Emerge Already Blog

Believe me. If I could, I would wave my magic wand and wipe out self-doubt for every artist that needed it. Not just because I’m so philanthropic, but because if I charged for that service I would be filthy rich. Only a rare few artists out there don’t face this demon and usually they’re of no help to us because they don’t know why they don’t suffer from this issue. But for the most part, many an artist faces a demon or two named fear, intimidation, or possibly second-guessing. So what do we do about it? Well, let me just say I’m not at all against seeking help for it. There are peak performance strategists like Renita Kalhorn, creator of Flow Factor (sign up here for her amazing FREE Mental Toughness Seminar on Performing Under Pressure, starts April 25th) who spend their lives teaching others to live in the zone and to routinely conquer the aforementioned demons. There are psychologists, psychiatrists, meditation experts, our faiths that we can all pull from as well. But even before we seek professional help it’s good to start by knowing what it is that we’re actually doubting. Rooting out the cause(s) of our self-doubt can take us a long way in beating it. Even before that, we have to understand why this pesky thing is worth expending the energy to defeat.

Why take self-doubt on headfirst and not just hope it will go away? First of all, because it won’t go away on it’s own. It may slink off into a dark corner only to pop up moments before you go on stage or right before you hit that tricky run you’ve been dreading. It’s just never far away and we as artists must banish it to a place where we can keep it at bay or at least reliably manage it.

Once we get rid of it, here’s what can happen:

1. We’ll actually enjoy our concerts as much as our audience is enjoying it. Did you ever notice that? Even while we’re screaming inside our heads about that last flub, the audience is still staring at us, dreamy-eyed! They love us, even when we’re busy hating ourselves.

2. We’ll play better, more like how we sound when we’re at home in our bathrobes without a care in the world, loving every second of the piece we’ve only been waiting our entire life to play.

3. We’ll feel better about our career choice, instead of regretting or second-guessing our worthiness or ability to call ourselves professional artists. Many of us quit waaaaay before our time and for all the wrong reasons.

1.  The Need to Impress and Prove

Maybe it’s from those many lessons where we just wanted our professors to say, “That was awesome!”. I had a wonderful undergrad professor and as much as she loved me, “That was awesome!” was a rarity. An affirmative nod a few delayed seconds after your last cadence was about the best you could hope for. Then every blue moon she would grace us with an affirmation worth writing on our calendars. But the damage is done, isn’t it? We want and crave that approval over our art. As a student, it’s a little more logical, but as a professional we have to begin to give ourselves our own approval. Or else, we’ll be at the mercy of every sour face in the audience, every goofball who brings the score and sits in the front row and every guy with a tie we assume is the critic. Remember, you already made it. You graduated. So in many ways your art, your technique, your interpretations have been “approved”. Stop playing for juries and start playing for yourself and for your audience.

2. Who’s Listening?

We assume everyone in the audience knows the score inside and out or has possibly played the Liszt B Minor Sonata that you’ve programmed. We imagine that all Eastman grads are seated in the front row, along with the local critic. We wrongly assume that everyone is there waiting for us to miss that note. Truth is, there will be a connoisseur or three in the audience (I can’t tell you how many of my piano technicians have been former serious piano majors, many from top conservatories), there will be Larry the Lumphead who only comes to the concert to criticize, but for the most part, the audience is there to be delighted. They also like to believe that you’re taking delight in what you’re doing. And as for the few jerks, if they start to question you after the concert, here is how that conversation should go:

Larry: So,  I see you had a bit of trouble in that Beethoven.
You: Well, you know it’s a tricky piece. So you must play, as well? (This is what he’s been dying for you to ask)
Larry: Ah yes, I graduated Juilliard in ’76! I studied under (Insert Big Name Piano Prof here).
You: Oh how wonderful, she was an amazing teacher. So where do you play next? (You ask very innocently)

And here is your moment of glory, this wonderful awkward silence that occurs when you’ve outed him. The truth is usually, that he doesn’t play anywhere next, he has no ideas of the pressure of maintaining an actual touring concert career. He’s only imagined it, so he has no right to belittle your efforts on stage. So just smile, let the silence hang. Eventually he’ll hem and haw, conjure up a local gig or two or mention an important past performance. And all you’ll say is, “Oh…I see.” Then you’ll politely turn to your next adoring fan.

3. Lack of Preparedness

This is the easiest one to fix. Get ready for your concert. Whatever it takes. If you’re not ready, your brain (neither your fingers) can be tricked into thinking you are. It’s the worst feeling in the world to go on stage knowing in your heart you’re not ready. Sometimes it can’t be avoided. Most of the time it can. So avoid it…like the plague.

4. Eliminating the You from your concert

Besides being unprepared, the worst thing you can do is play your concert hemmed up in the traditions of days old, pretending to be someone or something you’re not. This is the opposite space you want to be in if you’re trying to have your audience make a genuine connection with you and your music. It also keeps you from being free mentally and musically, which will ultimately keep you from performing how you know you can. I’ve already blogged about Putting the “YOU” in your concert and recently on Finding Your Artistic Identity. Take a look back at those entries.

Now, don’t doubt me when I say we have the power within us to win this battle. As the cartoon above so eloquently expresses… You’re not poop. I promise you.

Below is an older blog entry that seemed to resonate when I first released it. So I’m re-releasing it since it’s the theme of this week’s Emerge Already! Live Broadcast.  Our Guest Chatter, rebel pianist James Rhodes, will be joining us from across the pond. See More on James, then get familiar with the topic below. See you THIS THURSDAY live at 7:30 EST!

Click here to go to his website, gotta see it for yourself!

I’m going to just put the most blasphemous statement right out front.  A large part of your concert should be about YOU.

Not just about the music of the many dead (though amazing) composers you’re featuring or about the many living (and awesome) composers you’re featuring that might also be in your audience. Your concert is also not just about your fabulous technique, your striking stage presence or your intellectual tidbits. Rather, it’s about the real you, the most genuine part of you that drives you to create, to practice and to explore. He/She should be on stage and exposed (better yet, revealed) to the audience.

For the first few years out of grad school I used to program what I call the “Hurdle-Jumping Recital”. It was crafted for two purposes only: 1). To impress the audience, 2). To prove that I was a legitimate “concert pianist”. That meant that I played woefully long programs with only the biggest pieces by the biggest name composers performed painstakingly in order of classical music periods (from baroque to romantic). Yes, I liked most of the music but I didn’t necessarily enjoy playing it! Funny thing happened. I would sweat my way through a rather impressive program (if I do say so myself), clearing Chopin etudes, swallowing Beethoven Sonatas whole, and biting off a good bit of formidable Bach only to have the audience spend more time complimenting me afterwards about what I’d said about the music and how what I’d said changed the way they perceived the music! But what about those etudes, didn’t you see my fingers flying?! And they did, they recognized the physical stuff and appreciated it (and a few critics even praised it, so I got my ego fix) but what they remembered was the impact of the music itself and how it was presented. What made it memorable was the tie between the music and the artist rendering it. These weren’t lectured facts about time periods and musical structure, these were insights into why I was choosing to perform this particular composer, this particular piece, even stories about my life’s experiences that inform the music and the programming.

You’ve got to figure this one out for yourself.I’m not saying you should be crafting a Me, Me, Me fest. I’m saying you should give the audience more, more, more than just a flawless program. Give them an experience that has a beginning and an end, a high point too, all glued together with pieces of you. This means you might not say a word or you may talk more than you play. You might incorporate themed programs; not generic ones but thought-provoking, revelatory themes that reveal some part of you to the audience.

If all audiences want is the music, they’ll stay home and listen to a perfectly engineered cd. Instead, they’re coming to see YOU do what YOU do like only YOU can. Remember that.

I think I figured it out. For most of my musical life, I’ve been baffled by a particular phenomenon. I’m talk about boring artists, classical musicians in particular. The term “Boring Artist” should be an oxymoron, but it turns out it’s more common than you think. Once, I heard an amazing pianist. I had been waiting a while to hear her play, so I was pumped up for the performance (I’m very excitable for other artist’s concerts). She was flawless in execution, and there was excitement to be found in watching this execution play out, I was impressed for sure. But after about 3 minutes, I quickly lost interest, found myself mentally whittling down a to-do list for an upcoming trip, and by the end I had to admit to myself that I hadn’t been moved. What I do remember is she seemed uncomfortable, stressed, slightly annoyed and very uptight. She was playing tremendously difficult repertoire so I can’t say that I blame her. But here’s what I figured out:

As a result, I was bored because I wasn’t gleaning anything from the performance aside from what her fingers were telling me. Nothing jumped off the page about the composer or the music and nothing leaped off the stage about her musical personality. Maybe that’s because she wasn’t getting anything either, other than a sense of, “Phew, I got through that”. She had no artistic identity.

Identity is defined as whatever makes an entity definable and recognizable. Artistic Identity is whatever makes you worth seeing and hearing again!

I don’t know about you, but I can look back over my current career and see entire seasons where I was doing the same thing, not being myself. Then, what was I doing? I was spending time trying to prove myself to be what “others” thought I should be and trying very hard not to be what I feared everyone might think I was…whatever that was! I had fallen victim to artistic identity theft. The worst part about it was that my way of thinking was the culprit.

So why not be our true artistic selves? There are lots of good reasons. 1). Because if we play too much Modern music (or Spanish music, or music by women, etc.), people will assume we can’t play the “real stuff”. Even the other day I was practicing Liszt (the real, splashy, showy, fun, arpeggio-ridden kind) and my mom (who’s still holding her breath for me to play the Khatchaturian Toccata again, the piece that I won tons of kiddie competitions with) exclaims, “Oh I love it when you play real Classical music!” Because I worried that people other than my mom would also think this way, my first few seasons I played nothing but the classics, not because I love that music (which I do), but mostly because it’s what I thought people expected me to play in order to be deemed legitimate.

2). We tamp down our other talents out of fear of having our multitalented-ness questioned or deemed a cover up for lack of true talent in performance. I once had a manager ask me, “Well, what do we tell presenters when they ask us if you’re a pianist, or a spokesperson, a fashion plate, or a writer or a webhost?” He was worried my “extras” would cast doubt on my “main”. I say, tell them they’re getting a freakin’ amazing package deal!

3). We do what every other Classical performer did before us, because that’s all we know. Really, we only know half the story. History books and biographies reveal that most of the stuffiness we bring to our concerts is not based on the true atmosphere of concerts from way back when. Women threw their dainty gloves on the stage (the equivalent of today’s panty throwing antics) after Liszt performed, some even fainted. Only parts of sonatas were performed because even the guys who wrote this great music worried about lulling their audiences to sleep. Concerts in Scriabin and Kandinsky’s day were multi-sensory, incorporating visual art and dance. Schumann and Brahms had literature and opinion published in journals of the day, they’d be bloggers if they were alive today. Mozart improvised more than he played from the score.

There is no reason we modern-day artists need to be walking around in a fog of undiscovered identity. Identity is defined as whatever makes an entity definable and recognizable. As artists we have to start defining what it means to be us! Then we have to recognize our truest talents and put those on display. How? Play the music we’re meant to play so we can be free to give the performance of a lifetime. Pursue the other interests that will strengthen our main brand as performers and provide viable outlets for creativity as well as lucrative inlets for income. Create performance experiences that go beyond standard recitals and instead provide a glimpse into our artistic personalities behind the music.

What’s the consequence for not discovering yourself first? Well, you run the risk of being discovered while you’re not really being who you are and then having to live up to that false reproduction of yourself for the rest of your career.

Now, who wants that?

                     Have you gotten the Ultimate Guide yet? 

I love the word diversify because when I see it I think “options” and no chance at boredom. But it also means “increase”. An increase in opportunity, outlets, visibility, momentum and ultimately an increase in income. You know who else tells us to diversify? Financial advisors do! Because of the very same reasons. But for them it’s also more so about avoiding putting your eggs in one basket, about averting disaster. I tell you to diversify because I want you to make full use of your artistic potential and to not be bound by any limitation that forces you into a box, self-made or institutionally imposed. Below is an article from Best Growth Stock, a website about financial advising and analysis. It tells investors why they should diversify their stock portfolios. But I found it wonderfully telling that with the change of just a few words it applies directly to us as artists as well. Read on and take note, both for your artistic career and your stocks!

“Investing An arts career is a risky venture whether you’re an experienced professional or a new beginner. If this is your first turn around the dance floor you need to realize first that all investings arts careers are a guessing game of some type. There’s not any such thing as hassle-free investing career-building. In the stock music and arts market we will be exposed to more risks than any other thing career. This is the actual reason that it is so critical to have an stock artistic portfolio that is diversified enough to offer some insulation from devastation due to one stock bad concert, bond orchestra strikes, or an fund eccentric artsy project performing poorly while also making a conspicuous difference when one performs strangely well. Put simply, dilating your portfolio tempers the dangers you are taking by investing pursuing a career in the arts to some level. You’ve heard the old saying “never put all of your eggs in one basket”.

Why diversify? It will make your artistic portfolio less prone to market variations. It moves your eggs around so that your nest-egg (Main Artistic Brand) has more than one layer of protection from the evils of the planet and the variable minds of men arts presenters and the New York Stock Exchange Musician’s Union. You want to diversify your artistic portfolio so that one sector ill-timed squeak of the horn or one stock flopped album does not have the power to sink your financial future in one slipped swoop. “

Charith Premawardhana, Violist
Founder of Classical Revolution
Charith is a San Francisco based classically trained viola player, specializing in chamber music performance from the classical era to contemporary music and improvised styles. The mission of Classical Revolution is to present concerts involving both traditional and modern approaches while engaging the community by offering chamber music performances in highly accessible venues, such as bars and cafes, and collaborating with local musicians and artists from various styles and backgrounds. Classical Revolution has been playing chamber music to packed houses every Sunday night at Revolution Cafe in the Mission District since October 2006. Now they have expanded to 19 cities, including Amsterdam on April 17th!

Lori Lewis, Opera Singer
Founder of Everyday Opera
Everyday Opera is the brainchild of Lori Lewis.  A prime time radio veteran of over 13 years and accomplished singer, Lewis used her love of opera to develop the Everyday Opera concept.  She called upon New York Metropolitan Opera star Janet Hopkins to contribute with her vast experience and engaging personality. Together, they morphed Everyday Opera into a vehicle with broad artistic and mainstream appeal. EverydayOpera.Com offers articles, videos, and a Live Streaming Audio Network. Podcasts on demand are available for download. Interviews and feature pieces cover an appealing range of topics from opera to wine & food to travel as well as beauty & fashion.

We make great art. What we can pull out of a piano or a canvas is mind-boggling. The effect we have on audiences is potent. Our level of creativity is off the charts and greatness is surely right around the corner. Even still…all of that doesn’t give us the right to be jerks.

Always eat this voluntarily, never put your self in a position to have it smashed in your face!

 It’s so easy to get caught up in the process of making amazing art that once we get in that zone, that cherished cocoon of creativity, we quite frankly forget how to relate to people out in the real world. It’s even easier to get overly agitated when unexpected annoyances threaten our attempt at perfection like when the house piano is subpar, the stagehands are noisy, the stage mom is omnipresent, the donors are needy, the presenters are controlling, the tech guy is arrogant, etc. All of these scenarios are grounds for snappage.

Snappage- /sna-pij/ noun. a collection of pent up emotion finally erupting at an unfortunately inappropriate moment of time, usually resulting in great relief and satisfaction on the part of the snapper, but also possibly leading to long-term damage on said snapper’s career.

So where does humility come into play? Well, it’s the thing that will give you perspective. Don’t mistake it for self-loathing. But remember that it’s about recognizing that you and what you need are not all that matters. If we’re humble about how blessed we are to be in the position to even have these problems in the first place, the likelihood of bridge-burning snappage is less and less. If we remember the times when our only concerts were unpaid and graded, we’ll be less condescending of the small town presenter who dares to present us in the local high school auditorium which happens to be the only auditorium in town. When we recall what it was like to balance academics, accompanying that neurotic grad school soprano, passive-aggressively managing chamber rehearsals with an ensemble you were assigned to all while trying to assure you didn’t crash and burn at your own performance jury, that will make it much easier to tolerate the overbearing presenter whose only trying to insure a successful concert. When we remember the lonely silence of the conservatory practice room that served as a constant reminder of our “studenthood”, the hustle and bustle of the professional stage can serve as a reminder that we are in the very real process of arriving.

Humility is about reflection. Appreciating how just yesterday you were nobody and today you’re on the way to becoming somebody. It’s about remembering that your art is a gift that you were given. For some precious, supernatural reason you are chosen to bring beauty and joy to random people who didn’t even know they needed it. That’s cause for silent celebration not haughtiness or standoffishness, not rants and raves or bitter complaints, not tellings off. Because in the end, none of those antics prove your greatness. Your art, how you present it, how you respond to those receiving it are the true indicators of your potential.


The alternative is to be humbled. To have your weaknesses you’ve been so adept at hiding put painfully on display, to be told off yourself and given the hard truth about where you really stand in the grand scheme of things, to be reminded publicly that there are countless others equally, if not more, talented than you that come with way less attitude. To be humbled can happen without your knowing it because it means your bad reputation precedes you far faster than your great art. It stops up passageways, shuts doors, builds walls, slams gates all to prevent your entry.

So let us mind our manners and temper our tempers so that our artistic temperaments never block our artistic potential. Remember, everything in life that’s important is bigger than us.

Humility. Practice that.

Emerge Already! is thrilled to announce the Guest Chatter line up for this week’s Livestream episode. Tune in on Thursday (4/7/11) at 7:30 Eastern to hear our guests add to what Jade will be bringing you this week. In case you forgot, this week’s episode is “Fellow Artist Flubs to learn from”.

eight blackbird’s Tim Munro, Flutist

Grammy-winning eighth blackbird promises – and delivers – provocative and mind-changing performances to its burgeoning audiences. Combining bracing virtuosity with an alluring sense of irreverence, the sextet debunks the myth that contemporary music is only for a cerebral few. The ensemble attracts fans of all ages to its performances and recordings, which sparkle with wit and pound with physical energy.

About Tim
Born in Brisbane, Australia, Tim studied flute at Oberlin College, Queensland Conservatorium (Australia) and Australian National Academy of Music. His teachers included Michel Debost, Margaret Crawford and Patrick Nolan.

Tim has played with professional orchestras, chamber groups and new music ensembles around Australia. Highlights include concerto performances with the Queensland Orchestra, solo performances at the Melbourne Arts Festival and Bangalow Festival, and recordings for Australian radio and commercial CD release. He also participated in the Carnegie Hall Training Workshops and the Pacific Music Festival.

Composers he has worked with include Elliott Carter, Oliver Knussen, Aaron Jay Kernis, Joseph Schwantner, Tania Leon, Peter Sculthorpe and Brett Dean.

A classical music tragic, Tim likes to write and speak about music, and in an earlier life was Publications Coordinator of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra.

Check out Tim’s Blog and check out www.eighthblackbird.org.

Harold Gray, Founder and Artist Director of Portland Piano International Series

PORTLAND PIANO INTERNATIONAL IS DEDICATED TO PRESENTING THE FINEST PIANISTS IN THE WORLD IN RECITAL SETTINGS AND OUTREACH ACTIVITIES FOR THE PURPOSE OF ENRICHING AND EDUCATING OUR COMMUNITY.

Harold Gray retired from Portland State University as Professor on Music in 2005 after serving on the faculty there since 1977. Prior to joining the faculty of PSU he was Chair of the Piano Division at Illinois State University. As pianist of the Florestan Trio, Artists-in-Residence at the university, he performed throughout the United States and in Europe and Asia. He has performed in numerous summer festivals on both coasts and in Europe. For four seasons he brought French and American musicians together for chamber music concerts in the villages of Southwest France. Harold has been heard on National Public Radio and Television, and has recorded for Orion, Desmar and Advent-Europe. Harold also enjoys working on environmental issues.

Harold’s blog “Speaking of Pianists”
Portland Piano’s Website

Click to Preview the Livestream Page.