[Menvi-discuss] mental aspects of playing/performing

Tue May 8 22:32:55 EDT 2012

Hello,
Well I'm an Opera singer, so I'll give you what I'm told.
When people come and bang on your door and tell you they could go to the 
Opera house to hear music, and they don't need it right now, you know that 
you'll be thinking about all their complaints when you're in that opera 
house singing the lead.
Kind of taken from:
http://jenniferrivera.squarespace.com/

My voice teacher calls the zone you go into when you're in when you sing, 
your own cathedral. Your voice and the piano are the only things in that 
cathedral. You are able to tune out the piano to be a very small part of 
what you hear and just have your voice giving you feed back, or you can 
bring in the piano. It's all dependent on your preference and the part of 
the song.

I also do warm-ups before I perform, relaxing, getting the breath moving and 
energizing me. I look like a dork doing them, but they work so I deem them 
worth it.
But for relieving nerves in particular, I stand on the balls of my feet and 
just bounce up and down very lightly. While I'm doing that I make sure every 
part of my body is relaxed except for the muscles that are working. I make 
sure I'm breathing without constraint and I'm all relaxed and ready for the 
impulsive action that inspires my entrance.
When you bounce (The correct term is "feathering), it's just a very light 
action. with your heals moving up and down. It looks like you're shaking to 
people who are watching you.

I could also tell you vocal exercises to get rid of nerves, but for a 
musician playing something other than the voice, they won't probably do 
much.

I'm against almost all drugs when it comes to performing. Just perhaps some 
nasal spray if you're terribly sick, but in Opera, singing when sick is akin 
to running with a sprained ankle, so no drugs!

...But if you had bumps on your tonsils, that's another matter!!!... LOL JK

But if I find myself getting out of it, I  do a shake down and possibly an 
energetic slap-down.
(It's too difficult to say exactly what I mean over email... so I should 
stop... :()
Thank you,

Brandon Keith Biggs
-----Original Message----- 
From: Chris Smart
Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2012 3:23 PM
To: This is for discussing music and braille literacy
Subject: [Menvi-discuss] mental aspects of playing/performing

Hi folks.

For those of you who perform, or just get anxious if you know
anybody can hear you, even when practicing, how do you deal with it?

I'm doing some daily deep breathing exercises and trying to just
adopt an attitude of it not mattering so much if I hit a wrong
note, but that is easier said than done.

I got a chance to jam with Larry Carlton last month at a master
class, and while it was a positive experience, I was so worked up
it felt like I was listening to someone else play, like, observing
myself, not able to really hear what was going on. I don't mean
that in a good sense, as in, wow, I was so into the music I blocked
out distractions. I mean that I was so up tight I wasn't present at
all!

I realize that we are our own worst critics, and that we hear lots
of things the audience neither notices nor cares about, but that
doesn't seem to actually help my state of mind when playing.

Do any of you have any strategies for coping with this sort of
internal tention that actually work for you?

Connected to this is perhaps a controvercial question, but I'll ask
it anyway. Beta blockers ... good or bad?

Thanks for any insights,

Chris
P.S. One thing I read in a book recently stated that hey, we're not
performing brain surgery or piloting a plain. Nobody dies if we
mess up. *laugh*
--------------------------------------------------
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