Confidence – Bulletproof Musician: Recent Episodes
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Cellist Yumi Kendall (Philadelphia Orchestra, Curtis) shares insights on how she balances practicing with other career and life demands, plus the importance of self-compassion and developing positive mental habits.Source
If you’ve ever taken a professional orchestra audition, and perhaps even a seating audition at school or at a summer festival, have you ever wondered what the musicians on the other side of the room or the screen are listening for?Is it our sound? Intonation? Rhythm? Phrasing? Consistency? Expressiveness?Wouldn’t it be nice if we could get into the heads of audition committees and find out what they’re thinking when they hear us play? Well, we may not be able to read their minds, but a 2022 study gets us close.Source
Whether it’s auditioning for orchestra jobs, securing a residency for your string quartet, or building up your teaching studio, have you ever had one of those moments where you begin to question whether things are ever going to work out?Source
Parents, teachers, coaches in every sports movie you’ve ever watched, and strangers on the internet often emphasize how important it is that we believe in ourselves. For instance, here’s a popular quote that I’m sure you’ve stumbled across on the internet: “Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right.” -Henry […]Source
When you think of classical music, what instruments come to mind? An orchestral instrument of some kind, like strings, woodwinds, brass, or percussion? Maybe piano? Voice? Or guitar?Would accordion make your list?Source
I once heard somewhere, years ago, that if you want your kid to eat a new vegetable or unusual food, you have to put it in front of them an average of 16 times before they’ll touch it.Source
Whether you’re trying to play the clarinet, hit a backhand slice, pull off an omaplata sweep, or flip a pan-sized pancake without a spatula, you’ve undoubtedly heard the phrase “practice makes perfect.” Source
Tournaments and competition are a natural part of sports, and can be a lot of fun to watch, whether it’s your kid’s high school volleyball tournament or the NCAA basketball playoffs. Similarly, music competitions ranging from American Idol to the Van Cliburn competition to smaller local or regional competitions, can be pretty engaging experiences for an audience too.Source
You probably spend a lot of time thinking about how to practice and learn more effectively.You probably also spend a lot of time thinking about how to perform more optimally, and what you have to do in that moment to play your best.But as performance science researcher Aaron Williamon noted in his podcast episode a few months ago, there’s a third element that’s helpful to include in the practice-performance equation.And that’s what we ought to do after a performance - i.e. the post-performance review.Source
My parents would sometimes take me on drives in the countryside, with the intention of getting lost and finding their way back home. It always worked out fine with my dad at the wheel, but it seems that I did not inherit his good sense of direction, and given a choice, will tend to take the exit or fork in the road that takes me further away from home.Source
I don’t know if this is normal or not, but I’ve always really enjoyed reading consumer reviews.Whether I’m searching for the right bathmat, garbage bags, or sugar free gummy bears (and if this is the first you’re hearing of this internet phenomenon, read that review 🤣), I like having some data before taking action.Source
It’s the day before an audition, and as you take a few minutes to review some tricky sections, suddenly you get a twinge of anxiety and start stressing and freaking out about how awful everything sounds. How unprepared you feel. And how horribly you’re afraid things are going to go. It’s at those exact moments when you know the right thing to do is “think positive.”But these are also the exact moments when it’s hardest to think good thoughts. Like telling a kid to cheer up after they just lost all of their video game privileges for the day, as their little sister munches happily on the last ice cream sandwich in the freezer, giggling while watching her favorite YouTube show (hmm…that's awfully specific...doesn’t that kind of make you wonder what’s happening in the Kageyama household right now?). Most of us have a natural tendency to dwell on negative thoughts. To worry about the future, bemoan past decisions and choices, and focus on what’s bothering us right now in the present. Which from a survival perspective, probably makes good sense. But from a performance perspective, this negativity bias can make it difficult to stay in a good frame of mind before auditions. Or get to sleep the night before a big recital. Which can then make the performance go to crap.So how can we get better at “thinking positive” - at least temporarily - when we need it most? Source
Once upon a time, when my son was but a wee 5th grader, my wife and I sat down with him to review his homework assignment – an essay about the early explorers who discovered America. The idea was to give him feedback on how to make his next draft even better.Source
I don't know if this is a universal phenomenon or not, but I remember my kids both going through a phase where they tried to avoid explaining things by saying "it's complicated."To their credit, some of the things we experience in life really are difficult to articulate in words - despite being clear to us in a non-verbal sort of way.Source
Ever notice how your brain can sometimes be your greatest asset, but at other times, a total liability? Like how it tends to approach performances as if they are life-or-death tests of our worthiness as human beings, even though this is pretty much a guaranteed recipe for misery before, during, and after?That's obviously way more pressure than anyone needs, so searching for a more reassuring, performance-enhancing way to view performances (i.e. “reframing”) is something that many musicians have experimented with at some point.Reframes like:“Remember that the audience is rooting for you to do well; they’re on your side.”Or “Think of your performance as a gift that you are sharing with the audience.”The latter in particular is a way of framing performances that I’ve heard a number of times. But does it really work?Source
Whether you sing or play an instrument, I’m guessing that on your music stand right now, there is at least one piece with a scary shift or big leap in it that stresses you out when you see it coming.Where once you start thinking about it, your muscles start to tighten up, and you find yourself micromanaging or overcontrolling the details, which often just leads to a miss.I think this a pretty common bugaboo for many musicians, so when I heard violinist Laurie Smukler talk about how important it is to not just practice getting from point A to point B, but to practice shifting in rhythm, my ears perked up, and I was intrigued.Source
It’s been decades since that day I stood in front of a panel of faculty at Curtis for my college audition, but I still remember it as one of the most anxiety-provoking moments of my life.I had never met any of the musicians who sat and looked at me from behind the table. I knew them only by name and reputation - and even then, wasn’t sure who was who (needless to say, this was before Google and Facebook had been invented).I’m sure they were all perfectly congenial and friendly people, and heck, it’s very possible that one or two may even have smiled at me, but in the heat of the moment, all I saw was an intimidating row of stern, somber, serious-looking faces.Needless to say, my nerves shot through the roof.Whether it’s a college audition, juries, competition, or the unscreened round of an orchestral audition, what are we to do when we come face to face with the people who can meaningfully shape the future course of our lives with just a few marks of their pens?Is there anything we can do in that moment to buoy our confidence and keep our nerves from getting the better of us?Source
With the new year now upon us, you’ve probably begun to see a lot of articles about resolutions, goals, and habits pop into your inbox and news feed.We could spend months exploring the various aspects of this research, but I thought we could keep it simple today. And focus on just one question about setting goals.Namely, what type of goals are best if you want to maximize motivation and the likelihood of sticking with your plans?Source
You know those days when you walk into an audition, or a performance exam, or a music theory final, and for whatever reason, you just know that it’s going to be a good day?These moments can feel pretty terrific indeed - I mean, everything is funner and so much easier when we don’t have that knot in the pit of our stomach.Source
When I was going through the music world as a kid in the 80’s and 90’s, nobody really talked about performance anxiety.I mean, I’m pretty sure it was something we all felt, but it was so rare to hear anyone acknowledge it any way, that I still remember the one time another student brought it up before a concert.Source
“Don’t worry, be happy!”
“Stay positive!”
“Don’t be nervous/sad/upset/frustrated/etc.!”
Throughout our lives, we are told in many ways - both explicitly, and often, more subtly - that we ought to maintain a positive, upbeat attitude. That winners engage in positive thinking, and our success is dependent on our ability to avoiding being so negative.
And while there is certainly much to be said for positivity, sometimes it can be awfully exhausting to keep it up.
Because on occasion, we do experience things in life that are disappointing, discouraging, or frustrating. Sometimes we just feel kind of blah for no apparent reason. And when life throws us curveballs, most of us do have moments of pessimism, doubt, and maybe even panic.
How bad is it for us to let negative thoughts or emotions like this into our lives? Is this like the worst mental habit ever? Are we setting ourselves up for failure by not maintaining better mental hygiene?
Today I’ll be chatting with bassoonist Kim Laskowski, who is currently on the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music and The Juilliard school, and has been associate principal bassoon in the NY Philharmonic for nearly 20 years - a position she won at age 48.
I took piano lessons for several years as a child. But I didn’t get very far because I had a rather peculiar approach to learning.
Due to my principled objection to the existence of other clefs, I never actually learned bass clef. Anytime I got a new piece, I just memorized the left hand, and played off the music while looking at the treble clef.
I know…pretty ridiculous in hindsight.
But you know the saying “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”? Well, I was reminded of my bass clef aversion recently when listening to my daughter practice the piano. Unlike me, she can read both clefs. But in an interesting twist, she seems to have an objection to looking at the music at all, preferring to keep poking around for the right notes by ear.
Imagine giving a beginning hunt-and-peck typist this blank keyboard (btw, isn’t that the awesomest thing ever?), and you’ll have a pretty good idea what we experience in our living room every day.
Needless to say, it drives my wife (a pianist) crazy. Whom I’ll often hear shouting “LOOK AT THE MUSIC!!!” from various corners of our apartment.
But then I read a study recently which made me wonder if our little one is actually onto something.
Huh?! What could that possibly be?
You’ve undoubtedly heard musicians, athletes, teachers, coaches, and psychologists alike, extol the virtues of mental imagery. How it can not only enhance your learning, but improve performance, help build self-confidence, regulate your emotional state, and more.
But you’ve probably also heard that for imagery to be effective, you must be able to generate vivid, clear images (or sounds or kinesthetic sensations).
So…what are we to do if we can’t create a clear image, sound, or physical movement? What if the only thing we can conjure up is a fuzzy, vague, fleeting image? What if all we can see and hear are missed shifts and cracked notes?
Should we scrap the idea of imagery altogether? Or just keep at it in the hopes that one day something will finally click?
Performing can be fun when you know you’re prepared, walk on stage feeling confident that things are going to go well, play your heart out, and not only sound great, but experience that feeling of being in “flow.”
And then there are those performance days when you wake up the morning to a nagging feeling deep down (or a screaming voice), that you’re not ready. That you hadn’t given yourself enough time to really get comfortable with a certain piece, or hadn’t practiced diligently or smartly enough in the time you did have.
Playing poorly in front of other people is never fun. And the downward spiral of doubts and doom that can kick in after a disappointing performance is no picnic either. So logically, it makes sense to avoid performing until we’re at least somewhat performance-ready, no?
But what does the evidence suggest? Should we avoid any sort of pressure situation until we’re pretty confident that we’re performance-ready? Or are there any benefits to performing even before we feel totally comfortable?
In 1948, the UCLA men's basketball team finished with a 12-13 record.
Hoping to turn things around, they hired a young coach named John Wooden, who had spent the last two years coaching at Indiana State University.
He made an immediate impact at UCLA, coaching the team to a division title and a 22-7 record - more wins than they had ever had in a season.
I was listening to an entertaining This American Life podcast episode this week, and unexpectedly learned something curious about cats (the episode was not about cats).
Whether it’s an audition, recital, or blind date, I think we all know that nerves are normal and to be expected. But that doesn’t stop us from looking for ways to try to get rid of anxious feelings, because the butterflies and jitters aren’t especially fun.
Subscribe to the weekly podcast via iTunes | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Stitcher Once upon a time, when my daughter was a toddler, we brought home a container of super cute mini zucchini’s that we found a local farmer’s market. She took a nibble, made a face and spit it out, and from that […]
Whether it was reading non-treble clefs, the circle of fifths, chord inversions, or the day my mom tried to explain time signatures to me with fractional apple slices, music theory is something I always struggled to grasp.
Something about it just never quite clicked. And it always felt like something to be endured, whether as a pre-college student, or eventually, as a music major in college. Because no matter where I went, theory class was always a required part of the curriculum. Which always made me wonder…WHY???? 🤬
Pianist Leon Fleisher once said something along the lines how playing a note is easy - but playing that note musically is much more difficult.
And when you start adding more notes, and more expressive possibilities to the equation, the challenge only increases. Whether it’s elements of phrasing and timing, dynamics, sound and color, articulation, or even one’s physical movements, expressive musical performances require ingredients from many different dimensions indeed!
Have you ever found yourself wanting to improve yourself or your skills in some way, but unable to make meaningful progress? Even though you know exactly what you need to do to improve?
Like maybe you want to be a better sight-reader, and know that you ought to read through more music with friends, but keep making excuses or avoid the uncomfortable situations that would involve sight-reading?
Or maybe you’d like to become more comfortable with public speaking, and know that it would help to participate in a local Toastmasters group, but feel really awkward when attending meetings and participating?
Back in college, my wife and I would good-naturedly debate which was the more difficult instrument - violin (my instrument) or piano (her instrument).
I would always throw out the intonation card, while she would fire back with the claim that the sheer number of notes pianists have to play (and memorize) trumped intonation.
When it comes to discussions about memorization, and whether musicians ought to perform from memory or not, it does seem like pianists are often at the center of the debate.
Subscribe to the weekly podcast via iTunes | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Stitcher For most of my musical life, my go-to memorization strategy was to play things over and over, and hope for the best on stage. I mean, maybe it was slightly more involved than that, but it was definitely not the most […]
The great violinist Jascha Heifetz once remarked that we should always be happy when performing. After all, if things are going well, we should be happy that we’re having a good day. And if things are going badly, each note we play gets us closer to the end, so we should be happy about that too.
That said, it’s still no fun to be stuck on stage, feeling like we're laying an egg. Cringing at each botched shift, garbled run, and cracked note. Which of course just leads to a downward spiral of negativity and increasingly uninspired playing, as a tiny part of us curls up into a ball and dies on the inside, wondering why we even bother to try.
Of course, a week or month (or decade) later, we screw up the courage to listen to a recording of the performance, and are pleasantly surprised by how decent we sound. How the horrible things we were initially mortified by, are barely noticeable, and how many nice moments there are that we didn’t even remember.
So what's the deal? Do we sound better in the moment than we think? Or are our recording devices just not sensitive enough to pick up the things we hear?
We all have a voice in our head.
Sometimes it just offers a running commentary on the events around us ("Yikes, why would anybody wear that?"). Other times it just tosses some random weird thoughts into our stream of consciousness to keep us on our toes ("Hmmm...how would I escape an angry bear in the woods?").
Happy New Year! Yep…it’s once again that time of year when we are supposed to think about New Years resolutions and what habits we’d like to change. But with everything we’ve experienced the last couple years, I don’t know if I have the same level of energy as in years past, to make any massive […]
Ah, the dreaded memory slip.
We’ve all experienced at least one in our lifetimes. And spent many a sleepless night playing and replaying music in our heads, in an effort to reassure ourselves that we actually do have everything memorized. Or spent most of a performance fearing that we’re going to forget what comes next, or get stuck in an endless loop.
It may not literally be life or death, but it can certainly feel that way at times.
But then there are those for whom memorization seems to happen naturally. Easily. Almost without trying.
What’s up with that? Do they know something we don’t? Or are their brains just wired differently than ours?
With the Olympics just around the corner, you’re likely to come across an article or two about athletes’ use of mental imagery or visualization in the near future. Because whether it’s to build confidence, enhance performance, or allow for additional practice repetitions without putting excessive wear and tear on their bodies, mental rehearsal has become an essential piece of many athletes’ training regimens.
It’s not just Olympians who engage in visualization, of course.
Live with someone long enough, and you get a pretty good sense of what kind of person they are. What kind of movies they like. Whether or not they take out the trash. How respectful they are of your stuff in the fridge.
We live with ourselves for our entire lives, so sooner or later, we come to form a pretty clear idea about the kind of person we are too.
Whether it's an audition, a math final, or your herculean efforts to prepare a non-dried-out Thanksgiving turkey for once, it's never fun to fail, make mistakes, or fall short of your goals. Which probably explains why there are so many quotes on the internet about the value of learning from our failures, and embracing setbacks. Like...
As many kids do, my two little ones started asking for a dog when they were 5 and 3 years old.
At the time, our answer was a hard no. I mean, managing two kids already felt like a lot. We couldn’t imagine adding a high-maintenance ball of fur to the equation.
So as many parents do (or so I’m assuming), we kicked the problem down the road for future us to deal with, saying that while we didn’t think they were old enough to take on the responsibility of dog ownership, maybe in five years, when they were 10 and 8, we might reconsider.
We assumed that they’d forget about it. But of course they didn’t. And to convince us that they were responsible enough to have a dog, for 30 days, the older one woke up every morning, dragged himself out of bed, down the hall, out the door, down the elevator, out of the building, and took a selfie of himself on the street “walking” his non-existent dog.
So we got a dog.
And the first thing we learned, is that we had no idea how to train a dog. How to get it to sit, stay, pee outside instead of inside…the little furball didn’t come pre-trained with any particular commands, so we were kind of at a loss.
A bit of Googling led us to discover clicker training, which basically is a way of positively reinforcing or highlighting desired behaviors and providing feedback to the dog, so it knows when it has done something good. Which is a contrast to the more aversive approach to training that involves using pain or fear to get a dog to repeat a desired behavior.
This more positive approach resonated with us, so we gave it a try we delegated all of the training to our daughter, and it all seemed to work out pretty well.
So I was intrigued, when a few years later, I was listening to a Hidden Brain podcast episode and an orthopedic surgeon named Martin Levy described how he was using clicker training with – wait for it – his surgical residents. That’s right – clicker training for humans.
The gist, is that this way of teaching helped to take negativity and judgment and anxiety and fear out of the learning process, and seemed to improve skill acquisition as well. And there was even an organization named TAGteach which had a whole system developed specifically for humans. Which made me wonder…might this approach to teaching also work with musicians?
Umm…so does it?
I was watching blogger Tim Urban’s TED talk about procrastination with my kids this morning, and we all laughed at the part where he described the panic monster, because I think we’ve all experienced the elevated level of stress and anxiety that kicks in as a deadline approaches.
I don’t know what it is, but there’s something that happens, perhaps no matter how well prepared we are, where about a week or two out from a performance or audition, there’s an increase in these nagging, repetitive, negative thoughts as the impending moment of truth draws nearer.
Like an escalating series of “what if’s.” And a regret-inducing avalanche of “should have’s.”
These difficult-to-shut-off repetitive negative thinking patterns, or rumination, is one of the hallmarks of depressive and anxiety disorders. But even if this doesn’t get to a clinically concerning level, it still makes for a lot of stress and anxiety during the countdown to an important audition or performance.
Which for me at least, would contribute to a sense of desperation or frantic-ness in my practice, which would often exacerbate an already crummy-feeling week. And not do a whole lot to make things better on stage.
So is there anything we can do to reduce this repetitive negative thinking phenomenon in the leadup to a performance? Other than ramping up our last-minute panic-practicing?
Subscribe to the weekly “audio edition” via iTunes It’s been many months now since musicians and audiences have been able to come together for live music. But as restrictions begin to lift in many parts of the country, and as friends begin to gather, diners return to restaurants, and sports fans begin attending live games […]
Maybe it was an embarrassing memory slip. Or one of those runaway train moments, where you knew you were rushing, but just couldn’t stop. Or perhaps it was a super quiet and exposed moment, where your bow started shaking, and doing some crazy involuntary richochet type of thing.
I think we’ve all had certain performances or auditions that we wish we could take back. Where things went so badly, and we were so embarrassed or felt so ashamed, that it still affects us a little bit today. Where we tighten up when we get to a particular section of a tricky excerpt. Or develop a sort of complex about a particular part of the bow or dynamic range. Or become fearful and anxious in certain passages, even if we never have a problem with them in practice or rehearsal.
In the absence of a way to eternal-sunshine-of-the-spotless-mind our brains (and I actually can’t remember if that worked out well or not, so maybe it’s just as well?), how can we move past these distressing performance moments, and let go of our audition/performance “baggage” so these moments from our past don’t continue to affect our performances in the future?