What do you do when you really mess up in performance?
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- čas přidán 16. 07. 2024
- Do you ever mess up in a performance (and think you are the worst player in the world and should never touch your instrument again)? Michelle Anderson of Clarinet Mentors presents a video on how you can recover, and prepare yourself to enjoy your performance, even with tragic fails.
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It's really cool that you put this video up - my high school symphonic band went to festival today! I had a fast and technical solo in our final piece, and I have a history of psyching myself out before a solo performance. I've never really completely screwed a solo up yet, but they've not always been what I wanted them to be because I scare myself. I always think, "You can't mess this up, you've worked too hard and you can't let anyone down." This time though, I changed my thinking. I didn't even think about the solo beforehand - I just pretended that we were in rehearsal and that there was no extra pressure. And it worked! The solo turned out well, and the band did well. I will definitely be using some of the tips from this video to share with my fellow drum major candidates come next practice, if that's okay :)
Thank you for the video! You're helping me become a better clarinet player and a better section leader.
BEAUTIFUL performance at the end, by the way! ❤️
If I were one of the other musicians you were playing with, I would consider it a compliment that you got lost in the music.
One of my musician friends when he makes a mistake calls it his own “variation” on the piece.
Thanks for sharing this. I didn’t hear any mistakes. I thought it was beautiful. I’ve been thinking about this recently and people who aren’t musicians probably won’t recognize the mistakes and people who are musicians know what it is like and would be rooting for your success. I have years of music training and usually the only way I know if someone has made a mistake is if it shows up in their facial expression. So my advice is to keep smiling and playing and most likely no one will ever know.
Omg. I don’t even want to see anyone again when I mess up. Thank you for your vulnerability in confession. Confession is good for the soul. Then you just go on. You can’t be effective in the present when your looking behind you. I don’t know the piece so I couldn’t tell that anyone made a mistake. It was lovely.
Wow, listening to you sounded exactly like the thoughts I have when I've screwed up a performance! I was playing 1st in a church group two weeks ago and lost count of a rest in the beginning of the piece. As a result, no one came in with the piano accompaniment! We all just had our clarinets in our mouth and the rest of the group was looking at me for a clue to come in! Scary! But, fortunately the pianist saved us by quietly counting us in. It was panic though before that as I tried to think, "Okay, where do I come in, in the middle of this piece and make it sound right??! Fortunately, we were able to laugh about it afterwards. Thank you for your courage in posting this! Knowing that professionals go through the same thing, gives us amateurs hope. A great lesson : )
Thank you for being so beautifully transparent. I hadn’t thought someone of your calibre experienced these things too so it does encourage me. It has taken me some time to push past fear of messing up and I am usually the only one who notices when I do.
Wow! Here I thought I was the only one that wasn't perfect. I play a solo every Sunday in church and have trouble with performance anxiety. I think it comes from when I was a child and thought if I am just be perfect everything would be alright. Trouble is, I never have achieved it! Thank you so much for your lessons. They have helped me a lot. I am one of those self-taught persons. There are no instructions in this rural community. Been playing for 10 years, figure I have only 10 to go at most, but I do love playing the old gospel songs and southern spirituals. (I am 72, ha, ha)
When I first started playing the clarinet I was the most confident in my band class. So I decided to play a solo at my concert. I got distracted by my brother in the audience and I messed up and totally forgot where I was! It was bad, and for a long time I'd beat myself up about it and never played in front of an audience. I am glad you put this video up because it has changed my mindset and made me feel more confident in myself. I think you are a great teacher and I can't wait to watch more of your videos!
Thanks, Leo. I think we all have our own disaster stories. The good news is there are many more positive musical experiences out there that make it worth it. I appreciate your kind words. You should feel confident in your abilities, and just recognize that we all mess up sometimes. Don't let it hold you back.
Thanks for posting this. I get performance anxiety and it is good to hear that a pro like you sometimes messes up and beats herself up as well. We have to remember that the audience is with us and is there to enjoy our performance. My last solo (with piano accompaniment) I had a panic attack and lost my place and squeaked. But I found my place again and finished. Later, in speaking to audience members no one seemed to have noticed (or didn't mention that they noticed) and I got compliments, By the way, I did not notice your messing up in that Brahms excerpt - beautiful!
Wow Michelle, what a brave, impactful topic! I have never heard this from the many awesome clarinetists I studied with back in the day. It was always "Just don't screw up and you'll be fine". Such a validation of the value I remember from studying with you as a kid. You were/are the best clarinet teacher I have ever had.
Beautiful performance!! I am a classically trained tenor. The thought process is the same, though. In my lifetime, I've easily sung several million of those little black dots exactly the way they were written while adding nuance, emotion, varying tone color, etc to every one of them. I could say that I can't remember many performances where I really screwed up. There were some but in the overall scheme of things, a high percentage of accuracy was achieved. Imagine a baseball player with a batting average where he gets a hit 33% of his times at bat....that guy's a star. When our batting averages as performers is about 99.999 % perfect, we beat ourselves up. I get passed the goofups by thinking about my overall percentages.
The next thing is that I know that an audience generally has very little idea if something was missed or a wrong note was played anyway. I was not familiar with this trio and I couldnt tell what was missed. I thought it was a GREAT musical performance. Finally, I keep things in perspective in another way. I once went to a famous opera house to hear a performance of Verdi's Rigoletto. I waited for the famous quartet only to hear the tenor sing every bit of it a half step low!! If I miss an entrance and recover, or I sing a bum note....I can always remind myself that things cant be as bad as that Rigoletto Quartet! When I was younger, I was more self concious and beat myself up if I made a rare mistake...as I got older, I accepted it as part of the game of making music for others!
Excellent comments - particularly listening to a beautiful line and you lose where you are. Just excellent.
Thank you for addressing this topic. It's easy to believe that I'm the only one who struggles with these kind of mental games. I'm also so very glad your shared part of your performance in this video.
Thank you so very much, Michelle, for your vulnerability and wisdom. I can't tell you how helpful this video is to me.
Very gracious of you to share this
@Michelle - What a thoughtful, helpful lesson to post: dealing with failure, handling it professionally in the moment of performance. Just the vulnerability displayed to point out such things is helpful to so many of us, and to do so with grace in a time of personal tragedy. I admire you so much for this. Plus, this piece and your performance is so gorgeous, even with the flubs! :) By handling them so well, they were quickly overlooked and forgotten by the listener. It made me think of the bigger picture that live performance symbolizes: how to be real human beings as we strive for excellence and contribute our part to the beauty of life, graciously accepting our mistakes (and those of others) along the way. Isn't that one of the great purposes of art? Great lesson, Michelle. Play on!
I can't say, i never played publicly. i screwed up in front of my mom once, didn't sound as nice as i could, and wasn't in the good rythm though out the piece .i keep postponing a second rehearsal until i believe i master the piece... It's been a few years now...Still not ready ! So i mess up all my pieces but keep going at it . And when i am about to quit and/or throw my clarinette furiously on the ground ,i go watch your videos, Michelle. It keeps me going for a while !
Hi Michelle, I haven't contacted you for a while, but this video touched me. I have played in the New Horizons Band of Cincinnati for the past two and a half years - I'm a newbie! The feelings you expressed on making a mistake, especially becoming totally lost in a score hits me hard. Then the frustration and anger hits and you become even more upset. Yes, an occasional squeak or F# instead of F Natural occur. I guess we are all human after all. Thanks for sharing your ideas and feelings with us. I have been with you as a member of Clarinet Mentors for the past few years and have been helped immensely through your insightful videos and on line chats. And, beautiful, expressive clarinet control in your trio. You are great.
this happened to me too in the first part of Brahms trio. It is really so beautiful! And you guys are playing it so nice! It is so cool of you to post this video. I learned in the past from talking to the public that mostly the mistakes are even not noticed by them. So you just do the best you can. I looked to some video's of Benjamin Zander , which were so helpful. Don't be mad at yourself but think 'how interesting', when you are making a mistake.
I'm always amazed when after a performance, I speak to people who've listened and they tell me that they did not pick up on the mistake(s) I made. I often wonder if their comment is less sincere and more sympathetic. I will usually respond with some disbelief with a quick 'really?' at least or a long description of the blunder at most and they will continue to reassure me that it didn't jump out at them. Now, having watched this, I can see where they would say something like that. I can honestly say that I watched the performance at the end of this video 3 times, and I was hard pressed to find the missing entry point or the wrong note played. I think I found the squeak that you mentioned, but your tone is so on point that it easy to miss. I would also like to point out that your ability to not react to the errors helped you hide them well. It's obvious when a well trained professional is performing because their focus is always on the performance, not their feelings about the performance. There's a solace in knowing what's going on inside is not showing on the outside. Thanks for sharing this. It's always a pleasure to watch you perform (even if it's not one of your best)!
Just got my first sounds over the break that I can produce with some level of consistency.... So that said. Great video.
I agree that it was courageous of you to put this video up. The playing is beautiful in spite of the (minor) mess-ups. Pretty hard to make those late-life clarinet pieces by Brahms sound bad. However, I have another problem. Have you ever had those performances where *everything* went badly? That no matter how you concentrate on the next note (or next piece) you're struggling? I think we all experience the "20% discount" effect when playing performances, but sometimes I wonder if it has something to do with what we do the day of the performance. The other day I practised fairly hard the morning of the concert, and then played a really sub=standard concert in the afternoon. Maybe next time I'd be better to go for a run! Any suggestions?
I am not really familiar with that piece. In Brahms time no one would hav even expected to be familiar with any specific Brahms piece so not a big goof up. First, as I understand it, Brahms literally fell in love with the clarinetist, although it is not clear to me whether that love was requited. Whichever the case we have some truly lovely music which was left behind. No, I have no idea where you spaced out. It bri ga to mind a Wayne Shorter tune I brought to a jam session. It has 14 bar phrases instead of the nearly universal 16 bars. As I was listening to the excellent piano player playing his solo, I literally lost count. But I had listened to it enough and prepared myself enough that I knew how the 14 bars occurred. Same thing in your performance: I assume you knew the piece so well that when you zoned out you knew how to plug yourself back in, so to speak, to the flow of the piece. So, the take home is, know how the piece is structured, if possible down to the intuitive level, and you will be able to recover if and when you enter a bliss state. Namaste!
I have always said, the day I play perfectly with no mistakes is the day I quit. I have been playing a loooong time, since 1964 and still make little errors with the band I am currently playing. Always try for perfection but am human.
musicality really does save the day
If that was messing up I just wish I could '
can you make a new tutorial about circular breathing?
I don't want to sound presumptuous or boastful, but what happened to you and what you said about it, reminds me what Epictetus, the stoic philosopher, said about going to a public bath (in ancient Rome): “If you intend to engage in any activity, remind yourself what the nature of the activity is. If you are going to bathe, imagine yourself what happens in baths: the splashing of water, the crowding, the scolding, the stealing. And like that, you will more steadily engage in the activity if you frankly say ‘I want to bathe and want to hold my will in accordance with nature’. And do the same for every activity. So if any impediment arises in bathing, readily say ‘I did not only want this, but I also wanted to hold my will in accordance with nature; and I will not hold it like that if I am annoyed about what happens’.
So, next time something like this would ever happen to me, I will certainly suffer like you, but I will try to remember that I my main goal was to enjoy playing music and that mistakes can happen. So keeping this in mind, I will try to still enjoy it no matter what. (I know, easy to say, not so easy to do... but I guess it's as learning an instrument, but this time, learning to be kind to us)... Great video, and very special lesson! Thanks!
I noticed that at times you were tapping one or both feet. I normally don't tap my foot during a performance unless I'm not secure in the music at that point in time. Perhaps you were not up to your normal standard of preparation, which contributed to your difficulty at finding your place after the moment of euphoria.