I played at the school's annual awards evening tonight, and I'm needing reassurance.

I did it last year, but at that point i hadn't done much performing and the hall was packed so i was really nervous. But this time i wasn't nervous at all, and i think that was my downfall. You know when they say you need enough nerves to perform well? WELL I DON'T THINK I DID!!!

I made a few mistakes, and so did the other performers, but i'm thinking, the piece i played isn't very well known, and very few in the audience are "musically aware" shall we say. So do you think that because i tried to carry on regardless and i tried to sort of forget the mistakes, the audience will have thought it was good? I mean the type of piece it was....they probably wouldn't know they were mistakes.

Please give me reassurance on this, has this ever happened to any of you?

Thank you.

Yes I make mistakes all the time! When I do solos im encouraged to learn the music off by heart, and I've ended up improvising by shoving baa baa black sheep in the middle until i remember where im up to!!
now that is embarassing and noticable!!

im sure you did fine, and probably your mistakes werent as bad as you thought.
nobody can be perfect after all, I bet they all left thinking 'wow that was great!!'

=D

I am mistake prone, but I don't think little slips are a huge problem

Thank you both, I still feel bad for it, but not AS bad now lol

I'd be inclined to suggest not worrying about it. I'm sure it wasn't as bad as you think, for a start!

I played in our school's award ceremony earlier this year and was generally pelased with what I managed to do despite being more nervous than I had thought possible! One person came up to me afterwards and said, 'Well, I knew the piece so knew where you had gone wrong.' To be honest, that really upset/annyoyed me until I went back downstairs to be met by compliments from all sides, including from music teachers.

From what you've said, it would seem the majority of the audience would't even have known if you'd gone wrong, so I don't think you've got anything to worry about.

Well that was pretty mean and extremely impolite to say that to you!

Fancy saying that to someone! The cheek!

I suppose knowing me i am thinking i did worse than i actually did.

Only my mom and my music teacher probably noticed the mistakes, but i did have compliments afterwards lol.

I don't know of anyone (professionals included) that can honestly say they have ever played a piece completely free of errors. One friend is a sax player who plays 3-5 gigs a week and has done for the last 20 years: He thought about this when I asked him once, and turned all wistful as he remembered the gig where he could count the mistakes on only one hand!

It's not about whether you make mistakes, it's about how: If you kept it going you almost certainly did fine.

I'm sure your playing must have been fine. My worst ever performance invovled my starting an entire passage a tone out in my right hand and me not managing to correct it! Afterwards, my lovely piano teacher who would never say anything nasty about anyone said "well, maybe if you didn't know the piece it would have sounded OK..." Some people can perform well, and others can't. You sound fortunate enough to be on the well side!

Even the very best make mistakes sometimes. And did you know that when so-called 'live concert' recordings are made, they record the rehearsal so that they can (and do) patch where necessary.

My attitude (with my church organist's hat on) is that most people simply don't notice, and the ones that are musical enough to spot the mistake are also sympathetic to the difficulties of playing the #%&* instrument. This may not apply in schools as Miss Ross has found out, where there is a lot of competitiveness, but as you get older it gets easier to accept mistakes - like anything else, it responds to practice!

Don't let mistakes worry you! I always make them!

In year 10 I was accompanying a flautist and i had a week to learn this piece and there were a few bits that I couldn't get right..but on the night I got the right...and then came the last bar...fine..then the last chord ARGHH! wrong chord..attempt again...ARGHH lol! I took me five attempts get it But I just laughed and pulled silly faces to the audience and they enjoyed it

I once played le Onde at a wedding recenption. Chose it as the bride liked it and, more importantly, because I can sit down and play it right through without thinking, my hands start to play it without thinking in piano shops etc. I thought that nothing could make me mess it up but how wrong I was!

On the day there was so much noise with guests talking, wine glasses clinking, knifes, forks and plates clattering that I could hardly play and was making more and more mistakes that were getting harder and harder to recover from. I decided the best thing to do was to get off stage ASAP and about a third of the way through I came to a point where I thought that if I played D major with a nice spread on the chord it would feel finished.

In the event it didn't work very well, it was a very "clunky" cadence but I juts got off the stage as fast as possible thinking "what a total disater that was". In the event I lost count of the number of people who complimented me on my playing and i ended up wondering if they had ears at all! It's amazing what you can get away with in front on a non-musical audience.

i played for our school's award ceremony the other month. i was a little nervous, but was ok once i started. i started off really confidently, and the begining was perfect; but then came the middle section! i hadnt worked on the piece very much, and there were about 4 or 5 mistakes, and one horrible one where i wacked an F natural while playing in A major! the ending was fine though, but only because it was a variation on the begining! i sat down afterwards, and was like "arrghhhhhh! that was awful!!!!!", but then afterwards, i had the headteacher coming up to me and saying how wonderful it was, and then the deputy came along, and i got the "oh i wished i learnt the piano when i was younger" talk, which i always get!!! and a load of parents said how wonderful it was, but i was thinking "did you count the mistakes! there were about one thousand!!!", but aparently they werent as obvious as i thought, seeing as knowone noticed them! i dont think most people notice, as long as it doesnt interupt the flow of the piece, and ruin the overall effect of the performance, it doesnt really matter!

Jacob.

There was a pianist featured in Piano magazine a couple of months ago, I forget his name, but he was considered one of the leading prodigies of his day, though very vain and eccentric, a book has just been released about him. However he was prone to making mistakes on occasions, and when confronted about this after a performance in which he fluffed notes in several pieces, replied : '' Other pianists play the right notes the wrong way, I play the wrong notes the right way''....

I must remember that quote!

When I'm helping the pupils with their sight reading, we talk a lot about how to recover from a slip. It's better to accept that they will happen and learn how to deal with that rather than have them stress about getting their sight reading totally note perfect (which isn't the point anyway)

This is also where they find out the reason why I insist on them being able to tell me the key of the piece, know their scales and be able to form some basic chords. At least if you have to make up a few notes they are more likely to be in key and sound less conspicuous