From Fear to Flourish: Managing Performance Anxiety
Whether it is recording yourself for a tonebase challenge, playing in a lesson, performing for your friends and family, or getting on a stage in front of hundreds of people, it can be nerve-racking to put yourself out there!
You won’t want to miss this livestream with Chelsea Tanner that addresses performance anxiety with tangible tools you can take away to implement in your practice and performances. Being nervous before a performance is very normal, so we’re going to talk all about how to work with any anxiety that may be with you as you perform under pressure. Join us!
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Sounds excellent!
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I have many, many years of experience with stage-fright, probably the only characteristic I can claim to share with Vladimir Horowitz.
I am convinced that the key is preparation. I've had my share of embarrassing failures due to stage-fright, but the success I would mention is a performance of the Prokofiev Flute Sonata at the Longy School in Cambridge, MA. My (excellent) flutist and I were well-coached and I was more prepared for this concert than most other public performances I have done. There is a difficult closing passage at the end of the Scherzo in this work. I started worrying about it as we began the movement. We proceeded through the movement .... and then I realized it was over. To my surprise, I suspected those final bars had gone well. This was confirmed by the recording -- it was note-perfect.
I had a similar experience with the Pantoum movement of the Ravel Trio. I never thought I could do this movement at Ravel's metronome marking (Ravel told Eugene Lehner that he was serious about this tempo; Lehner told this to Dan Stepner; Dan told me). It's amazing what a year of practice will do!
This leads to my personal theory about this question -- if you are unprepared, you will play terribly under performance pressure. If you are really, really prepared, you will play somewhere between 97% and 100% as well as you can play. If you are truly prepared, your unconscious and your hands will surprise you!
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Don Allen Hi Don -- while there is no substitute for preparation, and for (perhaps) most people it can help ensure a decent or even very good performance even when feeling anxious, I don't think it's the root of the problem, and for chronic cases of stage fright it's not enough of an insurance policy. You can play something 10 times in a row perfectly in your living room, but if your hands start shaking or forearms tighten up in a nasty way, you'll never be able to play 97% as well as you can. It will be more like 70%, objectively, and subjectively for the performer it's a failure/horrible feeling to know you have performed so below what your best self can do. Chronic stagefright is akin to a phobia--it gets hard-wired in nervous system and needs to be retrained through exposure and therapy. Timothy Gallway (of Inner Game of Tennis fame) put it succinctly: we get anxious when we want something but cannot control whether we can get it. So the root of the problem, to me, is when people want approval and attach too much self-worth to how others may judge their ability to perform. The stronger the consciousness/worry is on the judgment of others--which we cannot control, even if we're Horowitz--the more the anxiety. I've experienced this myself in piano at times, and in an interesting, and helpful way, in sports. I played a lot of tennis growing up. Around age 16-17 I started getting very self-conscious when certain people would watch me play, and I consistently underperformed. Somehow the tennis playing was attached to my ego in an unhealthy way. It felt terrible. I stopped playing seriously for competition when I was about 18. Then started playing Ultimate frisbee. I sort of intentionally decided I was not going to attach it to me ego -- and voila, I don't worry about how others perceive my play. As a result I actually play better when a game is on the line and often better than some nervous teammates. So getting the ego more out of the way, getting it into a healthy relationship with the task, and de-elevating the connection and importance of others' opinions about you/the performer is key. Easier to do in a team sport than individual, and solo piano is a real test of how well one can center one's consciousness on the music rather than others' judgments. And yes, knowing you can nail a piece never hurts!
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When will classical musicians recognize that stage fright is induced early by pushy instructors/professors, and also by being forced to perform by memory, and therefore abandon these harmful causes?
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Superblonde DotOrg I guess never.
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Playing that first phrase -that is the question
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We commonly go from the practice room to the stage but starting with an awareness of what happens in our mind, body, and emotional self-talk as we’re about to perform, while we’re performing, and after the performance gives us the holistic checklist of what we must improve when we practice. More later on the website as we’re about to finish….
