Music Monday - Performance Confidence

I spent Saturday accompanying year 11 and 12 singers for their semester one performance exams – individual recitals of around 10-15 minutes in duration. (We are fortunate in Western Australia to be easing restrictions now that we have no community transmission of Covid-19, so these exams took place live in the room, with everyone appropriately distanced.)

As usual there was a range of performance confidence – from the super confident singers who love every audience (including exam panels) through to the singers with borderline performance anxiety. Each exam had its own dynamic in that respect alone.

Most of the singers I accompanied that day are also my own voice students, and so part of Sunday was spent finalising their semester one in-class results. During the period that we were all self-isolating at home (the end of the 1st term and first few weeks of this term) these students submitted performances to me in the form of self-takes via email. I then emailed comments and feedback. During that time in lockdown, I often mused on how much more confident one of my students was on camera, as opposed to in the room with an audience. On Sunday as I again watched one of her emailed videos from earlier in the semester, I reflected on her live performance the day before and how, using the same marking rubric, her exam performance could never achieve the same result as one to the camera.

Now of course, live performance is the lifeblood of music – and aren’t we bursting to get back to it?  However, is there a step, we as teachers could take, to build performance confidence via the camera for those students with some degree of performance anxiety? And importantly – what would the steps towards confident live performance entail? Could it be the sharing of confident self-takes with their peers to ‘prove themselves’ before performing live in the class?

Do you have thoughts on this? Please share!