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OVERCOMING PERFORMANCE ANXIETY

At my recent kids’ masterclass, the class leader, pianist Graham Fitch, likened playing in different situations – at home, for teacher, in a festival or exam, in a concert – to walking a tightrope. When practising at home, often alone, or with the family getting on with their own things around you, the tightrope is easy to negotiate, very close to the ground, and should you fall off, you won’t hurt yourself. When you play for your teacher, you may feel a little anxiety initially, but once you start playing, you settle into the music and look forward to your teacher’s feedback. The tightrope is still manageable, not too high, not too scary, and not far to fall.

However, when we put ourselves in more stressful situations, the tightrope is suddenly yanked up, and is sometimes dauntingly vertiginous. We view it with trepidation, and the nerves may well set in from the moment we receive the exam date, book the concert venue or send off the competition application form. Dealing with performance anxiety can be a major issue for many musicians and is, for some, the reason why they choose not to perform at all (most famously, perhaps, Canadian pianist Glenn Gould). As I prepare for my diploma exam (mid-December), coping with anxiety on The Day has been up there at the forefront of my mind, along with ensuring my repertoire is ready, my programme notes are accurate, the page-turner is primed, and my dress is appropriate for the occasion.

Everyone has their own way of dealing with anxiety, but there are some well-established strategies which can help, from physical exercises, deep breathing, sensible diet and rest, to psychological activities to help encourage a positive outlook on the event, and thorough preparation. For me, anxiety manifests itself mostly in physical symptoms: dry mouth, racing heart, trembling hands, feeling hot, feeling cold, headache and light nausea. Lately, I have learnt how to counteract this with positive thinking, Bach Flower Rescue Remedy and the “piano pilates” exercises from my teacher.

In preparing for a concert, exam or similar situation, where one knows one’s playing will be held up for scrutiny, it’s important to set that tightrope slightly higher, even if one is working in the relatively stress-free environment of one’s home or piano studio. This past week, my practising has incorporated recording myself playing, using a neat digital recording device (Olympus LS-5). It’s amazing how just having that little machine behind me as I played has upped the anti: knowing that there is an extra pair of “ears” listening has either made me play better, or caused me to crash through my repertoire with all the finesse and poise of a grade one schoolgirl. I posted the recordings on Soundcloud, and have been surprised at the positive feedback. It all helps!

It is also important to present one’s concert or exam repertoire to an uncritical audience ahead of The Big Day. Playing for friends, in the informal surroundings of one’s own home (if space permits), can be very useful. Ply the friends with coffee and cakes, don’t expect them to sit in hushed reverential silence, and just play for pleasure. You know you’re on show, but no one’s going to boo or slow hand-clap you.

Ahead of the event proper, try on your concert clothes and ensure everything fits and is comfortable. As a female pianist, it is crucial (for me at least) to have shoes with a heel which is comfortable on the pedal, and will not slip (much as I love high heels, they are impossible for playing the piano). Match your concert attire to the venue and time of the concert: you don’t need to wear evening dress for a lunchtime or early evening recital. Find out how to get to the venue well in advance, especially if you have to rely on public transport, and work out a route that will ensure you arrive in good time.

Even in the concert setting, on The Big Day, you can engage in psychological strategies to counteract the nerves. Imagine yourself walking across the stage, greeting the audience, sitting at the piano and placing your hands on the keys. Visualise the opening page of the first piece you will play and hear the music in your head. Take a deep breath and as you exhale, allow your hands to float onto the keys ready for the opening measures. Deep, thoracic (“Pilates”) breathing can also help when you are playing: in our anxiety, or extreme concentration, sometimes we do actually forget to breathe (I know I do this in the second half the Schubert Impromptu Opus 90 No. 2 – I have marked a reminder to myself on the score!). A deep breath in and slowly exhaled can help refocus, and can even have a softening effect on the music, especially during sections where a bugbear error has always cropped up in practice, or which are just plain difficult. Remind yourself that you are well-prepared, that you are ready,  looking forward to sharing your music with others, that you fear nothing, and that the experience will be fun, exciting, and instructive.

When helping my students prepare for our end of term concerts, we talk about performance anxiety and I remind them that playing the piano is very hard. The audience (parents, grandparents, siblings and friends) is sympathetic, nay, gobsmacked that anyone has the guts to get up on the stage and play. My own mantra in this situation is “I can do it. And you can’t”. Bullish? Egocentric? Of course – but you need a degree of chutzpah to drive you out onto the stage in the first place. And it makes you play better.

It is adrenaline (the “fight or flight” hormone) which causes the unpleasant symptoms of performance anxiety, but it can also be harnessed to create the right excitement, daring, poise and sprezzatura to perform – and perform well. My teacher has a lovely anecdote about her daughter, who was taking part in a school drama show. The child asked her mother excitedly “I wonder if I’ll get adrenaline on The Day?”, knowing that it would enhance her performance.

On a more prosaic level, it is important to go into a performance or exam situation well-rested and properly fed. Don’t hammer through your pieces on the morning of the concert or exam. Do gentle practice, eat a light lunch, preferably not overloaded with rich salad dressings or carbohydrates which will make you sleepy, take a nap, prepare your concert clothes, put your music in your brief case. At the venue, familiarise yourself with all the key entrances and exits, and facilities (including fire exits). Move calmly and quietly. Avoid too much conversation with venue staff, house manager etc. Get dressed and warm up. Now, start to think yourself into the music…..

The Inner Game of Music and The Mastery of Music, both by Barry Green, and The Musician’s Way by Gerald Klickstein all contain sound, sensible, and reassuring advice on how to prepare for a concert, strategies to overcome performance anxiety and how to “become a performer”. The accompanying Musician’s Way website is also extremely helpful.

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technique |tekˈnēk|
noun
a way of carrying out a particular task, esp. the execution or performance of an artistic work or a scientific procedure.
• skill or ability in a particular field
• a skillful or efficient way of doing or achieving something

Everything you do, sounds. All your movements, both intended and unintended, have their effect on the sound you produce

Alan Fraser

Technique lies at the foundation of piano playing, and good technique can serve the beginner student right through to advanced level. However, it should never be the “be all and end all”. Rather, it should serve the music – to create when required, for example, the lightest staccato, the most cantabile melodic line, a bubbling Alberti bass, sprightly trills and tremolandos, the most fluid legato.

Pianists are often praised for having “fine technique” or “superb technique”: this can range from obvious things such as physical agility/velocity and stamina to more esoteric, “hidden” aspects such as arm weight, wrist rotation, and alignment. These days, with the prevalence amongst mostly oriental generic pianists for putting technique above all else, piano “technique” has come to mean sheer physical capability, speed and sound production (usually too loud!) without a true understanding of how a particular technique specifically relates to the music, and the effects the composer is asking for.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this is staccato, of which there are different kinds:

  • Arm staccato gives equal measure to each note and is particularly useful for a crisp, short or bouncy sound. Involve the forearm and keep the wrist soft. Avoid pure wrist staccato as this pulls up the fingers and creates tension. Aim for a free drop of the arm and then bounce off the keyboard on the rebound.
  • Jeu Perlé literally “pearly playing”, this is particularly useful for semi-quaver passage work in Mozart and the like, also in Debussy, where such passages should be played quickly, lightly and clearly, and where too much obvious articulation would create dryness. It is a type of staccato playing that creates the tiniest sense of separation between each note (like the knots between the pearls in a necklace), and requires small movements and a close attack. Play the note and let it bounce up at you – i.e. do not pick the fingers up.
  • Finger staccato/flicking staccato Possibly the hardest staccato technique to perfect, this requires the fingers to flick off the keys and back towards the palm of the hand. Beware of tension in the hand and wrist when practising this technique, and employ the alignment of arm and wrists to fingers. To play repeated notes with finger staccato, practice using different fingers (say 1,2,3,4) but allowing the wrist and arm to take the fingers into position with a “polishing” movement in the wrist (I imagine there is a tiny pencil under my wrist, drawing an ellipse shape).

A pianist who has done their homework, and has fully studied, understood and absorbed the composer’s intentions and instructions in the score, will know what kind of staccato technique to employ for a particular section or passage.

When starting out with any new aspect of technique, whether teaching it or doing it for yourself, it helps to enlarge the movement. Thus, when I am teaching rotary movement, I get the student to make the movement in a broad brush away from the piano. I like to use the image of windscreen wipers for this – a visual cue which children find particularly easy to understand. Also, one is trying to suggest an ‘outwards-inwards’ movement rather than the reverse. Never attempt to teach a technique you have not learnt and understood yourself first.

Don’t practice technique in isolation, but rather understand how it should be employed in your music and then make a technical exercise out of a small passage or section from that music. Doing exercises like those by Czerny or Hanon are, in my view, less worthwhile than a technical exercise you have devised yourself to practice a particular aspect of your repertoire; it is also more interesting! Having said that, I have found Brahms’s ’51 Piano Exercises’ helpful, and also tuneful to play.

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Last week, with a degree of heart-in-the-mouth trepidation, I submitted the application to take my ATCL Diploma exam. Since I have not taken a music exam for……um……….30 years, the prospect is slightly unnerving, not least because I still retain a very strong memory of my Grade 8 exam: the empty room, the big black shiny Minotaur of a Steinway grand piano, the silent examiner, the Bach Prelude (D minor) which if allowed to, might run away like an excitable horse, the sturm und drang Beethoven Sonata (Opus 10, No. 1), and the Chopin Nocturne (also D minor) which I loathed….

The good news is that with 8 weeks still to go until the exam, I feel fairly well on top of my repertoire. The pieces are all learnt, quite a lot has been committed to memory (one is not required to play from memory in the exam), and the work now is to finesse and refine. The danger at this point, of course, is over-practice. My students, most of whom seem to specialise in winging it in lessons and do very little practice in the intervening weeks, look at me askance when I mention over-practising, but it does exist. Famous cases of over-practising include Scriabin, who ended up with a hand injury, something I can identify with. On a less dramatic level, the point at which one knows a piece intimately can be, if you’re not careful, the point at which weird and new mistakes start to creep in. These can be the most difficult errors to unlearn and so it is crucial to practice extremely carefully and thoughtfully at this point.

At the piano course I attended last month, we talked about practice diaries, and the benefits of keeping a very detailed practice diary – not just of how much time one spends practising each day, but also notes on what needs to be done, what has been achieved etc., along with a list of questions, which can be applied to each and every practice session, to encourage one to think very carefully about the repertoire one is working on. Here are some ideas for a good practice diary:

Have I warmed up? For quick warm up exercises see my earlier post here

Am I listening as I play? It’s remarkable how easily the mind can wander when you’re working on a piece that is very familiar. Stay focussed, listen, and be strict with yourself about errors, bumpy, uneven or sloppy sections, lazy pedalling, articulation etc.

Have I noted all the dynamics? Articulation markings? Other signs and symbols? Again, familiarity can breed complacence. It’s worth taking the time to do this detailed work even if it’s a piece you know well.

Am I noting rhythm and pulse properly? Practice with a metronome if necessary until an ‘inner pulse’ is established throughout.

Is my fingering secure throughout? There’s a passage in my Bach Toccata (BWV 830) which gets me every time! Slow, quiet practice (“like a Chopin Nocturne”) can be helpful in these instances.

Am I taking care over phrase beginnings and endings?

And what about shaping, colour, contrast?

Which sections do I need to memorise? For example, for an awkward page turn

Keep a detailed note of how many minutes of practice per piece you have completed each day. Keep a clock by the piano, or use the stopwatch feature on your ‘phone. It’s amazing how this can force the mind to focus, especially if you know you have limited time in which to practice.

What do I need to do tomorrow? At the end of each practice session, make a note of what has arisen out of today’s session and what needs attention tomorrow.

Good luck, and don’t ever let your practice sessions feel like the character in this novel:

Work shaped every hour for him, as regular as a lunar cycle, and the cadence by which he set his life. From the age of sixteen, he had known only this life. Without it, he could feel directionless, without focus. Yet practising, four to five hours every day, practising until you never got it wrong, could be a form of captivity. Often, when he was wrestling with something new and tricky, when the same page of the score confronted him day after day, he felt he did not move forward in the night. Then it really was like prison, though without the punishment, only in the sameness of his days.

(from Music Lessons by Frances Wilson)

And take inspiration instead from Robert Schumann:

So what does it mean to be musical? You are not musical if, eyes glued nervously to the notes, you play a piece painfully through to the end; you are not musical if you get stuck and cannot go on because someone happens to turn two pages at once for you. But you are, if with a new piece you almost sense what is coming, if with a familiar one, you know it completely. In a word, if you have music not just in your fingers, but in your head and your heart.

(from Musickalische Haus- und Lebensregeln)