Conquering the Fear: Overcoming Stage Fright
Imagine you're in the wings of a stage, feeling the pulse of the anticipating audience in sync with your rapid heart beat. You sneak a peek out into the concert hall: those seats are filled with viewers, viewers that, in your head, are full of expectations of perfection. Hundreds of people look out onto the stage, chatting with each other, forecasting an immaculate spectacle. As your hands tremble, the lump in your throat grows, and you close your eyes. You have about five minutes before the theater’s final call. You’ve spent all day trying to relax, but, instead, all you can hear is your mentor’s final critique ringing between your ears. You’re in a state of deep concentration, your mind fluttering between your concerns and the music you’re terrified of forgetting. You feel as though you’re mentally plugging holes, reminding yourself of the right fingering, of the correct technique in that one tricky passage, of the conductor’s last minute notes. You breathe in, you breathe out, but somehow oxygen isn’t doing the trick this time. You ask yourself if you feel like this before every concert, and the answer is a resounding “yes.”
Does this sound familiar to you?
Well, for many years, this was the sensation I felt moments before going out on stage. For those of us in the know, we call this stage fright. Even the best performers, at some point or another, get it: whether it’s a performing artist, like myself, or a high-
performing athlete, most people who have ever been on display, with all eyes on them, will have experienced it.
The month of October has become synonymous to scary things, which is why in this month’s blog post, I’m going to talk about one of the scariest things a musician can go through. Of course, there are other scares that plague us, for example, fear of a career-crippling injury, but stage fright, nonetheless, is enough to scare many of us out of a passion.
For me, stage fright became a part of my pre-concert routine once I began studying at the conservatory and started competing on a regular basis; I was in my late teens at the time. The conservatory mentality is one of perfectionism, because that’s what it takes in today’s classical music industry to succeed. Not only is classical performance an incredibly competitive career, but we’re also not just competing against each other, against other musicians. Nowadays, live-performing musicians are also competing against flawless, and heavily edited, recordings. Audiences have come to expect perfection, because that’s what most of them are consuming every time they press play on a Spotify song. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing: studio producers and engineers deserve every bit of recognition for all of their hard work. On the other hand, it plays a role in the massive expectations that I used to place on myself as a performing musician.
The funny thing is that I wasn’t always so demanding of myself. At the very beginning of my career, when I was six years old, the recitals I played gave me so much joy. I didn’t care about how perfect my performance was. All I really wanted was to share my passion with the people in front of me. In fact, my very first concert was a highly spiritual and jubilant experience. As a mere child, I had more wisdom concerning the music I was playing than I did as a full grown adult.
As the years transpired, as I mentioned, I began developing an exacting sense of perfectionism. I wanted everything that I played to be impeccable. I wanted to win every competition and get a standing ovation at every concert. Though I was playing music at an extremely high level, I wasn’t really enjoying myself anymore.
In order to play any concert or participate in any competition, I had to enter a state of very deep concentration, an emotionally, spiritually, and even physically taxing endeavor.
By the time the performance was over, I would feel utterly drained, at times even dehydrated. I wasn’t able to sleep after my performances, since I’d go through every error, every wrong decision, every mistake in my head, playing it on repeat, over and over again. It got to a point where I didn’t know if I could continue performing. One day, at about the age of 30, I had a conversation with myself:
“I study and practice 90% of the time. I work tirelessly day and night for that 10%, that time I spend on stage. And I don’t even enjoy that 10% anymore. I am suffering through it, so why am I dedicating my life to this?”
I came to the realization that the mistakes I’d make in my performances (because there are always mistakes. Nobody is perfect, especially not me. I am human after all) would mostly go unnoticed by the audience. And even if those errors were very obvious, they didn’t affect the intention of the music. So, then, what was really the intention of the music? What was my purpose as a guitarist?
And that’s when I had this glorious epiphany:
My mission as a musician, everything I do is for the audience. My mission is to inspire them, so that they see the best version of themselves reflected in the guitar, in its humanity, and its imperfections. The guitar isn’t perfect; there is no such thing as a perfect instrument, an instrument that never, throughout all of eternity, needs to be tuned, or fixed up, or cleaned, or replaced. The guitar is imperfect and so am I, and together, the guitar as the medium and me as the interpreter, we are meeting the audience in a space of vulnerability and soulfulness.
I got it right when I was six years old: the idea is to share my passion, my love of music, my love of humanity with others, and that in it of itself is my definition of excellence. So, instead of trying to be perfect all of the time, I had a new focus: I was going to be excellent. And excellence does not equate to perfection, but, instead, excellence is the attitude of sharing the best part of yourself with others.
“Excellence is the attitude of sharing the best part of yourself with others.”
Anyways, I have a video up on my YouTube channel, where I go into more specifics about how I overcame my stage fright and the anecdotes about the wonderful and, yes, imperfect journey that has led me to fully enjoy every moment of my profession, whether I am sharing my heart with you on stage or whether I’m enjoying the music I’m learning at home.