Imagine the worst audition
you could ever experience. Picture a stifling, noisy, overcrowded
waiting-room with a malfunctioning air conditioner, with you and
dozens of other perspiring musicians waiting interminably before
being called out to the stage—where matters grow even worse.
You can't find your violin. The sheet music is gone. The music stand
keeps falling over. And once you finally start playing, the stage
lights suddenly go out, plunging you into blackness at the precise
moment that somebody drops a huge hunk of lumber onto the stage—right
behind you—with a deafening crash.
Bad, huh? Enough to drive a person screaming out the door, or, at
the very least, to cause a good, solid player to melt down mid-audition.
That level of stress is simply too much of a bad thing. Right? Actually,
wrong, according to Dr. Don Greene, who believes that stress, when
properly prepared for, can actually be good for a musician.
A trained sports and performance psychologist who once helped Olympian
Greg Louganis withstand the nail-biting pressures of world-class
competitive diving, Greene has for several years been developing
specific coping methods for classical musicians—both students
and professionals—who sometimes suffer from performance anxiety
or who simply fall apart in high-stress situations. The trick, he
says, is not to try to control or minimize the level of stress,
but rather to welcome it, to count on it, and even—with a
little practice—to make use of it.
"One of the biggest mistakes a performer makes is to assume
that performance anxiety is abnormal, that it's bad," explains
Greene. "It's not good or bad—it's just adrenaline. If
you see nervousness as bad, if you believe that performance anxiety
is a terrible thing, to be feared and avoided at all costs, then
you won't come up with strategies to make it work for you. You'll
just spend your energies trying to minimize the damage.
"That," he says, "is not the best way to go about
it."
Greene, who lives in Hawaii, first learned to cope with stress as
a student at West Point, and then as a Green Beret. Later, while
working with Olympic divers, swimmers, top-level golfers, skiers,
tennis champions, and Grand Prix drivers, he began to develop strategies
to help his clients prepare for the stress of athletic performance
by retraining their relationships to anxiety and pressure.
In Short: Stop
Fearing Fear
In his book Fight Your Fear and Win: 7 Skills for Performing
Your Best Under Pressure, followed by Performance Success:
Performing Your Best Under Pressure and Audition Success:
An Olympic Sports Psychologist Teaches Performing Artists How to
Win, Greene established himself as a major force—a guru,
if you will—in the field of high-pressure performance. He
has worked with young players at Juilliard and with the Miami-based
New World Symphony, where he launched an adversity-training program
in which subjects perform while other students whistle and shout
and attempt to distract them. He also developed a system of mock
auditions, where players acclimatize themselves to stress by enduring
situations like those described in the opening paragraph of this
article.
Greene has taught or made presentations to countless musical organizations
including the Syracuse Symphony, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and
the New York Philharmonic. Alongside his current work with the Honolulu
Symphony Orchestra and the Oahu Civic Orchestra, Greene has been
working with young athletes and musicians at Honolulu's celebrated
Punahou School.
The psychology of sports, he has found, is very nearly identical
to the psychology of musicianship, identical, in fact, to most forms
of performance. “The principle of sports psychology is overcompensation,"
says Greene. "When practicing, you want to apply more pressure,
more adversity than might happen in the actual game or performance.
So then, when all that stress and pressure does happen, you can
say, 'Well, I've dealt with a lot worse than this. I can do this—no
problem.'"
Here are a few of Greene's tips for helping musicians understand
and make use of their own levels of stress and anxiety.
Train Your Brain
According to Greene, many musicians who grow nervous under pressure,
who don't do well under stress, end up looking for solutions in
technical things, energetically sharpening their musical skills
while ignoring the actual problem.
"If you can do a piece in a practice room—efficiently
and well—then you have the technical abilities to do it,"
says Greene. "But then if you go on stage and are not able
to execute the piece, it's not a technical issue. It's a mental
issue, an issue of how you deal with stress. A lot of people then
will go back to the practice room to work on a problem that wasn't
there, namely their technique, when the problem wasn't their technique—it
was their response to stress.
"So, the question is," he asks, "do they work on
that problem? Or do they deceive themselves and say, 'Well, I'd
better work on my bowing!' The problem is not their bowing—it's
their bowing under pressure."
Practice Performing
When musicians practice, Greene has observed, they are rehearsing
more than just their musical skills. "If I've seen one thing,"
says Greene, "it's that classical musicians are used to spending
a massive amount of time—and rightfully so—in practicing,
doing all the things they need to do—stopping, checking, correcting,
trying a different way of fingering, a different method of bowing,
playing pieces in fits and starts, doing all the things a student,
and even a professional, needs to do to get the technical piece
of the repertoire down.
"The mistake I see is that they never switch over from practicing
practice," he continues, "to practicing performance. And
then they go out on stage—where the environment is very different—expecting
to do something they've never adequately practiced. All that time
they've been practicing doing something they're not going to do.
They're not going to go out there and rehearse, stopping and starting
and correcting. At some point, a musician should start practicing
performance—making an entrance, playing the piece straight
through regardless of what happens, and then getting up to make
the exit."
So, how should a performer practice performance?
"I encourage musicians to either play for a friend, a teacher,
a colleague, or to simply put a tape recorder on or set up a video
camera," Greene says. "Having a person there, or a camera
or a tape recorder, puts pressure on you, and you realize that,
and that's beautiful, because then you're practicing performing."
The whole idea, he explains, is to apply as much stress as possible,
so that it mimics, as closely as possible, the conditions of being
in a performance.
"Believe me,” he laughs, "it's better that you figure
out how to deal with the stress and find good ways among friends
than to wait and see what happens in front of an audition panel,
a jury, or a paying audience at a professional gig."
Fake It
While Greene encourages his musicians to practice making their entrances
and exits—since an entrance can be a powerful anxiety trigger
for certain performers—there's more to it than merely walking
onto the stage and standing there.
"When a lot of people step out on stage, their adrenaline is
pumping," he says. "So when my musicians practice performance,
I want them going up and down stairs or doing jumping jacks or something
before they practice making their entrance. That way, they can feel
some of the symptoms that they may feel when they actually make
an entrance in front of an audience."
Whatever you do—don't relax!
"Powerful performance is not about being relaxed," suggests
Dr. Greene. "You have to accept that when you perform, you
might be feeling some extra energy, and the more accustomed you
can get to feeling that energy when you play your first few notes,
the better."
It's on the first few notes, he says, that a performer is likely
going to feel the most energy.
"There's been so much build up," he says, "and there's
probably been a lot of chaos going on off stage. It's important
to practice all of that, so when the chaos does hit, when the energy
and adrenaline kick in and you open your eyes to see that the jury
or teacher or the audience really is there, you're fine. You say,
'No problem. This is exactly what I've been rehearsing.'"
Illustration by
Kelly Doren
