With an upcoming recital looming, talk of performance anxiety starts blooming. It is almost spring after all.
I was recently reading a post by a young student that records her daily practices on Instagram. Many people, especially students, do this for their practice challenges as proof of their daily practices and as a tool to see growth in abilities over time. This one particular student, whose post I ran across is very good. Much better than her age would suggest and she describes all the performances and auditions that she does on a monthly basis in her posts. That is why I was a little puzzled when she, one day, suggested that she panics every time she has to perform. That her hands tighten up, that her vibrato while playing the violin suffers and intonation takes a holiday. This is someone that performs regularly on instagram for an audience of over 8000 followers. I guess it is the performance in front of a live audience that causes the stress. A lot of musicians suffer from music performance anxiety (MPA). In fact a recent survey of 1500 professional Norwegian musicians determined that nearly a third took some form of medication to alleviate the anxiety before a performance. The main reasons for the anxiety were determined to be pressure from self, excessive excitement to perform and lack of preparation, there may also be some genetic factors. While it is difficult to control some of these factors, adequate preparation can be one of the most important methods to alleviate the anticipated stress of a performance. For professional musicians, often the amount of music and schedule prevent adequate preparation. For non-professional musicians, especially those that participate in the New Horizons Music program, busy lives filled with all sorts of outside activities, interferes with the ability to find adequate practice time. When performing with the larger NHB we can sometimes get away with sight reading parts of a piece because there is usually a neighbor that can cover for your missed notes, but when performing a recital with only a few players, preparation is critical because there is no one to cover missed notes. The last two weeks I have been finding any chance I can to practice. I still don’t know if it will help me, I guess we will soon find out.
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AuthorDaniel Zarka Archives
March 2019
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