You could be a great pianist and choose never to perform, but I think that would be a shame. There is nothing quite like the rush, pleasure, and feeling of accomplishment that comes from delivering a great performance. You spend all this time working in private, building your skills, and you only keep it for yourself, pity! As an audience member, there is nothing I love more than seeing someone I care about strive and succeed in an artistic endeavour. You build a closeness with people that can’t be achieved any other way. Performing may not be for everyone but I think you would be doing yourself a disservice if you never gave it a fair go.
I used to dread performing. My fingers would shake so violently and be so weak it would often cause me to make mistakes. My mind was so filled with apprehension I would forget my music. The music I had worked so hard on perfecting would dissolve and give way to a robotic and anxiety-filled rendition of it.
Performance anxiety comes from the fear of failure or embarrassment. Understanding the root of it may be useful from the point of view of overcoming it. Without getting too psychoanalytical, the belief that we are not good enough, or capable of performing often comes from childhood. It doesn’t have to be related to music; any event that leads to public failure or embarrassment can build and strengthen that belief. To overcome this feeling, we need to prove to ourselves that we can perform and overcome obstacles. We need to have a series of achievements and successes in order to build the confidence needed to apply our skills in public, when the stakes are high.
There is nothing inherently more difficult in performing in front of thousands of people than performing by yourself at home; it is the same music, the same physical movements. All the difference is in our head and in what we believe we can achieve.
Confidence comes from skill
Before even thinking about performance, we need to make sure that our piece is performance ready. Most of the time, when we learn music, we learn it until it is good-enough, and we have learned what we wanted from it. Performance requires us to put in extra effort to make the piece virtually error-free and consistently great. The piece needs to be so solid and so good that you believe there is nothing that could happen that could throw you off. Whatever happens, you need the confidence that you will be able to deal with it. This is where you need to understand what you are scared of, and prepare for that.
There may be sections of the piece that you sometimes forget; spend more time with those sections:
- practise the section extremely slow (30% speed)
- practise the section faster
- practise it in your mind
- play the right-hand part with the left-hand and vice versa
- start on different beats and sub-beats
- understand the music on a deeper level
- the list goes on…
If a passage doesn’t feel secure technically, address that issue: go back to basics, back to playing slowly and figure out good technique for it. You are not going backwards if you slow it down again. Trying to push through is a waste of time.
Record yourself and get to the point where you can play the piece three times in a row with no mistakes.
Now you are ready to perform.
Raise the stakes
Well… First lower them, then gradually increase them. As I mentioned earlier, we need to build the confidence we can perform and overcome obstacles. That will not happen if we keep trying to perform in high stakes situations and falling short of the mark. By lowering the stakes and lowering our anxiety, we can build and gain that confidence to push us further.
Before I list the milestones you should aim gradually achieve, I want to stress the importance of having supportive people around. You need to have people who you care about and who care about you. You need to have people whose love and care is not dependent on your performance. You need to be convinced that no matter what you do when performing, their image of you will not be tainted. Sometimes people like that can be hard to find, but if you want to build that confidence, you will have to find them.
Here is the progression I would suggest for dealing with performance anxiety:
- Record a video of yourself with no intent of showing it to anyone. This is similar to recording yourself for the purpose of review, but the intent is different. While this is a private performance, it remains a performance, treat it as such. If you make a big mistake, continue until the end. You can re-record a different performance, but each performance should be complete.
- Record a video to show to a select number of people with the explicit instruction: positive comments only.
- Record a video for a few musically educated people to give their constructive feedback. You are not looking for suggestions for huge interpretation changes, but rather for people to give you a fair judgement of the quality of the performance. If the feedback is negative, it should be constructive.
- Repeat steps 2-3 live, rather than with video recordings.
- Grow the size of the audience to larger groups of people you know, to eventually groups of people you don’t know. Try to find opportunities around your area for performances: churches, retirement homes, talk to teachers and see if you can attend their student recitals. You could even film your (however small) public performance and put it online for feedback.
If you ever have the opportunity to perform in a group, I would recommend it. Being in the same situation as other people, going through the same struggle together in a supportive environment can be really beneficial. Also it eases the anxiety knowing that the attention of the public is not all on you.
Performing in public may be the most mentally challenging part of learning to play the piano, but more than anything else, it is the transferable skill. Learning to perform under pressure, and to perform well is a skill that will transfer to all areas of your life. Use it as a medium to be uncomfortable, to face your fears. Music is about more than practising by yourself. Share your music, share your vision.
