Curing Stagefright

It’s natural to feel nervous energy when performing. In performance, nothing is guaranteed, and that’s part of what makes it exciting and fascinating.

But nervous energy is different from performance fear, which we usually call “stagefright.” This can crop up when someone is worried about how they’ll come across to an audience. It could come from fear of making mistakes, fear of judgment from audience members, or fear of not being a good enough player to be out in front of people.

There are lots of advice columns addressing these concerns, but none of them seems to provide what I consider to be the essential fix for the problem. Usually, they’ll tell you to avoid mistakes by being totally prepared, and to neutralize audience judgment, they sometimes suggest manipulative ideas like imagining everybody sitting there naked, which presumably removes their dignity and erases your fear of them. Others give a pep talk to bolster self-esteem, and some even suggest drugs like beta-blockers to remove nervousness. The problem is, the only people who don’t feel any nerves before a performance are those who don’t really care about it, and I suspect that’s what the drugs may turn you into!

What’s missing in all this is that playing music for people isn’t about you, it’s about the music. People are there to enjoy it and learn something, not to pick apart your playing or your mistakes. Nobody even agrees on what constitutes a mistake.

The bottom line is that stagefright has to do with playing for an audience. It takes place when performers focus on their weaknesses instead of their strengths. This fear of weakness does not seem, to me, to be natural. It is often unwittingly taught by teachers who dread mistakes (which for this type of teacher usually means missing a note or playing one out of tune) and believe that teaching this to students will whip them into shape. This is fear-based teaching, and fear is never a long-term motivator.

The cure for stagefright is to invest in musicality, the feeling behind a piece of music, the composer’s intent, and even the background of how and why it was written and used. For example, if I were to play “Hector the Hero” by J.S. Skinner for an audience, I would think about the story of Hector (an article about this will come out down the road on my Scottish music and travel substack), how the tune came about, the first time I heard it played by Buddy MacMaster, and the fact that Buddy played the tune for his mother’s funeral. If I share some of this information with the listeners, they too can hear the story in the melody. I’ll play it better for thinking of the music in this way and trying to do it justice so that others can enjoy and be moved by the tune.

Preparing a piece of music in this way puts mistakes in perspective. Mistakes may happen but far more important is what you have to say musically, the emotional plot of the tune. It’s more enjoyable to improving technique in order to make the music more effective and compelling, than to attempt to make the performance “perfect,” whatever that may mean. And you can improve even more by becoming a “good perfectionist.”

There won’t be any room for stagefright in such a player. In fact, it won’t even make sense to worry about such fear, because they know the music has something to say. (By the way, if the tune doesn’t have a story of its own, create one! Turn your playing into a soundtrack for your own story; it will be more fun and interesting to play and listen to.)

This is not to say there won’t be nervous energy, but it’s important to distinguish nerves from fear. Nervous energy can provide a great boost to a performance if it’s applied to your strengths instead of your weaknesses.

Fear has no connection to making music. Stagefright is proof of this — it makes no contribution to playing or listening. As listeners, we want to hear what a tune has to offer, not whether the player can live up to an arbitrary standard of perfection.

Learn all you can about a tune, put it in context, and let people hear your way of saying it. However you play it, you’ll become more informed, and can play it even better next time.