[Editor's note: This article appeared in the October, 1992
issue of The Horn Call. I wrote the author for permission
to reprint it here. Richard Reynolds, a member of the International
Hom Society, revised the article after it first was published
in the San Francisco Chronicle, with less focus on the
Bay area, for general syndication through the Universal Press
Syndicate. Although
written for non-musicians, the subject is clearly of interest
and value to musicians. D.S.]
Beethoven's Ninth. The first movement is a piece of cake. You
clam a couple of notes, but nothing real exposed. The solo isn't
until the third movement. You've got lots of time.
Things start clicking in the second movement. You're starting
to match the third horn's sound, the attacks are right on, the
intonation solid. Maybe you even forget about the solo.
But as soon as you turn the page to the third movement you feel
it. Your heart speeds upalmost imperceptibly at first. You're
playing fourth horn, and you're looking at the solo you've been
playing from Max Pottag's excerpt book since you were 12. It's
not just a little solo. It goes on and on: long, sustained notes
that have to flow seamlessly and blend perfectly with the clarinet.
And then there's the scale. It's a b-major scale, the easiest
solo you will ever see in your life-and the most terrifying.
By the time you get to the beginning section with the clarinet,
your heart is racing. You try to take a really big breath, but
somehow you can't seem to get any air into your lungs. You start
to play. The sound is thin, unfocused. Worst of all, it quivers.
They're all listening to you and they all know you're losing it.
The fear grows. The scale is only a few measures away now. Your
hands are getting clammy, your mouth dry. You curse Beethoven
for putting the solo in the fourth horn part.
And then it happens: The whole orchestra stops playing, the chorus
stands silent. You're playing the scale all alone. You crack a
note. And then you find yourself pushing down the wrong valves,
missing notes completely. The top note of the scale cracks horribly
and you miss more notes on the way down. The conductor glares
at you, and everyone in the orchestra looks away.
It's only the first rehearsal. The next one will be worse.
Stage fright is a fact of life for every orchestral musician,
and one's ability to control it is the bottom line of a musician's
career. It is virtually impossible to play an oboe, violin, or
trumpet when your heart is pounding through your chest. If you
are nervous, you play badly. As the fear takes over, a wind player
or singer loses the crucial ability to control the air supply;
a string
player loses the delicate muscle control essential to wielding
a bow.
Musicians combat the fear with everything from massage and self-hypnosis
to psychotherapy, self-help books, and beta-blocking drugs like
Inderal. But the terror remains, even for world famous musicians
like cellist Pablo Casals, who suffered from stage fright throughout
his life, and Vladimir Horowitz, who gave up public performance
for more than a decade.
Writer George Plimpton, who has participated in boxing, football,
and hockey just for the experience, reports that the most terrifying
thing he ever did was playing the triangle in the New York Philharmonic.
Once the music starts, he writes, "there is no earthly way
you can stop it." There are no time outs in music, he continues.
"As soon as the conductor's stick comes down, one is carried
inexorably up toward the moment of commitment, and there's nothing
that can be done about it."
Ward Spangler, a freelance percussionist in the San Francisco
area, finds Plimpton's remarks right on the mark. Spangler reports
that other musicians who volunteer when the percussion section
needs someone to play a small part find it surprisingly nerve
wracking. Usually, he says, "they fold. With percussion,
nerves are a very tricky thing. If you get nervous, you get lost
and it's gone. You have to hit the thing. There's no oozing into
the note. You can miss the instrument. You can hit it twice."
For a string player, says San Francisco Symphony violinist Dan
Smiley, the most common nerve problem is that "your bow starts
shaking and you feel like you're losing control of making the
sound, which comes, of course, from the bow." Smiley also
points out that it isn't only the audience or critics that musicians
worry about. "Of course, a concert is for the audience,"
he says, "but it's also for the musicians. I've probably
gotten more nervous with my peers than with an audience, because
they know more about what you're doing."
While many music lovers are dazzled by fast, technical playing,
any musician will tell you that the hardest thing in the world
is to play a slow, exposed, legato solo. This sort of solo is
the stock in trade of the English horn, and English horn player
Bennie Cottone readily agrees that these solos are the most challenging.
"I try to screen everything out," says Cottone. "Once
the reed goes in the mouth you think about nothing but the music."
Nevertheless, he admits, "there are times when I get the
strange feeling that I'm going to fall out of my chair."
The simplest solution to stage fright, of course, would be to
persuade audiences to be more supportive. In a scholarly article
published in The Musical Times in 1925, one W.F.H. Blandford
offered a circus analogy. If the juggler misses on a difficult
trick, he wrote, the audience is understanding. "Suppose
now that, when the horn player cracked or wobbled in a trying
passage, his failure were received with murmurs, not of disapproval,
but of sympathy and encouragement; that the conductor immediately
stopped the band; that in breathless silence the player repeated
the passage two or three times until he got it right, whereupon
amid thunders of applause the movement was resumed, while the
gratified player bowed his thanks to a delighted audience."
Clearly, Blandford's idea hasn't caught on. Nor does it seem likely
that any other development is going to diminish symphony stress-which
studies have rated as equivalent to that experienced by jet fighter
pilots. And musicians are still looking for solutions.
One of the most controversial approachesand one few musicians
will discuss on the record-is the use of beta blockers, prescription
drugs developed to lower blood pressure. The beta blocker used
by musicians is propranolol, sold under the brand name Inderal.
It works by blocking the receptors that trigger the "fight
f light" response-the physiological responses that prepare
an animal to face a crisis. These responses are familiar to anyone
who has performed on an instrument, acted, or spoken in public:
sweating, tenseness, pounding heart, trembling, and sometimes
a dry mouth (a particular problem for wind players.)
Dr. Gary Gelber, a Juilliard-trained clarinetist and psychiatrist
at the University of California at San Francisco's Program for
Performing Artists, says that he experimented with performing
on Inderal himself but felt "emotionally cut off from the
music" when using it and decided his performance was better
without it. He'll sometimes prescribe it to help a patient get
through a hurdle, such as an audition or solo concert, but in
the long run prefers to help patients learn to perform without
it. He stresses that the drug should not be passed around casually
and should not be used by people who suffer from heart disease,
low blood pressure, asthma, diabetes, hyperthyroidism, or a tendency
toward depression.
Is the use of Inderal by musicians comparable to the use of steroids
by athletes? "The analogy breaks down," says Gelber.
"By taking Inderal, someone is not changing him or herself
in a fundamental way. They're just blocking something that can
interfere with the ability to do on the stage what they can do
in the warm-up room."
The recording techniques used to produce today's technically
flawless recordings, he says, are a much more artificial process
than taking Inderal: "There you're actually cutting and pasting
and creating a performance that never existed."
One musician, who prefers to remain anonymous, reports that Inderal
has had a tremendous impact on his playing. "I'm generally
a very calm player," he reports, "but if I get psyched
about something, it's all over. With Inderal, nerves simply aren't
a factor. And knowing that help is there if I need it has meant
that I almost never resort to Inderal. I use it maybe two or three
times a year."
Another musician who plays with the San Francisco Symphony reports
that Inderal is commonly used in auditions. "When I took
my last audition," she says, "I tried it, because almost
everyone told me that, for auditions, they take it as a matter
of course. I found it actually did help."
But the use of Inderal does not stop with auditions. Members of
the San Francisco Symphony, Opera, and Ballet orchestras confirm
that beta blockers are often used in performance, particularly
by principal players during highpressure performances. In fact,
it's unlikely that any concertgoer has heard an orchestral performance
in the past five years that did not involve performers using them.
In a recent survey of professional musicians, 27 percent confirmed
that they use beta blockers.
Gelber reports that they are also used by doctors for public speaking,
and another source indicates that surgeons often perform delicate
surgical procedures under Inderal. It's also rumored that the
drug is favored by pistol marksmen-who squeeze the trigger between
heartbeats. And, of course, beta blockers are commonly prescribed
to executives and other people whose high-stress jobs lead to
high blood pressure.
Fortunately, there are other alternatives, and the psychological
techniques for dealing with performance stress have become as
sophisticated as they are varied. Arthur Krehbiel, principal horn
of the San Francisco Symphony says a note he missed twenty years
ago, while playing in the Detroit Symphony, was pivotal for him:
"I remember when I clammed a big thing back in
Detroit. I really splattered something fierce, and my reaction
was to laugh. Up until that time it had been a major tragedy.
That was the start of a new freedom." Playing well under
pressure, he says, is a matter of "having the right parts
doing the right thing: having the emotions involved with the emotion
of the music you're performing; having the intellect surveying
the surroundings
(am I in tune, am I blending, etc.); and having the body do what
it's supposed to be doing naturally, without interference from
the emotion or intellect.
"For me it comes down to 'why are you there?"' says
Berkeley Symphony Concertmaster Ron Erickson. "If you're
there because you're thinking about the negatives-the fear of
making a mistake-you're also doomed. If you're there because you're
answering a call within yourself, you're there for the right reason
and have nothing to fear." Bassoonist Carla Wilson offers
another way of dealing with nerves: "I try to make the nervousness
into excitement. I talk to myself, and say, 'I'm excited about
this solo. It's going to be fun."'
Another method that is beginning to find favor with performers
is massage. Nicky Roosevelt, a freelance horn player, has studied
massage and works with a number of musicians. Her massage chair
is a fixture in the basement of the San Francisco Opera House,
where she helps opera and ballet orchestra members deal with the
physical and mental stress of their grueling schedule. Most people
come to Roosevelt to help them deal with the physical aspects
of playing long hours, but she reports that she also works with
musicians who are about to take an audition "to help their
body let go of residual tension so they can get a good night's
sleep-it gives them the best shot at being able to play at their
best."
A similar approach is self-hypnosis, which clarinetist Diana Dorman
says has been a real help for her. "You think about walking
down a path, going into a house, and making it a comfortable place,"
she says. "Then if you're nervous, you try to capture that
feeling of being in that comfortable place."
There are, of course, many books designed to help musicians deal
with nerves, most of them extensions of Zen and the Art of Archery.
Timothy Galwey's The Inner Game of Tennis has been adapted into
The Inner Game of Music by Barry Green, the principal bassist
in the Cincinnati Symphony. Eloise Ristad's A Soprano on Her Head
is also mentioned often.
Bill Holmes, a trumpet player with the San Francisco Opera
Orchestra, says Ristad's book has been very helpful. The technique,
he says, is to realize that your body can only produce so much
adrenaline. "So instead of trying to block it you say, "Give
me all of it.' You exaggerate the symptom and let it go as far
as it can go." Holmes has also found sports books can be
useful, especially James Loehr's Mental Toughness Training for
Sports. Loehr offers a list of thoughts that produce pressure-What
if I don't do well,- I'll never live it down if I lose,- my career
is on the line-and a list of thoughts that reduce it: Even if
I'm not the greatest today, it won't be the end of the world-
I'm going to be okay no matter what, etc. "When you read
the first ones you get up tight. When you read the others they
produce a different reaction-you feel more relaxed, more comfortable.
You know inside that the first ones just aren't true. The basic
idea is that you can change how you feel by changing how you think."
A recent study at the Center for Stress and Anxiety Disorders
at the State University of New York in Albany confirms this theory.
In the study, nervous musicians performed for each other during
five weekly meetings. After each performance, researchers interviewed
both the soloist and the musicians who made up the audience. The
results demonstrated that the assumptions fueling the performers'
nervousness were largely false. The musicians who made up the
audience were generally unaware of the nervousness and mistakes
that the performer assumed were glaringly obvious. And as the
interviews revealed this to the performers, their nerve problems
diminished.
When she sang the part of the angel in the Berkeley symphony's
December '90 performance of Oliver Messiaen's opera, St. Francois
d'Assise, soprano Susan Narucki projected an aura of total
peace and ethereal calmness. Yet her experience seems to contradict
all of the theories. Narucki reports that she long ago gave up
on attempting to be relaxed for a performance. Narucki makes a
distinction between adrenaline and fear. "I get tremendously
excited before a
performance," she reports, "and I've learned to just
go with it. If you have any blockage in your head, that rush of
adrenaline frees everything up." Beyond that, Narucki says
"I have a very strict diet and I stay to it. I don't see
people before I perform. And I do 150 percent preparation."
The techniques vary, but coming to grips with stage fright is
a never-ending struggle for every
musician. The performer never knows when it will strike, and can
never completely control it. So the next time you watch a violinist
stand up in front of a packed hall and make the Brahms Violin
Concerto sound effortless, wonder at the beauty of the sound,
marvel at the technical prowess, let yourself be carried away-and
then remind yourself that it's all being accomplished in one of
the most stressful settings ever devised.