Even professional musicians get stage fright, but a saxophonist and researcher in Japan found a way to help her and other musicians perform under pressure.

Positive memories of performances that went well make musicians more likely to do well on stage, a new study shows.

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“As a saxophonist, I have long been interested in understanding what allows musicians to perform at their best, especially under the pressure of the stage,” Aiko Watanabe told Keio University, where she is a PhD candidate. Watanabe worked in collaboration with Shinya Fujii, the Director of the NeuroMusic Lab, to study the psychology of performance.

It’s not at all uncommon for musicians to feel nervous before a performance, but sometimes their nerves can impact how they play. Feeling too jittery can make a musician perform badly on stage, but not all pre-show nerves are bad. Some studies found that activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which triggers the “fight or flight” response, can actually make musicians perform better. They just need to find out how they can steer their nervous system in this direction right before they go on stage.

Positive memories boost musicians’ music performance

The research team at Keio University noticed that some studies suggested that positive emotions could influence the sympathetic nervous system, and decided to put this to the test. They recruited 36 wind musicians, with between 3 to 38 years of professional performance experience, who volunteered to have their heart rate measured with an electrocardiogram right before and during a brief performance of Bach and Gounod’s “Ave Maria”.

Even though this performance was not difficult or career-defining, and only part of a research study, it was still a little bit nerve-racking, because they knew that they would be evaluated by the other volunteers. Since they were all professional wind instrumentalists, they knew that their peers would hear and notice all their mistakes.

Each musician was asked to play three times, with a different preparation each time. Once, they had to recall a positive memory of a time they performed really well. In another round they instead drew on a negative performance memory, and the third time they had to mentally go over some neutral pre-performance routine by imagining that they were waiting backstage.

They then performed their piece, and evaluated their own performance afterwards. Because everyone is their own worst critic, the musicians also evaluated recordings of each other’s performances, but overall these evaluations matched up pretty well. They broadly agreed with each other which performances were good or less good. (Since these were all professionals, let’s assume nobody did badly!)

So did the memory exercise make a difference? The performances where musicians recalled positive memories beforehand were overall ranked better than those where they drew on their bad memories, and their heart rate suggested an increased activation of the sympathetic nervous system as well. Surprisingly, the neutral memories also seemed to work, so anything to not dwell on bad past performances did the trick.

Of course, this was a small study, and in an unusual setting. But for any musicians preparing for a large performance, it shows that it’s worth to remember how amazing they have played in the past.