Page 11 - How to Shine on Stage

Foreword

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Being a good musician does not equal being successful on stage, as there
are many musicians who manage to play/sing wonderfully when they are
alone or in relatively informal performance environments, while once on
stage, they cannot display all that they are capable of. In fact, it is their
biggest frustration: feeling both a strong desire to demonstrate their ex-
cellence on stage, and at the same time a great fear that they may not be
good enough, that they would not be able to demonstrate their best on
stage. The reality is that there are few musicians who express true satis-
faction with their performance after leaving the stage; they always find
something that could have been better.
Being a soloist is therefore far from the idealised image of someone
who appears on stage, performs a great musical programme and receives
a round of applause at the end. Most music performers have extreme-
ly strict criteria for themselves and are not easily pleased with their per-
formance, since they always find some aspect of it that could have been
even better. The delivery always has to be perfect, anything less is unac-
ceptable. They can achieve great success by the standards of the public
and even their fellow musicians, and still not be satisfied with themselves.
Many musicians, even the most accomplished, experience performance
anxiety on stage, which can affect the quality of their performance and,
primarily, causes them to feel discomfort when performing.
Being a musician is both a blessing and a curse; there is nothing
more beautiful than feeling your mission in creating and interpreting
something as beautiful and inspiring as music, but there is also nothing
crueller than the strivings to comply with the daily pressure to achieve
perfection, where mistakes are not allowed. The musician’s path re-
quires constant personal growth towards liberation from constraints and
achievement of true communion with oneself. And in this unburdened
deep contact with one’s genuine nature, with one’s authenticity, there
can be a surge of flow, a state of complete immersion in an activity in-
fused with feelings of internal satisfaction which, consequently, is self-re-