This has probably happened to you: A piece you’re working on goes well during a practice session, but falls apart when you play it for your teacher—or, worse, in a concert. It’s the result of performance anxiety, something you can control only if you understand what causes it.
Gerald Klickstein, music professor at the North Carolina School of the Arts, is preparing a book on performance preparation. He says that the first step toward building confidence in performance is sorting out the things that can make you nervous. The second step is acquiring specific techniques that counter whatever activates your nerves.
“When I ask students about what makes performers jittery,” Klickstein says, “they usually have intuitive understandings. They tell me things like: too little practice, arriving late for a performance, trying to play music that’s too difficult, feeling like your life depends on how well you perform. You can sort those things into three simple categories: the performer’s personal characteristics, the task he or she has to perform, and the situation in which a performance takes place.”
Klickstein borrows those categories from Glenn Wilson, author of Psychology for Performing Artists.
Feeling like your life depends on the quality of your performance is an example of a problem rooted in the person. If you haven’t practiced well, you haven’t mastered the task. And if you’re playing at an important audition in an unfamiliar environment, that’s stress related to the situation.
So what does every performer need to do in order to be comfortable on stage?
Klickstein ticks off a very short list: “Manage personal issues related to performing, learn the music deeply so you master the task of performing that music, and be organizationally ready for the situation.”
Fight or Flight
The presence of performance anxiety doesn’t indicate there’s something wrong with you, Klickstein emphasizes; to the contrary, it’s related to a basic human reaction to danger, the fight-or-flight response.
“When that’s triggered,” he says, “the mind and body react pretty much the same way whether the danger is real, like if you’re about to be attacked by a bear, or if the danger is imagined, like when you’re about to go onstage and you don’t know how well the performance will go. The symptoms include a racing heart, dry mouth, nausea, cold hands as the blood is drawn away from the extremities and sent to the big leg muscles to help you run away, and a tremor produced by adrenaline being launched into the bloodstream to give you lots of energy to defend yourself.
“But fighting or running offstage are not good options for performers, so when that response is triggered, it can create havoc. We need to manage our response to stress and take charge of our overall health so when we arrive at the hall we’re confident, energetic, and eager to share our love of music.
“In addition, we all need backstage rituals to focus our minds, warm ourselves up, connect with the music, and make us feel the opposite of fight-or-flight response, which is a sense of calm and purpose. Now, this is not about relaxing. Relaxation is not a successful strategy for a performer. Performing is about focusing energy, not letting it dissipate. To counter fight-or-flight and focus creative energy, every performer should have at least one physical technique, one mental technique, and one task-oriented technique that he or she can use backstage.
“One of the most powerful physical techniques is called ‘two-to-one breathing.’ You breathe in through your nostrils for a count of three or so, and then you exhale through pursed lips for a count of six, repeating several times.
“A powerful mental/emotional tool is to use affirmations, or even prayers, that reinforce your passion for music and belief in yourself. An example would be to inwardly say, ‘I can handle whatever happens; I’ve prepared well.’ Or you might remind yourself, ‘I’m a student; my purpose is to learn from my performance and further my skills.’
“A task-oriented technique would be to bring your mute backstage and play some of the opening phrase shortly before you go on. In that way, you bring yourself into the character of the music before taking the stage.”
|
Getting to Carnegie Hall
Says Klickstein, “Onstage, we need to have good presentation skills and focusing techniques, so we can give ourselves fully to the music. After performing, we need techniques to evaluate our performance objectively, learn from it, and apply what we learn to further our artistry.
“The big question is: how do we acquire proficiency with those techniques? Well, we practice performing. Most people consider performance a culminating activity; you practice a lot, but you might go many months between performances. Performance for some musicians can be a very rare event, and infrequent exposure to performance situations isn’t going to allow musicians to gain fluency with performance-enhancing techniques.
“We need to identify the skills that help us perform well, and then practice those skills frequently in mock performance situations. Practice performances can take place by yourself with your audio or video recorder, or with a friend or teacher. One of the most helpful things you can do is to do practice performances in your lessons, and ask your teacher to evaluate your performances.
“I urge you to bring a recorder to such lessons so that, later on, you can listen to your performance, and review your teacher’s comments.”
Ah, but there’s much work to do before the performance. “A lot of what people call ‘performance anxiety’ is actually what I would term ‘preparation anxiety,’” Klickstein says. “No matter how much you tend to be on edge in front of other people, or how inexperienced you are at presenting yourself on stage, if you increase your skill at mastering music, your preparation skill, you can be so much more poised on stage.”
Or in a lesson. Klickstein says that when something that seemingly went well during practice falls apart in the lesson, it’s often because the student learned the music by rote, in a superficial way.
“Learning by rote depends on automated recall, which only functions effectively when you’re in an optimal state—and that’s usually not going to happen under the pressure of a public performance or even in a lesson where you want to play your best in front of a teacher,” he says. “You don’t know the piece well enough to direct yourself through it under stress. The piece feels fragile, and you don’t know if it will hold together; if you want to perform well, but you know that things might fall apart, well, then it’s normal to be anxious.”
The solution, he says, is deep learning rather than rote learning. This means knowing the piece through and through, every element out of its usual context. Can you play individual phrases accurately out of their proper order? Do you have a specific image or emotion to convey through every part of the piece? In a multi-voice passage, can you sing one part while playing the other?
Environmental Impact
Finally, there’s what Klickstein calls “situational preparation”: getting ready to perform in an unusual physical or psychological environment. “Novel situations can be stressful,” he says, “so we need to know what those situations are like ahead of time.”
That means getting familiar with the new environment well in advance. Get acquainted with the stage and the backstage area. Find a good place to warm up, long before you need to use it. Have some water and a snack with you, so that if there’s some sort of delay, you won’t become hungry and dehydrated. If you show up at the last minute and scramble to get your bearings, it will be more difficult to focus your energy on performing.
Klickstein emphasizes that you need to address stress triggers in all three areas—person, task, and situation. Your teacher should be able to help you deal with ordinary, mild performance anxiety. A moderate level of anxiety that significantly affects your playing may require a counselor to help you develop a healthy attitude toward performing.
And if your anxiety is severe enough to threaten regular breakdowns, enlist both an expert teacher and a therapist. “Never be afraid to ask for help,” he says, “and remember that you may be dealing with something that’s more than a music teacher alone is equipped to handle.” He also trumpets the value of general health and fitness: “Psychologists agree that a healthy diet, balanced lifestyle, and aerobic fitness are among your most effective options for stress reduction.”
Don’t be discouraged if it looks like you’ll never be entirely stress-free. “We’re all going to have a certain amount of stress when we’re expected to perform at high levels,” Klickstein says. “Confidence comes not from the absence of performance nerves, but from knowing that you can manage whatever comes up.”
|
|
