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Re: relaxation

Author: EEBaum
Date: 2005-11-30 16:06

I've had about four ideological "oh, how about that" moments over the past year and a half that have cut down my playing stress by about 80%.

They are, in the order they happened:

- People want to like to hear you play.
- The most painful thing to me as an audience member is not hearing missed notes, but rather hearing someone miss a note, and because of that, becoming flustered and losing all musicality thereafter.
- Music may very well be one of the few true adventures left in the world.

Two techniques that help as well:

- If you spend enough time becoming intimately familiar with the ins and outs of a piece -- not only learning which notes there are, but where each note is going, how each one is pulling, and even how they would work if the piece was arranged a bit differently (I made a big post on this recently) -- you are likely to have enough to hold on to that you can avoid focusing on nerves. Knowing the notes alone isn't enough, because it can become automatic, and when the notes are automatic, playing becomes passive, allowing you to think about such things as "wow, my hands are jittery."
- Put the music about six inches to a foot further away from you than it normally is. This still allows you to see the music for reference, but mainly by large phrases... it's far enough away that your focus can never get stuck on a single note. Of course, you need to have it under your fingers before this works.

Brute-force techniques personified by the phrases vjoet describes (e.g. "just play it") and similar just don't work for me with any consistency. They require a person to let out a bit of a scream inside and try to feign some sort of mystical connection with the music that you may not have a solid basis for.

-Alex
www.mostlydifferent.com

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