This week at UNI we are looking forward to a visit from Dr. Noa Kageyama, who is probably best known among musicians for his blog, The Bulletproof Musician. Dr. Kageyama is an expert in performance psychology, and currently serves on the faculty of the Juilliard School and the New World Symphony, working too help orchestral musicians prepare for auditions. He regularly presents masterclasses and seminars on performance enhancement and overcoming performance anxiety around the country.
Amid the lead-up to Dr. Kageyama’s visit I have been checking in with members of my studio about how performance anxiety affects them. Some version of “nerves” is present among almost all of us musicians in performance, and it is worth noting that they aren’t always a bad thing. Sometimes the energy and adrenaline that course through us on stage are exactly what make performances unique and memorable. But when that nervous energy snowballs into a reaction that causes us not to perform at our potential, it is generally characterized as performance anxiety.
I am looking forward to hearing more on Dr. Kageyama’s research and conclusions in the arena of performance anxiety (more on that later). But the conversation brought me back to something that I originally heard from a mental health professional in the context of generalized anxiety. What she said has stuck with me since that moment: “Anxiety is not an emotion.”
We often connect anxiety with our emotions because our emotions are most definitely wrapped up in the experience. And anxiety is certainly something that we feel. But anxiety is actually not the emotion itself. Anxiety is a uniquely human reaction to emotions that are verging on unbearable. The example given to me was this:
When a gazelle is grazing in the Serengeti and is interrupted by lion, the gazelle fears the lion and runs for its life. Its instinct for flight in the face of fear saves its life. But later, the gazelle doesn’t scold itself, saying “I was so STUPID to graze over there by that lion.” And it doesn’t worry about the future, asking “What if there’s a lion at the place I choose to graze tomorrow?”
For us humans, anxiety is everything surrounding a particularly negative emotion like fear, sadness, or anger. But for performers, it is most often fear. We badly want our listeners to enjoy our performance, or we want to make a good impression on them. We want to get the job. We want to convey the meaning we have found in the music we play, and we fear that we will not. That fear is often simply not there in the practice room, when we are playing for ourself alone. Anxiety comprises the mental and physical reactions to that fear.
In the Practice Room
Understanding the emotions from which our various forms of anxiety originate is a crucial step in successfully dealing with that anxiety. This process is simply a skill that can be developed over time with practice. Luckily for us musicians, we’re very familiar with practice.
As a musician trained in the conservatory model, I have consumed plenty of content on defeating performance anxiety, particularly in the arena of auditions. Much of what is recommended deals with simulating performance conditions in one way or another so that the performer can examine their mentality, practice regularly in “performance mode,” and over time become desensitized to the worst symptoms of performance anxiety. I do recommend exploring all of the options available for this type of practice, as detailed by Dr. Kageyama and others.
However, I also recommend taking some time, either in the practice room or not, to examine the underlying emotions that can cause performance anxiety. Emotions are not our enemies. They are helpful and necessary to us, and they make us human. They are our friends. They don’t need to be scary, but instead simply need to be unpacked and examined in the light. I don’t remember having a fear associated with performance when I was banging away on my Mickey Mouse drum set as a child (as evidenced on many home videos). But as I advanced, and as the stakes got higher, that fear, along with the accompanying anxiety, did appear. A major turning point in dealing with it was the realization that there was simply an underlying fear of what people would think if and when I make a mistake. A close examination of that fear went a long way toward taking away its power over me.