemon's own voice was nearly silenced at one time. And the story of her reemergence as an artist reveals as much about the nature of self-discovery as it does about triumph over adversity.
Susan Eddlemon first meets a reporter, sans violin, at a West Knoxville coffee- and book-store. Freckled and pretty, 50-ish, with a frothy tiara of pert auburn curls, she's unabashed about holding forth on the details of her life, her personal struggles, and her spirituality. (She foregoes the cappuccino, as she's forsworn caffeine for the duration of the Lenten season.)
"There was always at least one violin and a piano around my house when I was a child; both my parents played and sang," she says in a voice that's as high-pitched and melodious as her instrument of choice. "One day, dad started bringing home symphony records—Brahms and Beethoven—and very early on, I became attached to that music. In the very center of the music there was a joy, very burning. Joy was coming through, and I was reaching for it."
Susan Lang (her maiden name) undertook private violin instruction throughout her schoolgirl years in her native Cincinnati. At 18, she entered the prestigious Julliard School of Music in Lincoln Center in New York, where she would spend nine arduous years, studying, performing, practicing her instrument at least four hours per day. When she left the school in the early 1970s, she carried away three performing degrees: a Bachelor of Music, a Master of Music, and a Doctor of Musical Arts.
At the end of her Julliard stay, she met Scott Eddlemon, a classical percussionist whom she wed shortly thereafter. The couple left Julliard at the same time for their first professional endeavors, moving to Victoria, British Columbia and seats in the Victoria Symphony. Scott was a timpanist, and Susan was associate concertmaster, a status conferred on the second of an orchestra's two most accomplished violinists.
They would spend the next 14 years in Canada, with Susan moving on to an associate concertmaster position in the Calgary Philharmonic, then the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra. She also toured intermittently with Music Mosaic, a violin/piano/cello trio that performed extensively for Canadian public radio, and recorded one compact disc for commercial release.
Her husband, however, fell away from the life of a full-time classical musician, and took a post as regional director for a Canadian Christian outreach, the Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF). But when the Saskatoon economy fell into a tailspin, both Susan and Scott found themselves at a spiritual crossroads.
"I began to feel as if I needed a change," says Eddlemon. Even now, her speech is halting, her manner one of bewilderment as she tries to apply the tools of comprehension and description to an experience that defied such.
"It was as if I was in a tunnel, and it was getting smaller and smaller. Something was feeling very tight and painful, as if my soul was getting squeezed. All of the old cues, the things that used to thrill, weren't thrilling anymore. I didn't know what was happening; I just knew I had to stop."
Scott Eddlemon is a native Oak Ridger, and when his job at the IVCF was phased out in 1990, he felt his calling was to return home and work for his father's business, a Solway firm that sells sophisticated nuclear instrumentation. Susan, however, felt lost. For the next year, she didn't work or play violin, retreating instead into her role as mother of the couple's two young children.
Within those painful soul-stirrings, there was also a gnawing anxiety, says Eddlemon. "The peak came after we'd moved here, and I returned to Canada to make our trio recording. We rehearsed for two weeks, and I had a feeling of being trapped. It was a feeling of 'You can't play this, but you must.'"
It's not an uncommon affliction for accomplished musicians, she says, and some take beta-blockers or other psycho-active medications to reduce their performance inhibitions. But in Susan, the condition grew to be so emotionally asphyxiating that performance became a source of both physical and psychological distress. Eddlemon describes the quavering hands, muscle cramping, and tightness in her limbs that constricted the long, flowing bow strokes that are requisite to fine playing.
"The uneasiness crescendoed; I felt 'damned if I do, damned if I don't.' I had painted myself into a corner."
Local pianist Martha James played with Eddlemon in 1992, performing in a trio that also included flutist Tom Howell, as part of a concert series James had organized at Fort Sanders' Laurel Theatre. James jovially describes her one-time collaborator as "an impeccable musician...a top dog." But she also remembers outward manifestations of Eddlemon's inner turmoil, of the doubts and fears that inhibited her musical expression.
"She talked about the anxiety a lot," says James. "Her playing was excellent, but I think I can hear a difference now that she's put a lot of that behind her. When I heard her more recently, she seemed more expressive, much freer in her playing."
Indeed, Eddlemon has shed, or at least controlled, many of those crippling terrors, and has progressively reinvolved herself in the community of classical music. She has played a concert series in Oak Ridge, performed for local clubs and civic organizations, and was eventually solicited by the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra. Though she doesn't wish to commit herself to KSO full-time, she now plays in most of the organization's subscription concerts.
Ironically, the emergence of those forces that saved her career coincided with the emergence of the malign ones that so nearly squelched it. "Just as my anxiety was growing, I came to the realization that a new, more deliberate prayer life was taking shape," says Eddlemon, a devout Protestant church-goer since childhood. "There's a thing that grows in you, and you have to stop and listen. And that's connected to playing. You can't play without listening, just as you can't pray without listening."
Through a form of meditative spiritual communion—"listening prayer," she calls it—Eddlemon was able to peel away the layers of self-absorption that lay at the heart of her self-doubt. Her personal regimen now includes as much as two hours every day of prayerful meditation, Psalm readings, and spiritual "journalings."
"I was missing the 'listening' half of the prayer equation," she relates. "I was thinking 'I don't belong; I'm not good enough,' because I was only listening to the things I had to say. I needed to hear the Father's voice, what He had to say."
As her performing identity began to flower once again, a peer urged Eddlemon to resume teaching, as she had done in Canada, and strongly recommended her to Jennifer Willard, director of the Community School for the Arts. Operating out of downtown's First Presbyterian, the school seeks to nurture lower-income youth who display performing and artistic talents above the norm—"people for whom a professional career is not outside the realm of possibility," says Susan—and Eddlemon spends about nine hours per week with the CSA's more advanced violin students.
"Susan's an exceptional musician," says Willard. She notes that the school's violin recitals have been singularly musical since Eddlemon came on board three years ago, bereft of the awkwardness and misintonation that typically characterize the playing of younger students.
"She's not only very technically proficient, she's got a musician's heart," Willard continues. "She doesn't have the flash or showmanship people typically think of when they think of a soloist. Her brilliance is more internal, and you can tell it's a much deeper connection. The music comes from what I would call a much deeper place, and she seeks to instill that same connection in her students."
Susan Eddlemon's 2 p.m. student will arrive at any moment now; the petite violinist once again takes up the instrument she had rested on a chair in front of a window near the pulpit. In addition to her teaching schedule and KSO dates, she schedules some 20 to 30 weddings, and perhaps a half-dozen solo performances in a year, each of which requires weeks of intense practice beyond the "maintenance" schedule she adheres to in other months. As her musical and personal evolutions continue, Eddlemon says she will likely seek a college-level teaching position.
"It's taken me 10 years to get to this point," she says. "It's not an easy thing.
"There's something about playing, a joy even in the midst of pain, that draws me in the same way it did when I first began violin. It's a window to the Father, a common grace, and that's the reason I could never abandon it."
April 19, 2001 * Vol. 11, No. 16
© 2001 Metro Pulse
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