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Re: Oh golly, I'm nervous.

Author: gwie
Date: 2015-10-26 09:51

My teacher had me set up five chairs in a semi-circle.

In each chair, I would visualize someone that I truly cared about or idolized, and as I played I would stop and try to imagine what each person would say about my playing.

Being nervous is not bad...being nervous shows that you actually care about what you are doing. What you must train is your ability to perform WHILE you are nervous. In practicing like this you are putting yourself in a situation that hopefully simulates the kind of stress you would be in a real concert, and visualizing not only useful feedback from the listeners but also a successful performance.

Beta blockers, as covered extensively here on the BB (see the keepers thread on it), make sense when a person's physiological response to performance stress is beyond normal, to the point that it is debilitating. They do not confer any sort of advantage to the user, despite what some people may think. It will stop your hands from trembling uncontrollably, but it's not going to generate a gorgeous phrase in the second movement of the Mozart concerto for you.

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