In what will also be an ongoing discussion about psychology in music and the performing arts, I thought I’d give brief overview of some of the more recent things I’ve heard and found interesting.  I left out a lot just to keep things concise, but I hope that you look into both of the men mentioned below.

Here is a little experiment for performers: Think about the worst performances you can remember.  Now think about the best performances.  Which do you tend to remember more?  In general, we tend to remember our negative experiences over the positive both in the long term and in the short.  I might have just played a piece 99.5% accurately, but what I remember is that one tiny section I messed up.  The same is true in the big picture.  I’ve given many performances, but the ones I tend to remember most are the ones that were my worst performing.  I’ve learned to look past most of these memories, but many struggle to get over these issues.

I recently came across this video at TED.com that I think gets at this issue of recollection of past experiences (whether good of bad). If you are unfamiliar with this organization, I encourage you to visit their website and look around.  The organization holds conferences inviting many world leaders, pioneers in their fields, and artists (performing and visual).  Entry into the organization is very expensive (in the thousands of dollars per year), but they put up videos of all the speakers for free.  I find it a continuing source of inspiration both by the performances, and the talks on a number of varying subjects. In this video, Daniel Kahneman talks mostly about our two forms of memory: experiencing selves and remembering selves.  The experience self is living in the moment and deals with what is happening right now.  Most of these memories are forgotten because of the shear number of them.  The remembering self is the bigger picture and the story we tell ourselves later.  Reconciling those two can be difficult, but the video helps you to notice the difference and how than can affect your performance.

Last year at the National Conference on Percussion Pedagogy (NCPP), we actually had a sports psychologist, Dr. Bill Moore, come in to talk about some of the things he’s doing with musicians that has already worked on athletes.  Using sports psychology is not a new idea in music, as we frequently cite the work The Inner Game of Music, which was a reworking of the famous The Inner Game of Tennis.  Many of the same issues that plague athletes are the same that musicians and those in the performing arts experience when they perform.  I read this book many years ago, so I’ll try this summer to re-read it and talk more about this in the future.

Moore’s main point is that, in general, we do not practice for performances, we practice for error detection.  When we go into a practice room, our ears are listening for mistakes, and then we correct them.  Rinse and repeat.  The problem, he said, was that when we go into an actual performance, our minds are still in that mode of thinking which is the exact opposite of what we should be doing.  What good is noticing an error in the middle of performance since you can’t go back and fix it.  He advocates, that upon approaching the date of a performance, start to practice performing.  This emphasizes thinking about the big picture rather than error detection.  Some of the exercises he does is having student musicians make a visual representation (graph, picture, etc.) of their performance and then practice thinking of this when they perform.  He is currently teaching a music class so I’m sure I’ve left out many of his great ideas.

There’s a wealth of information out there, and this is only the tip of the iceberg.  I’m surely not an expert in this field, but I’ll try to send information as I hear of any new/interesting takes on performance psychology.