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（1）A CANCER-SURVIVING COMPOSER’S EXTRAORDINARY MOVEMENT
A sudden and rare brain tumor leads to an accomplished musician’s brush with death and a gap between his brain and his body – but Anthony Ptak will make music any way he can.
（2）Being in the cancer ward felt a bit like being in a jazz ensemble. The doctor controlled the tempo like a drummer, the nurses cheered him up like the trumpets, and the screaming patients sent shivers down his spine like the crashing cymbals.
All Anthony Ptak wanted to do was play the piano.
（3）“While I was in the hospital I would tell them — all of the players, the doctors, the nurses, the security guards — I would tell everyone that I play the piano,” says Ptak, a forty-four-year-old composer. “I just wanted to reaffirm something that I thought I was losing. I also wanted to set up a safety net, a way for them to remember to take care of me.”
（4）Before being confined to the cancer ward, Ptak was a music professor at NYU and a respected composer. He performed all over town and was known as much for his creativity as for his ability. He founded the New York Theremin Society — a theremin is an electronic instrument first made in Russia in the early 1900s and controlled via antennas, without physical contact. One of the last projects he worked on before his diagnosis was marrying music and technology by coding a computer program to play along with the theremin.
（5）If he lost music, he would have lost a part of his soul.
Ptak has always been more interested in adaptability and innovation than in harmony and preservation. He writes music that he says can be “difficult for people to contend with.” While he doesn’t consider himself a jazz musician, he has an affinity for the genre.
（6）“The thing about jazz is it’s always evolving,” he says. “Jazz came from the kind of grind when things go wrong. Life isn’t harmony and everyone smiling together. That doesn’t happen, man. Shit goes wrong and that’s what jazz is.”
（7）Shit started to go wrong in the fall of 2010, when he found himself unable to play a piece he had once played easily. At first he thought he was just rusty, but no matter how hard or how long he practiced, he still couldn’t get through it. Everything felt a bit off. As he approached the subway stairs on his way to his Greenwich Village apartment, each step seemed insurmountable. The former high school athlete had to grab onto the handrails to walk down. When he reached the platform he lost his balance and thought he was going to fall. Over the next few weeks he had trouble multitasking, then remembering things and, ultimately, walking. Doctors initially thought he had suffered a stroke. When they found the brain tumor, Ptak feared for his life.
（8）At the hospital, he struggled to keep the cancer from controlling his brain. By the start of 2011 it had weakened the left side of his body, including his hand. He kept telling doctors and nurses to be careful with his hand whenever they injected medicine into his body. When he heard that there was a piano in the basement it became his mission to go down there and play. He would ask anyone close enough to listen if they could get him to the piano.
（9）“If I could hold onto something that I knew, all of those things that were unfamiliar and out of control would be less relevant and out of focus,” Ptak says. “I’m always thinking in music. Everything I do musically is locked into my neurological system. It’s a part of me.”
As part of his treatment, Ptak received a regular dose of steroids. They were still in his system when hospital staff rolled him down to the basement and placed his wheelchair in front of the piano. The drugs strengthened his left hand; Ptak could play.
（10）Before his wife Jordana and a handful of medical staff, he performed an original composition, something he had been working on shortly before his diagnosis. To this day he credits that moment as the turning point in his recovery.
When his cancer went into remission in November 2011, the doctor told him that “the bear was in the cave.” So Ptak wrote a song called “Bear in a Cave.”
（11）Weeks after leaving the cancer ward, he played it during an open mic night at Caffe Vivaldi in the Village. He was not getting steroids anymore so he didn’t expect his left arm to work, but that didn’t stop him from putting on a show. It was his first time playing on a stage since being diagnosed with cancer. Sweating from the nerves, Ptak could smell the chemicals from the chemotherapy seeping through his pores. He sat through a couple of comedy acts and folk singers before getting up on the stage.
（12）“I was playing quietly because I didn’t want to wake up the bear,” he says. “Also, I wanted the performance to reflect the damage in my brain. I put my left hand over the keyboards even though I knew it wouldn’t work.”
（13）When his hand refused to do what his brain asked of it, Ptak adapted. The song was slow and quiet, demonstrating flashes of able-bodied skill as he built up the tempo before being slowed down by the other hand. It sounded like what it was — an internal struggle for control.
（14）The crowd clapped after the song and a woman came up to Ptak and told him it was a heartfelt performance. But much like responses to the innovative musicians of the 1920s, Ptak is sure someone in the crowd leaned over to a friend and whispered, “What the heck is this guy thinking?”
（15）Ptak lives to adapt. He walks with a cane, still cannot control much of his left hand, has problems seeing and sometimes drools uncontrollably. But he is alive, and despite the relatively small disabilities, his spirits are higher than ever.
（16）With his cancer in remission, his old energy is restored. He has become an unofficial spokesman for Sabi, a company that manufactures walking canes, and hooked up a GoPro camera to his cane in order to show people what it’s like to get around the city. He also joined a soccer team to prove to himself that he can still compete.
（17）Musically he has picked up where he left off, and he is still coding the theremin computer program. It was originally intended to play as a sort of backup instrument to his compositions. The goal was to have very specific notes play at certain parts of the song. Now that controlling his left hand is a daily battle, he is developing that code further to be more than just a backup.
（18）“I had to relearn some things because of the cancer,” he says, adding, “The coding is tough, it’s a fun challenge.
“Music was easy,” he says. “Music is a part of who I am."