Performance Anxiety: A Musician’s Bane

Award-Winning Pianist and Pedagogue, Matthew Xiong looks to help musicians that suffer from performance anxiety 

By Kayla Inman on March 18, 2021

 

Whether it’s some minor jitters before that church recital or a full-blown panic attack during a Carnegie Hall debut, performance anxiety is something that every musician experiences. Even elite musicians such as the pianist Glenn Gould have felt its effects, retiring from the stage at the young age of 31. Despite it being such a bane to many musicians, it is often an issue that's swept under the rug or spoken of in hush tones.

 

27-year-old, Boston-Based Pianist, Matthew Xiong is looking to break this collective silence, and open up a conversation about this important topic. 

 

Xiong has enjoyed a successful career as a concert pianist, having concertized both internationally in Australia, Europe, the United States, and Puerto Rico. Matthew has been invited to perform at many international festivals such as the Kawai Sydney International Masterclass Festival in Australia, the Beethoven Institute at Mannes School of Music in New York, and the Ian Hobson Steinway Society Festival in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. He has won many awards at various piano competitions, some of which include, 2nd prize at the 2017 Sydney Eisteddfod Concerto Competition, Honorable Mentions in the National Chopin Competition at the Sydney Eisteddfod,, as well as runner-up for the 2020 BU Carnegie Hall Competition, playing Rachmaninoff’s 1st Piano Concerto.

Xiong has also studied under some of the leading musicians of this time, including members of the Borromeo String Quartet and world-renowned piano pedagogues, Margaret Hair, Johny Perry, and Robert Mcdonald. He received his Bachelors of Music at the New England Conservatory of Music under Gabriel Chodos and obtained his Masters of Music at Boston University under Boaz Sharon. 

 

Yet underlying all this success, Xiong has always suffered from performance anxiety for the majority of his career. Xiong, now an educator is motivated to help his future students with this pervasive problem by taking a deep look at the psychology behind the anxiety that musicians face regularly, which will be discussed in this interview.

 

PIANIST MATTHEW XIONG

 

Kayla: When did you become acutely aware of your performance anxiety?    

 

Matthew: I think as a child, I wasn’t too anxious on stage. It was probably in my early teens, when I experienced a catastrophic performance riddled with memory lapses, that I realized I wasn’t exactly as invincible on stage as I thought. Having that experience had a profound effect on how I perceived performance from then on. 

 

Kayla: What have been some of the strategies you’ve used to handle the anxiety? 

 

Matthew: I searched hard for a solution to this, from my teens to adulthood, I’ve tried things like, meditation, drinking tea before a performance, eating bananas (which supposedly contain beta-blockers), to taking beta-blockers themselves. None of these really worked, to be honest. I went to my mentors to see what advice they could offer me, but the response was usually the same. “Just practice more.”, “You’ll get used to it the more you perform.”, “It’s totally natural to be anxious.”. Needless to say, these statements weren’t the most helpful either! 

Kayla: We don’t hear that much about musicians talking about performance anxiety, why is that? And what made you want to open up about it?

 

Matthew:  I think that musicians are kind of scared to talk about it, it’s classic avoidance; if you don’t talk about it, it’s less “real”. I also think that there hasn’t been that much done to try and help musicians with this issue, so it’s just kind of accepted as the status quo. What made me want to open up about it was actually my students. They were coming to me after competitions and recitals, and sharing their struggles with anxiety on stage, and how they were dissatisfied with how they did due to how it affected their playing. It mirrored my experience, and I didn’t want them to have to endure the same thing. 

 

Kayla: Have you been able to help your students cope with or resolve their performance anxiety? 

 

Matthew: I believe I’ve been able to help them. I knew that if I wanted to help them, I needed to educate myself on psychology as much as I did in music and performance. I had an encounter during my Masters' Degree with the violinist Noa Kageyama, who is a faculty member of the Juilliard School of Music, and a performance psychologist who runs the blog The Bulletproof Musician. He motivated me to do my own research and create a model that could help my students. Based on behavioral models by classical psychologists such as B.F Skinner, I came to understand what goes on when you perform. Having a bad performance actually creates a cycle; we feel upset about it, which in turn acts as a negative emotion that deters us from wanting to perform in the future. While if we avoid performing, we feel alleviation from the negative emotion, which rewards us for avoidance. We are metaphorically “feeding the dragon”, and it only gets worse the more we feed into this loop. 

With my students, the goal was to break this cycle, I would hold frequent performance classes for them, where they were able to choose their environment and pressure level. This means how many people they wanted to perform in front of, and how long they wanted to perform for. I would closely monitor them while they performed, and would ask them to stop if they noticed anything that resembled anxiety, like tension, or hyperventilation. From there, they would be congratulated and praised for what they were able to achieve. What I found from doing this, is that students start to realize how much stress they can endure, and build a controlled tolerance towards that pressure, by repeated exposure to victories over their anxiety; in essence, they don’t exactly feel less anxious during a performance, but they demonstrate to themselves that they are an individual that can tolerate and conquer their anxiety. The classes are essentially a prolonged exposure therapy session, that people who suffer from PTSD use to work through their stress. 

Kayla: That’s pretty insightful, I never really thought about performance anxiety as a form of PTSD, but it does make sense. 

 

Matthew: Yeah, I think PTSD is usually reserved as a description for the shell-shocked veteran, but it’s basically the same mechanism! 

 

Matthew is currently working with many young musicians in the Boston area with their stage fright, he hopes that his work and dedication to this issue will pay off, and create a healthier performance environment for the next generation of musicians. His student, 17 yr old Isabelle Hwang, who has been a frequent competitor in state-wide piano competitions, shares her experiences while studying under Mr. Xiong. 

 

Kayla: At what age did you start playing the piano?

 

Isabelle: Like many pianists who have musicians as parents, I began pretty young, I started playing at around the age of 4. I don’t remember too much then, but my parents told me that I was begging to play the piano, they wanted to wait a year, but I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the keys! 

 

Kayla: Have you always been interested in playing the piano?

 

Isabelle: I had a pretty on and off relationship with the piano, to be honest, I loved playing and I practiced pretty hard. But as I got more advanced, I had put pretty heavy expectations on myself to perform well in juries, competitions, and recitals. I started to dread going on stage, but the people around me saw that dread as normal; I don't think it helped that I wasn’t visibly nervous on stage. My performances got poorer and poorer, and I was feeling defeated and dissatisfied from every performance, I think I really did start to hate piano for how it made me feel. I ended up quitting for about a year when I was 13, but the whole time I was away from it, I missed playing. I remember just day-dreaming about playing piano at school; my teachers would come up to me to tell me to stop tapping the tables with my fingers. I don’t know what withdrawal feels like, but I’m guessing that was a pretty close estimate! 

 

Kayla: How did you end up studying with Mr. Xiong, and what was it like working with him?

 

Isabelle: I was in a music preparatory school at the time, and I re-enrolled after my one-year hiatus; Mr. Xiong was running an experimental performance seminar at the time, I believe it was part of an Entrepreneurial Music Grant program. I remember seeing the poster on the bulletin board and saying to myself, wow, I tick all those boxes, I need to check this out. To be honest, at that younger age, I knew nothing about performance anxiety; bear in mind that most adults around me had told me what I was experiencing was normal. 

So it was kind of a relief to put a label on the “symptoms” I was experiencing on stage. I went to the seminar, which ran every 2 weeks, at first there were probably only 3 students who went, but after a few months, the seminar had about 30 regular attendees, which included college-level students. We would voluntarily sign up to perform each seminar, and it went for 2 hours, with an average of 6 musicians performing each session. I remember the first time I played, I got 5 minutes into the piece I was performing, and Mr. Xiong kindly asked me to stop. Being a bit perplexed, I asked him what was wrong; I was shaking a little from anxiety, but I told him I felt I could continue since I usually would just push through my anxiety. He told me I was playing very well but asked If I had noticed that my shoulders were to my ears. It was quite a jarring moment, as I suddenly became aware that my whole body was scrunched upwards, with my shoulders pulled up and squeezing hard. He asked me to relax my shoulders, and to start the piece again, and that this time, I was to draw my attention to the shoulders as I played. I started again, and I noticed that every few seconds, my shoulders would start to squeeze and my anxiety would heighten in response to that. I didn’t get to finish playing that piece that session, but I actually felt really good about how I performed, cause I felt I had won a battle over my fear, by actually having a tool to “combat” it in real-time. 

It was quite an eye-opening experience, and each session that I volunteered to perform, was equally eye-opening. I started to gather more tools to deal with the various ways anxiety would affect my performance, from mental obstacles such as self-doubt which often arose during high-pressure performances by reframing my negativity, to releasing physical tension. Mr. Xiong had a keen eye and rarely let any sign of stage fright slip by. Over a period of a year, I was able to perform longer programs and be confident that I could overcome my anxiety while on stage. After the seminar stopped running, my parents contacted Mr. Xiong to see if I could continue studying with him, and I’ve been studying with him for the past 3 years now; he still runs these studio classes with me and my studio mates, which continues to be enlightening. 

 

Kayla: That’s quite a success story! Would you say that you don’t get nervous on stage now because of your work with Mr. Xiong?

 

Isabelle: I think my nervousness is probably still as high as it’s ever been, but instead of seeing it as an obstacle, or as something negative, I actually use it as a way to refocus myself and to remind myself not to go on autopilot. Mr. Xiong told me that he thinks that people who are naturally good at performing, likely experience the same thing, and for people that suffer from anxiety on stage, they just need a “path” to get to a point where they can feel victorious over their stage fright and harness it productively.