I have just been through my toughest musical experience to date.

I wasn't performing solo in a recital, or an exam, or a master class ... in none of these have I crumpled quite so badly.

Along with four other colleagues from the small cultural centre / music school where I study, I attended the summer music school of a much bigger and very successful music school in the south of the country, where my oboe teacher also teaches and conducts. He's been quite wary of taking us up to now and this week I found out why!

There are a surprising number of very talented children and young people in the school, which is inspired by many of the same values as the Venezuelan "El Sistema" and with similarly impressive results. For me, playing alongside these kids was more terrifying than anything else I've done so far.

We started from scratch (repertoire - 1st movement of the Eroica, 1812 Overture and theme music from The Terminal) was decided only a day or two before we started on Monday, finishing on Friday with a public concert in the city's main municipal auditorium. On the second day of rehearsals I completely clammed up!!!

I got the full works - tachycardia, shaking fingers, sick in the stomach, hands so sweaty I could hardly hold the oboe and my breath support just died. I've been pretty bad on previous occasions (most notably, an exam last year) but this time I could barely get a note out when it came to my short solos! It was really awful! I ended up closeting myself with my teacher for about an hour while he calmed me down (got me to oil a cor anglais as a distraction - and then to try and play it ).

In the end I resorted to propanolol to get me through two days of rehearsals up to the concert, by which time I had recovered a bit and could play. Not brilliantly but I could play. However, I don't want to continue to rely on pills to control my nerves. It did help with the tachycardia and finger shaking but I felt my reactions were slow and my mouth too dry (not sure if that was related).

I know there are quite a few performance nerves threads with loads of good advice, most of which I have read with care but I was totally incapable of getting anything to work in the heat of the moment. (Same goes for The Inner Game of Music, which I am also reading).

I'm sure many of you will have more great advice. What would really help my shattered confidence right now is to hear from anyone who has been through this level of disaster and come out in shining colours the other side, with performance nerves under control (or constructively channeled) and recovered confidence. Right now my self-confidence is at an all time low.

katica, I'm sending you a big

I don't know what to say other than I've felt terrified, though not to the extent you have described, and got through it. It is getting easier to get up and perform but it still terrifies me. Don't give up katica and remember that many of us are going through varying degrees of stage fright at the events we attend.

I don't know if my "when things go wrong" thread describes the sort of situation that you mean - http://www.abrsm.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=48891 - at the Gloucester forum event, while accompanying someone, I dropped my music on the floor and had to stop and pick it up, while my poor soloist somehow still managed to keep playing until I got back on track, then had a memory lapse for my own solo piece later on, skipped 16 bars then just carried on from wherever.

I don't want to trivialise your situation or what you are feeling by saying "there there" or silly things like that. I don't know if I've ever felt the way you are now, but I think I have come close. Something that helped me was to realise that: it is over now. I have other chances. I lived to play another day and while I do remember that day as being very stressful, I survived. You have too. To me, that's worth something.

I have no idea if what I am saying is making sense or being helpful. If it's just making things worse, tell me and I'll delete it.

Take care.

There are a lot of threads on dealing with performance anxiety on here, one of them quite recent http://www.abrsm.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=49484

I don't want to repeat myself, just so much:It is incredibly common, you are not alone, and it can be overcome, albeit with a lot of work and, very often, a "two steps forward, one step back"-approach.

Awww Katica What a difficult experience.


But don't look so hard on the 'pills' - propanolol is not an evil drug! It is hugely helpful for what it does and you don't need large doses. I think the most useful way to use it is like training muscle memory - use it for a few 'stressful' experiences and you begin to train your body not to react with panic symptoms but with a calm heartbeat and no distracting sweating or shaking. It enables you to concentrate on your performance.

It isn't a sedative, it won't make you sleepy or dopey or your fingers slow. Nor is it addictive or a path to major drug abuse! Used sensibly and occasionally it can be a useful tool to teach your body what a relaxed performance feels like... really, really enjoyable!

I take propanolol for medical reasons but also have used it for musical 'nerves'. Over time I now know what a relaxed and enjoyable performance feels like and rarely use it on a day to day basis. I would say I may always use it for exams but I do one exam every 2-3 years so that's not a lot. My confidence has benefited massively.

With judicious use it's invaluable.

Thank you so much for your support, louise1712, corenfa, Dugazon, lottie...

I don't know how I missed Misterioso's thread as I look out for those on nerves and anxiety... maybe because it started a just couple of days before I set off for the course. I'll continue the conversation over there, as I think it's a great idea to have a continuing thread that brings it all together.

I re-read corenfa's post-Gloucester thread, which is also really useful. One always thinks twice about posting a lot of detail on a public forum but it really does help other people.

Thanks for the advice on propanolol, lottie. There were good reasons for taking it but also I need to be a bit careful because of a particular lingering health issue (bronchial problems - though fortunately not asthma). It didn't really do that much to remove some of the anxiety symptoms, actually, but just not having the tachycardia was a relief.

I know exactly how you feel . The worst thing my teacher has ever done to me was to get me to play in a Master class when I had been learning for four or five months. I had refused to play in his Christmas concert about two months earlier but I had gone along to listen and concluded that while I wasn't good, I wasn't really that much worse than the others.

He told me that he had asked his own teacher from the Conservatoire in Paris to come and give the master class, that he was a very nice man and that it would be good for me to play in front of someone else. He did mention that he was inviting a few of his colleagues from other towns to come with their own pupils but I assumed they would be of a similar level to the ones in my music school and, without realising what I was letting myself in for, agreed.

On the day itself, they split the pupils up into "beginners" and "advanced". He put me with the "advanced" ones because I was playing the first movement of the Telemann sonata that you are currently working on (and the "beginners" were playing out of tutor books or "arranged" pieces). I was the only adult pupil present and all the other "advanced" pupils were teenagers (15+) from the other schools, and they really were advanced pupils. The more I listened, the more stressed I became. When it got to the lunchbreak I told my teacher that I had changed my mind and didn't want to play. He refused to let me chicken out, saying that if I chickened out now, I would never have the courage to play in public anywhere and in the end I agreed providing he announced first that I had only been learning for four months. He did make an announcement but by that stage my nerves had got completely out of control and I could barely breath let alone take in enough air to play the oboe. I had to have three attempts before a note came out and I struggled pitifully through the first line and the G at the end of the line didn't come out The masterclass teacher was very kind about it and said something about the G being a tricky note to play But I was mortified and can't remember the rest (I think it was too traumatic so I have blanked it out).

I do know that in my next lesson, I told my teacher that I was never ever playing in public again. And this was when he said to me that playing in public is a skill that pupils need to be taught, just as they need to be taught the technical side of the instrument and that the reason I was getting so anxious was because I had never been taught.

A couple of years later, foolishly I thought at the time, I let myself be talked into taking part in a similar one. See this thread:
http://www.abrsm.org/forum/index.php?showtopic=21512&hl=

However, there is hope . I didn't think I would ever be posting this but, five years on, my teacher is organising another one at the end of March and I am looking forward to it

I can't put my finger on anything precise that made things better. I think it is largely to do with confidence but the problem is how to get the confidence I have noticed from the various courses I've been on that the people with the most confidence, the ones who put themselves forward all the time, are not always those who play the best so it is not just to do with how good a player you are.

Having some "good" performances eventually enabled me to break out of the visious circle of nerves leading to a bad performance leading to more nerves... And I think a session of hypnotherapy helped too, but probably the most important was my teacher; his belief that I would one day be able to perform in public, and my belief that he knew what he was talking about. I think my performance skills (if I can call them that) are still quite fragile - I know, for example that one of the conductors always manages to make me feel stressed and that I don't play as well in that orchestra as in others - but I do feel confident when my teacher is organising things.

As for playing in orchestras, as someone said in the oboe thread, it is a different skill to solo-performing. In one of the masterclasses, the teacher, who is 1st oboe in a professional orchestra, told me that he finds orchestra solos the hardest thing to perform because you have the whole orchestra relying on you. If you are are playing a solo with an accompanist, then it is the accompanist's job to keep up with you, however many mistakes you make, but if you make just one mistake in your orchestral solo then you can potentially put every other musician off and bring the piece to a standstill. His solution to overcome shortness of breath, fast heartbeat etc. is to deliberately hyperventilate shortly before his solo that his body has become used to the effects of excess adrenaline before the vital part. At the time I thought this sounded like a good idea, but never plucked up enough courage to try it.

I don't really know what I can offer as advice - just not to give up completely on the idea of performing.

My horn teacher said this as well. I had never performed solo and she told me, right then - here is what you must do, and gave me a script that covered everything that I needed to know that I could just follow. For interest's sake, here it is (I think I can mostly remember it), though it won't be relevant to people here as you aren't horn players, and even if you are you might disagree, it's just her method.

1. Walk "on stage" looking confident even if you're not
2. Carry your horn under one arm; DO NOT hold it like a shopping basket.
3. Face the audience and bow once. Hold your mouthpiece in one hand so it doesn't drop out of the horn.
4. Tune with the pianist
5. Arrange yourself so you can see the pianist.
6. Make eye contact with the pianist and nod to start.
7. When you're playing, look into the far distance, don't make eye contact with anyone.
8. Smile and bow again at the end
9. Remember to acknowledge your pianist
10. Walk out looking confident no matter what went wrong.

The reason it helped me was that it was very detailed - things like, hold your mouthpiece so it doesn't fall out, look into the far distance etc, meant that my brain was occupied with thinking of these things and I had less brain space to get nervous with.

That is what beta blockers do, control the physical effects of the surge of adrenaline you get in anxiety: just controlling that tachycardia can be a big step though in starting you on the route to management of the anxiety though. As you probably know, those "nerves" tend to involve a vicious cycle - feel anxious, become aware of anxiety, start to sweat, notice pounding heart, feel breathless, makes me feel more anxious, and up and up it winds. Breaking into that cycle by preventing heart rate from taking off means you have a chance at least to address the other issues without tachycardia feeding into the cycle: what others have also found on the forum is that one way to use them is to get their benefit for a few of the anxiety-provoking episodes in a row, then trying lower doses or going without, as the mental aspects ease.

You very much have my sympathy - I've always tended to be anxious, and the day I played Bach's fourth Brandenburg concerto, as the first recorder player, I had to gauge timing of my betablocker quite carefully, to cover the rehearsal earlier and then the concert itself later. I took it late-ishly, was aware of tachycardia a lot in the runup to rehearsing....but got through, knowing it would be fully on board for the concert. During the latter, I lost my place for twenty or more bars (it felt like an eternity!).....and found my way back in, somehow, thank you, betablocker! For me, borderline blood pressure at times now provides me with an excuse to take slow-acting propranolol and kill two birds with one stone - but remember, if you're not wanting to feel "reliant" on it, it's perfectly possibly to use it for the most anxious times only, and also to get adjusted to the processes making you anxious without needing to go on using it all the time.

I'm so glad you turned up here, Roseau! I remembered you'd had a break-through recently and hoped you'd share a bit more.

The performance routine is a great idea, corenfa. I actually do something like an oboe equivalent for recitals. I need something similar, but more internal, for ensemble situations.

And thanks for the great info on betablockers, anacrusis.

I am cross-referencing it all over on Misterioso's "to be continued" Performance Anxiety thread and will continue the more general conversation over there.