on Anxiety

Learning music means day by day picking up an instrument and roting our way through this week's practice. At the end of that week, we sit down in front of one or a few kindly faces, in the form of a supportive teacher or club - and immediately freeze.

Why do we get nervous performing for others? It seems like such an odd question - ostensibly we're here to enjoy ourselves.

The straightforward answer is that, we're flooding ourselves with adrenaline - with ready energy - and the common solutions are simple ones: practice playing in front of a camera; imagine an audience while you play; rehearse your act.

While these are well-meaning suggestions, they miss the heart of the issue. I believe that performance anxiety is a very understandable and sensible phenomenon: we are doing something very difficult.

Music relates very intimately to our inner world. It's easy to explain why chocolate or Friends makes us happy, but when we emote to wordless music, we have almost nothing to explain why. It just sounds like so to us. Our feelings are an immediate reaction tied up to our emotional construction.

As such, when we make music, the line between *what we are doing*, and *who we are*, is very patchy indeed.

When we perform to others, we are - we intuit - sharing our emotional reality with them, and asking them to trust us with their own. That’s not done lightly: the stakes are about as high as it’s possible to get. Only the closest relationships attempt the same terrfiying maneouvre. On some level, part of us recognises the responsibility, and accordingly - and quite rightly - gets anxious.

Being anxious about performing isn’t irrational or some erratic phenomenon to be beaten off. I rather think we should learn to acknowledge the stakes - and then, come to acknowledge our own competence in the face of them.

If we have done even a little work, and if we are sincere, then we should legitimately feel ourselves equal to the emotional demands of being in the spotlight. If we can legitimise both our anxiety and our competence - and add a good splash of damitall - we'll arrive at a better headspace towards performing

on Noise

According to CS Lewis, music and silence are never to be found in Hell.

Noise (and music can be used as noise) is a fundamental expression: an articulation in sound, that signifies nothing more or less that one exists.

For those of us whose sense of individuated, secure self is under attack - and under the conditions of urbanisation and mass media, this is a great many of us - there can be an urge to make some noise, as naturally as a bird sings to assert its territory. For those of us with a history of being ignored, silence can feel like an unbearable threat.

But, our addiction comes at an awful price: our best, realest and most beautiful thoughts and feelings are, often, devastatingly vulnerable and fleeting. Noise can squash them out of consciousness entirely.

If we are to stand any chance of encountering our real selves, we must face what may once have felt like a terror. It takes maturity to hush and reassure the desperate child in us, and to embrace silence.

on Frustration

In the day to day of a music studio, we’re sure to encounter a particularly noxious emotional substance.

Frustration is a natural part of learning. A concept or a technique eludes us, despite our efforts: we slam the lid, go for a walk, turn on the TV. Mostly we can come back in an hour or so, but when our frustration is left unaddressed for too long, or when the stakes feel high, it can develop into a very real problem - a toxin that can poison our learning for good.

Frustration arises from a sense that something that we feel should be a non-issue is obstructing us. The sense of insignificance is important: mostly, we wouldn’t feel frustration towards recognisably difficult skills like rocket science or the perfect soufflé. As a result, it’s not likely to assail us as total initiates: crucially, it tends to strike just as we feel we are getting somewhere.

In the context of the music lesson, our frustration is magnified because - as always with learning music - our emotional reality is on the line. Feeling able to effectively articulate our internal world is the most important need of a human being. The sense that something so paltry as moving our fingers (or tongue) could cage us in, is the stuff of nightmares.

The answer to this problem lies in an unusual word: humility. It connotes so easily to a resentful kind of puritanism that we forget its helpful truth: humility is, in essence, a frank acceptance of the magnitude before us.

The mythos of romanticism is very keen on individual genius, and bombards us with stories of innately talented musicians breezily knocking off amazing feats. For a young musician starting out in a brutally competitive industry, it can feel that there are only two options: be a genius, or go home. It’s a cruel story. We don’t hear often enough that the genius of Mozart and Bach was matched by their workloads (Mozart’s whole childhood was a music lesson).

Mauro Giuliani was the most brilliant guitarist of the 19th century. His accomplishments are outstanding; his superbly virtuosic compositions are what tend to find their way onto our music stands. But turn for a moment to his opus 1, Study for the guitar: hundreds of boring drills, tediously worked out and laboriously trained in. This is a far more accurate portrait of progress. Giuliani was a genius, but when he set out to achieve perfection, he was aware of the magnitude of the task.

We deserve to be similarly humble in the face of our endeavours. We are aiming at a remarkably challenging skillset, hotwired to what is by definition our touchiest topic. If a teacher knows what they are about, they will learn to spot the tells of frustration and gently provide this encouragement: nobody is born with an instrument. Only a sadist would nurse it.