Apparently it's going to be a small competition in my local area (they don't even have a grand piano). And she assured me it's going to be very casual with only small number of people attending. I know it's going to be good for me because I explained to her how I get ultra nervous when I perform in front of an audience. So this was her solution!!
The competition is a month away but I already feel nauseous thinking about it. I will have 9 year old prodigies kicking my butt. It's like trying to recite a poetry in a foreign language that you just learn a few years ago and you are now competing with native speakers.

How old are you? How long have you played?
What are you looking for? Advice? Sympathy? Strategies to get out of doing it?

I'm 30 and have been getting back in less than 2 years. I dabbled a little as a kid. Anything you can throw at is welcome. Even tomatoes.

You will grow from the experience. I take lessons but do not do recitals or comps. My daughter does them and I am always impressed with how well she plays. It's a good experience, go for it!

Well, do you want to do it or are you really against doing it? Your teacher can't make you do it if you don't want to...you're not a teenager and she's not your mom.

I have mixed feeling about this. I know it's good for me but I'm just so scared. Also if I pull out my teacher may not want to help me get over my fear anymore. Oh it doesn't help that the last recital I performed was a disaster I was the only one with severe memory lapse

My professional advice is to withdraw from this now. Be firm with your teacher. Competition is not casual, except in the eyes of a music teacher.

Offer to play in some minor public way instead, if you both think that's a good idea for you. Perhaps a recital of adult beginners.

If you tell me where it is, I'll bring the tomatoes.

Seriously, though.. if it's such a small comp, I wouldn't sweat it. Best way to get over nerves is to continually do the the thing you're afraid of while working on some mental techniques.

(PS-this advice is coming from someone who used to be afraid to read out loud to his kindergarten class, but whom you couldn't kick off the stage now if you had to. It just takes time, and a serious devotion to overcome your fears. Facing them is step one. )

You reckon? I live in an area where piano is practically non existant. There arent many performance opportunities let alone an adult beginner recital (which I think is a great great idea!). Currently The only way to perform is
1) play for friends
2) enter in competition such as this one
3) the annual student recital

Or I can hijack the pub near my workplace where they have an awful sounding grand piano which might have been last tuned in the 1800. Last time I try playing on it the bartender gave me a dirty look

Ask the bartender if it's okay to play it for a bit, and what would be the best time. You probably just picked a bad time.

And buy a drink or two. Doesn't have to be alcoholic, just make a purchase. Usually makes them more friendly.

I'd reference Derulux's signature for good advice here. I'd first stop thinking about the whole thing as a competition and focusing more on the aspect of getting to perform (like in a recital) and share with others the music you've been practicing.

If you want to really practice for it, then practice not only diligently at home, but also practice performing (performing means no stopping even after a mistake!) every couple of days for others, taking note of where you seem to encounter mistakes, possible memory slips, rhythmic errors, any and all technical issues you hadn't noticed before, etc. and then follow-up at home by practicing with a focus on all these "new" issues. The nice thing about competing with nine-year-old's (or whatever age younger than you) here is that they don't have the thinking capacity for devising strategies like this.

Everything going through your mind is doing a good job of sabotaging you. It is succeeding. Take it in. Let it break you. Then, when you are broken. You can begin. That is where you really play music.
Why do you think they say: Break a Leg. ????
It is not until you have gone beyond existing in your autonomic nervous system that you can truly perform. You need to learn to go beyond trying to copy music. Start perfoming it.
I have an extremely good book by Madeline Bruser, titled: The Art of Practicing. She gives examples of people breaking though to really play with expression and feeling. It shows. She has a bunch in this book that I think will help you.
It's about the music. It isn't about you. Isn't about your ego. Once you face this. You will become a different person in this competition. The kids won't be able to come close to you. Once you face the fact that you need to play as if you are going to die tomorrow. That is when you break through to true performance.

After having done one recital at a retirement center where I was the only adult, I have laid down the law that I won't participate in kid's events. It's just weird to me.

(Incidentally I now MC for the same organization that put on the retirement center concert and that's fine - I could even play if I want, but then it would be clearly the adult MC performing along side the kids instead of being one of them!)

So, I would tell your teacher you will only participate (assuming you want to, otherwise tell them "no") if there are other adults participating.

There's a good reason my piano studio has "adult" only recitals (they actually throw them open to some advanced younger students but then it's clear they are expected to hang with the adults not the other way around.)

I doubt there are that many "prodigies" but only students who are ahead of you wrt their piano studies. I do understand how you feel though, my very first recital I played a song that I had worked on for months and felt very confident about. Immediately after my performance, a 12 year old played the same thing and made my effort look rather pathetic (and mine was pretty good BTW).
Then I learned he had been at lessons for 5 years vs my 1 1/2 yrs and I saw the flaw in my thinking more clearly.

That said, if you really don't want to play in the competition, ask teacher to drop you and make it clear you would prefer a few recitals first to gain some confidence in playing for an audience. The more you play for others the easier it gets. It's twoo, twoo.

I would suggest that you only do this if you have a piece that you have been playing for quite a while and are extremely confident that you will be able to get through it without disaster.

Experiencing disaster at a recital builds fear and that fear begets more disaster.

Extreme preparation will help you feel confident and that can make a huge difference.

And, if you do not want to do it ... don't do it.

I have an adult student who gets like this every year I enter her in the local piano competition. It's not really a competition, more like a festival. She plays in a room with just her and the "judge" who is just another piano teacher. They are always very kind to her and she's never had a bad experience. This sounds like a similar thing to what your teacher has you doing.

In preparing my student for this, I related this story to her. While I am a piano and voice teacher, I am also an opera singer. This involves a lot of auditioning, which is highly competitive. I did an audition a month ago in Chicago, where I was fully prepared for: I had my arias well-rehearsed, the acting down, was feeling healthy and confident. Then this past weekend I had another audition, but I had learned about it last-minute, and not only that, but they were requiring to hear certain arias that I had never studied. I had 5 days to learn them. I was sitting outside of the building, having arrived early to the site, but was not in the right frame of mind. I was not confident, and I wasn't happy with my preparation. I knew I didn't have a good attitude walking in the building, so I had to fix that.

Then I realized that every time I am auditioning, I am performing. I love to perform, because I am sharing what I love with my audience. I want them to be happy and entertained with what I've done. If they've never heard the music before then I'll be exposing them to some great "new" music, and if they've heard it before, well, everyone loves to hear something familiar and it will always have a different twist on it because they've never heard *me* do this piece before. I realized that I wanted to share my music with the director/judge, and not only that, they *want* to be entertained. They want to hear you do well. They're on your side. This is sometimes hard to realize because of course, the audience always faces you, which appears a bit antagonistic. In reality, they wanted to be communicated with through your music. Once I was able to get the right perspective, I walked into the building and did my best all things considered.

So the attitude that you have toward this event is SUPER important - perhaps moreso than anything else. Preparation, of course, helps, but many musicians are very prepared and still bomb the performance because the attitude is not right. Another way of looking at this is being in Love mode vs. Fear mode. If you play out of love of the music, the instrument, and the audience, then you will fare much better than being afraid of it all.

The best advice I can give you is to try performing your pieces a lot ahead of time for anyone who will listen, and in this process work on maintaining the right attitude throughout. Do not let your mind get distracted while you are performing, because when you play you must be focused on the music and communicating it to your audience. But in the days to come before you play, be sure it is always out of love.

What's the benefit of a competition to begin with? Music should never be a competition. If this will help you get over the fear of performing in public, fine. But then I would ask: do you even want to perform in public? Do you have plans to make this your job later on? Otherwise I see no benefit and no reason for you to suffer at all.

Is this really "competition" (judges, prices, etc?). Maybe it's just a fun recital, not a real competition?

Assuming it's a recital: maybe you're worrying too much on this. Most kids are not nearly as progidy as you might think if you check the youtube videos. Most are just playing basic tunes from the course book and these rarely get posted on youtube hence the skew in perception.

Yet it will not help you if you can't play your piece. Get it down properly before doing public performance.

RNAPLE, THANKS FOR THIS!
I´ll print this out and nail it to my piano! For long time I haven´t read something so motivating!

Thanks everyone how throwing in some ideas, Derulux if you are in Australia you are welcome to bring in your tomatoes.

After reading everyone comment I formulated a plan:

I'm trying a different trick this time, I'm going to perform with the mindset that it is a JOB that I have to do. The idea is that when it is a chore it would take the focus of you (your ego or whatever) onto the work of the composer. I do not exist I'm merely interpreting the composers work.

So... Let's hope that work, if not, oh well I'm gonna get laughed at, AGAIN.

That, my friend, is the right mindset. Alas, I am in the United States, but I do have many friends. A couple are on a work exchange in Australia. Let me know where the competition is, and if you happen to see anything bright red flying through the air, do remember to duck.

Job to do, right mind set? I don't believe this.

A job sounds like 'lets play the notes and be done with it'. Hope I get this wrong?

IMHO the right mind set is that both you and the listeners are enjoying the music. Music is more than what the composer wrote down.

You need to use whatever mechanism and mindset will work for you. If what he does works for him, then it is not wrong.

Wouter,
Did you read the OP? Albynism is nerve wracked by the prospect of this "competition." That will make enjoying the playing rather difficult. Sometimes, one simply has to do unpleasant things in life, and on those occasions an "I have a job to do" mindset will help you get through them.

Albynism, In a perfect world Wouter is absolutely right, but you're not living in that world at the moment it would seem. So your suggestion seems like a reasonable approach to me. But if I may humbly make a suggestion, you might consider making that become part of your world a worthwhile goal. By all means, do what you need to be successful at this, and do it again and again until you build enough confidence to say, "yeah, playing in public makes me nervous, but I've got this." When you have confidence, enjoyment can come, and you'll be amazed at how much better and more expressively you can play when you're really enjoying it. It's a positive feedback loop. Success breeds more success.

So no matter what happens at the actual recital in terms of your playing, find the success. And I should point out that if you go through with it, you've already succeeded by facing your fear. That is worthwhile. If you think of it that way, you'll have a built in success to further build on no matter what happens when you sit down to play. There's actually no such thing as success or failure, there are only results. Success and failure are how we choose to interpret results, how we choose to give them meaning. You're playing for you, not for them. So you get to define success any way you want. Find what you did well, what you succeeded at, find ways you can improve, and never give up.

Someone on this forum has a quote in their sig that I adore (I apologize to that person, I can't remember who to attribute it to). The quote is something like,

"Amateurs practice until they can play a piece without making a mistake. Professionals practice until they can't make a mistake."

Much wisdom there IMO.

Warm Regards

Two things ...

First ... you can come up with any sort of mind games you wish to help you get through this. If it works, great.

But, be mindful of the fact that the biggest factor in all of this will be how well you have prepared yourself with practice, practice, practice ...

You should absolutely practice it to a point where you can almost carry on a conversation while you are playing it.

That way, you know you did your absolute best and will have no regrets. Also, if you do freeze up you will have a much better chance of recovering and continuing on.


And Second ... No one is going to LAUGH at you. Get that out of your mind. They are cheering for you. They want you to succeed. They admire your courage. They are happy for you when you finish successfully.

If you do this, try to enjoy it. Otherwise, what's the point.

P.S. WE are pulling for you too. Let us know how it went.

Many years ago, I took some tennis classes. We had occasional informal "tournaments" against other clubs. Participants were in different "skill groups".

My teacher said:

. . . Sometimes, you're going to face an opponent _whom you cannot beat_.
. . . When that happens, keep cool, play as well as you can, and
. . . learn from what he does.

That was a useful hint.

Against talented, well-trained kids, an adult beginner is severely handicapped. That's just "how the world is", and everyone understands it. So give up thoughts of "competition" -- you're not going to "win"!

For _you_, it's a chance to play for other people, and that's worth doing. Pick something that's _easier_ than your "hardest piece", and that you really enjoy playing, and do your best with it.

[This advice is worth what you paid for it . . . ]

. Charles

The idea came about when I was watching an interview with a concert pianist. This guy does about 80 concerts a year. He said something like when he plays for himself it is different from when he is performing for others. So I took it that when he is performing he switches to "work mode" and when he plays for himself he is much more relaxed. I don't think you can ever be truly relaxed when performing in front of large audience, so there has to be a trick/mind games/mindset you need to put on to overcome that.

Let's see, if you were to stand still in a crowded place with a pineapple on your head you would be embarrassed right? But if it was your job, you get paid to do it and people are expecting you with a pineapple on your head, it would be less embarrassing. Am I right?

Anyway that was the worst analogy I can think of.

Thanks everyone for your input, all read and appreciated.

And yes I entered this competition with no intention of "winning" just an opportunity to perform. I told my teacher and she just said "oh you never know, you might win something..."

Call it the Pineapple Competition.

I am very very competitive when it comes to pineapples.