I played concerts for many years and loved it with all my being. Every performance was an opportunity to give my best and to shine in a very special and meaningful way. Now I perform as a teacher instead, giving seminars and other public presentations, and I get just as nervous and anxious before some of these events as I did before walking onstage to play a recital or a concerto with an orchestra.

Any kind of performance can be scary. It’s always a new audience, a new day in your life, a new level of challenge with the kind of repertoire or material you’re presenting – it’s a new you, daring to find out what exactly will come out of your mouth or your instrument, this time.

Maybe the stakes are really high this time. Or maybe you just really want to open your heart, this particular time, and give it everything you have, no matter who happens to be there. I’ve talked to famous musicians who sometimes get just as nervous facing an elementary school audience as they do performing at Carnegie Hall.

It isn’t just about the piece of music. It’s about this energy in your body – this life in you that needs to happen – in concert with other human beings. The life in you needs to be shared.

Is anything more beautiful or important than sharing our life, our aliveness, with other people?

We shake inside before a performance because we feel so alive – we feel  this all-powerful thing called life surging through our system. And it can feel glorious, terrifying, liberating, overwhelming, and all of these at once.

But sometimes it’s much harder than it should be

Expressing yourself at an important moment – when you really care, when you feel this deep desire to share yourself, or when you need a job and you have to show the audition panel that you deserve it – is always a huge challenge. But sometimes this challenge is made even more intense because of extreme circumstances.

Recent articles in the Washington Post and the New York Times have been revealing some of these extreme circumstances, which have been going on for many years: in particular, sexual harassment and sexual abuse – of orchestra members by conductors and colleagues, of ballerinas by their ballet masters and male colleagues, and elsewhere. Some of the details are shocking. It’s hard to comprehend how these sensitive artists manage to perform when their emotional and physical safety is threatened or taken away. Undoubtedly most cannot perform at their best in these circumstances. And offstage they are also suffering a great deal.

Other Kinds of Abuse

Many other stories of abuse come out at music lessons, when students feel safe to talk about what has happened to them. “My previous teacher yelled at me a lot.“ “My parents forced me to practice three hours a day.“ “My parents beat me if I made a mistake in a recital.“ “People at school told me my performance was great, and then I found out they said bad things behind my back.“ “My teacher told me I wasn’t talented and should just give up.“

All kinds of abuse are heaped on top of the vulnerable heart of a person who just wants to make music. To do something beautiful and good.

Our society has begun to face the facts of abuse, and people are gradually starting to heal from it. That is deeply good and necessary, both for those who have been abused and for all of us who benefit from their healed, beautiful presence. Whether it’s onstage or in our personal, everyday relationships, we all need to be around people who radiate joy.

And we definitely need performers who feel safe and free to express themselves from the heart. They heal us when their music making touches our own vulnerable, battered hearts. This whole world needs healing.

An important part of my job as a teacher is to help musicians heal so they can give their gifts to the world.

Finding Safety

Playing a musical instrument is one of the biggest challenges there is. We have to train our body, mind, ears, and emotions to function on an extremely high level, and we spend a lot of time talking about all this training. But the need for personal safety is even more important – for our full freedom of expression and for our health and wellbeing as performing artists.

A private lesson with a kind, understanding teacher can provide safety. But often, the experience of finding safety in a community of musicians can go even further.

Much of our difficulty in handling harmful situations is made worse than it needs to be by having grown up in families that failed to provide enough warmth, understanding, protection, and safety. If we are lucky enough to find a group of people who can be like a family – who can provide us with the understanding and kindness we need – we can heal from hurts in our past. We all need friends.

I feel incredibly lucky to have such a community – to actually lead the community of the Art of Practicing Institute in the programs I teach.  Hearing one person‘s story helps all of us feel our own humanness more, and we all get stronger in our fundamental belief in the power of the human heart. Knowing that others have experienced similar vulnerability and pain can be a relief from loneliness and despair, and it renews our faith in ourselves and others.

We need this kind of community. We need a place where we can be ourselves and feel at home. We need a safe place from which to go bravely out into the world and spread joy and beauty. We need each other, as companions on the scary, beautiful, and amazing journey of being performing musicians. There’s safety in numbers when the people you’re with are willing to be real and to share their hearts.

An Invitation

I invite you to join our community – by trying out our live online workshops. In addition to a short, powerful mental practice and a master class session, each workshop includes a half-hour discussion period, when people talk about anything they want. Often, these conversations are about personal issues that get in the way of performance. And typically, people feel much better from speaking about their experiences, being heard, and sometimes getting practical advice. The musicians in this group are kind and welcoming. And you are free to watch first before saying or playing anything!

So I invite you to just step your toe in, and see what it’s like when your fellow musicians drop their barriers and make friends with each other. Believe me – no matter how accomplished they may be, they’re all just people like you.

I’m offering a special deal on these workshops for people who are not familiar with our special community of musicians: You can join us for two free sessions if you contact me by October 31. Then if you’d like to continue, you’re welcome to. Also all sessions are recorded, so if you can’t make a session, you can always watch it later.

I’d love to have you with us.

I wish you much joy and success.

Madeline Bruser

Q & A of the Month

You talk about using mindfulness meditation to relax your mind before practicing, but I feel like I have so much to accomplish at the piano every day that I just have to get right to it instead of stopping to meditate first. Shouldn’t I take advantage of that good motivation and energy right away, instead of calming it down?

Thanks for this great question!

The passion to practice is fantastic. We need it. But meditation doesn’t really “calm down” your good energy. It relaxes and settles the nervous static within your body and mind – the excess energy that actually gets in the way of your deepest musicality, so you can actually express yourself more fully.

Music lives in the body. Most of the time, we’re not fully engaging our feeling capacity or our perceptions. We walk into a room without noticing the atmosphere in it. We enter a conversation without observing how others are feeling. Or we charge into our practicing without being aware of sensations inside us. So we miss out on a bigger experience that we could be having. And we bring less of our true selves to the situation.

Meditation is a way to get more in touch with your true self. And in my experience, even two minutes of it completely alters how a student plays at their lesson. They may come into the room with all the energy of their day still rattling around inside them, and if they start playing right away, I take in all that rattling energy along with the music they’re playing. But then if they sit still and let themselves just breathe for two minutes, when they play again, the rattling is gone, the person is more fully there, and the music comes through from a deeper place. It can be dramatically different.

Sometimes students choose to do the Performing Beyond Fear exercise instead, which takes about 6 minutes. That can be amazing, because it brings out their deep communicative energy, the really powerful passion that lies just underneath our speediness – under our “gung ho” energy, or our somewhat mindless, “Let’s dive in!” attitude. And it’s not less joyful – it’s more joyful, because we’re free of the tension that often occurs when we’re in the sway of intense emotion.

I recommend that you try one of these mental techniques a few times and record your playing before and after. Or have someone in the room with you to describe to you how it sounds different after doing the technique. When you actually experience it for yourself like this it can be very surprising.

​Submit a question for possible inclusion in next month’s issue of Performing Beyond Fear. 

When I was 27 I realized I needed to find a way to enjoy teaching more, since it was my main source of income. I had always liked teaching, but practicing and performing were what I loved.

So I looked for books about how to teach. Luckily, someone recommended Freedom to Learn, by psychologist Carl Rogers.

The book was a revelation. Rogers described the teacher as a “facilitator of learning,“ saying that people naturally want to learn and mostly need to be encouraged to follow their own innate perceptions, responses, and curiosity. While a teacher possesses knowledge that a student needs, the wise teacher draws out the inner wisdom of each student, teaching them to teach themselves, by honoring who they are and what they already know. Such a teacher asks her student lots of questions: “What do you think?“ “How did it sound to you?“ “How did that feel?”

I underlined many passages in the book and put many asterisks in the margins. I even put circles around some of the asterisks. I was really excited to learn a whole new way to relate to my students.

But three weeks after I finished the book it dawned on me that I wasn’t applying anything I’d read to my teaching. This realization came in the middle of giving a lesson to a 17-year-old girl. I suddenly saw that I wasn’t enjoying the lesson, and I remembered, “Oh! Carl Rogers!“

So I asked my student, “What do you think? How was it?“ And out of her mouth came everything I had planned to tell her about how she had just played. She already knew. I would have wasted my breath.

But more importantly, I would have given her the impression that my thoughts were more important than hers. I would have put a lid on her intelligence instead of encouraging it and delighting in it. And I would have continued to lose opportunities, in every moment of my teaching, to discover the real mind and heart of each student and to engage in life-giving, creative dialogue with them in which both of us learn all the time.

As soon as I started teaching this new way, my life changed. I began to love teaching. And my students were learning more and having more fun at their lessons and in their practicing. They started thinking for themselves and taking charge of their own learning. They felt empowered.

It feels really great to work with empowered students. It’s a real, dynamic relationship.

Practicing From Natural Curiosity

Whether or not you’re teaching others, you can apply Rogers’ approach to your own practicing. You’ll find lots of ideas about how to do this in Chapter 7 of my book, The Art of Practicing. The chapter’s called “The Spark of Inquisitiveness.” And the basic idea is that if you simply listen inside yourself to what you’re most interested in looking at or working on, from moment to moment in your practice session, you’ll practice smarter, instead of harder. You’ll make more discoveries – because your mind is more open. So you’ll accomplish more and have more fun.

Practicing is a lot of work. But our work needs to be intelligent. And intelligence is something within us that needs to be developed, by really paying attention to it. This means paying attention not only to our thoughts, but also to our feelings, perceptions, and desires. All of it is part of our intelligence.

Think about it. You already know so much! You know what you think about how you’re playing. You know how it feels in your body. And if you keep paying attention to what you know, you can trust yourself and take the time you need to get the results you want. You can relax with the process.

How do you do that?

If you feel tense while you’re practicing, stop for half a minute. Relax. Breathe. Maybe get up and stretch. Treat yourself like a human being!

Maybe you’d like your hands to feel more comfortable in a certain passage. Take whatever time you need to look at it in detail. Play with one hand at a time and really look at each move you’re making. Notice exactly where the discomfort is, and see if you can let your muscles relax more or position your hand a little differently.

Or maybe you’d like to get a better sound. Try slowing down and noticing just one single sound as it comes from your instrument, letting go of whatever judgment might arise. Relax your whole body as you listen to it. Don’t even think about the next sound. Just relax where you are and see if there’s something about this sound that you can enjoy. Keep letting go of negative judgments and just listen. The more you let yourself relax, the better your sound can be.

When and How to Look for Help

If your practicing starts to open up that way, you can start to feel a lot better. But if you’re often feeling confused about how to get the results you want, remember that making music requires extremely adept use of your body, your mind, your emotions, and your hearing – all at once. And sometimes you might need to find a good teacher to help you practice and perform to the best of your ability.

Whether you want help with one particular aspect of your technique or you want to really transform your playing, look for someone you feel comfortable with. A person who makes you feel welcome and who inspires trust. You can feel it – you can tell if they really want to hear what you have to say and if they care about helping you.

Before having an actual lesson, ask a prospective teacher lots of questions. Sometimes simple questions will tell you the most: “How do you teach?” “What’s your physical approach to the instrument?”

Talking to the teacher in person can really help you sense if they’re right for you. So ask for a consultation, and go ahead and get specific with your questions if you want to: “Playing fast is hard for me. How could you help me with that?” “My arms get tight when I play octaves and chords. Would you be able to help me play them more easily?” “I have trouble playing in tune. How do you work with that?” “ I want to get a bigger sound when I sing. How do you help people with that?“

You might also want to know, “What are your ideas on practicing? How much should I practice?” Or, “Can you help me feel more confident when I perform?”

As you listen to how they answer your questions, trust how you feel in response. Do they sound like they know what they’re talking about? Does it make sense to you? Do you feel confident that they can help you with your problems?

If you think you could trust this teacher, try a single lesson first. Raise lots of questions at the lesson too. A question could be in the form of an observation, like “My thumb doesn’t feel comfortable when I move to this key.” Then see how the teacher responds. Does she look closely at what you’re doing with your hand and offer you a solution that helps your thumb feel more comfortable?

And notice if the teacher asks you questions during the lesson. Does she check to see how her suggestions are landing with you so that the two of you are in synch and it’s a joint learning process?  Or is she just telling you what to do throughout the whole lesson?

Then ask yourself: Do I feel better about how I’m playing after this lesson? Do I feel more encouraged now about my future as a musician? Am I looking forward to practicing and to my next lesson?

What We All Want

We all want to feel free and confident – as musicians and as people. So we need people with us in our journey who already have a good amount of freedom and confidence themselves. Look for a teacher with these qualities. When a teacher has personal confidence as well as conviction in their ability to help you become the musician you’re meant to be, they will be naturally friendly and have a sense of humor, along with the wisdom and clarity you need, so that you can relax, be yourself, and grow.

If you find such a teacher, you will want to practice. And you will know how.

And if you’re curious what it would be like to work with me? In person or online? I invite you to sign up for a free consultation. I love meeting new people – especially when they’re motivated to give themselves the best learning experience they can and become the best they can be at the piano.

I wish you much joy and success.

Madeline Bruser

Q & A of the Month

In one of your videos with a student, you asked her to feel “rooted to the bench” and to “sit really down.” What was that about?

Being “rooted,” or physically grounded, has a big effect on any musician’s playing, or singing. In terms of reliability, which is the first ingredient of fearless performing, there’s nothing more reliable than the force of gravity—which we usually take for granted. If we actually focus on how gravity roots us to the ground, or to the bench—if we tune in to it—we have a great advantage. In her case, it helped her have more power and ease with her arms.

Athletes understand this principle. If you watch a boxer deliver a punch, you can see him push his feet and legs into the ground as he’s about to use his arm. You can understand this principle easily if you mimic that movement in the following way: Sit solidly upright and deliver a punch into the air, straight ahead of you. You will easily feel power in your arm. Then give up your solid, vertical position by hunching over, so that your weight is no longer sinking straight down into the seat, and try delivering the punch. Immediately you will notice that you lose power. You lose power because you literally lose your ground.

The extraordinary mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson was very striking in how she related to the force of gravity. One reviewer commented that she seemed to draw energy directly up from the ground when she sang. I perceived the same thing in her myself. Her feet were solidly planted on the floor, and the energy seemed to move powerfully upward straight through her body and out from her throat. It was glorious.

There’s nothing like this rootedness—not only for physical reliability, but also for confidence. It gives you a solid base from which to openly express yourself. My own playing, and that of my students, opened up enormously when I discovered this principle. Of course, you also need to use your hands and arms efficiently in order to make it all work.

Our ability to listen is also directly affected by this kind of physical groundedness. The stability allows you to be more receptive. So although you may be moving less, you can actually be more engaged with the music.

​Submit a question for possible inclusion in next month’s issue of Performing Beyond Fear. 

As I write this, I’m about to leave my home in New York City for the beautiful campus of Edinboro University in Pennsylvania, to teach the Art of Practicing Institute’s 6th annual summer program, Mindfulness, Confidence & Performance. Musicians from six countries are coming to open up their playing and singing, and we will celebrate their transformation at a closing concert for the public, followed by a special night out for ourselves.

It’s a totally amazing week, because we’re there to let go of habits that don’t serve us and to learn new, healthier ways to practice, perform, and live. No one is the same afterwards. We all leave the program feeling deeply nourished as musicians, performers, and human beings.

If you’re not coming to this program, I’d like to provide some ideas in this article, based on what happens there, for how you can nourish yourself as a musician wherever you live, focusing on three main elements of the program: nature, deep work, and supportive community.

Nature
After spending most of my year in New York City, the natural environment of the Edinboro campus is a wonderful breath of fresh air. It’s very green and spacious, and has a beautiful lake in the middle that we walk by every day on our way to and from the music buildings.

As human beings with demanding lives, we all need to refresh ourselves periodically – every day and every week and season of the year. So wherever you live, find some greenery, and ideally a stream, river, lake, or ocean to go with it. But even if you have only a potted plant or some flowers in your home, take time to gaze at these and drink in the beauty. Breathe deep, and exhale! Or just close your eyes and take time to imagine a beach, a forest, or a peaceful lake. Let yourself breathe and let your body relax.

Get Away

In the middle of summer program, everyone takes time off one evening to go to Presque Isle – a gorgeous state park on Lake Erie. That is, everyone except me; I catch up on rest that evening. But I’ve enjoyed seeing everyone come back looking happy and exhilarated.

Wherever you live, if you have the chance to get away to a special place once in a while, take it! I go on a meditation retreat in the country three times a year for a week, and the sheer contrast of this peaceful place makes it feel like I’ve been away from the city for a month. We need this kind of space in our lives, and the music we make when we come back can be so much more fresh and inspired.

Deep Work with Music

As in the private lessons I teach at my home studio and online, we take time in the master classes at Edinboro to go into depth and detail in working with music, and participants learn far-reaching concepts that they can apply to every piece they study. Although we also talk about music in traditional ways – looking at articulation, phrasing, structure, pedaling, and countless other aspects of a piece – we focus primarily on what makes the Art of Practicing unique: fundamental and universal points that are often overlooked in studying music and that can make all the difference in achieving a free and genuine performance.

How can you go more deeply into music in a similar way at home? The Art of Practicing can be a wonderful guide. Each chapter focuses on a different aspect of practicing and gives you a lot of ideas to work with from moment to moment with your instrument. And the questions and answers, which appear at the end of most chapters, which can clarify these ideas.

Deep Inner Work

The deep work we do at the program also includes mindfulness meditation, Focusing, and the Performing Beyond Fear exercise. These are mental techniques that have direct visceral effects, and they are truly transformative for practicing and performing.
Meditation is a gentle process of gradually increasing your awareness of yourself and everything around you. Because of this gentleness, the practice opens up a space in which people feel safe to talk about what they are going through.

Since the publication of The Art of Practicing, mindfulness meditation has entered the mainstream of our culture, with 20 million Americans practicing it. You can now find instruction in many types of mindfulness, in many cities and online. Look for a place that resonates with you.

Another technique we learn and practice at the summer program is Focusing – spelled with a capital “F”. Focusing is a brilliant method for getting in touch with buried emotions and releasing them. It was developed by a psychologist named Eugene Gendlin as a way for people to heal from painful experiences. And it can also be used to become more aware of positive feelings and to let them spread further in your system, providing wonderful emotional and physical nourishment.

You can learn this simple technique from a book. Two excellent ones are The Power of Focusing, by Ann Weiser Cornell, and Your Body Knows the Answer, by David I. Rome. Focusing is a great practice for us, because emotions are our currency in making music, and we need access to them in order to express the huge range of human feelings in great music.

The third technique we do each day is the Performing Beyond Fear exercise, and an audio of the instruction I gave in this exercise at last summer’s program is now available online. It includes an introduction, guided instruction, and the live question and answer session with participants that followed.

Supportive Community

I love people, and wonderful people come to this program. They come because they’re motivated to go deep and to change their habits in order to become the musicians they’re meant to be. I also feel so fortunate to have great assistant teachers supporting me in the training process, in which participants bravely let go of familiar but unhealthy habits in working with music and begin to try new, healthier approaches, some of which may be challenging at first.

At each year’s program I get to witness the joy and power that each participant experiences as they discover a whole new level of engagement with music in the company of others who appreciate their efforts and the breakthroughs they are making. Friendships often form quickly in this situation, and many of them are lasting.

How can you find brave, motivated people like this at home?

Look for musicians who seem more open and vulnerable than others. Strike up conversations with them, being as honest and genuine as you can, even if it feels scary. Little by little, reveal your own weaknesses, insecurities, and passions, and trust your intuition in asking them questions about their own experience with practice and performance and in the music world.

Remember, no matter how much someone might cover up their fears, confusion, and insecurities, we’re all basically alike. We’re all vulnerable human beings at heart, and in fact, the reason we love music is that we are so vulnerable to its beauty and power.
Every morning at the summer program, we have a one-hour discussion group, in which people talk about whatever is coming up for them in the work we’re doing.

You could consider starting a discussion group where you live, perhaps centered around my book, The Art of Practicing. Since the book’s publication, I’ve heard of many college music teachers who have made it required reading for their classes, as well as groups of performers and teachers who have held discussions on the book. Many people also participate in book clubs, and sometimes this book is one they talk about. Such gatherings can be a great way to bring like-minded people together.

For further reading, here are two articles I’ve written on how to receive nourishment and support: Receive First, Then You Can Give, and Creating the Musical Community You Need.

I wish you much joy and success.

Madeline

Q & A of the Month

I have been performing in a string quartet regularly for the last couple of years, and some of the personal relationships between us have become difficult. Sometimes I feel like I can’t be free to make music with them because of the tension between us. Do you have any suggestions?

That’s a juicy situation.

Making music with people is definitely an intimate activity, and all intimate relationships are challenging at times. Once you’ve committed to people like that, personal issues are bound to come up sooner or later. But if you can work through them, everyone can learn a lot, and the group can become stronger.
I remember once asking my mother, maybe when I was in my 20s, about how difficult it must be in a marriage after the honeymoon is over. Her answer was one of the most helpful things she ever said to me: “That’s the best part!” We don’t want to deal with pain and difficulty, but when you commit like that, it forces you to grow, and wonderful things can happen.

In my experience. often just when things are feeling unbearable in a relationship, if you can find a way to communicate effectively, you can get through to someone and turn everything around. And one of the main keys to doing that is taking full responsibility for your own part in the communication difficulties. It takes two to create conflict, and sometimes, it just takes one person to start turning things around. So I think that if you have enjoyed playing with this quartet and are motivated to make it work, there is probably a way.

These days there are so many books and professionals around to guide us through tough situations to a higher level of emotional intelligence in communicating with others and making decisions with them. I actually once conducted a two-hour session with a well-known quartet in a weekend retreat they had, to help them face the next level of challenge in their career. They invited me to lead them in meditation, and I added the Performing Beyond Fear exercise after that. The discussion that came out of it opened everyone up a lot, and gave them helpful insights into themselves and each other. From there, it was easier for them to discuss topics that brought up conflict between them. You could consider trying something like that with your group, if everyone is agreeable. It could even be done online, using video conferencing through zoom.com.

For myself, facing such challenges with others always begins with spending time alone, writing and working through my own feelings, before attempting to get through to someone I’m frustrated with. And consistently, I’ve found that even if I’m dead set on the idea that everything is the other person’s fault, there is always a piece of work for me to do on myself before I am capable of speaking effectively to them.

So I would start with some self-reflection. If your frustration is at the point where you are feeling angry, get the anger out on your own, away from the people involved. Once you have recognized your feelings and expressed them in a harmless way, and you have developed some insight about how you’ve contributed to the tension in your relationships with each person, your mind will be clearer and more open to listening to their point of view. And from there a resolution can occur.

Who knows – maybe you will become so accomplished at this kind of thing that other ensembles will hire you to help them sort out their interpersonal issues!

​Submit a question for possible inclusion in next month’s issue of Performing Beyond Fear. 

(This article has been edited since it was first published in May, 2014.)

Recently my family and I had a very special houseguest named Victoria, who was visiting us for the first time from a distant country. We had been hoping for years that she could come, and we wanted her to feel welcome and at home, like a part of our family. As soon as I received the e-mail confirming her flight to New York, I began getting the apartment ready for this wonderful occasion. I had long postponed doing many things to uplift our home, and now I had a great opportunity to finally do them. I had a week for the whole project.

Each day I spent time de-cluttering rooms, ordering new things online, or shopping in neighborhood stores. As I made changes to each room, I often stood at its entrance to see how it felt to walk in. I wanted Victoria to be surrounded by beauty and spaciousness, so she could relax and enjoy herself. I also wanted her to get to know us better by experiencing our home environment.

On the day that Victoria arrived, I finished some last details—trimming straggly plants, replacing worn-out potholders, buying flowers and putting them in vases. After I put the dinner on the stove, Victoria came to our door, and our long-awaited visit began.

It was an amazing three days that we will long remember. And Victoria said the house felt wonderful. I knew that she would want to come back.

Each Performance Is an Opportunity

I tell this personal story because I believe that a musical performance can be given in the same spirit as the one with which we opened our home to Victoria. We don’t have to think of our audience as a bunch of outsiders marching into our space and judging us for our marred furniture or wrong notes. We can do the best with what we have, bringing it up to as high a level as we can in the time we have, and then let go and share it with the people who have made the effort to come hear us. Even if we don’t know them, isn’t it better to focus on the fact that they are our fellow human beings, with human hearts, so that we can enjoy sharing our humanity with them, instead of freaking out over what they might think of our imperfections?

​But What If I Won’t Be Ready?

It’s easy to lose sight of such a beautiful goal when you are working hard to solve technical and musical problems and worrying that your performance won’t be ready in time. But you can actually use those moments of struggle as reminders of your goal: As soon as you notice that you’re feeling overwhelmed by the demands of preparing a piece for performance, you can stop in your tracks and shift your focus. You can reflect on the opportunity you have to connect with music and to share it with others. This simple shift of focus can dissolve your anxiety, open your heart, and bring more joy into your practicing and performing.

“Easier said than done,” you might say. “I’m practicing for an audition, and I know those judges are going to be supercritical. It’s ridiculous to pretend I’m just going to share music with them.

It’s true that in high-pressure, competitive situations it’s easy to forget the whole point of making music. Yet you can still train yourself to let go of stress and to cultivate joy. And if you do, your audience, whether they are paid judges or paying ticket holders, will feel your heart intentions coming through in your performance.

But Exactly How Do You Do That?

I’ve written a book, and many articles, about how to let go of tension and self-doubt and connect deeply with music in practice and performance. And in December I released the audio of the Performing Beyond Fear exercise—a powerful, 7-minute exercise that actually shifts your focus from self-consciousness to generosity. From worrying, “What will people think of me?” to thinking, “What can I give to them?” That energy of generosity can then come through in your performance, taking it to a new level of expressive power and confidence.

This is what it means to see your audience as your guests. Because after all, just like with our guest Victoria, once your audience arrives, it is no longer about you. It is about sharing your performance with them.

Can a Seven-Minute Exercise Really Do the Trick? 

It may be hard to believe that such a big shift could happen from doing such a brief exercise. But if you try it, you will see for yourself. Even non-musicians have asked me to teach them this exercise for use in situations where they are put on the spot, including giving speeches and taking tests or job interviews, and they’ve found it tremendously helpful.

So if you’re ready to learn how to rise to the occasion of performing, check out the audio. You can hear the first 20 minutes for free and decide if you’d like to learn this amazing technique for getting past performance anxiety.

​We’re All Alike

All of us are basically the same. We each have a human heart from which we can connect with others in performance and uplift their lives. And we each have layers of habits that get in the way of doing that. No matter how stressed or out of touch you may feel at times, it can be surprisingly easy to rouse confidence and connect with music and with an audience from the depth of your communicative power.

Learning the Confidence Habit

My wish is that you could make the Performing Beyond Fear Exercise a regular practice in your life, as a way of encouraging warm, confident, human energy to flow through you and toward others, in performance and throughout your life. The whole point of music is to connect one human heart to another, or to many others. That is why I teach.

I wish you much joy and success.

Madeline Bruser

P.S. The Art of Practicing Institute summer program is nearly full, but we still have room for a few general participants. So if you’re ready to dive into a big discovery of your musical potential, I invite you to join us on July 21 for a transformative week in Edinboro.

My husband and I recently returned from a trip to Italy, and my mind is filled with images of the gorgeous countryside of the Val d’Orcia, in Tuscany. For many centuries, the Italian people have made a deep connection with the land, cultivating it with care and respect, living in harmony with it. As our car wound its way through the last 30 minutes of our drive from Rome to the farmhouse we stayed in near Montepulciano, it felt like a fairytale: Whichever way we turned and as far as the eye could see, in all directions, were gently rolling hills covered with blankets of wheat in varied shades of spring green, fields of yellow flowers, vineyards, orchards, tall cypress trees in single file here and there, and simple, terra-cotta roofed farmhouses where people lived their daily lives. I kept looking out the windows in disbelief – was this really the world? How could it be so beautiful?

When we arrived at Agriturismo Le Caggiole, the farmhouse I had wanted to stay in for 2 1/2 years, it was beyond anything I had imagined – a paradise, with stunning views of the countryside, exquisitely restored stone buildings, and the fantastic perfume of flowering trees and plants. A woman named Monica welcomed us at the reception desk more warmly than anyone had ever greeted us at a new place. As I sat outside on the terrace gazing at the hills with their vineyards and olive orchards, all my stress melted away. Somehow, we had entered Heaven.

During our six-day stay at Le Caggiole, we drove to many beautiful places in the area. Several times I saw a sign on the road that said “Rallentare” – which, as most musicians know, means “slow down.”

And I thought, if only we could slow down all the time – if only we could appreciate our lives, including the people and the music we love, as much as the Tuscan people have appreciated their lives in the country. Isn’t this the real answer to happiness?

Yes. It is.

I thought about how falling in love with the Val d’Orcia is like falling in love with a piece of music. You feel like you’ve never heard anything so beautiful, and you want to get as close to it as you can, to play the music yourself, to never let go of all that beauty.

And yet we do let go of it – countless times, when we get frustrated or impatient in our daily practicing. We often try to bend the music we love in a direction it doesn’t want to go in. Or we gloss over details, dimming the radiance of all that beauty. We tune out. Maybe because it’s so beautiful we can’t take it all in.

What Makes It Beautiful 

Looking at the countryside of the Val d’Orcia, with its occasional farmhouses planted among the fields, orchards, and vineyards, it’s easy to imagine that the people who settled there created these simple dwellings with a conscious intention not to disturb the environment but to cultivate the land with an appreciation of natural order and potential. Everything looks like it just belongs there – their agriculture is inviting, not strictly geometric or factory-like.

I was fortunate to have several conversations with the owner of Le Caggiole, a man named Giacomo, whose family has lived in the house for six generations. He showed me a framed page from a book, on the wall near the reception desk, describing the history of Le Caggiole, going back to the eighth century. He told me that he himself, along with some workers, had torn down the building we were staying in brick by brick, because it was so old it was falling apart, and rebuilt it brick by brick in its original form. A little while later, he came out to the terrace to show me on his iPhone an ancient painting of the very view that I was looking at. I felt honored that he was sharing how much the place meant to him.

Reflecting on Giacomo’s words now, I realize that his love for Le Caggiole is an inspiring example for all of us. As musicians, our work is to take apart the music we love and put it back together brick by brick. We need to appreciate every detail of it – how it is really put together – so that the people who listen to us play or sing this music experience it in its true form.

Your Golden Opportunity

I invite you to discover how much beauty you can create in music by slowing down with us at the Art of Practicing Institute’s weeklong summer program in July. Like the Val d’Orcia, no pictures or descriptions can really prepare you for how amazing the experience is. But through the meditation practices, discussion groups, and master class sessions, your mind will unwind and you’ll hear music and your own heart so vividly, entering a whole new world of appreciation.

Appreciation is the key to it all – to everything inside us and everything we are capable of creating. We need to appreciate ourselves for doing this incredible work of bringing music to life. And to remember that we do it from love.

I hope you will join us this summer, where we will shed so much new light on how to make music from the heart, how to rebuild pieces and phrases brick by brick, and who we really are as musicians. It’s a magical week, filled with the dazzling beauty of music and of the people who make it.

I wish you much joy and success.

Madeline

P.S. If the summer program sounds like a fairytale, I invite you to call or email me with any questions you might have.

P.P.S. And one more picture: Presque Isle State Park, on Lake Erie – the place we take a field trip to in the middle of the week of our program:

Q & A of the Month

I teach piano, and I don’t always succeed in communicating in the most helpful way with my students. Some of them have a lot of doubts and fears about their abilities even if they play quite well, and I find it hard to be sympathetic about their doubts and fears while still trying to encourage them about their progress and potential. How can I help them believe more in themselves? 

This is a beautiful question. In my experience, really hearing and understanding how a student feels – or for that matter, a friend or family member feels – is often easier said than done. You really have to feel your way with it and learn as you go.

Every day I find that I miss an aspect of something someone has said. I feel like I’m not quite tuned in to where their heart really is or to what they intended to convey. Or I discover that I don’t know the whole story behind their feelings, and that I’ve responded with inadequate information. And the people who are closest to me don’t always completely understand me either.

It can be very helpful for us as teachers to ask questions of a student when they express doubt or fear, to be sure that we understand. And we also need to be aware of our particular habitual tendencies in talking to students. Some of us tend to talk too much, not leaving them enough space to feel or express how they feel. Or we might jump to conclusions about what the student is trying to say. Other teachers may be afraid to reveal anything personal about themselves or their feelings, because they don’t want to come across as unprofessional, but they end up limiting the degree of personal connection with the student, which can make it harder for the student to open up and trust them.

For me, this whole endeavor of communicating well with students, and with people in general, is a lifelong practice. We are all such complex people, and human communication is loaded with endless subtleties and challenges.

At the same time, if you make a sincere effort to understand them, most people can feel how much you care and will allow for slight misunderstandings and keep trying to express how they feel. So the main point is to first let yourself feel how much you care about the student, and then, from that caring place, let them know you’re really trying to understand them by asking questions and responding with warmth. Once you’ve done that, if you feel the student is indulging too much in negative thinking, you could try pointing out specific things that you appreciate about their progress and potential. Let them know that they’re not alone – that others have had similar doubts and fears yet have succeeded in making their dreams come true as musicians. And ask them if they have questions about what you’re telling them.

Also, please feel free to invite them to join our Facebook group! It’s a safe place where musicians can share their doubts and fears, as well as their joys and inspirations, in facing this huge, human endeavor called making music.

Submit a question for possible inclusion in a future issue of Performing Beyond Fear.

(This article has been edited since its original publication in this e-zine in October 2015 under the title “Why I Teach”.)

People sometimes ask me why I gave up performing. And until now, I always said that I didn’t fully understand it. I knew I had dreamed of becoming a great pianist since I was five years old, and that I had followed that dream as far as it took me, into a rewarding performing career. And I knew that when I discovered a new physical approach to the piano that instantly improved my students’ playing, I switched my main career focus to teaching. I remember how my students’ faces lit up every day that week, as they suddenly heard themselves playing more beautifully. And I remember the moment at one of those lessons when I saw light bulbs flashing in my head and realized I had something really important to teach. The next thing I knew, I was canceling a concert I had scheduled in Chicago, I stopped pursuing concert dates altogether, and I was giving a lot of talks to musicians called The Art of Practicing.

All of this made a lot of sense to me. But recently, I decided to look back into my childhood to see if I could find any indication that teaching would eventually become my true calling. And I remembered that when I was 13, a magazine arrived at our house, in our sheltered, little, white suburb in California, and that the cover story of the magazine opened up a whole world for me that I had never heard of.

It was LIFE magazine – a wonderful, weekly publication that unfortunately no longer exists. On its cover was the sweet, smiling face of a 12-year-old boy named Flavio who lived in a shack with his parents and seven siblings in dire poverty in the slums of Rio de Janeiro. Through the efforts of this journalist, money had been raised to bring him to the United States for medical treatment for a severe lung ailment – possibly tuberculosis – and to help create a better life for everyone in the slum he came from.

As a middle-class teenager in California, I had no idea that people lived anywhere in tiny shacks with dirt floors. The article mentioned that when a dog bit the leg of Flavio’s little brother, his mother grabbed a bottle of alcohol, poured it on his leg, and quickly went back to the rest of the miserable daily hardships of caring for her family.

Shocking photos accompanied this article, showing Flavio’s life in the filthy slum, in which, as his parents’ oldest child, he had to earn pennies to feed them their rice and beans every day because his father had injured his back and could earn only $20 a month. But on the magazine’s cover, Flavio wore clean, new pajamas, print on a white background, that were given to him at the hospital he was taken to in America. Just as I had suddenly become aware of a world like his, he had now been introduced to a world like mine. I was completely stunned by the contrast.

A New Dream
I wished that I could bring Flavio to the beautiful house I lived in with my family and show him all of our modern conveniences. So I pretended that he was there with me, and I walked through the rooms showing him everything I had previously taken for granted. “Look!” I said out loud. “These are called faucets. You just move the handle like this and fresh water comes out!” I went on to show him the stove, with its miraculous burners that turned on as easily as the faucets, and the big, shiny brown refrigerator, with so many kinds of delicious food in it. I imagined Flavio’s face lighting up with amazement and delight.

That day, I gave birth to a new dream. I dreamed I would someday introduce someone else to an easier and happier way of life, beyond anything they had ever known. I was excited for Flavio that he had come to America, and for the first time, I dreamed of one day adopting a baby and giving it a life it wouldn’t otherwise have had. Thirty-two years later my husband and I did adopt a baby, and she is now 20 and thriving. But I also realize now that my passion for teaching comes from this same place of wanting to see others enjoy things that I am fortunate to possess already. This desire has become the strongest motivating factor in my life.

I know I am extraordinarily fortunate to have received not only excellent piano training in my youth but also training in mindfulness-awareness meditation for many years from a true master teacher. And I feel even luckier that I have been able to blend these two incredible traditions, of Western music and Eastern meditation, into an approach to practice and performance that has helped many musicians discover a whole new world of possibilities.

When A Musician Breaks Through

So often, a musician who has been struggling for years to play with more ease, confidence, and brilliance suddenly discovers how to do it right in front of me. When that happens, a wave of warm energy spread through my entire body. That person may not feel as desperate in their struggle for musical fulfillment as Flavio and his family were in their struggle for a decent material existence. But they may still be suffering deeply – from debilitating stage fright, from practice-related tension or injury, or from intense frustration with their ability to express themselves freely through music. They may feel disheartened about their musical future, and they may wonder if they could ever come close to the kind of playing they admire in the greatest performers, the rare few who somehow shine brighter onstage than the rest.

The first time this musician works with me they may discover a simple, new physical or musical technique that works as easily as turning on a faucet and suddenly having cold or hot water run freely. Just as suddenly, their playing suddenly flows more easily than before. Their ease and confidence in practice and performance develop and deepen a lot over time, and if they continue with this new approach, they may actually begin to live in the new world of possibilities they discovered when they first tried it. When that happens, I feel enormous satisfaction – that I am fulfilling my true purpose, using all of my talents and training to help someone else become the musician they’re meant to be.

Are You Ready to Discover Your New Possibilities?
If you’re ready to break through to a new level of performance, I invite you to join us this July for the Art of Practicing Institute’s unique and transformative summer program. Each participant contributes so much to this astonishing program and extraordinary community of musicians, and we’d love to have you join us. Amateurs and professionals are all welcome. It’s about being fully human in making music, and finding out what that longing inside of you can really lead to.

I wish you much joy and success.

Madeline Bruser

P.S. If you’re wondering if the summer program is right for you, by all means, give me a call or send me an email. I’m happy to answer your questions. We want you to feel part of everything that happens during that incredible week.

Q & A of the Month

I’ve heard a lot about your approach, the Art of Practicing. Would you say it’s for everybody, or only for a certain kind of musician? 

Anyone who’s curious about working with this approach can benefit from it. Even applying one or two ideas from it can make your practicing easier and more enjoyable. But for some musicians, the approach resonates more deeply.

Generally, what motivates someone to learn more about it is some kind of dissatisfaction with their current experience of practice and performance – some physical discomfort with their instrument, a lack of confidence onstage, or a feeling of not being able to fully express themselves in making music. They feel like something is blocking their way, and they want to feel more free.

But even realizing that you want more freedom comes from having already had a glimpse of it, and from feeling the contrast between that glimpse and your usual experience with music. My own sense of the possibility of more freedom and confidence at the piano came after an unsuccessful audition. It somehow didn’t make sense to me that after so much work, for so many years at the piano, I still didn’t have the kind of confidence I wanted. I had seen performers who seemed to possess a whole different kind of ease and confidence onstage. And something told me that it must be possible for me to develop that too. But I was 29 before I fully recognized this deep longing in myself, as well as the deep faith that what I desired must actually be within my grasp.

For me, the road to this confidence began with mindfulness meditation, which I remembered had relaxed me when I first tried it a year earlier. This time, when I felt intense self-doubt at an important audition, I was finally ready to go back and try meditation again and to stick with it. And it ended up leading me to a feeling of being deeply at home onstage, to the kind of confidence I really wanted. The whole development of the Art of Practicing came from that experience of feeling at home in my own body and mind, in both practicing and performing.

You can’t really dive into something new if you’re not ready for the change it will bring. Meditation, and the Art of Practicing as well, changes your life. And like anything else, there is a time for it – a time when your body and mind say Yes. I have a wonderful student right now who read the book several years ago and only recently reread it and found it really had a lot of meaning for her. That’s when she was ready to contact me and start lessons.

So I would say, the best thing to do is to try it if you like, and to see where it takes you. Be true to yourself. That’s really what the Art of Practicing is about anyway.

Submit a question for possible inclusion in next month’s issue of Performing Beyond Fear..

(This article was first published in Performing Beyond Fear e-zine in March 2013.)

By his third lesson with me, Michael, a gifted young pianist, had already begun to get familiar with the new physical approach I was teaching him. His hands were no longer tense, and he had freed up his wrists, arms, and shoulders a lot also. But when he finished playing his Bach prelude, he said he wasn’t satisfied with how his hands felt—he wanted his movements to feel more fluid. I knew that for his hands to move more fluidly, he needed to start focusing less on technique and more on the music. He had accomplished the first step—of acquiring basic, efficient coordination—and he was ready to refine his coordination by opening up more to the beauty and flow of the music. I also knew that by tuning in more to the sounds he was making, he would play with more sensitivity and expressiveness.

To help Michael relate more strongly to the music, I suggested that he sing the left hand part of the opening phrase while playing the right hand part. If you’ve ever tried doing this, you know it takes some effort; it requires you to fully hear two musical lines at the same time. But Michael has a well-developed ear, and he did it remarkably well. Next, I asked him to repeat the same process, but to pay close attention to each harmonic interval he played, and to notice how it affected him inside. He went more slowly this time, taking time to focus intently on each harmony. Finally, I asked him to just play the phrase with both hands and notice how it sounded. The music became vibrantly beautiful, and his face lit up in a dazzling smile. “It’s music!” he exclaimed in delight. I asked him if he could explain what he meant, but he was at a loss for words. “That’s all I can say. It’s music!” His joy and excitement touched me. It was as though he had just run into a long lost friend.

What Michael experienced at that moment was something that had only occasionally happened to him in the past. As he described it later, “I didn’t intellectualize about what I was playing. I just heard it. I felt it.” He got out of his head and in touch with his hearing on a deep level. For all the years and countless hours he had spent practicing, he had an unusual experience in that moment of the real, visceral power of making music. He had indeed run into a long lost friend.

Our Birthright as Musicians

All of us, as musicians, are born with a special ability to respond to sound. Our love for music is more intense than other people’s—so intense that we feel compelled to become intimate with music by producing the sound with our instrument and our own body. Yet, like Michael, in the innumerable hours we spend mastering our instrument and learning repertoire, we often lose our intense connection with music and start running on automatic pilot. We get caught up in trying to meet performance deadlines, or in pushing ourselves to play pieces at full tempo. Or we mindlessly run through a piece, thinking it sounds just fine and ignoring the fact that we actually feel no great joy in the act. And sometimes, as Michael later said about a lot of his previous practicing, we try to imitate what we’ve heard on recordings, forgetting that we can think and listen for ourselves—that we can make a genuine, personal connection to the music we’re playing and really release our vital, creative energies.

In short, although we work so hard practicing our instruments, we often don’t receive the tremendous nourishment that music can provide. And it’s often because we don’t take  time to deeply drink in the sounds we’re producing. We put out more than we take in. In doing so, we neglect our needs as artists and as human beings—our need to engage fully with music and to truly express ourselves. As a result, quality suffers—the quality of our playing, and the quality of our musical lives.

To add insult to injury, we often assume that the reason we don’t feel satisfied with how we’re playing is that we’re still not working hard enough. Or that we’re not talented enough. Or both.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

How Practicing Really Works

Of all people, we musicians need to reclaim our birthright to enjoy music, as we’re making it. We need to enjoy it to the fullest extent possible. Of course, we need to work to develop technical ease, but if we want to have something truly wonderful to give to an audience, we also need to focus much more than we usually do on enjoying the miraculous reality of musical sounds

Michael’s hands did move much more fluidly when his ears were more engaged with the music he was playing. But more importantly, the sound he produced was vibrantly alive—it was infused with his personal energy. And even more important than both of these results, Michael learned a core lesson about being a true musician: he learned how to have such joyous experiences more often. He met the power of his own mind—the amazing power of paying full attention to music as he was making it.

Michael told me later that although he had had moments of vividly hearing music while practicing slowly in the past, he had never realized that slowness was a key to this experience. After that lesson, he deliberately practiced more slowly, and had repeated experiences of this intense connection with music. But then he often found himself reverting to his habit of playing fast, and stopped enjoying the music. “It’s a weird impetus to play fast,” he said. “It’s much more personal the other way.”

So How Do You Learn to Play Fast?

The real key to vivid engagement with music isn’t slowness. It’s attention. But most of us are so used to speeding through all of our activities, including our practicing, that we need to slow down a lot at first in order to discover the power of attention. As we develop our listening capacity much more, it operates fully at faster and faster speeds. In other words, practicing is as much about training our ears as it is about training our muscles.

The Surprising Ability of Your Own Mind

In last month’s article, Grandma’s Recipe for Space, I described the simple technique of mindfulness-awareness meditation, which allows your mind to slow down and settle into a natural clarity and receptiveness. Doing this technique for even a few minutes can help tremendously in clearing mental and emotional space for experiencing the pure joy of genuinely making music.

At the Art of Practicing Institute’s summer program, and in our ongoing live online workshops, we do this kind of meditation regularly, in addition to other highly efficient practices to increase natural receptiveness and creativity for making music. I invite you to join us!

Musician, Heal Thyself

I also invite you to take a moment now to think about your relationship with music and with your instrument. Remember the first time you felt the desire to make music, and ask yourself how that desire has played out in your musical life. The next time you’re about to practice, stop for a minute. Look at your instrument (or if you’re a singer, visualize it), and reflect on how miraculous it is.

Who made it? How? What is it made of? Where did those materials come from? How many years of evolution went into the instrument that you are fortunate to possess right now?

Think further: Who wrote the music you’re about to play? When did they live? What did they go through to learn to write such music? How many years has it survived, with its meaning still intact?

And further: How do all the parts of your body contribute to the sound you produce with your instrument? How long has it taken you to learn to make those sounds as well as you can now? How many millennia of human evolution are behind the physical and mental capacities you were born with to make music?

Take at least a minute to reflect on all of these things.

Now. Pause for a moment. Listen to the silence. Feel the energy in your body as you’re about to make the first sound. Open your heart to the music, Then make that first sound.

How did you like it?

Can you imagine continuing to practice with this kind of connection to the music?

I hope that this simple exercise will help you discover that it really isn’t so hard to get back in touch with who you are as a musician, and with the amazing opportunity you have to practice your instrument. Enjoy it, while you can. As often and as fully as you can. You and your audience will benefit.

I wish you much joy and success in making music.

Madeline Bruser

P.S. If you’re ready to open up your playing on a new level and to find out how to become more of the musician you’re meant to be, I invite you to contact me with any questions you might have about the summer program, the live online workshops, or individual sessions in the Art of Practicing and Performing. I’ll be happy to help you decide if one of these options is right for you.

Q&A of the Month

I have trouble solving technical problems when I’m playing romantic music. I get so wrapped up in it emotionally that I typically don’t even realize my hands are tense till my teacher points it out. How can I practice romantic music and be more aware of my body at the same time?

This is a great question, one which many musicians grapple with.  Passion for romantic music is a great strength to have, but we also need to develop command of our passionate energy so that it doesn’t sweep us away into destructive habits. I think a lot of practice-related injuries develop from this particular issue.

Working with passionate energy is very challenging. It’s also one of the most important disciplines for a musician. We’re in love with music, and we have to continually expand our ability to relate to it with understanding and receptivity, rather than overwhelming it with our emotional intensity. It’s very much like loving another person.

Once we understand this fundamental issue, we can relax with our intensity and appreciate it as a good thing, yet also continually remind ourselves to pay closer attention to musical and technical details—because that’s where success and fulfillment lie. One surprisingly helpful thing is to begin every practice session with two minutes of just sitting still and noticing your breathing, as described in last month’s article, Grandma’s Recipe for Space. It clears your mind and slows down the nervous system so you can relate to the music from a less stressed place.

Sometimes playing a passage twice as slowly as you want to can reveal amazing things in the music and in your technical approach. Even if you  think this will be boring, applying your attention to what you’re doing can bring incredible awareness and joy, expanding the musical result.

It’s also essential to find out if your technical approach is completely efficient. If you have any questions at all about whether or not your coordination is totally natural, seek out the most expert advice you can find. Some teachers are known for this. And if you consult a technique expert, be sure to ask lots of questions and to trust your own experience with the techniques they show you.

You can’t really separate technique from music, and an interesting thing can happen if you forget about the music for a moment and deliberately focus on the mechanics of producing the sound: Very often, more music actually comes through, because your body moves more freely when you lighten up your approach.

On the other hand, playing extremely slowly and noticing how each sound affects you inside can work a profound change in your practicing. It can help you work less hard, because you become more receptive and less active. This listening technique is described in Chapter 10 of my book, The Art of Practicing.

The best advice might be to try practicing everything more slowly for a week or more. Just give your body and mind a chance to operate with more physical comfort. Then, when you go back to playing faster, try to make comfort your top priority, and really focus on that. Whenever you realize that you’re less than completely comfortable, slow down and try to notice exactly where the discomfort is. See if you can let go of the tension in that part of your body. In this way you can take care of your body, just as you take care of the instrument you play. Remember that your body is an instrument—a precious one.

You’re welcome to set up a free consultation with me, in person or online, to get my feedback on your technical issues and to talk about next steps that are right for you.

(This article has been edited since it was first published in September, 2012 under the title of “Creating Space for Music to Flow.”)

At seventeen, I arrived at music school at Indiana University, full of ambition and excited about being surrounded by musicians and about studying with my new teacher, Menahem Pressler. The music building at the school was round, and before school even started, I began walking through the circular hallways looking for an empty practice room. As I literally walked around in circles, countless times, hearing dozens of pianists practicing away, I was sure that they were all better than I was.

At the time of my first lesson, Pressler was away on a concert tour, and his assistant met with me and assigned a set of exercises for finger independence, which Pressler wanted all of his new students to practice. I practiced those exercises intensely, five or six hours a day, during my first week of school. And in my panic about measuring up to the competition and pleasing my new teacher, I lost six pounds. I also came down with a cold. On top of that, I got my first case of poison ivy while walking in the woods on campus. I was a wreck, and I called my parents for sympathy.

A day or so later, the phone rang in my dorm room. “Madeline? It’s Mr. Pressler. How are you?” I was shocked to hear from him. “Fine,” I managed to say. “Your father tells me you’re not so fine,” he said. In a kind voice, he asked me to come to meet him that week, for the first time. I still get tears in my eyes remembering how relieved I was that he cared.

That phone call was the beginning of a wonderful relationship. Pressler is an amazing pianist, and he opened me up to a whole new world of sound and possibilities with the piano. But his kindness and warmth were equally important to me, and I worked for him as I did for no other teacher. He was direct but gentle with his critical comments, and he taught me to value imagination and creativity in my practicing. My time in the practice room became infused with curiosity and openness. It was about exploring music, the piano, and my artistic nature— not about proving anything to anybody, or struggling to get somewhere. (Or practicing finger exercises five hours a day.) Everything opened up inside me.

The Shift Toward Overwhelm

I feel very fortunate that I had those two years at Indiana, focusing on being an artist and enjoying practicing, before I hit New York City and started studying at Juilliard. From my perspective now, those two years, far removed from the stress of urban life and heavy professional demands, were like an extended summer, in which I had space to relax and to develop as I needed to.

In the middle of February, with all the challenges that winter creates in our lives, summer feels far away. We are typically inundated with work, and we feel the pressure to bring many projects to fruition. It’s so easy to get overwhelmed and to lose the spaciousness and freedom we typically have in summer.

But it’s possible even in winter to approach the demands of our work in a spacious way. And it’s essential.

Balancing Heaviness with Lightness

Each season has its qualities, and the darkness of winter brings a sense of seriousness and depth—we may find ourselves going inward more and being more reflective. At the same time, we may feel more pressure to develop our musical gifts and to meet deadlines with performances, auditions, or school jury exams. Such pressure can cause us to lose touch with the pure joy of making music.

It’s important to remember that in order to come fully alive, our musical gifts need to breathe. When we take more time to relax and breathe, our mind and body can work with more ease. We discover room inside of ourselves to both receive and recreate the infinite variety of energies in music—to respond in a full-bodied, open hearted way to what we hear, so that we can transmit it to others.

In a previous article, Getting Intimate with Greatness, I wrote about how to relate to the myriad of sounds in the music we practice, so that all of them can vibrantly flow through us. But there is an even more basic step we need to take. This step is to establish an initial spaciousness and openness to music before you even begin to practice.

To do this, simply sit still and take a moment to breathe and to feel your own presence, physically and mentally, before you engage with your instrument. In other words, before connecting with music, you need to connect with yourself—your living, breathing self.

You can think of yourself as a living, open vessel, with energy constantly flowing in from the world around you through your senses, mixing with your own energies, and then radiating and flowing outward to the environment and to others through the communicative energy in your speech, in the music you make, and in your presence.

When we are already filled up with stress and sensory overload, our system is clogged. Musical sounds have very little room inside of us to play, dance, flow, and make their magic. But if we can de-stress and unwind, our body and mind can open, and we can receive and enjoy new sensory abundance, so that it can flow through us freely and reach others.

Grandma’s Recipe 

Maybe you remember visiting your grandma as a child, and enjoying a level of relaxation that your parents didn’t have, because they were so busy making a living and running the household. Or maybe you remember a favorite vacation spot and how it felt to breathe fresh air and not worry about the usual things you have to do. When you came home from your time at Grandma’s or on vacation, you had new energy for life; you felt refreshed and ready to take on the challenges of school, practicing, or taking care of business.

Until the avalanche hit—the inevitable demands of work and life. Then your system started to feel the strain and to shut down and close off. Your vessel became too full.

To help you find that mental space again, here is Grandma’s recipe for creating space in your practicing:

1. Remember that refreshing time, the feeling of being able to breathe.

2. Take at least two minutes to do nothing but breathe. Just sit comfortably upright and notice your breathing. In, out—in, out. When your mind wanders, gently bring it back to your breathing. Being upright helps you be both alert and relaxed, as you need to be for making music. It also allows your lungs to fully expand with breath, which nourishes your entire system. Keep your eyes open, gazing somewhat downward, without trying to focus them on anything. This will keep you aware of your environment yet also focused on your breathing.

3. Then notice how you feel different—perhaps more calm or awake—or maybe you realize how tired you are.

4. Gently begin to practice your instrument, noticing how the first few sounds affect you. See if you can notice each sound coming into your body and changing you inside. This is what music does when you’re open to it.

5. Continue practicing with this awareness—of sounds and inner sensations, as well as the sensations of touch and movement.

6. Notice when you begin to lose this awareness.

7. Stop.

8. Take one to three deep breaths and begin the process again—or if you prefer, go back to step 2.

After your practice session, reflect on what happened and what it means to you.

Surprise!

In case you didn’t realize it, Grandma’s recipe is 2500 years old—it’s the recipe for what is called mindfulness. It begins with mindfulness meditation—with awareness of your breathing—and it continues with mindfulness of sounds and sensations.

Mindfulness is the opposite of mindlessness. But it’s much more than just being careful and minding your p’s and q’s. Mindfulness is really the innate capacity of your mind to be aware of whatever is happening in the present moment. And the recipe above is a basic method for cultivating that capacity, by deliberately paying attention to something—in this case, your breathing, and then the sounds and sensations you’re experiencing. This simple act actually changes your brain each time you do it. The more you do it, the more you build the habit of noticing what’s happening in your daily experience—the sounds and sensations of practicing, the atmosphere in the room, the energy in your body in different situations that arise. Your nervous system actually changes, and you become less driven by habit and more aware of the present moment and its possibilities. You wake up to vivid reality and become more of yourself. More sensitive, more musical, more artistic.

All kinds of people have been using mindfulness techniques in recent years, including athletic teams, cancer patients, doctors, and business leaders. They do it because it gives them more access to their mental power and frees them from problematic levels of tension and stress. It also brings out their receptivity to people they’re working with, and it opens their minds to creative solutions they hadn’t noticed before.

And it has begun to make its way into the lives of musicians, who are overwhelmed with the demands of playing their instruments, job stress, and performance anxiety. I’ve been doing it for 40 years and have watched many musicians discover their true capabilities through regularly practicing this simple discipline.

If you’re concerned that adding this additional activity to your day will be too much, know that even ten minutes a day can make your practice time more efficient. So it actually saves you time.

Taking Care of the Vessel

Music demands so much of us—physically, mentally, and emotionally. Taking time to breathe is a way of taking care of ourselves in the midst of these demands so that more of our gifts can shine through in the music we make—more vitality, more richness and depth. More beauty.

Try it, and discover for yourself how giving yourself space to breathe can open up your playing or singing.

If you’re interested in pursuing meditation but don’t live near me, I’d be happy to hear from you and to recommend places where you can learn and practice this mind-opening technique.

And if you really want to treat yourself to a fantastic experience of spaciousness with music, consider registering for the Art of Practicing institute’s summer program, Mindfulness, Confidence & Performance, where you will meet other wonderful people who are ready to breathe more easily and make music more freely.

I’d love to have you with us.

And I wish you much joy and success.

Madeline Bruser

P.S. You can also apply to be on the waiting list as a Master Class participant at this year’s summer program. If you’re not sure the program is for you, feel free to schedule a free consultation.

Q & A of the Month

What is the best way to gain strength and independence in my left hand at the piano? I have worked on Hanon’s exercises and scales for at least four months now, and I am still having trouble feeling fluent with my left hand. When I am playing a descending scale, my left hand seems to lack accuracy and stability. Do you have any suggestions?

Everyone’s left hand is less adept than their right on the piano. Most piano music has a lot more notes in the right hand part, so the right hand gets more practice. Also, the ear naturally hears the higher parts in a piece more easily than lower ones—which is why most melodies are written on top. What this means is that we’re less conscious of what our left hand is doing, so that our coordination doesn’t usually develop as well with that hand.

Coordination involves the brain, which is affected very much your level of aural and emotional engagement with what you’re doing. I don’t think you need to do Hanon exercises, unless you enjoy the sound of them. Actual music is best most of the time, and you can isolate certain passages and work specifically on the difficult parts of them, as if they were exercises. These snippets of actual music are more interesting than Hanon exercises—more musical. Scales can be helpful if you play them with a lot of awareness of how they sound and of how your hand feels. Just remember that it’s this awareness that improves coordination. If you just push through scales or pieces—more out of a big effort to improve than out of enjoying the sounds and sensations—your coordination will suffer. Try singing the scale first, in a musical way, and then imitating that musicality in your playing of it.

Along with these issues, you need to know how to use your hand with minimum tension—by sitting at the right height and distance, for optimum finger and arm leverage, and by letting the fingers rest on the keys when they’re not playing. And it’s essential to not try to get a big sound with the fingers alone, but to rely on the arm for this purpose, and to know how to use the arm efficiently and effectively.

It’s always best to go slowly enough to play with ease, comfort, and accuracy. If you play faster than you comfortably can, it’s counterproductive. You have to trust that fluency and speed will come from doing what you can, not from pushing beyond that and overloading your playing mechanism with excessive demands. That only creates excessive tension, which can lead to inaccuracy.

See if you can get into how good it feels to move your hands slowly and comfortably, not trying for a big sound. Great technique develops from that foundation.

Submit a question for possible inclusion in next month’s issue of Performing Beyond Fear.

(This article was originally published June 25, 2012.)

When I was 29 and preparing to move back to New York from California, I decided to raise money for the venture by playing a series of recitals called Concerts à la Mode. I rented the Berkeley Piano Club and solicited contributions of desserts from friends and local bakeries, which we served after each performance. The series consisted of three different programs, performed two weeks apart within the month of July. I had never performed that much repertoire within so short a time, but I wanted to try it.

After a critic gave the second concert a good review in the San Francisco Chronicle, the final performance, an all-Chopin recital, was sold out. But I didn’t have enough time to prepare. I still remember the feeling of being up there in the light onstage and playing through the entire program in a state of panic, mixed with sheer chutzpah. Two of my parents’ friends left immediately afterward, apparently to avoid the embarrassment of having to talk about my performance. I made a lot of money that night, which helped with my move to New York. But more importantly, I learned something from that concert. I was careful after that to give myself more time to prepare performances, and to not bite off more repertoire than I could chew.

Permission to Fail

Performing is always a risk, and especially when we’re young, we need to take risks and to make mistakes, in order to find out what works for us. No advice from others can substitute for firsthand knowledge.

I’m sure my parents were uncomfortable that evening at the Berkeley Piano Club. But I have fond memories of them giving me lots of room to make mistakes growing up. I always had the feeling that they loved me and knew I had to find things out for myself. Looking back, I can see that my parents’ attitude toward my mistakes was one of their biggest gifts to me. They gave me permission to fail. And they trusted that I would eventually succeed by learning from my own experience.

Childhood Mistakes

My parents had been watching me make mistakes since I was very small. When I was six, I thought that getting dressed for school took too much time every morning. So I decided I would solve that problem by putting on my school dress at night and sleeping in it. When I came down to breakfast the next morning in a very wrinkled dress, my mother said, “What did you do, sleep in your dress?” “No,” I lied. But I knew she was onto me. I also knew she was too amused to get angry with me. And of course, I learned that my idea of sleeping in my dress didn’t work out.

Our Adult Standards

My mother may have thought I was cute for sleeping in my dress, and even for lying about it, but when we are adults, our audience may not think it’s cute if we show up in a wrinkled concert gown and give them an unprepared performance. In fact, when the stakes are high, we expect ourselves to be prepared to the max, and we often slip into harsh self-judgment if our performance doesn’t live up to our high standards.

But the fact is, mistakes don’t stop at age 18 or 21. We keep growing throughout adulthood, and a lot of that growth happens through learning from the mistakes we make.

How can we bring some of the lightness and humor that comes with recalling our childhood mistakes into our serious lives as adult musicians? How can we develop a healthy perspective on our mistakes in the professional arena?

Occupational Hazards

A good first step is to acknowledge the extreme challenge of being a performing musician. Scientists have said that playing a musical instrument is the most complex neuromuscular activity that people engage in. This statement makes total sense to us. In practicing our instrument, we face enormous athletic demands along with the equally huge task of hearing all the sounds we’re producing, plus handling the emotional responses to the music that are flooding our system. On top of all this, when we perform, we add stage fright to the mix, challenging our capacities to the limit.

Friendliness Toward Ourselves

It can be very helpful to take a moment to appreciate this mind-boggling challenge, and to appreciate how brave we are in taking it on. This simple acknowledgment of our valiant efforts can help us breathe a little easier as we go about our practicing and performing lives—we can relax and accept the fact that making mistakes is inevitable.

We make so many different kinds of mistakes. We play wrong notes. We have memory lapses. We misjudge how much preparation time we need. We over-practice to the point of exhaustion, leaving us with no energy to give an inspired performance. And we make faux pas in communicating with people in our profession whose trust we value. Mistakes are human, and no one escapes making them.

However, we do have a choice about how we handle our minds when we do something we’re not proud of. Do we judge ourselves? Do we pretend it didn’t happen? Or do we look straight at our pain with a sympathetic attitude toward ourselves and try to learn from what we’ve done?

The Crucial, Often Overlooked Point

The most helpful thing I know of in facing a mistake is to realize that the reason we feel bad about it is that we care. We care about how we participate in society as performers and as human beings. We want to give our best, and to have a rewarding experience onstage and in our lives. This heart of caring is always there, underneath our feelings of guilt or embarrassment. And making contact with this caring place in ourselves can soften us  and dissolve a lot of our self-judgment and anxiety.

Overcoming Negative Conditioning

Perhaps people in your past have judged you harshly for your failings, and you have difficulty getting past their judgments. It’s easy to lose faith in yourself when others have treated you badly—in fact, many musicians suffer from debilitating stage fright that stems from their experience with abusive parents or teachers.

Nevertheless, if you take some time to look deeply into yourself, past the judgments of others, and even past the pain you have suffered, you can find within you the desire to do well and to fulfill your potential. That desire is so good. It is the most basic and human thing in you. Take a moment to appreciate it and to feel how strong it is. It will help you realize that it is fundamentally because you are good, and because you care, that you feel bad when you fail or make a mistake.

Start With Small Steps

Although this caring place in us is tender and soft, it contains great power. As soon as we contact it we feel nourished and strengthened by it—we recognize it as healthy and full of positive energy. If we can make a habit of appreciating our caring intentions, we can increase our strength and positive energy for performance.

Start with small steps. The next time you find yourself judging yourself for making a mistake in practicing, remind yourself that you just want to do well, to make music and express yourself. Give yourself that moment to relax and appreciate yourself, and watch what happens inside you. Then start again and see how that positive energy affects your playing or singing.

Carrying Your Heart Onstage

Each time you remember to appreciate your own goodness you are encouraging it to shine. When it’s time to perform, you can let it illuminate the space for everyone present.

To do that, take a moment before walking onstage to appreciate your own bravery. Just stop and notice your fear, and then extend warmth to yourself by remembering how brave you are to go out there. This warmth will naturally flow into the music you make, and your audience will feel it.

A pianist once called me from the West Coast to ask for advice a few days before she was going to play a big concerto with an orchestra. I recommended that she take a moment to appreciate her own bravery right before walking onstage. She called me later to tell me that people swarmed up to her after her performance and said they’d never heard anything like it—they were so moved by her playing. Because she opened her heart to herself, her heart came through in her performance.

Performing Beyond Fear Begins at Home

So the next time you catch yourself feeling bad about a mistake you’ve made or a challenge you’re facing with a piece of music, stop to appreciate how much you care. If you make a habit of opening your heart in this way while you’re alone and feeling safe, your courage will grow, and it will be easier to risk opening your heart onstage. That is performing beyond fear..

I wish you much joy and success.

Madeline Bruser

P.S.  If you’re ready to let go of mistakes more and discover more of what’s on the other side of self-judgment, I warmly invite you to come to the Art of Practicing Institute’s summer program and become part of our amazingly supportive community of musicians. It’s a safe and welcoming place where you can be open and have fun with the whole process of getting past fear and discovering freedom. If you’re not sure if the program is for you, feel free to contact me for free consultation about it.

Q & A of the Month

I tried what you suggested in a previous article—tuning into the feelings of disappointment, uncertainty, and longing—and it did help me play better. But I don’t think I felt confident doing that. How do we get from feeling lost and uncertain to feeling confident?

Confidence comes from getting so familiar with feeling shaky and uncertain that you begin to feel real power in that energy. It’s a person’s vulnerability that always moves us in a performance. It catches our heart. Each time you accept and face these feelings you’re manifesting courage; you’re not turning away from the energy within you, but you’re allowing it to flow.

I suggest that when you try this technique again, you notice the quality of the energy in your body. You may label the feeling as “disappointment,” “longing,” or “uncertainty.” But these feelings have very potent visceral energy. It’s when we shut them out that our energy stops flowing.

The more you get familiar with the free flow of this kind of energy, the more power you will find in it. Then you develop a very real and deep confidence—the confidence to be completely yourself.

Unwrapping Your Gift

(This article has been edited since it first appeared in this e-zine on December 25, 2012.)

Although I didn’t grow up celebrating Christmas, I’ve always felt the spirit of the season and have been moved by how this particular day transforms so many people. Their joy in giving and receiving gifts, in expressing love, generosity, and appreciation, is beautiful and contagious.

The anticipation and planning of this special holiday remind me of the ritual of giving a concert performance: We plan and prepare, with excitement and care, and then the moment comes when we give our gift to our audience. It can be a wonderful and powerful experience.

But usually, giving our gifts onstage is a lot harder than buying a present, wrapping it up, and putting it under someone’s tree or into their hands. It involves complex and demanding preparation, and even if we’ve learned the music extremely well, we may nevertheless lack confidence at the crucial moment of performance.

Often, the reason we lack confidence onstage is that we’ve never fully discovered the gift we have inside of us. We’ve carried it with us all our lives, and we’ve perceived it to a degree, but we’ve never fully unwrapped it and seen how beautiful it really is.

When we don’t fully unwrap the gift we carry inside us, it can feel like a burden. We sense that it’s there, and we want it to just leap out of us and victoriously take the stage. But we feel frustrated because we don’t know how to make that happen.

Some of us do unwrap our gift when we’re alone, practicing our instrument—music flies out of us, and our heart soars. But when an audience is watching us, we somehow hold back or clam up, and people never get to see or hear what we’d hoped to share with them. Only part of it comes through.

My Gifts to You

My first gift to you today is the free 20-minute taste of the Performing Beyond Fear exercise, which was recorded live at the 2017 summer program. If those 20 minutes inspire you to purchase all four tracks, you will not only actually experience this amazingly transformative, short exercise, but it will take you right into the world of our summer program—especially in the wonderful Question and Answer session with the participants in the final track. And if you’re inspired by all that, I warmly invite you to take the plunge and join us at next year’s program.

My second gift for you today is to fill in the picture of the summer program a little more.

The program happens on the beautiful campus of Edinboro University, in Erie, Pennsylvania, and it’s called Mindfulness, Confidence, & Performance: A Transformative Program for Musicians. It will take place July 21 — 28, 2018.

We walk past this lake a few times a day, between the dorm and the music buildings, where we have practice rooms, a rehearsal hall, a recital hall, and an 800-seat concert hall. Daily sessions  in mindfulness techniques, as well as our morning discussion groups, happen in the spacious rehearsal hall, with windows looking out on green lawns and trees. After lunch, everyone has time to practice their instruments, applying the techniques taught in the daily master classes, in which we apply techniques of the Art of Practicing, begin mid-afternoon on the stage of the concert hall. One evening in the middle of the week, everyone is invited to ride to a gorgeous beach on Lake Erie before sunset. And on the last night of the program, participants are invited to play in a celebratory concert for the local community, followed by our own private party at a  restaurant. We end the program the following day with mindfulness practice and a discussion group in the morning, and the closing lunch in the dining hall.

The mornings mindfulness practices—including meditation, Performing Beyond Fear, and Focusing—are followed by an hour of group discussion, in which both faculty and participants speak openly about issues they experience in practice and performance. The atmosphere is noncompetitive, warm, and supportive, and people often stay in touch after the program.

We designed this unique, transformative program for musicians who feel ready to let go of unhelpful habits, and take their music making to a whole new level. If it sounds appealing but you aren’t sure if it’s right for you, I invite you to set up a free consultation with me to help you decide.

To tell the truth . . .

The program is a huge gift to me too. I’ve taught ten of these weeklong programs now, and the experience of seeing people open up their playing so much in that span of time is extraordinary. Discoveries happen every day, and people find out they can do things they never knew they could. It’s as rewarding for me as any performance I’ve ever given. I get to offer my gifts, and to see people take off and fly with what they receive. I often wonder how it is that I’m so lucky to be able to do this.

A Shining Example of Performing Beyond Fear 

Many musicians experience such extreme fear about performing that they view their audience as an enemy. The following story is an inspiring example of a brave musician who went beyond fear in front of an audience that was actually directing real hatred toward him.

In 1960, pianist Byron Janis was selected by the United States government to begin a cultural exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, after years of intense animosity between the two countries. His first concert in Moscow followed the news that an American spy plane called the U2 had been deployed against the Soviet Union, which outraged the Soviet people. On the day of the concert, a man in the street recognized Janis and fired an imaginary machine gun at him, shouting, “Americanski, nyet!” When he walked onstage that night, many members of the audience greeted him by screaming, “U2! U2!” Their hatred was palpable, upsetting him intensely.

But somehow, as he sat at the piano and waited for them to quiet down, he found himself thinking, “I am not your enemy. I just ask you to listen to my music, which I want to play for you without rancor but with love.” From that place of love and courage, he gave his concert. At intermission, he received a long ovation, And at the end of the entire concert, people in the audience streamed toward the stage, some of them weeping. Deafening applause and cheering went on for 20 minutes, and one woman shouted, “You make us love America!”

It was Janis’s deep devotion to music and deep motivation to play from love that enabled him to rise above the hostility of his audience and to melt their hardened hearts. Although we may not feel up to meeting the kind of challenge he faced that night, we do share such devotion and motivation. Underneath our fear of performing, we always hold within us the power of our devotion to music and of our desire to share it with others.

I hope you will take heart from this story and at least consider the idea that you yourself are capable of finding a way to give joy to your audience, even though you may be quaking in fear. The Performing Beyond Fear exercise will help you do that.

I wish you much joy and success.

Madeline Bruser

Q & A of the Month

I’ve seen some of your articles about mindfulness, and I understand that by paying attention to technical details I can practice more efficiently. But how can I get past the level of just paying attention to details and really become free and expressive with a piece so I can really perform it well?

Mindfulness does mean paying attention to details; you’re right. But as each of those details becomes clearer, you start noticing more details—you notice what else is going on around those details.

So let’s say you’re focusing on keeping your thumb relaxed while you’re using your other fingers. And you get to the point where your thumb stays relaxed without your focusing on it anymore. Then your mind is free to focus on the next thing. On the smallest level, it proceeds in that way, taking you into real ease in playing whole phrases and finally a whole piece.

At the same time, as your mind becomes clearer, you become more aware of when you need a break from such fine detailed work, and when you want to try another approach to a piece—such as letting yourself enjoy the quality of sound in certain chords, or going over parts of the piece that you’re already comfortable with in order to enjoy them and to take them to a new level of freedom and expressive depth.

The real point is that as you become more aware of the details, you naturally appreciate them more. So mindfulness includes noticing how the music makes you feel—which contributes to greater expressiveness. And it also includes noticing what you’re most interested in doing from one moment to the next, and if you need a break to get up and stretch or walk around or just rest.

Mindfulness basically gives you a chance to get to know your own mind and to trust it more and see where it can take you. Practicing mindfulness meditation trains your mind to be more awake and appreciative—more conscious of what’s going on—and that spills into your practicing.

Submit a question for possible inclusion in next month’s issue of Fearless Performing.