5 important things to understand about music performance anxiety

Music performance anxiety is a common issue amongst performing musicians and can have a range of negative consequences. Despite its prevalence and damaging effects, it’s rarely talked about or addressed in music education.

Here are five important pieces of information about performance anxiety which will hopefully change your views about it and help you see performance anxiety not as an uncontrollable scary monster but a manageable challenge in your musical life.

1. You are not alone: it is common and even professional musicians suffer from it

Music performance anxiety is common. No one is immune to it—it doesn’t matter how old you are; whether you are an amateur, a student, or a professional; or how much performance experience you have. Some of the most famous performers are said to have suffered greatly from performance anxiety including Arthur Rubinstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Pablo Casals, and Glenn Gould, just to name a few.^1,2

However, musicians rarely talk about it and the problem is not addressed in music education very much, which can often make people feel like they’re in it alone.

It is difficult to give an accurate prevalence rate due to lack of standardised measures or cut-offs. However, one large-scale study³ (the largest study of its kind to date, though a little old, from 1988) involving over 2000 professional orchestral musicians found that 24% of respondents reported that performance anxiety was a problem for them, while 16% reported it being a ‘severe’ problem. This study surveyed 48 major US orchestras including the Chicago Symphony, New York Philharmonic, Cleveland, and LA Philharmonic orchestras, amongst others.

Performance anxiety is believed to be even more common amongst students, and findings from several studies suggest that around 20-35% of music students experience problematic performance anxiety.⁴ In fact, it seems that almost all students experience some level of performance anxiety.⁵

It’s important to know that you are not alone, because then you can talk about the issue with others and this also helps to destigmatise performance anxiety.

2. It does not necessarily mean that you are going to perform badly

Here is an excerpt from a definition of performance anxiety given by a leading author on the topic:

“Music performance anxiety is the experience of marked and persistent anxious apprehension related to musical performance that has arisen through specific anxiety conditioning experiences and which is manifested through combinations of affective, cognitive, somatic and behavioural symptoms…It may or may not impair the quality of the musical performance.”^6(p12)

Note the last part, which I have underlined for emphasis. Research has found mixed evidence for the effect of performance anxiety on performance quality.^7–9  It has also been noted that ‘catastrophes’ in performances are extremely rare,¹⁰ while ‘feeling nervous’ to some degree can actually facilitate optimal performance.^11,12 This suggests that performance anxiety does not necessarily affect performance quality.

This is not to undermine the severity and problematic nature of performance anxiety, which can have a range of consequences including negative impacts on one’s wellbeing, mental health, and career. However, it is important to know that there is no clear connection between experiencing performance anxiety and performance quality.

3. The audience will probably not even realise that you’re feeling nervous

A study⁷ which tested an intervention programme for performance anxiety amongst high school music students found a disconnect between performers’ and audience members’ perception of performance anxiety. The students in this study did a performance before and after the intervention to see how effective the intervention was – and it was effective indeed, with students reporting lower levels of performance anxiety after the intervention.

Judges were asked to rate their perception of students’ performance anxiety during their performances. Since the students reported feeling less nervous after the intervention, you’d expect the judges to think the same. However, this was not the case.

While the students reported feeling less performance anxiety, the judges could not tell the difference. In fact, their ratings overall were very low – the judges did not think that the students looked nervous during the performances, before or after the intervention.

The authors made an interesting and important remark upon this finding which I think sums up the key message very well:

“This finding conveys an important psychoeducational message: while students may feel anxious and/or perceive themselves to look anxious, this anxiety is not necessarily discernable to audience members, even when these members of the audience have been explicitly requested to be vigilant to signs of MPA (music performance anxiety).”^7(p8)

4. Physiological symptoms do not have to become ‘anxiety’

Physiological symptoms of performance anxiety include increased heart rate, sweaty hands, trembling, and butterflies in the stomach, amongst others. For many people, experiencing these sensations before a performance leads them to jump to the conclusion that they are feeling nervous and anxious. But it does not need to be so.

You can turn your ‘anxiety’ into ‘excitement’ if you choose to interpret your physical sensations in a different way.¹³ This is because anxiety and excitement possess similar physiological symptoms – for example, butterflies in the stomach could mean either that you’re nervous and dreading something, or that you are excited about something and can’t wait for it.

Musicians display similar physiological symptoms regardless of their levels of experienced performance anxiety.^8,14 The difference between people who experience high and low levels of performance anxiety lie mostly in how they interpret the physical sensations.

For this reason, it has been suggested that reframing anxiety as excitement is more effective than trying to calm down, because relaxation has different physiological properties to anxiety.¹³

5. If you perform badly, it does not mean that you are a failure

Musicians often start playing their instruments at an early age and invest tremendous amounts of time and effort into music. Because of this, they may develop a unidimensional identity,¹⁵ where their identity and sense of self comprises mostly, if not only, as a musician. As a result, self-esteem—both as a musician and as a person—becomes heavily reliant on musical successes. This means that musicians start to believe that if they perform badly, then they are a failure as a person, and this leads to increased levels of performance anxiety.²

Remember that you are more than your performances and your successes as a musician!!

In summary…

When it comes to performance anxiety, remember that:

• You are not alone
• It does not necessarily mean that you will perform badly
• The audience probably won’t notice
• The secret is in how you interpret the physiological symptoms (i.e. You can turn your ‘anxiety’ into excitement)
• Your successes or failures as a musician do not need to define who you are as a person

Most importantly, performance anxiety is not a fixed trait – you can learn to manage it. For tips on managing performance anxiety, check out our previous article 10 things you can do to manage performance anxiety (Part 1).