On its own, without musicians or an audience, a concert hall is just an inanimate object. Quiet, still and lifeless. But adding musicians and an audience should, if all goes well, bring it to life.
However, musicians can do much of their formative training, practice and rehearsing away from the concert hall.
And this can provide insufficient opportunity to get really comfortable in the live arena, particularly when starting out in the profession.
Left unchecked, this may start to undermine a musician’s confidence on stage at the crucial stage of a career.
So how can you feel more at home in the concert hall environment, so that it feels both natural and safe to perform there?
Owning the stage
One route to feeling more confident in a concert hall is to think about (i) how you will own the stage and (ii) getting used to how that feels to you.
Imagine that you are the head of state or the CEO of a company delivering an important speech with dignity or splendour. Imagine you are that person and that you have absolute authority to get your message across to your listeners in a way that makes them want to listen to you.
Now think the same as you practice and then carry that with you to the stage – and think about the dignity and splendour of the musical sound that you want to portray to your audience. Try that both standing up and sitting down so that it doesn’t feel alien to you if you are performing standing or sitting.
Animating the stage
The above thought processes can be a good way of building greater confidence on stage and understanding the relationship between your imagination and the positive energy that it can provide in performance.
However, imagining only that you own the stage can be a little limiting, because ultimately, any performance is a three way process between:
- you and your audience;
- you and your fellow musicians on stage; and
- you and the acoustics of the concert hall.
This then poses the question of how you will bring your performance to life in your actual concert hall surroundings?
Imagining that you are a person of power might enhance part of your performance and you might feel like you own the stage, but really bringing a performance to life is much more than that. How you share and inhabit the concert hall with everyone else within it have equal importance in any form of music making.
Thinking of ‘animating the stage’ provides you with an opportunity to think more about musical colours. To think about your role within any musical phrase, about how you want to feel on stage and how you want the audience to feel. And imagining how you will project those colours into the concert hall and onto its walls and its ceiling, so that there is a real sense of the musical sound and energy that you are producing doing something and coming to life.
This may feel like a strange and alien concept at first, but without imagination, music can start to feel very stale and repetitive. But by thinking more about first owning the stage and then animating the stage, this can provide a route to both building and growing your musical confidence.
In turn, it allows the musical energy that might otherwise remain trapped inside you through feeling inhibited in a concert venue environment, to be fully expressed and set free. Which ultimately allows you to feel far more relaxed on stage and enjoy sharing the music making experience with everyone around you.