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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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To me, music may mean Beethoven, Debussy, and Mozart. To you, music could be Eminem, Busta Rhymes, and 50 Cent.

The Catholic Church had actually banned music that was characterized by polyphony, which is when more than one musical part is played at the same time. The Church feared that polyphony would result in people doubting the unity of God.

The Church even banned the musical interval known as an augmented fourth, which is the distance between C and F-sharp. Apparently, this interval was dubbed extremely dissonant, that is must have been brought to Earth by the Devil. The church named in “Diabolus in musica.”

Bob Dylan was booed by the audience in 1965 when we picked up an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival. People even began to leave.

But why?

Pitch and Timbre. Pitch caused the medieval church to respond in uproar, and timbre was the musical attribute that got Dylan booed all the way off stage.

So, what do the music of Bob Dylan, Busta Rhymes, and Claude Debussy have in common on the most basic level?

The answer: Music is organized sound. Let’s take a closer look at the building blocks of music.

Tone – usually a discrete musical sound. The word “note” can also be used, but most often the word “tone” refers to what is heard, and the word “note” refers to what you see written on sheet music scores.

Pitch – a completely psychological aspect of music. Pitch relates to the actual frequency of a specific tone and also to its relative position on the musical scale. Basically, it answer’s the question “What note is that?”

Rhythm – The durations of a collection of notes and the way they are grouped together. Think of the beat in your favourite song. It represents a variance of notes over time.

Tempo – the overall speed or pace of music.

Contour – the general and overall shape of a melody. Think of a melody that has patterns of notes going up or down.

Timbre – distinguishes between certain instruments, for example, between a cello and a piano. This “tonal colour” is produced by overtones from each instrument’s vibrations.

Loudness – another psychological aspect of music that relates to the physical amplitude of a sound.

Spatial Location – where the sound is coming from.

Reverberation – refers to the perception of how far away the source is while also taking into account how large a room is in which the music is being played or heard. This can also be referred to as “echo.”

Generally, these musical attributes can be separated. Thus, they are known as “dimensions” of music because they can be separated, varied, and studied, one by one, without disrupting the other attributes. The difference between random sounds put together and “music” has to do with the way these dimensions are strung together to produce a relationship between them. When these are combined and form relationships in a meaningful way, they cause us to notice higher-order aspects of music, known as meter, key, melody, and harmony.

Meter – refers to how tones are grouped together in relation to time. It is created by the human brain, extracts information from rhythm and loudness.

Key – has to do with levels of musical importance within a piece, and does not truly exist in this world, but only in the human mind. It is a mental comprehension that exists as a function of our experiences with different musical styles and idioms.

Melody – the main “theme” of a musical piece, more simply, the part that you sing with. The notion of melody is different across all genres of music.

Harmony – the relationships created between the pitches of different tones. These tones create pitch setups that lead humans to expect certain things in a musical piece, often expectations that a skilled composer or musician can either meet or disrupt for artistic and expressive instances. Harmony can be considered to be a simple, parallel melody to the primary melody, or it can refer to a chord progression.

Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:

Take a listen to your favourite classical, rock, pop, country, or jazz song. See if you can distinguish between the several musical attributes that I discussed above. It’s really interesting once you try, in fact, you’ll realize that you will start listening to songs more closely, no matter WHAT you find yourself listening to!

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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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WHY do we love music? To ask such a basic human ability means that we must ask about evolution. We know that animals and plants evolved different physical forms and characteristics in response to their environment.

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.

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Music is unusual among all human activities for being everywhere all that once, and also for being so old and ancient. No human culture during any time period, from the past to the present, has lacked music. In fact, some of the oldest artifacts found by archeologists in excavation sites are indeed musical instruments.

When human beings come together as a group, music is always there. Weddings, funerals, college graduations, soldiers marching off for war, stadium sporting events, going out for a night on the town, romantic dinners, mothers rocking their babies to sleep, and students studying are all examples of when we use music.

Music is and was a part of everyday life, even more so in nonindustrialized cultures than in modern Western cultures. Only recently (relatively speaking, 500 years ago) have we found that a distinction has come about that has cut human society into two, resulting in different classes of musicians. These may be known as the professionals and the amateurs.

Our culture makes a unique distinction between expert performers. For example, we have professional singers and regular folk who will pay for to listen to those performers. Regular people view these professionals in another class level.

However, if you were invited by an African tribe to take part in an authentic, African tribal song and dance celebration, this would be different. If you told the leader of that tribe, “Sorry, I don’t sing,” he would look at you, puzzled, and say, “What do you mean you don’t sing? You can talk, can’t you?”

It’s just as odd as saying that you can’t dance, even though that you can walk, run, skip, and so on. Singing and dancing in these cultures is seen as something that is a completely natural activity, involved by everyone. It’s interesting to see how modern society classifies the “experts” from the “non-experts.”

Just a couple of generations ago (before television), a lot of families would spend their time playing music for entertainment. Today, there is an enormous emphasis on technique and skill set. Is a musician “good enough” to play in public?

Music has indeed become a sort of reserved activity in modern society, where the rest of us just sit and listen. The music industry is one of the largest business sectors in the world, employing hundreds of thousands of people, making billions of sales in albums, Internet downloads, and concert tickets.

Americans actually spend more money on music than they spend on sex or prescription drugs. Considering this fascinating fact, I’d say that the entire human race definitely qualifies as expert music listeners.

We exhibit the cognitive ability to detect incorrect notes, to search for music that we enjoy, to remember hundreds of melodies, and even to tap our foot to the beat of the music—an activity so complex, involving meter extraction that most computers cannot even do it.

Why are we so intrigued by music and why are we willing to spend so much money on it? Two tickets to a concert can cost as much as a week’s worth of groceries for a family of four, and one CD can cost the same as a piece of clothing or basic monthly phone service. Understanding why we love music so much is an open window on the essence of human nature.

Elise’s Musical Tip For The Day:

Stay tuned for my next lesson on this topic. In the next article, I will be looking at evolutionary psychology in relation to human likings of music.

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