Performance
Playing for an audience is a separate skill. That sounds odd, because it is the same music, the same instrument and the same hands. Everyone who has done it once notices that something changes as soon as people are watching.
- very common
- a range, not one number
- rehearsable
At which level
- Any level
- Any instrument
In short
The first and possibly most useful reassurance: you are not unusual. Among professional musicians, nerves before a performance are the rule rather than the exception. Reported rates vary widely, and rather than picking the most alarming number it is worth knowing why they disagree: definitions differ between studies, populations differ, and most rely on self-report.
Some tension helps and some wrecks. The inverted U, where moderate arousal produces the best performance, is a useful picture and too simple to be the whole story, because the type of task and the kind of anxiety both change the shape.
How you practise it
Choking is the specific failure where the thing you can do best falls apart, and it has a known mechanism: attention moves to the execution of movements that normally run automatically. What demonstrably helps is practising under conditions that resemble performance, having a plan for what to do after a mistake, and a fixed pre-performance routine. All three are rehearsable, which is the point of this page.
Where you run into this
- A piece that is flawless at home and falls apart on stage
- A slip that ends the performance because there was no plan for it
- A player who gets better under pressure because they rehearsed the pressure
Our own examples
A short piece here you can use for a pressure rehearsal: record yourself, play for one person, play it first thing in the morning without a warm-up. Those conditions are the ones that transfer.