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.

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Vincent Van Gogh's "Starry Night"

Music is everywhere. It is used to evoke our emotions everyday, wherever you are. Advertisers use music to make a pair of jeans, a six-pack of beer, or a new car model seem more hip and cool than their competitors’. Filmmakers use music to tell us exactly how we should feel about scenes that might otherwise seem ambiguous, or to heighten our emotions at a certain dramatic point.

Music is always used to manipulate our emotions, and people enjoy it. We accept it and thrive with it. But people who still love music insist that they know nothing about it. Music theorists have a mysterious set of terms and rules that are as odd and complicated as some of the most intense studies of highly advanced mathematics.

In the eyes of a “nonmusician,” the tiny black spots and lines and squiggles of musical notation just may as well be notation of highly advanced mathematics. And yet, you don’t have to know how to read musical notation to know what kind of music you like.

Most of us have a practical knowledge of what we like. You may be a huge hip-hop fan, memorizing the lyrics, practicing in front of your mirror, driving and nodding your head to the beat of the music… but you may, in fact, know nothing (or very little) about musical notation.

I know that I like the artistic works of Vincent Van Gogh. I can often spot or even guess his paintings even before I’ve looked at the artist’s name because I like his style, but I could never paint such a beautiful masterpiece, knowing how to mix each colour on the pallet, use specific brushes, or conjure up such a imaginative scene in my mind and transfer it onto a canvas. Still, I appreciate Van Gogh as one of my favourite painters.

People become intimated by what they don’t know, and it’s a shame that many people are so intimidated by the jargon that musicians’ theorists, and cognitive scientists throw around.

An unnatural gap has developed between those who love music, and those who are discovering new things about how music works.

Music remains to be a mystery in many ways. If we all hear music the exact same way, how can we account for our widely different preferences in music? Why does someone prefer Limp Bizkit over the Beastie Boys, but another prefers the Beastie Boys over Limp Bizkit?

In the last few years, the human mind has been opened up as the field of neuroscience exploded with new approaches in psychology, new brain-imaging technologies, and drugs which are able to manipulate neurotransmitters.

Thanks to the continuous advancements in computer technology, we are coming to understand computational systems in the human brain like never before. Language is practically nailed into our brains, and consciousness itself is something that comes from observational physical systems.

Until now, no one has take all of this together and used it to comprehend humanity’s must beautiful and mysterious obsession: music. It is indeed, one of the deepest mysteries of human nature.

Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:

Look out for my fifth article on The Science Behind The Music. Here, we’ll start asking questions like, “Is listening to music the same as eating when you’re hungry, like satisfying an urge? Or is it like watching the sunset or going for a spa massage, triggering a sense of pleasure?” Look out for article number five!

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2. (Lesson #1) The Science Behind The Music: Human Curiousity This is the first article of many that I will...
3. (Lesson #2) The Science Behind The Music: Cultural Influences This is the second lesson to a series of lessons...

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So, I guess in hopes of lifting my spirits just a little bit, I’ve decided to just post a few music and piano quotes. Some of them are really inspirational, artistic, and funny.

1. “No other acoustic instrument can match the piano’s expressive range, and no electric instrument can match its mystery.” ~ Kenneth Miller
2. “The piano is the social instrument par excellence… drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.” ~ Jacques Barzun
3. “The piano is able to communicate the subtlest universal truths by means of wood, metal and vibrating air.” ~ Kenneth Miller
4. “One man gets nothing but discord out of a piano; another gets harmony. No one claims the piano is at fault.” ~ Author Unknown
5. “I’ve never felt anything that moves me as much as my piano. I’m an emotional player. I don’t really like people. I prefer my piano to people. It’s totally reliable and it’s alive. I can hear what it’s saying.” ~ Tori Amos
6. “When you play music you discover a part of yourself that you never knew existed.” ~ Bill Evans
7. “Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.” ~ Igor Stravinsky
8. “To play without passion is inexcusable!” ~ Ludwig van Beethoven
9. “Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.” ~ Frederic Chopin
10. “I sit down to the piano regularly at nine-o’clock in the morning and Mesdames les Muses have learned to be on time for that rendezvous.” ~ Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky
11. “Pianos are such noble instruments – they’re either upright or grand.” ~ Author Unknown
12. “It is wonderful how soon a piano gets into a log-hut on the frontier. You would think they found it under a pine-stump. With it comes a Latin grammar, and one of those tow-head boys has written a hymn on Sunday. Now let colleges, now let senates take heed! for here is one who, opening these fine tastes on the basis of the pioneer’s iron constitution, will gather all their laurels in his strong hands.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I absolutely love the fifth quote. That’s exactly how I feel, especially right now. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:

Considering the fact that I am going through some hard times now, I think it’s best to just lose myself in some classical piano music or direct my mind into the sheet music by continuing to work on my project pieces. You should do the same, if you ever find yourself in a bad mood or upset state of mind. Music is something that you can really lose yourself in, and it’s fascinating because it’s unexplainable. It’s just there. It just happens. It’s like a natural grounding and healing mechanism for the human soul.

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