uncollaborative piano

Over the years playing half-prepared music as a collaborative pianist, I’ve developed a toolkit to start addressing anxiety and distraction while performing. I often get stuck in a loop thinking about something other than clean playing. While I don’t have a master key to focused performance yet, here are the cognitions I cycle through to try and relax while on stage:

-Focus on depth of tone. I find tone helps you focus on what matters as a pro musician, and lets cognition about voice leading, contour take the forefront because you are listening to the surface of the sound throughout the length of the tone. It also organizes other cognitions about “what the notes are” into the right place, making that data secondary to direct perception.

Overall, I think it’s possible that the mind is more efficient at perceiving musically as a form of cognition than thinking about notes. The second is data processing, and more affected by anxiety. The first is more fundamental to the mind’s operations, and is the native procedure of musical thinking.

-Focus on rhythmic feel and groove. My percussion teacher used to say “are you feeling it?” This is often paired with moving the way you want to while playing. This kind of kinesthetic involvement can reduce anxiety and help put you into just having fun with the music. Rhythmic feel is sometimes considered paramount over playing correct notes or all the notes.

-Kinesthetic sensation. If you can focus on how your arms and hands feel, sensation wise, it will almost immediately clear the mind and allow you to get back to reading or focused on the moment. This is a method I neglected for years and discovered just this last weekend.

Another angle I might be finding is that you have to calibrate your confidence level. It takes a certain amount of conceit to be a musician. You have to sort of revel in how good you are at what you do. If you can inspect whether your level of confidence is going to support your performance and put on the needed attitude, you can transform how things go on stage.

Put in a less interior way, think of what the audience wants. They don’t want perfection. They want a show. It’s more fun for them to see someone move through their mistakes and play effusively rather than clam up. They want to see a person in flow. Sometimes this sort of audience/not-self direction can be helpful.