Ravel in Manchester - more on performance anxiety

I rarely get nervous for concerts but one exception was a recent performance of Ravel's 'Gaspard de la nuit' and 'La Valse' at the Chetham's piano summer school. I'd played the works for the first time two days previously and had not been very happy with how they had gone. Now I had to face the fear of embarrassing myself in front of people like Bernard Roberts and Peter Donohoe, not to mention a whole room full of piano students. It was made worse by the fact that I'd not been able to practise at full strength for a while - I'd been plagued by minor muscle strains for weeks - and so I didn't feel completely prepared. The unpleasant novelty of being nervous about a concert gave me a lot to think about, and made me realise how unhelpful nerves can be: I started to imagine disastrous mishaps, and lost the unquestioning trust I normally have in my abilities. Nevertheless, when I finally came to perform I felt once again as I normally do - relaxed and excited to be on stage. So what changed in the interim? I'll come to that in a moment.

A common view among musicians is that nerves are inevitable and even useful up to a point. But why should they be inevitable? If you can play something well in your practice room, why not on stage? My experience is that the more relaxed I am on stage, the better I play, and I can honestly say that before most concerts I have no nerves at all, only excitement. This issue comes into sharp relief when we think about the very widespread fear of public speaking; in some surveys it comes out as the number one fear, ahead even of death. That tells us something very important about how irrational we can be when it comes to being isolated in front of a group. What possible harm can come to us? If we speak easily to individuals every day, why should we suddenly become tongue-tied giving a speech? Clearly, a speech needs structure and concision - there is a certain skill involved there. But that doesn't explain why the thought of it should induce panic. Somehow, we perceive a level of threat which is completely illusory, and our audience can seem to become a pack of wild animals waiting to devour us. This is a fascinating question to ponder - what is going on in our brains? Surely some kind of ancient memories are being evoked, whether from early childhood or from our evolutionary past. If anyone can suggest further reading on this, I'd be very interested. The important point is to realise that our rational thinking gets hijacked by our 'fight or flight' response, and that our perception of risk becomes seriously warped.

I think this is a helpful context for thinking about musical performance. If it is common to panic at the thought of simply talking to a group, it should not come as a surprise that something as physically complex as playing a musical instrument could create at least as much fear. Anecdotally, I know of several very eminent musicians who suffer greatly from performance anxiety, and my suspicion is that there are virtually no performers who do not struggle with it from time to time. While one can certainly talk about various rational fears - playing wrong notes, not conveying the feeling of a piece, disappointing oneself/one's teacher/one's friends, damaging one's career and so on - I think the reality is that often these fears get confused with the much stronger, 'fight or flight' kind of fear. Certainly, that was my experience before the concert in Manchester. I thought I was worried about appearing rather foolish to people I respected, but I came to realise it was a much more visceral feeling than that, a feeling of profound threat. Once I understood that, it became easier to deal with. I don't think this kind of irrational fear can be reasoned with; I had tried telling myself that I could play these pieces pretty well but that made no difference to my anxiety. What helped me was examining the fear as calmly as I could, noting its irrationality, and placing it alongside what I knew to be the truth of the situation - that the fear didn't reflect reality, that the audience were not 'wild animals', and that I was capable of performing well. This is a process which needs patience and curiosity, but in holding these contradictory positions together in my mind I found the fear gradually dissipating and, in the end, disappearing altogether. I regained that sense of trust in my abilities and in the audience's receptiveness, and the concert ended up being deeply satisfying, an outcome almost unimaginable to me 24 hours before. I found the whole experience a salutory lesson in how much more control we have over our minds than we sometimes think, and how needless nerves can be.

There's one other thing which I think is worth mentioning - a Buddhist meditation practice called the 'Metta Bhavana' (the links on the left of the page take you through it) which explores our feelings towards ourselves and others. I'm not Buddhist but I think this practice is a very useful antidote to performance anxiety because it emphasises our common humanity and strikes at the illusion that the performer is different from the audience. That means you have to give up a sense of specialness as a performer, but it also means you no longer see the audience as a hostile mob. In the end, I think both changes are extremely helpful.