on performing ❧ 51
except to my vanity? What good does it do to rest, or not to rest, to eat or not
to eat beforehand, to practice or not? In short, what can I do?
Any musician who declares that he is never nervous is lying, no matter how
long and varied his experience may have been. What he really means, if he is
not a soulless automaton or a monster of complacency, is that he has learned
to control his nervousness and turned it to good advantage when perform-
ing. But the means adopted to control nervousness or to combat unfavorable
acoustics can sometimes do more damage to a performance than nervousness
itself. In one’s best performances, one has often the feeling of fl oating, of tak-
ing fl ight, of being sustained by mysterious forces, of being absorbed into some
kind of state of grace. Merely feeling comfortable on stage is no assurance of
a performance which communicates itself to others. Just as states of grace are
seldom achieved without preliminary suffering, so many a fi ne performance
has been preceded by hours and days and years of agony and struggle.
The ways of invoking a performer’s good luck are as many and varied as
performers themselves. They range from sensible precautions about physical
well-being through preferences for diet and sleeping to superstitions that, for
the simplemindedness and absurdity, would outdo any practices of the world’s
most primitive tribe. A few of mine: never warm up by playing immediately
before going on stage; avoid wearing a completely new or a completely clean
set of clothes; always have something about your person that is a little dirty,
preferably something left over from the last concert, like a white tie or a vest
whose loss of pristine freshness is not suffi cient to be noticed at a distance. If
there is to be a party afterwards, settle instead for the invisibility of a soiled
pocket handkerchief or a used pair of socks. Hope that no one will come into
the green room immediately before a concert and ask, “Are you ever nervous?”
If so, never deny it—the effect of the question can only be dispelled by barking
in reply, “Of course!” Know that if at intermission or after a concert someone
asks—“How are you?”—it has been a bad concert.
An experienced performer knows that he can expect only rarely to appear
in public under fully ideal circumstances. Furthermore, he has discovered
that these ideal circumstances do not always produce the best performances.
Sometimes, in fi ghting and cursing his way through obstacles of fatigue, worry,
poor instruments, and bad acoustics, he puts up a struggle that wins him a
greater victory than more comfortable circumstances might have provoked.
Every performer knows the experience of rising from a sick bed for a con-
cert or of holding out for the duration of a long program while running a
high temperature. Something may have occurred to throw him into utter
fury immediately before coming on stage to unfold for his listeners the divine
serenity of a slow movement. But the worst drain on a performer is travelling.
Often the diffi culties involved in getting from one place to another make the
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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