How to Survive a Music Recital
In the back of their heads, most students want to know how to survive a music recital. Most specifically, the nerves. How do you survive being nervous and how do you survive the embarrassment of messing up your performance?!
The good news to hold onto is this: everyone gets nervous at a music recital! Even professional performers still get the butterflies! But how do we deal with these butterflies? Here are a few essential points every music performer should know and do in order to best survive a music recital.
1. Practice This Mindset if You Want to Survive a Music Recital
Know that you will get butterflies.
Don’t fight the fact! Don’t deny the butterflies. Why? Because that will cause you to hold body tension, which causes more stress, which also causes students to hold their breath instead of breathing easy, which then gives the extra adrenaline no outlet to leave your body… and it all spirals downhill from there. That’s why we all start shaking during a music recital: adrenaline rush.
Instead, acknowledge that the butterflies will come and practice being ok with that as a mindset. Two unknown quotes that I have held onto through the years are:
“It’s ok to have butterflies in your stomach, as long as you make them fly in formation.”
“You may never get rid of the butterflies but you can learn to fly with them.”
Analogy I have heard said is:
“You have to ride the waves because if you fight them, you’ll drown.
If You Mess Up, Oh Well. Keep Going!
Trust me, most of the little mess-ups we do, the audience doesn’t know happened. Especially if you just fake it til you make it, keep going forward in your performance. I forgot a verse once when singing in a performance at a music school and no one in the audience realized I repeated an old verse. Only my professor did because she was grading me lol.
Also, when you don’t make a big deal of your mistakes and you just keep going on with your performance, audiences are very quick to forget the glitch. By the end of the whole performance or show, they will have basically forgotten… a secret between you and me, most audiences are dumber than you think 😉
2. Essential Points to Rehearse for Your Music Recital
Practice to Build Muscle Memory
As aspiring musicians getting ready to perform, our biggest fear is that we will start to play or sing and then somewhere along the line we’ll forget our words or forget a part of our music because we will be so nervous. Building muscle memory is a huge tool for surviving the adrenaline and nerves! Building muscle memory means practicing your music so much that your body, not just your mind, memorizes what it needs to do. The benefit is that your body will be on autopilot when your mind checks out on you. Muscle memory is the best insurance to preparing to survive a music recital!
Practice Like You Want to Perform
This means practicing each time like you are performing… for example, smiling! Smile even when you’re not on stage and rehearsing alone! Acting or body movements are the same. Practice these while you practice your music in exactly the same way that you would like to do this one stage. Again, this is part of building muscle memory so that when your mind checks out on you, your body as practiced these things many times over and knows exactly what to do to give a great performance even if “you are absent”!
Practice Being Conscious of Your Breathing
When we get nervous, one of the first things to fall apart is our breath. We forget to breathe. And that cycles us down the spiral of stage fright symptoms. One of the best ways to fight getting nervous and survive a music recital is to practice being conscious of your free breathing. A free breath out is the outlet of the excess adrenaline that will hit your body and take over your mind!
3. Don’t Overthink On Performance Day
When the big performance day comes, it is extremely helpful to think about enjoying your performance. Let your muscle memory take over. As long as you have put in the practice, your performance will go a whole lot better than you might expect if you just sit back and enjoy your performance. Go on autopilot, be present, enjoy the flow of the experience. Don’t even practice on the day of you music recital!
4. After Your Recital
We like to say that things don’t end once you perform and walk off stage on your recital day. Give yourself a day and then look back on your performance. Recording your performance is always a good idea. Recording your performance will allow you to go back the next day and look at your performance with a more objective perspective.
Sometimes when we perform and our nerves are crazy, we mentally blackout and we don’t always remember how it went. We just simply “survived”. That’s why it’s a good idea to record your recital performance so you can see how you really did!
When you make it a habit to record yourself performing, you’ll start to understand the weaker points of your technic better. Then you can address those specific things in your practice sessions to perfect them. That way, next time you perform, you will have built up that muscle memory to accomplish what you want, the way you want! Ultimately, you want to be proud of your performance!
Those are our top points we have to share with you on how to survive a music recital! You will find yourself mastering your recitals better and better each time if you take these points seriously and implement them into your rehearsals and practice times off stage! Good luck!