7 Out ot Control The Drama of Performing

Thoughtful, absorbed practicing can indeed create an oasis of serenity. But what happens when it’s time to perform? Clearly, it is one thing to make music in private and quite another to do so onstage. And when I say “onstage” I mean it metaphorically; performing for two people in a living room can feel every bit as public as performing for two thousand in a hall.

We tend to undergo dramatic changes whenever our behaviors are framed as public performances. Telling a good joke in private, or voicing a passionate opinion to a friend—these are natural, colorful self-expressions. But if someone told us that television cameras would start rolling while we told the joke or expressed the opinion, we’d be “acting” and would probably feel stiff and artificial. Sometimes we even forget how to smile when we have to “perform” a smile; when a professional photographer asks us to smile naturally we inexplicably can’t figure out which muscles we normally use, so we end up grimacing weirdly into the camera.

Physical skills, as well as personal expressions, feel different when there is an audience; as millions watch, the figure skater misses the triple jump she had landed perfectly in practice just moments before. Or the golfer misses the two-foot putt that would have won him the championship and million-dollar endorsement deals. This unpredictable immediacy of the present moment provides the very drama that makes sporting competitions so riveting to witness.

By and large, as individuals we’re not used to being in the limelight. In many ways we are a society of consumers, leaving performance to high-level specialists—those accomplished professionals who clearly “deserve” to be on the stage. Furthermore, in musical contexts we’ve perpetuated a vocabulary that draws a line between the talented and the untalented, those who have a singing voice or don’t, those who can or can’t dance. Within this framework, many people would undoubtedly feel a bit presumptuous labeling themselves “musicians” and might very likely find the prospect of performing for an audience somewhat intimidating, or even ridiculous.

Yet part of us craves the stage, or so I believe. Many an adult music student announces at the start of lessons that he has no interest at all in trying to perform, only in playing some pieces “for my own enjoyment.” But once his skills expand, his comfort and security grow, and his personal musical voice awakens, he becomes more open to being convinced (or perhaps prodded) to give a performance. And once he does perform a well-learned piece for others and in that moment senses new spontaneity and communication in the familiar notes, he experiences a wonderful and rare feeling: elation. Later he thanks the teacher for not paying too much attention to his earlier protestations.

In our culture of specialization, performance tends to be thought of as a big deal. an event that invites public scrutiny and critical judgment. This is not a viewpoint shared by all cultures, however. Apparently in certain tribal societies the spoken language contains no word that corresponds to musician. The reason is simple: they have no concept of a set-apart class of specialists who might be known as musicians as opposed to all the nonmusicians—virtually everyone in these tribal cultures, both young and old, is used to singing, dancing, and beating on drums with communal spirit and without apology or fear. Apparently musical activity is accepted as normal and basic; music is considered an enjoyable component of life, of celebration, and of oneness with the tribe. But in industrialized society, the idea of performance is daunting to many people. Yet like all challenges, of course, it presents an opportunity.

In certain tribal societies
the spoken language contains no
word that corresponds to musician.

Why bother with performing at all? For one thing, it’s the crucial culminating step of the learning process, the capstone experience that pulls it all together. When you perform something well onstage, it is really part of you, in a way that no practice-room moment can duplicate. Even more importantly, performing means communicating with others, so music comes into its own as a magical language when it takes to the stage. It’s the sharing of music that gives it its fullest meaning.

The ego in crisis

It’s easy to sense that dramatic changes are underway when we go onstage. We feel the familiar physical symptoms driven by heightened adrenaline which we call nervousness: dry mouth, racing heartbeat, cold hands, perspiration, accelerated thoughts, overactive digestive processes. These are primal mammalian brain reactions that kick in whenever survival itself is at stake, and they are beautifully designed for the purpose. Hands get cold, for example, because if blood stays more around the vital organs and less in the extremities, we will survive longer if one of our limbs is caught in a trap or bitten off by a predator. As if we were cornered chipmunks, our racing thoughts and sped-up energy get us ready for either of the classic survival options: fight or flight.

But no one would claim that our physical survival is actually at stake if all we’re about to do is get up in front of thirty-five friendly individuals and play Sicilienne on the flute, a Beethoven sonata on the piano, or sing “Ol’ Man River.” Yet many find themselves filled with visceral panic as they are about to go on (in fact, when I was competing once in a major international piano competition we were rather alarmingly informed that medical personnel would be on call backstage, should a contestant suffer a breakdown). So something else must be operating here—some significant fear that seems as momentous to the brain as survival itself. There must be a good reason why, according to many studies, fear of public speaking is one of the greatest fears human beings have. I think the underlying fear can be easily identified: losing control in front of others, and facing the possibility of embarrassment and humiliation.

Something new is going to happen and we don’t know what. It might be very good, or it might be very bad. Either way, it will be a surprise—we seem to have utterly relinquished control over events. We tend to feel physically peculiar too; when I chat with a music student and ask if she ever feels, when stepping onstage, as if she had been transformed into an outer-space android with a totally different nervous system in place of the usual one, she always knows what I’m talking about. We do tend to feel that way, disconnected and odd, at least in the first moments of a performance—until we find a groove, hit our stride, or as the French say, “ease into the bath.”

When I think of the performing experience and how it affects us, I picture a delicate transparent shell around the performer, like a clear, pliable bubble or membrane. This is the shell of ego, the protective shell of a person feeling in control, navigating through various everyday situations in life. Most of the time we depend on the existence of that shell (imaginary as it may be) as our refuge whenever we might need it, our invisible armor, our personal zone of privacy. But that shell cannot stay intact onstage, where we voluntarily get up in front of others and make ourselves the focus of attention, and this is what we sense in advance, instinctively, about the nakedness of performing. Will our fears cause the shell to harden, become brittle, and shatter? Will we fumble unnervingly and feel humiliated? Or will the shell happily melt away, permitting our musical impulses to soar trustingly out into the room with newfound energy, joining meaningfully with the receptive spirit of the audience? In any event, something new and exposing will happen as soon as we sense that this is the official performance, that “This is it.”

There’s a remarkable feeling of aliveness and connection which we are all capable of but (unfortunately) rarely feel; it’s often referred to as “living in the moment.” One thing is sure: to get up onstage and perform is to plunge oneself instantly into living in the moment.

Nerves

The feeling of nervousness that performers have is not a feeling that many people are used to. Thus, we may fear and dislike the word nervous and all that it implies. Of course it only adds to our general agitation if what we’re nervous about is nervousness itself!

Finding a way to frame the same physical sensations with different, more encouraging words can ease our fears greatly. Why not think of our hyper-energy, cold hands, and rapid thoughts as symptoms of excitement and anticipation? Most experienced performers will say that they still get nervous before every show, but they often add that they welcome the feeling, finding it essential to the heightened focus and alertness that are hallmarks of vital performing. Undoubtedly they have, consciously or subconsciously, found a positive conceptual framework for the aroused physical state we think of as nervousness.

Fight-or-flight symptoms are an uncommon experience for modern people, since for most of us primal survival is not a danger-ridden daily issue. Our ancestors may have risked their lives hunting mastodons (nervously) in order to eat, but we drive to the supermarket. Yet our brain’s wiring hasn’t changed much, and human survival responses are still triggered by the idea that we are under imminent threat. Since this is a rare event, we may easily overreact when those feelings occur.

Another, perhaps less obvious, reason we find the nervous state distressing is that we’re not accustomed to being held accountable in the dramatized way that is part of every public performance. Public performance is a potent truth serum, stripping away all self-delusions and instantly revealing—in front of an audience—the solidity of our knowledge, our precise degree of mastery. All bets are off when we step onstage, and things usually don’t happen exactly as rehearsed or predicted. What thoroughly integrated learning it takes, both in body and mind, to welcome such accountability with confidence!

Public performance is
a potent truth serum.

By contrast, if you are taking a spelling test, you can pace yourself—stop and think for a moment before committing to a particular answer. You can take time to retrieve your knowledge. If we could do this with music, there would be no issue of nerves. But while spelling is mental, musical performance is physical and mental, and it gives you no extra time to think. It would obviously ruin the possible magic of a performance if we were to stop abruptly in the middle of a phrase, stand up, and say to the audience, “Sorry, folks, I really messed up that last passage (which surprises me since just half an hour ago I played it perfectly during the warm-up)—so let me take another shot at it, OK? Thanks!” No; since the flow of sound mustn’t stop, we find ourselves profoundly accountable both to the music and to the audience.

One little-discussed and surprisingly beneficial aspect of performance nerves has to do precisely with this accountability. The unconscious mind, uncannily aware, knows when there are loose ends—such as incomplete memorization or a technical passage that’s been learned too shallowly to be secure in performance. Something must be done to tie up the loose end, but the conscious mind has refused to pay any attention to the matter during practice—perhaps it’s not even aware that there’s a potential problem. So the unconscious tugs at our sleeve, using the symptoms of nervousness, saying, “Please, for your own sake, take another look! Right now, before you step onstage! Don’t assume you really know this!” In this instance, nerves are functioning as an effective stratagem for self-protection. If we try to cajole ourselves out of nervousness using generalized feel-good psychological techniques, we miss its pragmatic, helpful message and (later) pay the consequences.

Admittedly, getting the message only moments before we walk onstage doesn’t give us much time to respond—although many a performance has indeed been saved backstage, ten minutes before curtain time, by someone listening carefully to nerves and studying a specific spot that was shaky. The more useful response in the long term is to realize that honest, thorough practicing greatly reduces the need for this type of nervousness.

 

Just as there is plenty to be learned from mistakes, once we put our egos aside, there is also much to be learned from nerves. I remember clearly the occasion on which I was the most nervous in my life: my first concert as a concerto soloist with orchestra. In retrospect, I’m glad that I got so nervous; the nerves helped me learn more in one night than I ever could have learned from a teacher or from practicing.

Once we put our egos aside,
there is much to be learned
from nerves.

I was an eighteen-year-old college student and had just won, much to my amazement, my first concerto competition. The award was a performance as soloist with a community orchestra before an audience of about two thousand people. Although I was a novice at formal concerts and had never performed a concerto before, the two pieces I played were comfortable to me, and all had gone surprisingly well up to this point—the lessons, the audition, the rehearsals with conductor and orchestra. But there’s nothing quite like an actual performance, as I was about to find out.

Concert night arrived. I put on the tuxedo and strode out onstage, feeling like a piece of petrified wood. The work was Mendelssohn’s Capriccio brillant in B minor, op. 22, which starts (luckily) with a safely undemanding slow section, lyrical and expressive. Although my fingers felt stiff and alien, I was riveted on the task at hand and the music sounded perfectly OK. But then came the fast “brilliant” part. That started to go well too, although the fast tempo fueled my adrenaline more than I needed it to, which in turn made the tempo even faster. But despite the precipitous speed, I began to enjoy the occasion more, breathe more calmly, and allow my ego to take an interest. Soon my thoughts were drifting pleasantly away from Mendelssohn’s familiar notes and toward my own situation, and I was reflecting on how nicely things were going and fantasizing about the rousing ovation I hoped to hear at the end. I was definitely no longer “in the moment.”

The daydream vanished,
I plunged back into reality,
and the nerves hit again.

It was during a rapid but quite simple transition figure of repeated sixteenth-notes (after several decades, I still know the exact spot in the score) that the daydream vanished, I plunged back into reality, and the nerves hit again, all at once. This time, though, the nerves were on a mission: they wanted solid data, and they wanted it now. I heard a strange voice in my head—a part of my mind I’d never heard from before. This nasal, crisp, robotic inner voice wasted no time on small talk. It fired questions at me in an insistent, machine-gun style: “How many times is this figure repeated, is it going down or up, what key are you in, what key are you going to, what exactly happens next?” In highly condensed brain-time these questions were posed all in the same instant, but they were crystal clear nonetheless.

It was equally clear that I was doomed to flunk the quiz, didn’t know a single answer. But hadn’t I played the piece over and over in the past without a hitch? Yes. Didn’t that prove I knew the piece? Well, I thought I did.

Let’s freeze the movie frame for a second, and take a look at what was really happening. The passage in question is actually so uncomplicated, and fits under the hands so naturally, that I’d never given it a lot of thought. I’d learned it in ten minutes and usually just let muscular habit and my good musical ear guide me down the familiar pathway. But as soon as I heard the list of robot-questions onstage, I felt pure panic, because I instantly grasped the way in which I was unprepared. The questions themselves were 100 percent fair. This wasn’t neurotic self-tormenting on my part; this was a straightforward request for factual information about the piece I was presenting, which, as a well-prepared performer, I should have known. It was my job to know the piece cold, to be able to recite all its musical data without touching a piano.

Had I learned it in that way, I wouldn’t ever find myself onstage grasping at tactile, visual, or auditory kinds of memory—all of which function automatically and strongly but are also primal functions that can’t stand up to questioning: the tactile, visual, and auditory memories can evaporate at any time. They come easily; therefore they can go away easily. But exercising one’s left brain to name every note and analyze all the patterns, without looking at a score or touching an instrument, is productive work. It’s a bracing mental workout that solidifies the memory by actively retrieving information from the recesses of one’s own mind. This process is radically different from the simple, passive act of recalling how familiar music goes.

Similarly, a successful academic student knows that active studying is infinitely more effective than passive reading. For example, asking a friend to test you on the twenty-five vocabulary words (and to jump around the list, so the quiz won’t be too easy) will cause you to retrieve the definitions from your own head, thus giving you the certainty of knowledge that leads to solid confidence under pressure. But just reading over the words and thinking, “Yes, these certainly do look familiar” calls for no retrieval of information at all; this is passive studying and poor preparation.

Since we know with certainty that we will question ourselves onstage, we simply aren’t prepared until we’ve created the sort of solid musical memory that will stand up well under serious pressure.

All this was clear to me in an instant. It was also clear that I would have needed no more than five minutes offstage to study that passage sufficiently to answer the quiz with ease. But I hadn’t done that—hadn’t seen the need—and now I was being held accountable. That attack of nerves was in fact highly beneficial, teaching me a practical lesson which gave me far greater onstage security in the years that followed. I wouldn’t have paid any attention to the lesson if I hadn’t been trying to “survive” in front of two thousand people.

 

And now to resume the movie: somehow I managed to salvage the moment by jumping ahead a couple of beats to the next theme—or what I fervently hoped was the next theme. Luckily this episode occurred right before a place in the music where the orchestra is silent for half a page, which enabled the conductor to figure out where I was so we could get back together quickly. I’d like to think that what the audience noticed was at most a minor glitch, but to me it was a turning point in understanding the job of preparing for performance.

Performance nerves illustrate what music study has to offer: an adventurous journey of knowing. We discover that knowing is dynamic, not fixed from day to day. Frequently our grasp of the piece at hand turns out to be shallower than we had thought, not quite integrated enough. This is humbling and at the same time inspiring. This sense of knowing as an adventure could easily apply to philosophical or spiritual quests, but the great boon of stage experience is that it brings immediate reality to a concept that might otherwise seem quite vague. The act of performing almost forces us to become our best selves: performers must be realists, rise to the occasion, and shed limitations such as self-delusions, narcissism, and unproductive thoughts. Our minds must unite intuition and rationality in a purposeful, high-level way. We must make sense of the abstract. We must become fluid, open-system thinkers, always receptive to new connections. If learning to play a particular piece of music is a journey, then that journey of knowledge isn’t quite complete without the culminating stage of public performance—even if it’s for an audience of one.

Expansiveness

Up to now, this chapter has focused inward, on the challenges and opportunities for the performer. But equally significant is the outward focus, the aspect of sharing and connecting with others through music’s uncanny powers of enchantment.

As it happens, the expansive side of performing also became real to me during that same performance years ago. My second piece of the evening was the Rimsky-Korsakov Piano Concerto, op. 30, and I had calmed down appreciably by that time (no more daydreams, fortunately). The solo cadenza toward the end of this concerto is always a favorite of mine because of the relaxed, improvisatory warmth of the writing. Something intriguing happened when I got to that spot in performance.

Until that moment, I hadn’t thought very philosophically about what expression in performance really meant: I thought my role was to “offer my interpretation” of the music to the audience, whom I hoped would find it acceptable and demonstrate their approval of me with respectful silence during the music and applause (thunderous, please) afterward. However, I now sensed something different; the collective awareness, the attentive mind of the audience, was a tangible, mutual bond of energy linking me, the soloist, with two thousand listeners. Actors and other performers know this feeling, but it was new to me and I’d never thought of it before. It was a sense of effortless collective power—not my own power at all.

It was a sense of effortless
collective power—not my own
power at all.

I seemed to be plugged into a meaningful circuit, a circuit made up of many elements: the composer’s thought, my response to it, the piano, my hands, and the audience’s individual and collective feelings. All the components energized each other and formed a pattern. This was a reversal in perception; my fears before going onstage had stemmed more from the sense of separateness—the austere formality of the stage, my isolated role as soloist under the lights, and the physical and psychological distance all this created between me and “them.” Even family and friends were temporarily part of the anonymous “them.”

But once I accepted the alone-ness of the stage, stopped fearing it, and stopped trying to protect my ego from its imagined dangers, it began to feel surprisingly comfortable and enriching. I felt one with the piano, relaxed and trusting. I realized that my connection with the audience had become intimate, nourishing, and boundless. And as for interpretation, I was receiving as much as I was giving; there no longer seemed to be a fixed, intact item known as “my interpretation.” Clearly, the expressive intentions I had worked out in solitary practice were merely preparations, pale outlines of what I now felt (knew) were the fuller meanings the communal circuit was creating.

Here’s another example of the same sort of experience, outside the realm of music. Let’s say you’ve been asked to tell a dramatic story to a kindergarten class. You practice it at home, working out your timing, inflections, and gestures. But when you find yourself in front of the children, telling it for real, something unexpected may happen. If you’ve managed to capture their rapt attention, if you see the engaged gleam in their eyes, you may be transformed. Suddenly you are freer, more commanding, more creative in your narrating style—forget all the planned gestures!—and you also find yourself grasping for the first time the story’s true power and meaning. The circuit is complete, they’re bringing this flow out of you, and you can’t go wrong (unless of course you break the circuit by thinking too much about your own wonderful performance).

Thus part of the enrichment we get from performing is a discovery—the sense that artistic understanding is not only a solo journey for the performer but a communal wisdom that transcends his or her personal boundaries.

The stage is full of surprises and brings primal immediacy to every moment. In The Hidden Face of Music, Herbert Whone says about performance:

In the animal world we see a potent stillness which appears to delay the attack until the last moment; for the string player it is the stillness of the bow . . . for the pianist it is the hand raised in still suspense above the keyboard, and for the singer or wind player it is the control of delicately withheld breath. It is a sense of delay before an entry which gives a heightened awareness—an awareness that belongs to the forest, to the prickling of ears, to stealth and the cracking of twigs. To be immediate, means to be animal . . . the musician as well as the athlete would do well to study this part of his being. The art of immediacy is the art of no mediation—of the elimination of all that stands in the way of pure action. It is a life work.1

The ego-drama of performance can be visualized in terms of where energy is directed. Onstage nerves are often driven by thoughts of “What do you all think of me?” Performing for a panel of judges in a music contest can also make a musician of any age fixate on “What do you think of me?” Such thoughts of powerlessness can cause a physical sense of constriction, as if one’s shoulders were being squeezed. It’s as if all the energy in the room, all the scrutiny, were pointing in at the performer, as the arrows in the diagram suggest.

The constriction of “What do you think of me?”

But to embrace performing and its possibilities means to reverse the direction of those arrows. Instead of the anxious egoism of “What do you all think of me?” we can convert to the generosity of “Let me share this with you” and the receptivity of “What does this mean to all of us, right in this moment?” Then the circuit of energy in the room becomes complete.

Sending energy out, completing the performer-audience circuit

To sense performance energy as a bond with others is among the greatest rewards a person can have. For that to happen, the pathway to fulfillment must be open, free of roadblocks. This raises questions about music lessons: what can teachers do to encourage self-trust in students, both onstage and off? The next chapter considers lessons from the teacher’s point of view.