1) Definition of Performance Anxiety: What is it?

    ~physical symptoms: shaking, nausea, coldness in the extremities, physical weakness, dizziness, excess of physical energy, racing pulse, heart palpitations..all resulting from extra adrenaline in the system. The body initiates a “fight or flight” response, drawing energy away from injury-prone extremities, toward the internal organs, preparing for battle.

    ~emotions: fear, panic, anxiety

   ~ thought patterns: I will fail, I am a terrible musician, I will embarrass myself. Subconsciously, there are beliefs about ourselves that are disproportionately affected by playing music in public…I will fail, everyone will hate me, I will be alone. Virtually none of these things even come close to being true. The anxiety you associate with the performance is virtually always way out of proportion to its importance.

    ~effects on performance: bodily and mental symptoms mentioned above can create shaky or superficial tone, rushing tempo, inaccuracy.

    ~prevalence/universality: This is something that even the greatest artists deal with.

2) Causes of performance anxiety

        ~cognitive distortions (messed up thinking)

                "my self worth depends on how well I perform" "I must be perfect"

                "people won't like me as much if I don't succeed. If people don't like me as much, I will be very alone and unhappy." –not true, much of the time, people will be sympathetic, will empathize, will be relieved that they’re not the only one who’s not perfect.

                "what will the audience think of me?"-the audience is dumber than you think. Half the time they’re not even paying attention. Half of those who are don’t really know what they’re hearing.

                "what if/ catastrophization scenarios” What happens if I fail…addressed below.

        ~insufficient preparation

                not enough practice

                practice crammed in at the last minute

                less than totally effective practice techniques

3) Solutions to performance anxiety

       ~lessening the anxiety itself

                Have a sense of humor about what you’re about to do—go into a practice room and intentionally screw up your piece in funny ways. See how it feels. Get out of “perfection” mode.”

Improvise around your piece, even if you’re really, really, bad at it. Desensitize yourself to the panic that comes from departing from the score. Learn to make friends with imperfection.

                realizing you're not alone-virtually all of the greatest performers in the world get nervous...

                plan a treat for yourself once the performance is done...fun with friends, special lunch, movie, anything you enjoy. Give yourself something to look forward to after it’s over, regardless of how well you feel the performance went.

                treat yourself to a new outfit

        ~giving better performances

                some anxiety can actually be beneficial

                        Some of the most boring performances are ones where the performer does not get nervous. Nervousness can give the performance unexpected energy, new, spontaneous interpretive ideas we come up with while performing, and the energy necessary to last through the performance, which, in some cases, is an entire recital. Also, many have experienced a euphoric relief at getting through the first few minutes of a performance, this relief can actually make us perform BETTER than usual! So performance anxiety isn't necessarily something to be pushed away or controlled, but to be made friends with.

ways of knowing music

                memory where applicable—discuss with your teacher the various ways of knowing music—finger memory, intellectual memory, visual memory, aural memory.

                Do a sufficient number of dry runs. Playing a piece for others, making yourself play the piece when you’re a bit nervous helps bring out things you need to work on, and also helps cement things in place.

                practice techniques for piano – most of them involve either separating elements out, or squeezing things together:

Examples of separating things out:

hands separately practice

practicing with the hands an extra octave apart

practicing with one hand silently on the wood of the piano

practicing very, very slowly: for piano, and other instruments where this is possible, practice very, very, very slow. When we get nervous onstage, the adrenaline pumps through our veins and our sense of time gets distorted. Typically, we perform faster than normal without knowing it. The result can be more inaccuracy than usual, wobbly or stifled tone, stiff musicality. Practicing slowly, a lot, trains us to counteract the rushing almost all of us experience when we get nervous. I tell my students, think SLOW onstage Some rushing is also due to fear, subconscious or otherwise, that you don't know the piece well enough. So we rush in the hopes that our muscle memory will take over. Which brings us to:

practing one voice (line) at a time, practicing singing various lines, practicing with different articulations.

For memory purposes, practicing mentally away from the instrument, with and without the score in front of you. It is possible to memorize entire pieces without ever playing or singing them.

Learn to start cold in several different places in the music, and get to the point where you can jump instantaneously to your next place.

Then practicing improvising a connection to your next starting place (it doesn’t have to be a good improvisation). Then a memory slip becomes an opportunity to show how clever, fearless, or resourceful you are.

Examples of compressing things together:

Practice groups of notes as solid clumps…this gives you a better grip on the keyboard and counteracts shakiness.

Practice seeing the piece as a whole by playing the first few notes of each of your starting points rapidly in a row. This gives you a “bird’s eye view” of the piece. Walking on stage, you know you can get through it no matter what.

Learn to understand what’s going on theoretically behind the music. The more you can understand large numbers notes as harmonies and scales, the fewer things you have to think about. The more you understand the form of what you’re playing, the more grounded you’ll feel in what you do.

Other ways to give better performances

At some point, try being on stage long enough at a time to let nerves settle down (ie more than 10 minutes). Realize that as undergraduates performing in relatively short installments, you are in a slightly disadvantageous position of not being on stage long enough to let your nerves settle down.

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