The Musician's Way Blog

We professional musicians love to share music with others. Whether we perform in concert halls, nightclubs, informal gatherings, or recording studios, our hard work is most rewarded when we connect with listeners.

The majority of students, though, spend little time in performance situations. By and large, they make music in practice rooms.

So, are music students typically acquiring the skills of expert performers?

An Underappreciation of Performance Skills
It appears to me, having taught and performed professionally for 30 years, that vast numbers of aspiring musicians aren’t learning essential skills, and, as a consequence, they’re being crippled by performance anxiety.

In fact, researchers estimate that about 25% of advanced student and professional musicians wrestle with severe anxiousness on stage. A larger percentage deal with less debilitating but nonetheless unpleasant symptoms.

As I see it, many students buckle in concerts and auditions due to an underappreciation among music educators as to what performance skills are and how they’re learned.

That is, the skills involved in memorizing music, starting and ending pieces on stage, coping with stress, directing the musical flow under pressure, and so on often receive only passing attention.

Yet when educators turn away from teaching performance skills, they unwittingly train their students to be anxious performers.

Lack of Skills = Lack of Confidence
Consider, for example, the plight of the average young piano student.

She might take lessons from a local teacher and practice at home. Then, once or twice a year, her teacher might sponsor a student recital; otherwise, the student won’t perform much, if at all.

But such limited exposure to performance situations won’t enable the student to gain facility as a performing artist.

On the contrary, she’s more likely to be saddled with stage fright because performing will feel alien – she’ll probably have little grasp of how to set appropriate goals and be in command on stage.

Conversely, well-taught students receive specific performance education, perform regularly under their teachers’ direction, and can play or sing confidently even during the early stages of their training, much like young athletes. For them, performing is fun.

Undereducated students, however, seldom realize that their jitters result from a lack of know-how. They mistakenly conclude that there must be something wrong with them: “I don’t have a knack for performing,” they’ll say.

On-Stage Confidence for All
I’m convinced that all of us can perform music confidently and artistically, but we must acquire specific skills to do so.

Therefore, I’ve created an educational system, articulated in my book, The Musician’s Way, in which performance skills are integrated into music lessons and practice sessions and in which performing becomes commonplace.

Students who follow such an approach learn to unite practice with performance. They become capable of solving problems, managing nervousness, and expressing themselves authentically on stage.

Here are some highlights of the performance skills that are described in The Musician’s Way.

Pre- at- and post-performance skills
Performance skills come into play before, during, and after a show. They encompass the ways in which we learn music in the practice room, center ourselves backstage and on stage, present ourselves to the public, deal with stress, handle errors, evaluate our efforts, and so forth.

The Musician’s Way breaks down pre-, at-, and post-performance skills while preserving their interconnections.

Part I of the book, for instance, emphasizes deep learning and spells out failsafe ways in which we can absorb and memorize music. Part II provides guidelines that help us plan concerts and recording sessions, prepare for auditions, develop stage presence, harness on-stage energy, assess performances, and more. Part III covers self-care and creativity enhancement.

The text also reveals that nervousness has three main sources: the person, the task at hand, and the performance situation. Therefore, performance skills can also be thought of as being personal, task-oriented, and situational.

For example, if we’re going to take charge on stage, we have to be adept at making music in high-stakes situations; we must be personally committed to sharing our music; and we need to choose repertoire – i.e., a task – that’s within our capabilities.

When students are unfamiliar with on-stage and backstage environments, are ambivalent about performing, or select overly challenging music, they’re preset for anxiousness.

Of course, to become fluent with performance skills we must practice them, so see my post “Practicing Performance” for pointers on how musicians can gain fluency with performance techniques.

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Do you feel that your performance skills are secure, or are they in need of an upgrade? Did your teachers help you amass a fully stocked performer’s toolkit? I hope that you’ll contribute your views here.

Preview The Musician’s Way at Amazon.com.

© 2009 Gerald Klickstein