I watch. The timbre of darkness in my bedroom changes fractionally as the luminous numerals on the clock shift from 04:00 to 04:01, and my head continues to roar.

Any professional violinist will tell you, the glamour of performing great music is more than countered by permanent injuries of one kind or another. Physical deformation, skin rash on the neck and those clawed hands, as well as tinnitus or partial deafness in at least one ear - all of those screaming high notes clattering their assault into the senses for hours and hours, every day…  

I needed the money of course. Never marry a musician they say, and it's true. Very few earn a decent living, let alone 'making it'. Look at many a famous composer from the past, however, and you'll find they either had some moneybags patron, or they came from a rich family and could indulge their talent each waking hour without having to clock a nine-to-five shift just to pay the rent. That's a generalisation of course, just as it is that all violinists are as crippled as I am, but read up and you might be surprised.

Either way, this was an offer I couldn't refuse.

I've played plenty of music both ancient and modern, so there wasn't much more that I needed or wanted to learn about scordatura. This to my mind is a tedious procedure that, like gold leaf on food, seriously has to justify its presence with some kind of meaningful effect for it to be a welcome addition. Scordatura involves de-tuning one or more strings on the instrument to a lower or higher pitch. There's a lot of time and effort invested in intonation with violin playing, which is why beginners always sound so awful. De- and re-tuning the strings always plays havoc with my 'ear', so my heart sank when the score arrived for this lucrative project.

I won't name or describe the composer involved, not because they are particularly famous or litigious. It just doesn't do to badmouth fellow musicians whatever you really think about the mud they churn out on a copious basis.

This score that arrived was complex beyond any reasonable standard of playability. It wasn't the usual denseness of notes that have most non-specialist performers running for the hills, but the details. Just as an example, there were scordatura instructions actually indicated in microtones down to the cents you normally only see when it comes to tuning keyboard instruments. Pointless and absurd.  

I normally enjoy collaborating with creative people. I admit that the ensuing correspondence might not have put our working relationship on the most positive of foundations, but when we finally started working in earnest, the frictions already expressed from both sides soon solidified into intractability. I did my best, brought out my most expensive tuning meter and demonstrated the results as notated, but it was never right. Time after time I would repeat passages, each time attempting subtle variations that sought to approach the holy grail of this composer's intentions, but it was still never right. All of us players have come across composers who think they know what they have in mind, but who turn out entirely cloth-eared to even quite egregious mistakes during rehearsals. Others are masters of the nuances they seek and are equally skilled at communicating this to their musicians. This composer insisted they knew what they wanted but also seemed entirely disconnected from the field of practical reality, and whatever technical explanations and demonstrations I gave they were unrelenting and increasingly impatient in their pursuit of unachievable goals.

My brain cooked. My ears felt as if they should be bleeding. My hands became numb, and even the varnish on my poor tortured instrument seemed to be losing its gloss. It can't be done. I've tried everything. I'm not interpreting I'm following your instructions as far as is humanly possible, but you can hear for yourself it's not really what you want. It's a dead end. 

After many hours we parted, with questions about my fee and the upcoming premiere performance hanging unanswered in that space where the magic had failed to happen.

Like most of us, I want to do my best. Failure becomes something personal - what did I do wrong, what could I have done better? The mind and the emotions fight back - that awful person and their shitty music, who do they think they are and who would want to hear that ghastly stuff anyway…

The clock now reads 04.27. The combination of roaring dissonance in my head and emotional wrangling is giving me vertigo. I stagger to the bathroom and drink some water.

Entirely having forgotten a destructive impulse from earlier in the evening I flush the toilet. It is blocked. Fragments of paper caked in meaningless music notation rise towards me. Blackness fills my consciousness and I'm falling. 

Dawn is on its cusp as my eyes creak open. I slowly gather myself from the floor, stiff and cold but uninjured, and I shakily re-enter the normal world.

After some restorative coffee and a nap on the couch, I decide it's time to go back to work but my brain won't let me.

My mind has gone, and decades of muscle memory are flatlining.

I have hit a wall and now I can play nothing.

Nothing. Not even Bach...