Perspectives on Music Performance Anxiety
Why your stage fright uncovers deeper issues in music education and culture
What is Music Performance Anxiety?
You have been practicing this piece for almost a year. You have played it thousands of times, mastering every small detail that you know the audience may not even be able to perceive. Yet, 30 minutes before going on stage to perform, you start shaking. Thoughts come to your mind that something might go wrong with your performance. What if you forget the piece midway and you stop, while the audience awkwardly watches you try to recover? What if your hands or voice are too shaky, forcing mistakes while you play your instrument or sing that the audience will judge you for?
These critical or self-evaluative emotions a musician has towards themselves before, during, or after a musical performance are often characterized as Music Performance Anxiety (MPA). MPA is really more common than you might think. A 2015 musicians’ health study shows that out of 447 classical musicians, 98% have experienced MPA at some point, while 70% have even tried using beta blockers, medication that blocks stress hormones and slows down the heart, for it [1].
You don’t even need to look at professional music performers to understand how prevalent MPA is. If you’ve ever participated in music recitals at your school or university, you have probably noticed that most students experience some level of stage fright, and very few look excited and confident to go on stage.
Music Performance Anxiety is therefore a disability, in the sense that it is a disabling attribute of one’s personality in their goal of producing a good music performance. Or…at least that’s how the medical model of disability might portray MPA, but the reality is far more nuanced than this.
Medical Model
The medical model of disability has been the dominant perspective from which we view disabilities. The medical approach seeks to identify physical and mental factors in a person that contribute to them facing a disadvantage in their integration into society or their ability to perform tasks that an “average” person can perform. Medically, MPA is considered a member of the social anxiety disorders. [2]
While it is hard to argue against the importance of the biomedical examination of human behavior, the medical declaration of some behavior or characteristic as a disability can have a stigmatizing impact. In the case of Music Performance Anxiety, it implies that people having this “flawed” characteristic need to fix it in order to be able to become musicians.
The extensive research on how to use psychotherapy treatment [3] to treat MPA and the increasing use of medication for alleviating the symptoms of performance anxiety [1] reinforce the perspective that music performance anxiety is an undesirable, incapacitating characteristic and an unavoidable barrier to hopes of equal access to music.
When we start asking questions about whether MPA is purely a construct of one’s physical and mental characteristics, however, we start to see that it is a far more nuanced “disability” than the medical model alone portrays.
Social Model
The social model of disability shifts the focus away from the identification of physical manifestations of disability. Instead, it identifies social deficiencies that lead to systemic social barriers and exclusion that disallow individuals with some form of impairment to attain their valued functionings [4].
In this case, we can reformulate the discussion on music performance anxiety in a different way. Instead of viewing it as an impairment that disallows individuals access to music education, we can question whether the music education system has deficiencies that lead to unfairness of access.
Not everyone that wants to learn music necessarily wants to become a musician -in fact, most people don’t. Yet, performance has become an inseparable part of music education approaches today, with mandatory end-of-semester recitals being commonplace in high schools, universities, but also music schools even for classes of students that are 3 years old or younger. Most people want to learn how to sing or how to play the guitar without having aspirations of becoming music performers, and most parents don’t sign up their kids to music school so that they can become professional performers. Music Performance Anxiety for most people becomes a disabling factor only because performance is mandatory in places where it doesn’t have to be. Music clearly has a myriad of benefits even outside of the context of public performance. Enforcing public performance, therefore, clearly places unfair barriers for those who are not interested in or comfortable with performing.
Cultural Model
Another productive approach is considering the cultural mark of music performance anxiety, both as a culture of disability and with regards to the cultural views on disability, an approach referred to as the cultural model of disability [5]. Are there common stereotypes or associations we make regarding music performance?
Perhaps we can think of the portrayal of successful pop artists in pop culture as confident performers who know how to interact with and please their audience. The ability to go on stage and perform with confidence and without mistakes when thousands of people are watching is an unattachable characteristic of successful performers in the pop music culture.
In a western classical music context, we are often exposed to the narrative of 10-year-old piano prodigies who win piano competitions and gain a spot in the world’s most prestigious concert halls. We observe how they seem completely calm as they perform a hard piano concerto while accompanied by a big orchestra of professional musicians.
Musicianship is undeniably culturally associated with the demonstration of artistic capability, a story that seems incompatible with a socially anxious individual that wants to learn how to play their favorite pop songs on the piano, that wants to create and even share their own lo-fi hip hop songs, or that wants to learn music theory to understand their favorite songs a little bit better.
Social Relational Model
Lastly, an enlightening alternative approach for investigating musical performance anxiety as a disability is the social relational model [6]. The object relations construct of disability raises awareness of the relative and contextual nature of disability, something we observed arises from the previous two models as well.
In the case of a mandatory end-of-semester recital to demonstrate the piano skills you developed, music performance anxiety seems like an impairing characteristic. For many individuals in the social anxiety spectrum, however, introversion and comfort with solitude is an inherent part of their music experience, both in listening and especially in creating. While the relation between creativity and social anxiety is still a matter that isn’t perfectly understood [7], the fact that more and more artists are open about them being introverted and it being a big part of their creative process is an important step to challenging the cultural image of what a successful musician is.
Closing thoughts
Through this short exploration, we saw that Music Performance Anxiety isn’t simply a disability that one needs to overcome in order to learn music. The truth is, there are serious, unfair accessibility barriers in music education that stem from a troubled association of music learning with performance. Most people do not want to become professional music performers, and many people enjoy practicing, creating, and even performing music in solitude or among close friends or family. But even among professional musicians, the career of the ‘live performance musician’ is becoming less common, with most musicians relying on recording their music and releasing it online.
Mandatory public music performances reinforce cultural stereotypes of the performing musician, and, concerningly, amplify the medical model of Music Performance Anxiety, leading to an increasing amount of people seeking psychotherapy treatment and resorting to medical treatment of their anxiety symptoms. Understanding how different everyone’s experience and aspirations with music are can help us understand that Music Performance Anxiety is not just something that is constructed solely within ourselves.
Why did this expectation and enforcement of musical performance arise in music education? Why are we assuming that music is an inherently social activity? I am planning to publish more short explorations of questions such as these in the topics of music education and disability studies, so your feedback and opinions are welcomed and appreciated! You are free to use the illustrations in this article for non-commercial purposes, but please remember to credit me by referencing this article.
References
[1] Beder, John. The 2015 Musicians’ Health Survey Results. Senza Sordino.
[2] Burin, Ana & Osório, Flávia. (2017). Music performance anxiety: A critical review of etiological aspects, perceived causes, coping strategies and treatment. Archives of Clinical Psychiatry (São Paulo). 44. 127–133.
[3] Matei, Raluca & and Jane Ginsborg (2017). Music Performance Anxiety in Classical Musicians: What We Know about What Works. BJPsych Int.
[4] Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, Disability Alliance. (1976). “Fundamental Principles of Disability”, Summary of the discussion held on 22nd November, 1975.
[5] Devlieger, Patrick. (2005). Generating a cultural model of disability.
[6] Wilson, Shula. (2003). A Relational Model of Disability. Disability, Counselling and Psychotherapy, 19–40.
[7] Silvia, Paul & Kimbrel, Nathan. (2010). A Dimensional Analysis of Creativity and Mental Illness: Do Anxiety and Depression Symptoms Predict Creative Cognition, Creative Accomplishments, and Creative Self-Concepts?. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. 4. 2–10.
