When Music-Making Goes From Playful to Fearful
Does stage fright scare kids away from learning to be musical?
Posted December 2, 2024 | Reviewed by Davia Sills
Many kids basically deduce that if listening to music is so great, how much more amazing must it be to make the music yourself? Often, would-be musicians have this realization as young children. Why? Because the creative and exploratory nature of small children leads them to try things that appeal to them without concern about whether they will immediately be “good at it.” Young kids can enjoy the experience of music-making without worrying about how the quality of their performance will be judged by others. Or, put in more educational terms, they invest themselves in the process without being concerned about the product.
What makes performance anxiety so remarkably cruel is that it can change music-making from an activity of joyous personal expression to one of intense dread. On top of that, it feels deeply personal. It affects a momentous change in people, a real 180-degree about-face. Kids who were gleefully running toward greater musical engagement end up retreating to the safety of only listening to music.
From Playful to Presentational
Have you ever noticed that musicians who are instrumentalists are said to play their piano, horn, or whatever their instrument is? Contrast this with tech-savvy people, who are said to use a computer or even “know how to work a computer.” Yes, playing a musical instrument may simply be a figure of speech, but perhaps it should also serve as a reminder that music is basically a playful activity.
The hallmarks of play are that it is imaginative, intrinsically motivated, self-directed, and process-oriented (Gray, 2017). Music, at its best, checks all the boxes. Young children seem to understand this entirely. At playgrounds all around the world, you are just as likely to hear the sounds of singing and rhythm-making (on whatever objects are available) as you are to hear the sounds of laughter and screams of delight induced by slides, swings, and merry-go-rounds.
Evoking scenes of childhood is not merely a welcome escape from the grim realities of stage fright . Rather, consideration of the playful music-making of children may be part of the solution to the widespread problem of performance anxiety. Unfortunately, it may be something of an untapped resource.
While there is no question that psychological research has provided valuable insight into the nature of performance anxiety, the vast majority of the research has been conducted on musicians who are adults or late-stage adolescents, specifically, conservatory and university music students. Much less is known about the onset of performance in younger people (Patston & Osborne, 2016). It is generally accepted that “most young children love to perform, love an audience, and seem blissfully unaware of any flaws in their “performance’” (Kenny & Osborne, 2006, p. 103). Why, then, do elementary- and middle-school students begin to experience anxiety when they take the stage at their recitals and school concerts?
From research in the psychology of music, there are a number of reasons to believe that music performance anxiety happens in school settings more than anywhere else. Based on an earlier study of people’s early autobiographical memories from childhood that involved music, Sloboda (2005) concluded that musical memories with positive significance were twice as likely to have occurred away from school than in school. More recent research has indicated that performance anxiety is more prevalent among young people involved in classical music than those focusing on popular genres (Nusseck et al., 2015). Obviously, classical music is much more commonly the type learned in schools and other formal educational settings, such as private studio lessons.
In studying the emotional experiences reported by classical music performers compared to “nonclassical” musicians, one researcher concluded that performance anxiety is not simply a problem of the individual, but it can be culturally determined; based on her research, Perdomo-Guevara (2014) recommended that those in education examine the performance approaches embedded in their teaching because educational environments can partly determine whether students’ music-making induces positive or negative emotional experiences for them. In other words, we should consider whether we, as educators, are teaching performance anxiety to our students.
Education With Enjoyment
To be clear here, education is not the problem. Obviously, the process of learning and growing musically does not in itself cause an increase in anxiety. The implication of the aforementioned research is not that performance anxiety stems from education but rather from the formalization of children’s music-making in front of a designated audience. Perhaps the encroachment of performance anxiety can be warded off if young people continue to make music for others in a personal-sharing way rather than as a staged presentation as their performance skills advance.
Preschool-age children “exhibit enthusiastic temperaments about entertaining” and think performing music for others is “enjoyable and exciting” (Kladder, 2016, p. 112). Yet, as early as 3 and 4 years of age, they can exhibit anxiety responses when performing a “concert” for their families, especially when done on a stage in an unfamiliar location (Boucher & Ryan, 2011). Unfortunately, as kids mature, develop, and do further music study, their performance anxiety tends to increase rather than decrease.
Unfortunately, the onset and increase of performance anxiety can cause many young people to abandon music studies altogether. Dropout is something of an epidemic in music education. In most American school systems, a music class is provided to all students at the primary school level. When they are a little older, however, and music becomes an elective class, it is a curricular offering that the majority of students elect not to take.
And further down the line, at the secondary school level, if an American high school has 20 percent of its student body enrolled in music, it is thought to be doing an exemplary job providing music education. And finally, of that minority of students who do school music through to high school graduation, only a very small percentage continue to use what they learned in school to be active music makers as adults.
Surely there are multiple factors contributing to this bleak attrition phenomenon in music education. It cannot be blamed all on students’ experiencing anxiety at school music performances. Still, it would be hard to believe that performance anxiety is not a factor at all.
It is no easy task to neutralize all the factors that contribute to the onset of performance anxiety in musical kids. Still, preserving youthful enthusiasm for music-making is a worthy calling for all music teachers and experienced performers who mentor younger ones. We must find ways to encourage our young artists-to-be to keep in touch with the playful and enjoyable aspects of music-making that first captivated them.
Boucher, H., & Ryan, C. A. (2011). Performance stress and the very young musician. Journal of Research in Music Education , 58 (4), 329-345.
Gray, P. (2017). What exactly is play, and why is it such a powerful vehicle for learning?. Topics in Language Disorders , 37 (3), 217-228.
Kenny, D. T., & Osborne, M. S. (2006). Music performance anxiety: New insights from young musicians. Advances in Cognitive Psychology , 2 (2-3), 103-112.
Kladder, J. (2016). Music performance anxiety in young children: A review of literature. In J. A. Bugos (Ed.), Contemporary research in music learning across the lifespan (pp. 111-122). Routledge.
Nusseck, M., Zander, M., & Spahn, C. (2015). Music performance anxiety in young musicians: comparison of playing classical or popular music. Medical Problems of Performing Artists , 30 (1), 30-37.
Patston, T., & Osborne, M. S. (2016). The developmental features of music performance anxiety and perfectionism in school age music students. Performance Enhancement & Health, 4 (1-2), 42-49.
Perdomo-Guevara, E. (2014). Is music performance anxiety just an individual problem? Exploring the impact of musical environments on performers’ approaches to performance and emotions. Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain, 24 (1), 66-74.
Sloboda, J. (2005). Music as language. In Exploring the musical mind (pp. 175-189). Oxford University Press.
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Robert H. Woody, Ph.D., is a music professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an author of the book Psychology for Musicians .
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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.