No ego, no fear

Performance anxiety is mostly rooted in focus on the self. Much of the standard advice about overcoming it centers on muting the ego, on allowing the music to flow through you, becoming a vessel for the music, which is after all the main thing.

As obvious as this sounds, over-concern with oneself and one’s “performance” in an evaluative, judgmental sense, remains a default mindset for many musicians. For one thing, the desire to show off and to be admired is part of most performers’ personality profile, part of what attracted them to public performance in the first place. It can be stubbornly persistent on a visceral level even for musicians who strive to focus on audience communication or on the music itself in their intentional outlook. 

Then, much of the culture around music concentrates attention on the performer more than “the music”. In classical music, the narrowing of the mainstream repertoire to a couple dozen composers and their selected masterworks makes for a peculiar obsession with minute differences in interpretation of music that is already well known to much of its audience—what pianist Peter Serkin called “that harping by musicians and critics on how you play, as if that’s the central issue.”

Given the strong connection between egotism and anxiety, it makes sense that performing with other feels very different from performing solo. Playing collaboratively, I am less inclined to be nervous, and I never experience the overwhelming, almost panicked distress of my worst solo performance moments. Performing with others, it is self-evident that it is not “all about me”. I have to pay attention to my partners, which derails obsessive solipsism from the get-go; and from a starting point not entirely in my own head, it’s that much easier to let go and give myself over to the music. 

Playing new music has a similar effect. When I perform Beethoven, I’m comparing myself to Schnabel and Barenboim and Goode. And their performances are easily found online, which sometimes makes me ask why anyone should come hear me, or what purpose there is in adding to the hundreds of interpretations on YouTube alone. But when I play the music of my deceased composition teacher, or a new piece by a student, the focus is again on the music, not the realization. And at the same time I am clearly doing a service by realizing the music—literally, making it real—for listeners who might otherwise never hear it.

In this project, I try hard to have a piece or two in every show with a local collaborator or by a local composer. I’ve managed this in all but four instances so far. Comparing the all-solo recitals to the others, it’s interesting to note that the ego-muting effect of collaborative playing tends to extend to the entire concert, so that I feel less self-conscious and judgmental in my solo playing, even if it’s 80% of the program.