Below the jump is a piece I wrote in frustration after attending a local organ competition in 2005. I watched the whole field landmine their own performances with silly errors that could have easily been avoided; the winner, in the end, was the one who gave the least discomfort! It was a most perplexing result, and one that the adjudicator was not completely happy in delivering.This article was published in the June 2005 edition of Organ Australia, which elicited a reply from Robert Ampt, Sydney City Organist, pointing out that good learning and practice strategies would be more productive than the ideas I put forth here. I don't think there's anything I wrote that would go against that -- after all, it is better to get the piece learnt properly to guarantee a smooth performance, than to have to make it up on the spot to get out of a self-inflicted pothole. All the same, my original point was that the players in the competition went to such unseemly (if unconscious) lengths to torpedo their own performance that it would have been better for them to have tricks like these up their sleeves.
It's worth noting that that competition hasn't been held since 2005, but that's a whole other rant.
A musical performance is an experience that has at least two participants. Most obvious is the player. Perhaps less obviously, probably because they are more often regarded more as consumers than participants, is the audience. A musical performance is something that involves both, and performance anxiety is something that affects both. The audience is never passive, as we are so often inclined to think. They reflect in every minute detail the player in front of them. When the player’s shoulders go up, those of the audience do likewise. The more the player regards the audience as hostile, critical or at least ‘other’, the more likely it is that there will be a major episode of performance anxiety. This will always cripple a good performance before the first note is even played. I recently attended the organ section of the Boroondara Eisteddfod, where, in addition to quite a bit of good playing there was also a great deal of destructive performance anxiety on display.
This discussion will cover two particular areas. The first is to consider the nature of, and triggers to, performance anxiety, and how they are manifested. The second is to outline some strategies for addressing the particular problems performance anxiety raises.
Books about the psychology of musical performance always include a section on recognising and dealing with performance anxiety. To the best of my knowledge there is probably only one good sustained, book-length, discussion of performance anxiety, and strategies for dealing with the problems it creates, and this is Barry Green’s The Inner Game of Music. This is part of a series of Inner Game books based on a concept promoted by Timothy Gallwey that cover everything from golf and tennis to accounting (!) and really ought to be on the shelf of every performing musician. Green offers the following insight, which underpins the whole of his approach:
Whether you are playing tennis, engaged in business, or making music, each activity has its own challenges and ways to overcome them. It is, if you like, a game.
This game, the ‘outer’ game, is the one we all know we are playing. You play it in the ‘outside’ world, against ‘outside’ opponents…The obstacles are your opponent’s back hand, the cut-throat competition or the intricate fingering. Your goal is to win the point, or land the contract or play that difficult passage…you are also playing a second, or ‘inner’, game all the time you are playing the ‘outer’ game. This second game is subtler, less easily noticed and more quickly forgotten. It is played out in the arena of your mind. The obstacles are mental obstacles, such as lapses of concentration, nervousness and self-doubt. Your goal is to express your potential to the fullest…These two games, the inner and the outer, are closely interrelated – and each one has a considerable impact on the other…The problem arises when we are playing both games but think we are only playing the outer game. These are the times when…‘the game ends up playing the person’, rather than the other way around.[1]
The nature of performance anxiety is therefore essentially psychological: it is a nagging feeling that starts before the performance begins and works outward to the physical manifestation during the performance. It is a vicious cycle that starts with the assumptions I make about how my performance will affect the audience (will I win?), and my attempt to control that response (I will make them vote for me by turning on a brilliant performance). An example of the negative consequences this brings is the very common ‘wrong note’ phenomenon.
When a minor mistake occurs, it sets off a series of events that will always lead to the next one. The only person in the building who knows about the original mistake is usually the player. The most common response is to try to appear in control by altering the tempo, generally in the faster direction. This destabilises rhythm and can undermine the ‘muscle memory’ that enabled the player to learn the piece in the first place and leads to trouble in places where there was none previously. Physical signs become apparent: shaking of head, frowning, disintegration of technique as hands and feet move up from the key surface. All of this is classic ‘fight or flight’ response: you naturally draw away from a source of physical danger. These physical signs transmit tension to the audience too: as the player exhibits more signs of physical stress, they begin to sit forward or squirm in their seats, and the shoulders rise. Audiences identify with all the physical cues a performer transmits – nothing could be more narcissistic than having 20 human mirrors in front of you!
We have all had days when we seem more adept at making mistakes than actually getting things right, and in a sense, we need to have them occasionally. It’s just a pity that they tend to occur in public. This is why performance anxiety is so destructive. However, the anxiety is present before you even walk in front of an audience. In my experience it is that my prior perception of my own judgement of audience expectations in regard to the performance I will give that feeds the episode of performance anxiety. In a competitive setting performance anxiety is prompted by my prior knowledge that my performance is the difference between my winning the prize and coming second or third. Having made my wish-list, I know I can always have a bigger shopping spree at Fine Music with the cheque for first prize. That said, I recon singers and wind players have it a lot worse than organists: if they have a physical breakdown in performance there is no way back.
There are two triggers that bring on performance anxiety for most people. The first is when we are playing for reasons that are specifically external to the experience of performing the music on the desk in front of me. I think competitions have an incredibly artificial atmosphere. This is mostly because the players are ultimately thinking about the prize money and the attached status. To fail to gain a place is to be critically demoted in the hierarchy of young players. Performance anxiety is absent from certain situations, such as when practicing, or playing for a friendly audience, such as one’s congregation, most of whom will gush endlessly regardless of how poorly you feel you might have played. The second trigger is my sense that there may be people in the audience who know the piece I’m playing. Of course, these will always be the minority in any ordinary audience, but it’s my knowledge of their knowledge that compounds the effects of the ‘wrong note’ phenomenon when it hits. Even if half the audience can play the piece, as a result of my experience of bringing it to the performance level I will still know something about it that they don’t. The common factor is a sense of the audience judging your worth as a player. I suspect you would have to travel a great distance to find a truly hostile audience bent on bringing you down: the audience is invariably on your side.
Strategies for addressing performance anxiety are often unhelpful, mostly because they tend to be time honoured proverbs of a generally trite and callously hollow-headed nature. Often they are delivered to the player, post ritual public humiliation by the adjudicator, in a secondary ritual of ‘rubbing it in’ presided over by other players that appear never to have had a single episode of performance anxiety in their entire lives, despite protests to the contrary. It is worth recalling Green’s insight about the inner and outer game: go back and read the quote now if you think it would be helpful. Green’s whole contention is based on the observation that performance anxiety embraces you when you embrace it. It is important to let go of the anxiety in order to be free to perform well. What follows is my response to this valuable insight. There are two major strategies and one memory text:
- Movement: less is more;
- Confidence: recognise your inherent capacity to play the notes;
- Enjoying the music: treat the experience of performing it as a worthwhile end in itself.
Technical meltdown is one of the most common manifestations of performance anxiety. This is brought on by factors such as speeding up and exaggerated physical movements. I call the latter ‘flapping’. It usually involves hands being drawn up from the manuals by the wrists and quite a lot of elbow movement – just like a chicken impression! The more worrying aspect of flapping is how it affects pedalling: most players start pedalling like Cossack dancers when they’re under pressure, which places stress on the lower spine. This is why so many organists have bad backs. Both of these problems were proudly on display at the Boroondara Eisteddfod. ‘Less is more’: reducing the height from which you approach the manuals and pedals means that you are more likely to avoid a physical breakdown. My approach to manual playing under stress is to try to keep the hand position as neutral as possible in ordinary passage playing (the “cat’s paw” position), and focus all movement over the lateral plane. Likewise, I aim to keep my knees together and as close to the pedals as possible. In a stressful situation you are at an advantage if you are able to restrain your physical movement and focus it where it is most effective, because this ultimately helps you to keep on going without losing control. Finally, it’s a good idea not to hold your breath – this only compounds all the other physical stresses. Good deep breaths will help to stabilise your own internal rhythms, which helps you to re-establish rhythm of your playing.
The most destructive aspect of performance anxiety is how it eats away at your confidence. You know you can play your most challenging competition piece perfectly well in an empty building, on your own. But introduce the “audience that needs to be impressed” factor into the equation, and your confidence in your ability evaporates. I would suggest that none of the competitors at the Boroondara Eisteddfod had any problems with their pieces in their practice, but that the day of the competition offered the sort of pressure that leads to self-doubt and diminished confidence. One problem with confidence is that our practice methods are sometimes not very effective when we are preparing for a performance. We frequently deal with minor details, and as a result we lose sight of the larger picture. One very effective way of countering this is to use a recording device as part of your practice pattern. You will always be your own worst critic: no one else’s expectations of my performance are higher than my own. Recording enables you to assess where problems are, how they occur and develop practical strategies by locating exactly where the problem begins and how this affects the sound of your performance. You can also come to appreciate the strengths in your performance by hearing it from the audience perspective – it can be a harrowing experience at first, but ultimately worth the initial effort. It keeps the details in perspective, and forces you to think about the bigger picture.
Enjoyment of music works on many subtle levels. As part of the experience of music, enjoyment is a word that has several connotations for me. In the act of performance, I am attempting to communicate something about the music, which communicates an implicit “en-joy-ment” of the performing experience. I am also responding to the experience of making music as an end in itself. Often the least enjoyable performances are ones where the player is obsessed with the details of the piece. They may have had a rough time in their last practice, or may feel that they don’t know enough about the music to be able to convey something about it. Musical performance is like a painting in that there are a lot of smaller things that contribute to a larger whole. You can focus on the brushstrokes, how the paint is layered on the surface, how the colours are used in a purely technical sense. You can analyse the piece to shreds by focussing on details. Alternatively, you can step back, look at the picture as a whole and see the details in the context of the whole. Idiom, melody and harmony are three features to explore in developing a sense of the big picture. They can be the way to have a lot of sublime fun in learning a piece.
- Idiom – organ music can be any of the following:
- String music (e.g: many Bach fugues, such as the a minor [BWV 543] or D major [532] or C major [564]; Vaughan Williams’ Rhosymedre; Mendelssohn’s c minor Prelude and Fugue)
- Vocal music (much of the classical French organ repertoire, quite a fair amount of Franck or Lefébure-Wely – the list goes on)
- Wind/brass music (Frescobaldi Canzone alla Francese)
- Can you imagine the sound of the piece you are playing as it might sound in an orchestrated version? How could you convey this alternative sound in your own playing?
- Melody:
- Is the melody one that you could sing, or would it work better on an orchestral instrument? Try singing the themes from the following works, and assess how this informs your playing as a result.
- Franck’s Prelude, Fugue et Variation
- The subject of the fugue in c minor [546]; contrast this with [543]
- Hindemith’s Second Organ Sonata (2nd m’vt)
- The plainsong from any of the Couperin masses
- Are there any distinctive features of how the melody is constructed? Does it contain any repeated sequences? How are they generated? What is the compass of the whole melody? Where does it peak?
- Harmony:
- How quickly does the chord progression change in a given passage? The technical term for this is harmonic rhythm.
- What sort of harmonic implications are built into a melody?
- In a fugue, which harmonic areas of the home key do the episodes explore? How do they relate to the subject?
- Are there any “surprise” chords (e.g: the Neapolitan sixths in the Adagio of BWV 564)?
- Are there any moments where it is not really possible to speak of ordinary diatonic harmony, especially in pre-twentieth century music? A good example of this is the way the harmonic structure dissolves in latter stages of the fugue of Bach’ Passacaglia [582].
An enjoyable performance is one that communicates something of these musical factors as part of a whole. Details do matter when they are seen in the context of the bigger picture, but they become destructive when they obscure it. People new to playing the organ often fail to appreciate that the music they are playing is not necessarily keyboard music, and are left a bit dazed when it doesn’t sound quite as musical as they would like. This can lead to a fixation on localised technical matters, working at getting through a particular passage unscathed, and then to the end of the piece, where what is actually needed is a broader perspective. Similarly, lacking a sense of how the harmony moves can lead players to blunder through passages where the harmonic rhythm is quite rapid, only to hit a wall when the harmony slows down, or makes a left turn. This can lead to a rather grim attitude to the piece you’re playing: you learn it because you ‘have to’. We live in a culture where music is basically regarded as a hobby, and these sorts of considerations are seen as the highbrow concern of elite trained musicians, especially among organists. However, the most rewarding aspect of learning a piece is discovering the highlights, finding where they happen, and communicating some sense of the excitement these bring.
In performance we are frequently our own worst enemies. Instead of being enslaved to the ‘wrong note’ phenomenon, treat it as the springboard to having some sublime musical fun on the edge. This is the ultimate strategy for circumventing the phenomenon. Make every mistake matter. Learn some outrageous and idiosyncratic ornaments that can be dropped in to cover a mistake, practice at a variety of tempi. From the first read of a piece, do anything that will distract you from fixating on the mistake made a bar back and help you get back on track in the bar you are actually playing. The more you obsess about things that have passed in a performance, the more you collaborate in your own demise. The more you try to control your performance from the mental outside, the more the ‘wrong note’ phenomenon will ultimately play you. If we approach performance as an experience that involves the audience in an active sense, we are all (player and audience alike) less likely to suffer performance anxiety. It is by treating the problems that can present themselves in performance as opportunities instead of obstacles that we are liberated from performance anxiety. This is ultimately to the benefit of the musical experience in which we all share.
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