Boviosity!

I have performed for the last 3 Sundays at my church and will be performing again next Sunday. This grueling performance schedule is due to the year-end finale to my two groups I accompany, the Cherub Choir (ages 3-2nd grade) and Extol (ages 2nd grade through ??)

Yesterday I performed a particularly knuckle-cracking piece on piano, Rich Mullins' "Sing Your Praise To The Lord," complete with Bach intro. It's kind of cool, and I love being able to do this, but as I sort of expected and had resigned myself to, performance nerves set in and there were a couple unplanned finger-crashes.

This happened the previous week with guitar accompaniments to other, simpler songs. Performance nerves are a bane on my musical performance, although oddly they hardly ever (if ever!) affect my acting performances. (That's me as River City's unlovable and, in particular, un-NERVOUS Mayor Shinn in the picture at top left.)

What's the difference between these two modes of performance? Partly it's tone-deafness and partly it's rehearsal time, I think. That is, if I hit a bad note in a piano performance, it sounds like a nuclear explosion in my ears; if I hit a false note in a theatre performance there's another sure-fire laff or tear just down the road. But wait, why isn't that true of musical performance too?

I think with musical performance there exists an ideal, wherein the performer hits every note on his score right on time (and only those notes!) and if that doesn't happen, SOMEBODY in the audience will notice it; if an actor says "the" instead of "that" or transposes two speeches, usually only his fellow-actors will notice, and they're too busy worrying about their own crap to notice it. So yes, solo music performance is that way; group music performance could be more forgiving although I recall performance nerves giving me the feeling I'm killing the group.

I need techniques to overcome these performance nerves; it's good that I'm getting this experience under my belt and I have a feeling that the next time I sit down at the piano in front of a large group, I'll be less nervous and do better at the music.

I read once that Sir Laurence Olivier took a break from the stage for a long period of time due to stage fright. This petrified me because if someone that good can get stage fright, then someone like me must deserve it. Then I read somewhere else that the secret to overcoming stage fright is preparation. The rather obvious corollary to that is that if you're experiencing stage fright, it's with good reason...you probably need to prepare more.

I haven't experienced it since then, in my acting. I comforted myself yesterday that I had prepared as well as I knew how (a library book helped me a great deal with that) and that nobody expected me to be perfect. I also had to remind myself that it was not to "wow" them or "impress" everybody that I was doing this; rather it was for the kids to have a good time singing and for everybody to have a good time listening. That helped. The crashes were mere seconds in a 4-5 minute performance. I'd rather have the 4:55 seconds of bliss along with the 5 seconds of panic than have a whole lifetime of neither.