Develop A Secure Mental Play For Performances

Do you get nervous when you find yourself in a room full of anxious relatives, friends, or complete strangers staring at you, eagerly waiting for you to blow them away with your amazing piano skills?

Believe me, I’ve been there. After more than a decade of participating in music festivals, competitions, annual recitals, conservatory examinations, and having my parents force me to play the piano at family gatherings, one could say that I’ve had my fair share of butterflies and sweaty palms at the piano.

Nervousness is a very natural human emotion, just like happiness, anger, sadness, fear, and so on. Generally, nervousness is a product of a mental perception of a situation where performance is critical. Nervousness forces us to concentrate entirely on the critical task at hand and most people don’t like to be nervous because it is normally accompanied by feelings of fear of failure.

Since nervousness is a performance enhancing reaction to specific critical situations, it is almost certainly necessary for a great performance. However, it needs to be kept under control. A healthy attitude toward nervousness should be developed.

History has been documented by legendary pianists of extreme nervousness, as well as completely non-nervous performers, suggesting that the nervousness phenomenon is very well not understood.

Under extreme conditions, emotions can get out of control and therefore can become a liability. Emotions are designed to work under normal circumstances. For example, fear can allow a small animal to escape from a predator. However, when cornered, the small animal may freeze completely with fear, making it easier for the predator to catch it’s prey. The overwhelming fear puts the small animal in a worse position than when the emotion of fear is more controlled.

And so, under extreme conditions, performances can spin out of control due to overwhelming emotions. Playing a piano solo in front of a large crowd qualifies as an extreme condition. In my own experiences, I have felt my heart beating out of my chest, sweaty hands, dry mouth, shaky hands and legs, and even memory loss (I forgot if I had already repeated a section of my piano piece).

There are ways to keep nervousness under control. Some claim that prescription medications such as Inderal, Atenolol, or even Zantac will work to calm nerves. In opposition, you can make your nervousness work by drinking coffee or caffeinated drinks, not getting enough sleep, and so on.

So, how exactly can you help control your nervousness? First of all, remember that you are your worst critic. Your mental attitude has a lot to do with your performance, You may notice mistakes that you make, but instead of worrying about it, smile and move on. In conservatory exams, you are penalized if you make a mistake and go back to that certain note or bar to fix it. Remember than even just casual playing will sound terrific to an audience, and they generally heard less than half of the mistakes that you can identify.

Do not pretend that nervousness does not exist. This is especially important for young performers, since it can cause them to suffer more easily from long-term psychological damage. Performance training is important because it allows nervousness to be discussed and examined in an open manner.

Developing a positive mental attitude is the best way to control stage fright. By helping yourself understand that performing is a great opportunity for you to grow as a musician an individual, you will effectively minimize your nervousness. If you want the best likelihood for a flawless performance, you must develop a secure mental play. You can then start playing from any note within the piece, you can stay ahead of the music, and you can hear the musicality inside your head, and even develop skills such as absolute pitch.

Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:

During a recital, I had to play a very fast piece and I was overwhelmingly nervous. I messed up completely in the middle of the piece, turned around to the audience, and said, “I messed up!” There’s a big difference between creating humor from a mistake or recovering effectively from it and making that mistake create a disaster that affects the entire performance. This is why its so important for a student to play very easy pieces that can be performed with nervousness under control. Even just one performance like this can create an overall, optimistic attitude that performing without nervousness attitude, which can affect you for the rest of your life.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Relax!

As you build up your speed in your piano playing, it becomes more and more important to learn how to relax at the same time. Generally, this means that you should only be using the muscles that are needed to play. You can achieve relaxation much easier by practicing your pieces hands separately. Here are a couple pieces of advice that I follow during my practice routines:

It is better not to practice at all than it is to practice with even the slightest bit of tension. It’s much more efficient to relax and play a single note, and then advance carefully; only playing those easy materials that can be played relaxed.

Do not forget to relax all areas of the body, including breathing and periodic swallowing. You thought hands and arms and fingers were the only parts of the body needing relaxation? Well, think again. Some students will stop breathing when they find themselves playing very demanding pieces because the muscles are anchored at the chest. If you’re throat is dry after playing, it means that you also stopped swallowing. My piano teacher told me a horror story of her younger years when she had been playing for an audience at a recital, when all of a sudden she started choking on her own breath right in the middle of her playing.

To fully relax, you must find the proper energy and momentum balance as well as arm, hand, and finger positions and motions that allow you to play with the right amount of energy. This may seem complicated, and it can be. Relaxing can require a lot of experimentation. If you have been concentrating on relaxing on a regular basis during your practice routines, then you should be able to quickly execute this. For those who haven’t been practicing their relaxation, you can try practicing an easy piece until you build up stress, and then try to relax. For this, you’ll need to find different motions and positions of the arms, wrists, and body. When you find them, you’ll feel the stress gradually drain away from you.

The most important element of relaxation is energy conservation. There are at least two different ways to conserve energy. Firstly, do not use unnecessary muscles, and secondly, turn off those muscles as soon as their jobs are done. Again, this is easier said than done. You can experiment with this using the gravity drop, During a gravity drop, you allow gravity to pull the arm down, but at the end of the key drop, you need to add tension to the finger for a moment to stop the hand. Then you need to quickly relax all of your muscles, but do not lift the hand. Just rest it comfortably on the piano with just enough force to support the weight of your arm. This is a lot harder than you would assume, because the elbow is practically floating in mid air. You can test whether or not you are pressing down by taking the arm off the keys and resting your forearm on your legs, completely relaxed. Then you can carry over that same feeling to the end of your gravity drop.

Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:

Without relaxation, neither music nor technique could be possible. Technique comes from the brain. Non-musical playing actually violates so many aspects of nature that it interferes with the human brain’s natural processes for controlling the mechanisms of playing. Basically, if you spend your practice sessions doing mindless repetitions, you will find yourself going through a long, roundabout way of learning piano.

Related posts:

1. A Closer Look At The “Gravity Drop” Gravity is just the right force needed to play the...
2. Playing Scales On The Piano Using Thumb Under and Thumb Over Methods When you play a scale on the piano, the thumb...
3. Introduction to Piano Fingers There seems to be a lot of confusion about piano...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

To point out Darwin’s theory of evolution, all living organisms have coevolved in relation to the physical world. If a certain species develops a characteristic that allows them to overcome a particular predator, that predator is then faced with evolutionary pressure to either find a way to overcome that defense or find a different food source. “Natural selection” is like a race of physical changes between organisms to catch up with one another.

Evolutionary psychology is a relatively new field. It extends the notion of evolution from physical aspects to mental aspects. Our bodies are not the only product of millions of years of evolution… our minds are as well.

The patterns in which we think, our abilities to solve problems in certain ways, and how we use our senses, are all products of evolution. Researchers are now studying how our minds have coevolved with the physical world, changing in relation to certain conditions.

Researchers studying this field believe that we can learn a lot about human behaviour by looking at the evolution of the human mind.  How did music serve as a function as humans were evolving and developing?

Of course, music from fifty thousand years ago would be very different from Chopin AC/DC, and the Jonas Brothers. As the human brain evolved, so has the music. Did specific regions and characteristics evolve in our brains to allow us to make and listen to music?

Rather than assuming that art and music belong to the left side of the brain and logic and math belong to the right side, it is evident that music is actually distributed throughout the entire whole of the brain.

Studies of people who have suffered from brain damage show that some patients have actually lost the ability to read a newspaper, but can still read music. Some can even still play the piano, yet they cannot pick up enough coordination to button up their own sweater.

Listening to music, performing music, and composing music engages almost every area of the brain and involves almost every neural subsystem. Maybe this accounts for people who claim that listening to music exercises our minds, or a pregnant woman who listens to Mozart everyday will give birth to a more intelligent child.

Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:

Get ready for Lesson #4 coming up, with more on the topic of evolution and the human brain with its relation to music.

Related posts:

1. (Lesson #5) The Science Behind The Music: Controversy In Music & Musical Attributes What are the fundamental aspects of music? Learn about them...
2. (Lesson #2) The Science Behind The Music: Cultural Influences This is the second lesson to a series of lessons...
3. (Lesson #4) The Science Behind The Music: “I Know Nothing About Music” People know when they love music. They know what kind...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.