Reg: Karen and Les, if we take a look at all that, each of your
reasons starts with "I".
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I wouldn't presume to answer for anyone else, that would be
presumptuousness.
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Reg: Apart from the obvious non-inclusion of the needs of others, it
also calls into question the interpretation of the work one sings.
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What? You are assuming that I don't consider the needs of others
based on an internet post merely because it began with "I"? You call
into question the interpretation of my singing based on an e-mail
when you've never even heard me sing?
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Reg: Compulsion and self love are exactly the weak foundations I
intended to underline, but more specifically the fear of performing
in public which is the bane of so many performers and performance.
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Oh, I thought it was "FEAR or SELFISHNESS" as you prefaced your first
post. Now it's compulsion and self-love?
Performance anxiety (PA) can be influenced by many things. In my
experience (and I don't presume to speak for anyone else, that is why
I use "I") perfectionism has a greater influence on PA than
selfishness. With perfectionism implies fault-finding. People who are
fault-finding imagine that everyone else does what they do when they
are in an audience; i.e., they sit there ticking off a checklist of
no-nos in their heads. "Nope, under pitch there, bummer. Whoops,
nasty scoop there. Uh-oh, glottal attack. Yikes, that's one nasty
tone; totally inappropriate for the style. Ye-e-w, breathing in the
middle of a phrase; oughtta know better. Dang, that's one awful yodel
goin' on there; they need to learn how to handle that passgio." etc,
etc, etc, ad nauseum. When they get up to sing in front of other
people, no wonder they're seized with terror! They just know
everybody's out there doing the same thing to them.
Huge egos don't give a crap what anybody thinks. Fragile egos are
very sensitive to what anyone thinks.
I had terrible performance anxiety until I sat down and figured out
why I wanted to sing in the first place. Was it just to "show off"?
No, because lots of times I knew singing right then wasn't going to
show me in my best light but I sang anyway. Why on earth would I do
that? Eventually I learned it was because I love to listen to people
sing in spite of their imperfections (actually sometimes because they
could perform amazingly well in spite of them). Singing moves me,
especially if the story a song contains is well told. It doesn't
matter what style it's in if they tell the story well. It doesn't
matter if they follow all the rules. It doesn't matter if they make
mistakes. Hell, even the very best of us make technical mistakes when
we sing. But we shouldn't obsess about such things, that's when
pathology sets in.
I discovered that it's much better to share what I love about a song
with other people than to keep what insight I have about it to
myself. Yeah, nobody's perfect and we all make mistakes but it isn't
all about US.
Regards,
Les
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