Ranging from memory to tempo to sound quality and expressiveness, they evaluated the degree to which their performance was worse, better, or the same as their dress rehearsal in eight areas (on a 7–point scale where 3=much worse 0=same 3=much better).īut the researchers carefully manipulated the timing of their self-evaluations. Two evaluationsįollowing their concert performances, the students completed an evaluation form designed to help them compare the quality of their concert performance to the quality of their dress rehearsal run-throughs. To learn more about how we perceive the quality of our performances, an interdisciplinary group of researchers ran a study involving 21 undergraduate and graduate-level piano students ( Masaki et al., 2011).Įach student was videotaped doing a complete run-through of their repertoire in two different situations – a dress rehearsal and a performance (not something contrived specifically for the study, but a real honest-to-goodness performance they would have had to give anyway). So what’s the deal? Is it possible that we really do sound better on stage than we think? Dress rehearsals vs. How we can’t even find the horrible things that we were initially mortified by, and how many nice moments there are that we didn’t even remember. Of course, a week or month (or decade) later, when curiosity gets the better of us and we screw up the courage to listen to a recording of the performance, it’s often pleasantly surprising how decent we sound.
Which just leads to a downward spiral of negativity and increasingly uninspired playing, as a part of us starts to seriously entertain the idea of stopping and walking off stage…
#STITCHER LISTEN LATER IN AIRPLANE MODE CRACKED#
Cringing at each botched shift and cracked note. Still, it’s no fun to be stuck on stage when we’re having one of those bad days. And if things are going badly, each note we play gets us closer to the end, so we should be happy about that too. After all, if things are going well, we should be happy that things are going well.
There’s a quote attributed to the violinist Jascha Heifetz 1, in which he says that we should always be happy when performing. Subscribe to the weekly podcast via iTunes | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Stitcher
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