Managing Music Performance Anxiety for Teachers and Students
by Dr. Daniel Ramjattan
(DMA University of Toronto, M. Mus, University of Ottawa, B. Mus University of Ottawa)
Guitar Lecturer, Classical Guitar Instructor, Wilfrid Laurier University
Guitar Faculty, Royal Conservatory of Music Oscar Peterson School
Classical guitar instructors now have access to unprecedented resources to help their students improve their technical fluency and their expressive capabilities as interpreters on the instrument. However, their ability to help students close the gap between their on-stage and off-stage performance quality remains elusive. Clinical literature describes this impairment as the result of music performance anxiety (MPA), which remains a nearly universal experience for musicians. MPA can often lead performers to abandon their careers, have devastating performance breakdowns, and more. The symptoms, all-too familiar for professional and amateur musicians, include shaky hands, a spike in our heart rate, cold hands, and much more. If nearly all musicians experience this at one point or another, seeing this as an illness or disorder neglects the fact that each of these symptoms can become accommodated and managed with daily practice. Within the limited scope of this short article, I hope to help readers develop some practical strategies to help their students with music performance anxiety, based on my experience and research.
In my doctoral dissertation, entitled Music Performance Anxiety on the Classical Guitar: Expert Strategies from Psychology and Pedagogy (Ramjattan, 2022), I examined fourteen different texts written by tertiary instructors on classical guitar and compared their strategies for addressing MPA to several peer-reviewed treatments within and adjacent to the field of psychology. Having found only fourteen texts which discussed the subject, despite making an exhaustive review that spanned over 200 years of written texts, I found that the authors recommended:
- Adequate preparation and mastery of all technical challenges in each piece in one’s program,
- Recording oneself, mock juries/auditions, and frequent performances in progressively challenging environments in preparation for a major event
- Choosing repertoire appropriate for one’s technical and musical understanding
- Reducing unnecessary tension and the use of breathing exercises
- Visualizing sections of the music and playing them in one’s mind
- Trusting in one’s preparation, and
- Actively maintaining a positive attitude toward practice and the enjoyment of music
The literature in psychology broadly echoed this approach, with strategies from Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and sports psychology showing the most clinical support. Writing three years later, I have seen that most of the strategies for helping individuals manage MPA revolve around developing three core constructs through practical exercises with students.
The first, psychological flexibility, involves helping individuals to move courageously in the direction of their values, even when they experience hardship. Since music matters to us immensely, it means that it also has the potential to unlock our deepest fears. Since we’ve invested so much time and effort into music, every performance can feel like a trial to determine whether our investment was worth the return. Therefore, our suffering, as a separate construct from pain, can be seen as behaviours that cause us to escape or avoid the difficulties we face when pursuing our values. Psychological flexibility asks us to practice and improve our ability to notice our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and physical reactions, and make clear, concrete, and daily plans to go in the direction of our values. Finally, it asks us to notice our thoughts and separate them from our identity, even though they emerge from an ever-changing self. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is a treatment protocol which has shown success in thousands of studies involving various forms of anxiety and music performance anxiety, and instead of aiming to reduce symptoms, it aims to develop one’s psychological flexibility to increase one’s overall well-being despite hardships.
The second important construct involves self-compassion. This essentially means treating ourselves with respect, and talking with ourselves in the way a great teacher would talk to a student. This concept involves believing in our ability to succeed and our inherent goodness, and believing that we are intrinsically deserving of love, regardless of our musical output.
The third and equally important construct involves mental toughness. This can be thought of by understanding the four C’s (Perry):
1) Developing an internal locus of Control, which involves our ability to take responsibility for improving on our successes and failures without making excuses or wallowing in self-flagellation.
2) Developing Confidence in our ability to succeed, having done so in the past. It also involves having confidence that whatever difficulties happen, we have the mental fortitude to overcome them.
3) Intentionally aiming to take on higher degrees of Challenge in our field in order to grow and break through our boundaries,
4) Commitment to stick to the plans that we’ve laid out for ourselves and bounce back when we stray from our plans.
Altogether, psychological flexibility, self-compassion, and mental toughness are not fixed states of mind that we acquire once and keep forever. Like the guitar, we must practice them daily, and, like a muscle, they grow when used and shrink when neglected. Fortunately, I believe the guitar can become a vehicle to improve these skills and make us a better, happier, and more fulfilled person.
Three Ways We Can Help Students Train for MPA in Lessons
#1: Use Recording Devices as a Core Tool
One of the many ways we can help students become acclimated to the feeling of performing on-stage involves recording them, or having them record themselves, playing through their repertoire. We can use this tool for multiple purposes to develop psychological flexibility, self-compassion, and mental toughness all at once. This can happen in a pre-listening and listening phase.
Directly after finishing the recording, in the pre-listening phase, students can write down some of the thoughts, feelings, and sensations they experienced while performing, while the memory remains fresh in their minds. Did they experience any particularly “loud” thoughts? If so, encourage students to notice that thoughts, while certainly real, are not necessarily true. Just because they had the thought “I’m messing this up”, doesn’t mean the recording will show evidence of that. With these loud thoughts, encourage the student to write the words, “I am having the thought that…” before writing down the loud thought. This helps them understand that the thoughts emerge from them, but are not them.
Before moving on, ask if the student felt any feelings of discomfort in core sections, and how they reacted to them. If the discomfort emerged from unnecessary tension, observing this and addressing it directly in that musical passage will help solve technical and musical problems all at once, and reduce the distress in those passages. If the discomfort did not come from overexertion or tension, then have the student label those discomforts, such as “heart racing”, “sweating”, “cold hands”, write them down, and recognize that they may appear again in the next performance, but will not necessarily impair their performance if they prepare for them. To help them prepare for these feelings, they can practice running a section of their program after running up and down the stairs, for example, to acclimate them to playing with a higher heart rate, or running their hands through cold water before playing a set. These things tell the student that the problem comes from their reaction, not the symptoms, and when these phenomena inevitably appear in performances, they will remain unsurprised and unimpaired.
Afterwards, in the playback phase, ask the student to listen to the recording with their notebook still in hand. Ask them to write down constructive criticism, free of insult, and free of glib compliments. Ask them to write at least two successful points in the performance, and at least two things they would like to improve. Importantly, the student should talk to themselves like a good teacher. They should not compliment or insult the person playing the guitar but should compliment or criticize the content of the performance with specificity and minimal hyperbole. For example, instead of saying, “I played terribly”, they can write, “In the A section, bars 5-6 had many unclear mistakes”. Similarly, instead of saying, “I played amazingly”, they can write, “I really nailed the dynamics and chord changes in the B section”. After every criticism, students should feel prepared, in conjunction with the teacher, to find solutions to improve less successful sections.
#2: Encourage Students to Play the Guitar with the Confidence they Hold a Spoon
Many students who struggle with MPA tend to have a shy or unassertive affect. They will usually describe themselves as unconfident, which can often affect their stage presence. Nevertheless, nearly all students who have use of all four limbs will demonstrate real confidence when they hold a spoon. In fact, their confidence level allows them to a hold a spoon without even contemplating its presence in their hands. They can often watch a television show, or even concentrate while reading a book while holding a spoon! This level of confidence can only emerge as the result of persistent and focused effort in a time before they can remember.
In the same way, confident playing emerges from understanding each passage of music with the confidence they have holding a spoon, to the point where they can sing the music in solfege while playing, count while playing, and even hold a simple conversation or do basic arithmetic while playing through a passage they know well. However, developing this level of confidence requires a deep level of deliberate practice that seeks to master every minute detail of the music, instead of focusing on large sections or playing the piece from start to finish. It requires the student have a comprehensive understanding of each bar, and even beat, of the music, on a technical and musical level. Generally speaking, this means playing a section ten times in a row without mistakes means that the chances of making a mistake in front of others will remain minimal. Conversely, if a student can only play a portion of the music successfully with musical and technical fluency in one out of ten tries, logic dictates that the odds are certainly not in their favour when they play the given passage in front of an audience! In fact, all things being equal, they are most likely to play slightly worse than they play in the practice room, if they only practice in a comfortable environment with no one else watching!
#3: Encourage Students to Release their Psychological Tension
Many of the individuals who excel at music and pursue it more seriously, either professionally or in music school, will tell you that they found their sense of self-respect through performing music for others. Most students I’ve met in music school will tell me that, somewhere around adolescence, music seemed to give them social capital. It gave them access to interesting and attractive people, and often gave them awards, both financial and otherwise, that implicitly communicated the message their performance quality determined their self-worth. If they played well, they became deserving and worthy of love, and often this came with more access to friends, romantic interests, attention from their peers and loved ones, and more. Unfortunately, this musical identity, when threatened by a bad performance, negative feedback by a teacher, adjudicator, or audience member, poses a significant hazard to young players especially. Therefore, a poor performance will literally make these musicians feel worthless—they will often describe themselves as a “garbage musician” or a “garbage player”.
Nothing could be further from the truth. We play music, we share music, we make music, but we are not the music. It emerges from us, like our thoughts and actions, but it cannot be the only aspect of a person’s being. Separating our performance quality from our identity becomes crucial for musicians and can only happen in the practice room and during lessons. Importantly, the teacher needs to make this separation for themselves and come to the realization that distinguishing between our identity and the music we make will only improve our playing by preventing psychological tension. We can understand this psychological tension as the imagined expectations we have for ourselves, and that others have for us, and the deep belief that a success or failure determines our value as an individual. When students reduce this tension by releasing themselves from the desire to impress others, their ego stops hindering the quality of their playing and they ironically experience more appreciation, gratitude and genuine enjoyment of performance.
To facilitate this separation, Kenny Werner (1996), in his book Effortless Mastery, asks teachers to stop students when they display visible frustration or anger with themselves when working through a difficult passage. Stop them; encourage them to drop their hands and put the instrument down somewhere safe. Ask them to wait until they can feel the blood pumping into their fingertips. Then ask them to say aloud: “I release myself from the desire to impress others”. Then, watching themselves in third person from the back of their own head, ask them to play the passage again. Releasing this psychological tension in the music will make the music sound more fluid and elegant and will communicate that students are more than the music, and that releasing their ego, not feeding it, will help them reach their highest potential.
References:
Ramjattan, D.M. (2022). Music Performance Anxiety on the Classical Guitar: Expert Strategies in Psychology and Pedagogy (Doctoral dissertation). University of Toronto. ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. 10.13140/RG.2.2.20681.01125.
Werner, K. (1996). Effortless mastery: Liberating the master musician within. Jamey Abersold Jazz.
