Performance Anxiety

Got you beat. I have been playing for over 60 years and always had performance anxiety, although not in front of my teachers. At age 75, I got my first prescription for propranolol. It works. The only time it failed was when I forgot to take the pills.

This is one of those topics that most of us can relate to in some form. My experience might be a bit different because I’ve been a working guitarist for my adult life. I’ve played solo and ensemble, classical and jazz, pit orchestras and audio wallpaper gigs. I never had nerves when I was young. I never experienced real performance anxiety until I was in my 40s. I was playing a solo recital opening with a movement of one of the Bach Lute suites. I was more unsettled than usual before the performance and just a few measures in it hit me: gut wrenching fear. My right hand trembled and the ring finger extended and I couldn’t use it. The piece disintegrated and I squelched the urge to run off the stage. Experience kicked in and I made a joke. I don’t remember what I said but the laughter broke the tension and I got through the rest of the concert, though not my best work. My ring finger never came back to full function until the next day.

This started a 10-year struggle where every performance could be plagued by that fear. I worked with my Doctor, had some sessions with a therapist. I did try a couple of pharmaceutical interventions that were helpful in the short term but not a way of life. A couple of things pulled me out of it. First, I changed the way I framed my personal narrative concerning performance. I had gotten into the habit of thinking of performances as something I had to do – and in truth, if I wanted to make a living they were. But whenever I thought of an upcoming performance, I didn’t let myself think, “I have to play this show”, and substituted, “I get to play this show”. It may seem contrived but it helped change looming dread to anticipation. The other thing is a bit more esoteric but it helped me change my attitude. If you accept that making music is an art form, then where does that art exist? We don’t have a painting on an easel or sculpture on a pedestal. Our art is transient and exists only in the space between the artist and the audience. It’s the interaction between musician and audience that creates the possibility for our art to exist and in that sense the audience is an equal partner in our efforts. For me, embracing the idea of the audience as my partners, people who are there to share in this experience and somehow help me elevate my efforts, helped me turn the corner and I haven’t had any serious issues with performance anxiety for the last 15 years. I don’t know if any of this might be helpful but I’ve been doing this long enough to know you can’t predict what might be the key to help someone’s struggle. Good luck to you!

Lars Kjøller-Hansen said:
AndAriel Elijovich for me performing a doctoral thesis in medicine is nothing compared to playing for your family. In a doctoral thesis you can just say “oh,maybe I did not express that optimally, let me explain more in detail”. You can’t do that with a played a musical phrase that came out suboptimal.

 Two questions: do you feel there's no going back and playing again for your family? Do you feel it's a shame to play suboptimal? Maybe the answers to these questions are somehow in the root of the problem. 

Hi again! There's so many people sharing here. It's great that this came up. Really, we all owe Michelle Roper for starting this thread. And getting to know all your experiences has led me to many thoughts. My take on this thing goes along what Mark de Beer said. Most of you have expressed your PA in comparison to what you did when younger or what you did or do as a professional ... and that came after a lot of work at a more innocent age. I think you are putting too much preassure on yourselves.

 Lars Kjøller-Hansen even mentions playing for your family as above a doctorate thesis presentation in regards to tension. Also, the Susuki method can be learnt at any age and involves a very detailed relationship with the pieces that favors the feeling of joy at performance. It's not just a way to teach kids to learn. It's a way to teach kids to enjoy.

Of course, professional musicians also suffer from PA and there are measures to work on that
: when i was studying in Italy, Luigi Biscaldi taught me to run up and down the stairs of the apartment until my heart beat was fast and my breathing was uneasy and then come to the guitar and steady as fast as possible (through breathing anfd concentration) both and start to play. This is very much along what Lars said...  and I wrote about studying deeply and connecting deeply with the piece you are playing: knowing it so much you can write the score from first to last note including all indications and fingerings, being able to play the piece just with your mind, with your hands in the air... certainly, those things help.

I have been reading all your comments and learnt new things, for example about Noa Kageyama (thanks   Steven Bornfeld ) and went to the youtube channel and, of course, it's all very interesting with no buts.

I fear though that as Randy Wimer put it, this has much more to do with the way we frame it than with anything else. I have chosen to take it more relaxed (and I am a professional player). And I had to accept that my kids take time, my teaching takes time and my study is reduced by all those things... and though I have more than 30 years playing guitar I still learn new things every day, there's no optimal phrasing, there is no error free performance. At least for me. But also not always for the greats. As I said, I have heard many greats doing the same kind of horrendous mistakes as any amateur and they sound as horrendous as anybody elses. Plus, the more you know, the easiest something becomes a mistake when is not exactly as you thought of it. 

The awarness that comes with knowing more should not ruin the moment of sharing. Also, it's possible that, as Marc Adler put it, not everybody needs to share their process on a stage. Showing the work you do on your instruments has become very "institutionally goal oriented" as in "you have to show what you are working because you are paying for it and something must come out of this and it has to be shown that progress is being made" ... yeah,... welll... if that puts you in the situation of playing uncomfortably then it's not good at all.

As I said before, this is hardly something to be solved by a post, but sharing ("sharing" is a key word) is being great and, lo and behold...!! we are all sharing our imperfections and nobody is booing us for it. Why can't that be the case with sharing at performance? 

Playing perfect requires a lot of work. Playing perfect, I don't think you or I understand quite right what playing perfect means!! I mean... I know you have heard someone "play perfect" but probably, the performer went home thinking "neah,... that passage was not as tight as I thought it was". Somebody told the anecdote in another forum about Jason Vieux saying that to play perfect you must make all the mistakes while performing and then work a lot at home to mend them all. I think you are all being too harsh on yourselves by trying to achieve "perfect" or even "good". I think it's comfortably good to think of the intention to do maybe "better".

And keep in mind, also, "perfect" does not prevent problems either... Great "perfect" performers have huge mental issues about it. 

I am looking forward to keep learning from you and knowing you though this subject and all others. Thanks to all of you for sharing!!  

Reflecting on the previous comments here, as well as on some thoughts that I have had for a long while, I think that one of the issues that contributes greatly to our performance anxiety is social media.

Back when most of us were young, there was no such thing as "The Internet". There was no getting jealous of someone's physical appearance (as posted on platforms like Instagram and TikTok). There was no "life envy" after viewing someone's marvelous vacation experiences on Facebook. There was no 24x7 bombardment of content that made us reflect on our own lives.

When I was studying marimba, the only way that I saw other marimbists play was maybe at a national percussion convention (PASIC), or maybe when the university invited the occasional guest artist. I didn't have much to gauge my own playing against, save for the comments of my professor.

Now, we are faced with the onslaught of channels like Siccas Guitars and GSI. Every day, we log into YouTube and get a dose of near-perfect performances. Of course, most of the performances have been edited to some degree, with the guitarist sometimes being forced into miming to an edited audio recording. With so much perfection surrounding us, every little mistake that we make can be magnified in our own minds.

I have been to a number of open mics where various performers have made hash out of the work they were playing. We feel some internal sympathy for the performer, knowing that we are fully capable of making the same hash out of our own pieces. At the end, people applaud, everyone says "Well done", and life goes on. And, a few minutes later, we forget about the performance.

So why are we so hard on ourselves if we play a single wrong note? Why does that bad note worm its way into our subconscious and contribute to performance anxiety? It's because we are trying to hold ourselves up to a certain standard, and we feel like we let our audience and ourselves down if we are nothing less than perfect. After playing instruments well when we were young, or maybe having some good successes in our professional lives, we find it hard to accept nothing less than a Grade A performance when our turn comes.

It would actually be educational if a platform like Siccas showed us some of the outtakes of the performances in order to show us that even the most polished performers are not perfect 100% of the time.

(Sorry for the rambling ....)