Swine flu, the news, risk-assessment and performance anxiety
Is the feeling that the world is going slowly mad a sign of middle-age? If so, I'd better buy my slippers and pipe. I've just listened to a full 15 minutes of a 30 minute BBC news bulletin devoted to the terrifying threat (sic) that swine flu poses to the world. We had the worse case scenario explored in intimate detail with only a fleeting acknowledgement that this probably won't occur. Never mind that only one person outside of Mexico has died from the disease, or that the Mexican government recently downgraded the number of deaths conclusively linked to swine flu from 20 to 7, or that many thousands of people already die every year from flu and its complications. People with the virus seem to be recovering quickly? Well, one of the programme's guests warned us that the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 appeared relatively benign when it first appeared, only to end up killing tens of millions. In other words, everybody panic! In a rare missed trick, the newscasters neglected to warn us that a large asteroid hitting the planet would probably wipe out life as we know it. Increasingly the news seems to be an elaborate theatre in which distorted snippets of current events are used to terrify the wits out of us. The sad thing is, it must be what we want or else the news providers wouldn't find it a profitable angle to pursue.
A few months after 9/11, I remember seeing Dr Phil on American TV being interviewed by Oprah Winfrey. (For those who don't know Dr Phil, he's a US talk show host who prides himself on his reason and empathic skills. Is it possible anyone doesn't know Oprah?) He said that given the terrorist danger the country faced at that time, he judged it was too risky to take his son to a football game. Oprah nodded sagely. And yet presumably, neither found it too risky to step into their car, despite 42,000 people being killed in car accidents in the US in 2001. I was amazed and disturbed that two of the most trusted personalities in America were publicly advocating such a paranoid response to terrorism.
Why do people take such irrational stances towards risk? On the one hand it's understandable - an unfamiliar risk is scarier than a familiar one because you don't know its extent, but that shouldn't stop adults being able to reflect on the risk and put it in a sensible perspective. Maybe the problem is that people who live in societies of greatly reduced risks (from death in childbirth, food shortage, waterborne disease etc.) can lose their tolerance to it. We imagine in fact that we are in control of our lives, immune from disaster, and so every little threat that emerges is intolerable. We are clearly not helped in this by a news system intent on fostering that paranoia in us. I went to see my financial adviser yesterday who surprised me by saying that the stock market had risen by about 25% in the last month. I listen to the news on the radio regularly as well as reading a couple of newspapers online, yet I didn't notice about this. After months of disastrous economic headlines it seems pretty dishonest that this information didn't make it into the news in any significant way.
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Yesterday I held a seminar on performance anxiety at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Dance in Glasgow. Here again, the question of risk arises, and it's a thorny one. It is common for people to be nervous of performing, often very nervous. (I asked at the beginning if anyone didn't experience nerves - not one hand went up.) But what actually is the nature of the risk? What is the problem with playing badly? If you think about jobs with real pressure - deciding whether or not to go to war, performing brain surgery, being a firefighter - it is clear that nothing terrible can happen to a performer. Only our ego can be damaged, and what's so very bad about that? There is often a large disparity between the reality of the 'threat' and a performer's experience of it - the audience can be imagined as a very hostile, critical group when by and large they are simply there to enjoy themselves. Coming to grips with this disparity is a crucial part of developing as a performing musician.
Clearly there can be practical consequences to playing badly - in a competition, it can mean not advancing to the next round, in concert it can mean bad reviews, over a long period of time it can damage a career or prevent it from happening in the first place. And here there is a cruel irony - almost invariably the more relaxed you are about the quality of a performance, the better you play, but the more determined you are to play well, the more tense you get. So how do you foster that sense of relaxation, of 'not caring'? In the course of the discussion yesterday, a point came up which relates to the risk-phobia of our culture. No-one can create a career in music for themselves - there is so much luck involved. I suspect the terror of playing badly is often related to a fantasy that you are in control of your destiny, that your success or failure depends entirely on you: that way you don't have to accept the fact that many forces are outside of your control. The realisation that life can be unpredictable and unfair is a double-edged sword, both painful and freeing, and it can help a performer to forget about reaching for success and simply play for no other reason than the joy of experiencing and sharing music with others. In my opinion, this is when real music-making happens.
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Comments
Steven, you tell us: "...presumably, neither found it too risky to step into their car, despite 42,000 people being killed in car accidents in the US in 2001. I was amazed and disturbed that two of the most trusted personalities in America were publicly advocating such a paranoid response to terrorism" ...and you ask: "Why do people take such irrational stances towards risk?" I think it's an insightful comment, and an intriguingly relevant question. Phobias regarding snakes, thunderstorms, big spidery agencies, what-have-you... are our psychological legacy, bequeathed by ancestors for whom such threats were existential (fear is a useful inheritance insofar as it helps to navigate the body in the direction of survival (you may mistake a shadow for a burglar but, because of this, you'll never mistake a burglar for a shadow!)). Nevertheless, as you note: such phobias linger uselessly in many modern societies (e.g. surveys reveal that American city-dwellers are more "afraid" of snakes, scorpions, lions and tigers than they should be about some clear and present dangers like, for instance, motor cars or domestic electricity) where there is a conspicuous absence of dangerous wild animals, a cornucopia of efficacious medical solutions to much of the disease which inspired such dread and fear in our ancestors and a plethora of professional people on hand to leap to the aid of any distressed citizen. With regard to fear of public performance, I think it's perceptive to notice the vulnerability of ego and even more shrewd of you to highlight the "cruel irony" in striking the right balance between relaxation and tension. Personally, I've discovered that playing informally in bars and hotels has helped me to foster an appropriate balance of these elements which I can subsequently bring to bear upon more formal events of a similar type like, for instance, when I'm called upon to perform a demanding concerto such as Rachmaninoff's D minor. As to the perceived threat of terrorism: my memory (which encompasses the late 1970s, 80s and 90s, living in Britain) includes the perpetual, menacing, ubiquitous and ambiguous threat of IRA-planned attacks. My memory also includes the various medias’ broadcasting of harrowing examples of their occasional “successes“. (perhaps “ubiquitous” is ill-chosen by me in this context for I have to admit that, growing up in an un-strategic part of Scotland, I probably did not experience the brand of nervousness endured by my English relatives) Still, to my mind at least, one relatively heartening aspect of those years was both the way in which Britain did not publicly capitulate to the terrorists’ terrible inducement and the way in which the public consequently tolerated the risk. This strikes me as a markedly different environment from the one we currently endure, as I have my dignity arbitrarily stripped by the police power of the state at least twice weekly at every airport I pass through. There does appear, in contemporary Britain at least, to be an encroachment of paternalism on behalf of the state. We've recently witnessed some appalling infringements upon our erstwhile liberties, perversely framed as though they offered "protection" in respect of those liberties (e.g. we've seen elected European parliamentarians banned for nothing more than their potential for uttering unwelcome thoughts on British soil). I think the agencies and agents of the state could do worse than to recognise that our government's principal duty to the nation entails the upholding of its liberty, NOT its security (in fact, I would argue "security" is just a means of upholding liberty) - unfortunately most folk don't appreciate the cost or worth of the freedom they abuse, so it's easy to prey upon their fears (playing with their innate phobias) by spuriously citing "national security" in defence of restricting liberty. Don't let us ignore the fact that the very first thing our enemies would do, were they to succeed, would be to curtail our liberty. Perhaps a better way of framing this would be to suggest that the purpose of national security is to protect liberty. You see, liberty (of conscience, of expression, from religious tyranny, of movement, of suffrage, of sexual orientation, etc.) took a very long time to emerge in our society (about 500 years if we take The Reformation as a significant starting point - AC Grayling's marvellous book, Towards The Light, provides a beautifully crafted account of these developments). Moreover, it didn't emerge without a great, struggling, mortal effort on the part of millions of (usually anonymous) ordinary people. So, to repeal these freedoms is to undermine the fruit of their endeavour and to weaken the structure of the civil democracy they built for our benefit. Shame on us while we tolerate this. And I hope you'll forgive me if any of the foregoing seems unpalatably political, but I think it relates well to the matter under discussion, namely: the rationale of fear, as well as to the topic as introduced, namely: the exploitation of phobia.
Posted by Alan Colquhoun on 03 June 2009
I had that same feeling after watching the BBC coverage about a school closing in London because of swine flu. It seems like such an overreaction, and the media just seem to want to whip up as much hysteria as possible. Interesting re performance nerves. I know they're irrational and unhelpful, but once your body starts producing that negative physical reaction, I find it very difficult to put a stop to it. The trick has to be to prevent it from getting to that stage in the first place. Personally, I find nerves to be directly related to how much I feel I know what I'm doing. If I'm rock solid on it, then I can control my reaction. If there's the tiniest sliver of doubt, then the nerves have a way in.
Posted by ECB on 13 May 2009
This is kind of a revelation to learn that music pros also feel this way! I'd so much rather blame the occasional error on bad luck than admit I didn't practice enough. It's rather freeing to look at it this way. Wishing I had thought to read your blog before!! Congrats on the superb reviews. Come and see us soon again! love, Judy
Posted by Judy Johnson on 14 August 2009
re performance anxiety: I think most people have the wrong attitude towards mistakes right from the start. You can observe in most musicians, from beginners to experienced performers, a tendency to "correct" themselves after making a mistake. Very few seem to show an ability to observe their mistakes passively. Which isn't the same thing as disregarding a mistake, let me say. The trouble is that we generally don't pay enough attention to our mistakes, if you ask me. Nor do we practice them deliberately, enough. A mistake is really just when you fail to do what you intended. This starts to become a tragedy when you try harder and harder to achieve the goal and repeatedly fail. The first step to solving this problem is widening the parameters by which you define success or failure.
Posted by Jeffrey Heath on 20 May 2009
Jeffrey, I think you're right that the issue of how one approaches wrong notes is extremely important both in practical terms (practising slowly enough to attend to them and correct them), and psychologically (examining the anxiety connected to making mistakes). The second is far more tricky to resolve, and probably different in some ways for every performer. Issues of success and failure, as you put it, are so personal and so deeply embedded in most of us that it can take a lot of time to find a healthy outlook on them. How do you see this? What do you consider appropriate parameters for success and failure?
Posted by Steven Osborne on 20 May 2009
ECB, actually there are things you can do to calm bad nerves even once they get going. The simplest is very slow breathing. Your body reacts to your mental state of panic by revving up and happily this process can also work in reverse (although not quite so quicky!) - your mind be calmed by bodily relaxation. That does require that your mind is not obsessing over it's fears however, which corresponds to your comment about feeling prepared.
Posted by Steven Osborne on 20 May 2009
re performance anxiety and fear of making mistakes, again: I find this a really fascinating topic and there's so much that can be said about it. I must admit I'm a bit wary of polluting your blog with long ramblings! So i just want to mention the things that are at the heart of the issue for me. Regarding the psychological side - I think one of the fundamental mistakes we make is trying to control our actions by using more effort, more will power, more intense desire to achieve, more emotion, etc... I don't believe this is conducive to good learning. To me, it seems that most of us have the notion that we should respond to our mistakes in a way that shows (to ourselves or others) that mistakes are bad, detestable, morally wrong, and that we really do care very much about NOT making mistakes. These are some basic facts I like to keep in mind: - A wrong note repeated many times unintentionally will probably 'get stuck' and be difficult to eradicate. A wrong note repeated many times INTENTIONALLY becomes more and more fully under your control. - repetitively practicing any skill helps achieve mastery of that skill, which can then be more easily modified or added to. You could 'practice in' a wrong note this way, then change it as you gain CONTROL of it (as long as it is done with awareness and intent). - If you appear to "not care" (i.e. not become emotional) about mistakes, you are not a bad person and your progress toward perfection will not be halted. - We only know the experience of something by comparison to what it is NOT. We should constantly remind ourselves that we are always on the path towards our ultimate goal. We must look forward, asking ourselves how to take that next step closer toward our final goals. If you play poorly, there are reasons. If you can understand those reasons, you can keep improving.
Posted by Jeffrey Heath on 22 May 2009