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What if music theory could be exciting and easy to understand?

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Dr. Greene has written eight books, two of which we discuss in this conversation, “Performance Success” and “College Prep for Musicians”. He also publishes articles covering all aspects of peak performance psychology for music, sports and all performing disciplines on his website, Winning on Stage.

You may be familiar with some of the ideas in this interview, such as visualisation and positive self-talk. However, If you’re like most music learners, you’ve probably come across these ideas in vague blog posts or conversation. You’re going to find it hugely valuable to hear from a performance psychologist who’s worked with world-class performers across several disciplines for many years.

We talk about:

• Why trying to feel relaxed is not actually the route to reliable performance under pressure
• The five areas you can assess yourself on, to know how best to improve your own performance abilities.
• The importance of a so-called “pre-shot routine” that can help you perform at your best even when your heart is pounding

This conversation is going to equip you with some valuable new insights and strategies to apply in your musical life and open your eyes to what might be possible for you!

Watch the episode:

Links and Resources

• • Winning On Stage
  • Winning On Stage Articles
  • Dr. Don Greene’s Books
  • Performance Mastery Assessment
  • Centering Training

Transcript

Dr. Greene: Hi, I’m Dr. Don Greene. I’m the author of Audition Success, Performance Success, and College Prep for Musicians. Welcome to this broadcast.

Christopher: Welcome to the show, Dr. Greene. Thank you for joining us today.

Dr. Greene: Thank you so much. Nice to be here.

Christopher: So in the foreword to your book Performance Success, Julie Landsman of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra wrote, “It takes something more than talent to win auditions and perform consistently at the very peak of one’s powers. It takes what Don Greene has to offer.” I wonder if you could tell us in a nutshell what is that? What is that extra something?

Dr. Greene: The extra something is a different approach to performing under pressure. Rather than the alleged approach of a lot of music teachers of just relax, my approach is more that it’s a competition, just like sports, and you’re not supposed to be relaxed. You’re supposed to have your body physically relaxed, but the mind needs to be engaged. And it’s a competition, so I approach it more from an athletic point of view than a musical point of view. So we talk about things like focus, channeling energy, hanging in when it gets tough, go and become fearless. And that’s more of my approach. And it has been very successful in auditions.

Christopher: That was something that really jumped out to me in Performance Success was there was a line along the lines of, “If you feel relaxed right before a performance, something’s wrong.” Which I think runs contrary to a lot of the advice out there.

Dr. Greene: Well, that’s just it, you’re going to feel adrenaline, you’re going to feel it surging through your body. If it’s important at all, you’re going to be feeling that rather than trying to deny or wish it away to accept it and learn how to use it. Thing is, with performers, on stage they have good reason to be nervous or I would call it excited. First of all, they’re on stage, and you’ve got the spotlight effect. Everybody’s watching, everybody’s listening, and they’re probably the only one making any noise or sound. And everybody’s paying attention. And if they’re up on stage, they’re supposed to be good. So you have the expectation, the double whammy. And then if you’re also going with the attitude, “I just need to relax, or my teacher wants me to relax,” then you have the triple whammy. And that’s when it doesn’t tend to go well.

Christopher: So I definitely want to circle back in a moment and talk about that physical experience of stress or anxiety, and what you just said about nervous versus excited. But before we do, there’s something else from that same foreword that spoke out to me, which was Julie Landsman talked also about how she had already become quite competent in performing reliably. Like she was hitting the right notes at the right time, but felt all the joy had gone out of performing. And working with you brought a lot of that joy and sense of creativity back. I wonder if you could give the listener a glimpse into what it is about your process that lets performers not just execute well, but actually enjoy it and feel better about it.

Dr. Greene: Yeah, it’s wonderful if they can enjoy it. There’s a concept of flow, and people in flow tend to do better. There’s a word called “autotelic personality”. And that means that people enjoy it for the sake of doing it. And hopefully all your fans, listeners enjoy what they’re doing. That they do it even if they weren’t paid, and hopefully they can get paid. But autotelic personality is that enjoy doing what you’re doing. But that is based on the foundation of competence and proficiency. You have to have goods in order to enjoy it. So that’s the main key is you work on your skills.

Dr. Greene: But then you reach a certain level, not perfection, because perfection doesn’t exist as far I’m concerned with musical instruments, that you reach a certain level of competence and proficiency. And then you switch over from working music to playing music. And I think this is a real key, that too many people get caught up in trying to perfect it and work and work. And it takes an enormous amount of work, 10,000 hours if you want, to get to a level of competence and proficiency. But once you get that level, you need to switch over from working music to playing music and enjoying the process. Being with other musicians, making great music. Hopefully that’s what all the work is about, that you can go onstage and play like a kid just enjoying it, with the freedom to play, and share that with other people who can enjoy it. That to me is what music’s all about. In order to get there you’ve got to work to play. But that’s the essential thing.

Dr. Greene: There’s two kinds of practice. There’s practicing practice, which you need for competence and proficiency. Practicing practice is doing all the things you need with a metronome, with a tuner, stop and start it, record it, play it back, play it slowly. That’s what you need to do for work. But once you reach a level of proficiency, you need to switch over from practicing practice to practicing performing. And that’s where no tuner, no metronome, and you don’t get to stop and start. You have a tape recorder on but you play through it no matter what. And this is practicing performing. And this is the essential switch over from working to playing. And this is where you first start out with a recording, record yourself. And once you start, you don’t stop. And then you invite a friend over, and then three friends over, and then your teacher.

Dr. Greene: And you get used to performing with the adrenaline because you’re not going to feel that when you’re practicing practice. So you’re practicing at a level that you’re not going to do, and then you’re going to do something that you haven’t practiced. So I think it’s important that you practice performing under increasing pressure to get used to it. And the whole goal is to realize that you can perform better with the pressure than you can relaxed in a practice room. And that’s the main key to switch over, to take it to a stage on the way to enjoying it. By getting used to the adrenaline, in a safe environment, with a recorder, then one person, and learning how to channel that adrenaline, because it’s going to be there. And hear that you can sound better. The notes speak louder. You have more direction, more intensity.

Dr. Greene: The one thing you won’t have is comfort. That doesn’t go with the package. You either get high performance or comfort. If you want comfort, stay in a practice room. If you want to proceed for grass as a musician, you got to take it to the stage. And that involves getting used to the pressure, and accepting it, and channeling it.

Christopher: Terrific. Well, what I love about your work is how clearly you present people with frameworks and concepts and tools to actually dig into all of this stuff that can otherwise just feel a bit overwhelming. Like when you talked just now about it not being a comfortable thing, that doesn’t mean you have to have lots of chaos and stress going on in your head, and thoughts whirring all over the place, right?

Dr. Greene: No, not at all. You want to calm that down, chaos. But you’re still going to be feeling the adrenaline in your body, namely heart racing, blood pressure up, butterflies in your stomach, hands shaking, needing to go to the bathroom a lot, all of these things. And just realize that they go with the territory.

Dr. Greene: The only catch is if the heart races, it doesn’t need to affect your playing. The main thing that affects people’s playing under pressure is they get tight, physically tight. Their muscles don’t work the same when they’re tight. And that’s the difference between a practice room and a stage, is people tend to be physically loose in a practice room, and on stage they’re carrying a lot of attention. So it’s almost like practicing on one instrument and then going on stage with a different instrument. You’re working with a different mechanism if you’re working with tight muscles.

Dr. Greene: So I ask musicians under pressure to realize where they’re tight, where they tend to tighten up. And it tends to be in what I call key muscles. In other words, horn players tend to tighten up in their upper body. String players in their hands or arms. It goes with the territory. And so what each individual musician needs to do is look at where they tend to tighten up under pressure, and then under pressure not go to your heart racing. “Oh my god, my heart’s racing. Now I’m not going to play well.” But to relax in their key muscles so that they will play well. Because supple muscles work better than the tight muscles. That’s straightforward. It’s very mechanical. And this is not a head concept, this is a physical concept. It gets your body prepared to play.

Christopher: Interesting. And on this physical front you mentioned a moment ago there’s a difference between nervous versus excited. And I’m sure for some people in our audience, having just heard you talk through those symptoms, they can understand how those two might coexist, or there might be a choice between them. But maybe you could unpack a little bit more. What’s that about?

Dr. Greene: It’s a question of interpretation. And it’s in the middle of two things. It happens really fast, it’s perception, interpretation, and action. So you walk into a room, go on stage, and all of a sudden your heart starts racing. You perceive your heart racing. You feel your heart racing. At this point you can make an interpretation. The interpretation can go north or south. You can either say, “Oh my god, my heart’s racing. Now I’m not going to play well.” And then you’ll act in that way, defensively not play well, not play out. And yeah. Or you can make the correct interpretation which is, “My heart’s racing. Yeah, I’m up here on stage. It’s supposed to be racing. It’s racing. It’s okay, I’m going to play well.” That’s it. And that’s the correct interpretation.

Christopher: Terrific.

Dr. Greene: There’s what’s called “task irrelevant cues”. Task irrelevant. In other words, certain other things that happen under pressure can affect your playing, and they are relevant, and that’s muscle tension. Others are totally task irrelevant unless you make them relevant. This is where the interpretation comes in. So if you interpret the racing heart as a bad thing, “Oh my god, I’m not going to play well,” you’ll go south, you’ll prove that. Or you can just pay attention to task relevant, relax your muscles, and the rest of them are task irrelevant. Your perspiration, your hand shaking, dry mouth, butterflies in your stomach, shaky knees, feeling unstable. Irrelevant, doesn’t matter, unless you make it matter.

Christopher: Fascinating. Well, I want to talk a bit later on about your centering technique, or rather, the centering technique that you recommend, which I think factors in some of that physical relaxation. But let’s talk a little bit more, if we may, about the mental side. You made a distinction in your book about left brain versus right brain in this content that I hadn’t come across before. Can you explain a little bit about that?

Dr. Greene: Sure. We have two hemispheres of our cerebral cortex or our thinking mind, most advanced form of our brain. Left brain thinks in terms of words and numbers, analysis, thinking, self-talk, criticism, instructions, counter instructions, blaming, criticizing. This is the domain of mathematicians, attorneys, a lot of business folks. The right brain is where we perceive in images or pictures, sensations like bowing or embouchure, and sounds, like music. So this is the territory of musicians, creative artists, painters. No words, no analysis, creativity. So there’s a constant interplay between them.

Dr. Greene: But for musicians, here’s the thing. In order to learn musical skills, you’ve got to do it left brain. It’s got to be a portion. Somebody’s got to explain in words to how you to form embouchure or how to do correct bowing. It needs to be explained. And it’s preliminary learning. And you can also accompany that with right brain learning, which is watching the teacher, listening, asking what it what it feels like. But it’s more left brain at first, and then it shifts more to right brain as the learning increases. So for accomplished musicians, it’s mostly right brain. They don’t need the instructions anymore, it gets in the way. They don’t need the criticism, that gets in the way. What they need to do before they play is shift to right brain. Namely, hear the music, play the music. Or hear the music and watch your good bowing, or feel your fingering. No words. Words are what causes distractions.

Dr. Greene: And if you practice 10,000 hours so you have the right to start out in right brain. Hear the music, play the music. Not hear the music, think about how you need to play the music, and then play the music. That’s what screws it up. And this is the switch from amateur to professional. You don’t need to intermediate thought, that’s what the 10,000 hours of practice is about so you get the right to hear it and play it.

Dr. Greene: What centering is about, it’s a seven step process. It’s pretty involved. But what it’s about is getting people out of their left brain into their right before they play the first note.

Christopher: Gotcha. And maybe that addresses what I was about to ask which is that process of going from left brain to right brain and going from analytically learning and thinking to just being able to play, is that something that only happens on that 10,000 hour time scale across an artist’s career? Or is that something that happens-

Dr. Greene: I’m sorry, you can do that earlier on, and you need to after the preliminary learning is done.

Dr. Greene: So with easier pieces, once you master a piece, you can start applying this.

Christopher: And maybe we could give people a glimpse into that centering process and what’s going on to help them shift from left brain to right brain.

Dr. Greene: Yeah. It’s a very complicated seven step process. It takes about two weeks to learn. It comes from the martial art Aikido for focus and Western sport psychology. I have a course on my website, winningonstage.com, on the centering course for people to take a week or two or three to learn how to center properly. I could walk you through the seven steps right now, but ti would be like asking you to walk me through music theory. I understand a little bit. I understand one, three, five, and CEG, and the seventh and major seventh or a flat seventh. But beyond that, I don’t understand. But if you could explain solfege to me, go for it.

Christopher: Of course. Well, in that case, maybe we could talk instead about the before and after. So what would people typically be experiencing before a performance, and what might they experience otherwise if they had done the centering technique?

Dr. Greene: Well, before, if they’re not used to the adrenaline or if they fight the adrenaline, they don’t have a coping mechanism or a strategy, likelihood is that before they go on they’re going to get a shot of adrenaline. They can be relaxed before or think, “Yeah, relax, take it easy.” But most of the time it’s going to kick in. Not all the time, that’s the catch. Especially if exhaustion, you stayed up for a few nights, or you got a lot of other things going on. But even then I found with musicians that they started, and like 30 seconds into the piece it’s like, “Boom, there it is. Oh my gosh. I thought I was fine.”

Dr. Greene: So before an audition or a big performance and any pressure situation, it’s probably going to kick in. And once it kicks in, this whole sequence of things happen, a lot at the same time. Physically I’ve talked about it. The increase in heart rate, blood pressure, muscle tension. But that’s only the physical part. You got two other parts, which is the mental and the emotional. The mental is people tend to get slammed into their left brain. They’re now trying to figure out how to get their heart rate down, and they’re not going to figure that out before they go on. People tend to get very negative, doubtful, self-critical, and imagine the worst. This will increase muscle tension. And the more you think about the worst, the more likely you’ll cause the worst. People go into blaming, find fault. They should have found a better teacher maybe. Very critical. And they get into avoidance thinking like, “I don’t want to be here. Get me out of here. Fight or flight. Run for your lives.”

Dr. Greene: And it goes into beta processing. It goes into high speed left brain, very high speed. Now there’s a committee meeting taking place in your head. And they’re starting to yell at each other. The faster it goes, the more you’re distracted. The faster it goes, the more you’re in your head, the less you can feel the instrument, the less you’re in right brain. So you can’t hear the music, you’re not feeling your body the right way, and you’re having trouble finding notes on the page. This can destroy a performance. But that’s just the mental.

Dr. Greene: Then we have the emotional, which is fear, anxiety, terror, which will continue to increase the heart rate and increase the muscle tension. So when all three of these things, the physical, mental, and emotional happen to a musician, it will definitely affect their sound. Like on the first phrase. They will hear that sound and it won’t be good. And then they’re going to shift into left brain and how to figure this out, because it doesn’t sound good. And that’s the beginning of the train wreck.

Christopher: And I really enjoyed your artist’s performance survey in the book, which is kind of a self-assessment with a lot of statements that you can rate yourself on how much you would agree with that on different situations, from the practicing privately right through to the performance. And just to give our listeners an idea, we’re talking about things like, “I have a strong will to succeed,” or, “I want to gain other’s recognition of my talent,” or, “I don’t focus very well.” And by going through this self-assessment you get a really vivid picture, I think, of, I don’t want to say your strengths and weaknesses, but your current situation when it comes to performing. And Dr. Greene, you break that down into seven different areas. I wonder if we could just briefly talk those through to give people an idea of not how complex, but how rich this topic is for them to explore and potentially improve in.

Dr. Greene: Okay. I wrote that assessment when I wrote the book, which is more than 20 years ago. And I’ve refined the assessment, refined my ideas. So I’ve got it from seven to five. I’ve got my website called the performance mastery assessment. It’s updated based upon my learning over the last 20 years working with musicians. So the performance mastery assessment is on my website. And you take it and immediately get it back. But you also, if you want, get a half our session with me to explain what it means and what to do about it. So I would encourage people to take the performance mastery assessment.

Dr. Greene: But here are the five categories on that. The first one is energy regulation, and this has to do with controlling and channeling that energy, because I’m going with the assumption it’s going to be high. I rarely get any clients coming to me saying, “My energy’s just too low. I’m falling asleep at auditions.” It doesn’t happen. So it’s about channeling that adrenaline that we’re talking about and using it with the right interpretation. You’re like, “Yeah, I can play better with the adrenaline than I can calm in practice.” And that’s the key switch. That’s where you want to get to, better under pressure than when you’re relaxed. Because you’re not supposed to be relaxed, other than your body. So that’s the energy regulation, and that is tied to centering, because the centering will help control that energy and channel it. That’s what it does.

Dr. Greene: The second one has to do with mindset or confidence. Because people generally don’t play better than they have confidence in their playing. But confidence comes from three things. Self-confidence or self-belief comes from physical action, of doing the right things. This is where you practice, play for your teacher, set up concerts. You got to put in the time. The thing I love about sports and music is you can’t fake it. You got to put in the time. Yeah. So do the right thing.

Dr. Greene: Number two has to do with the left brain and self-talk. Are you talking to yourself in a positive way or negative? Either one is going to affect your confidence. You talk to yourself in a positive reinforcing way, it’s going to go up. You find fault with yourself, a lot of self-criticism, a lot of blaming, it’s going to go down. It’s as simple as that. Because most people are talking to themselves all the time, and most of them are believing everything they say to themselves, whether it’s right or wrong. So this programming goes into our subconscious mind, and it definitely affects your confidence level.

Dr. Greene: And the third is more right brain programming, which is what you’re imagining. Are you imagining it going well or imagining making mistakes? That will also affect your confidence. If you constantly go over and over the mistakes, you’ll cause those mistakes. Your confidence will drop, you’ll focus on it, and then you’ll manifest those mistakes. So the whole idea is because our confidence level is constantly moving, it’s never static. It’s going up or down based on your last practice, your last lesson. It’s always moving. The idea is to continually move it up by doing the right things, by developing positive self-talk, or mental quiet, even better. And by doing mental rehearsal of imagining it going well, imagining seeing yourself, hearing yourself, feeling yourself playing the piece that you’re struggling with. Rather than focus on it not going well, just imagine it going well. And even if you can’t play it yet, you can imagine, you got a great creative power to imagine … I can imagine myself playing the Brahms. I can’t, but I can imagine it. I’m very in my mind. I can play every instrument in the orchestra.

Dr. Greene: It’s very important that you reinforce the physical learning with mental rehearsal. Because any time you practice, even professionals, you can practice for any amount of time, you’re going to make mistakes. And those mistakes will register in your self-confidence. You’ll remember the mistakes. Christopher, I think you can imagine, remember a mistake you made in a performance two years ago.

Christopher: 2 years ago!

Dr. Greene: So that’s not the concept. The concept is to imagine things going well, and it will raise your confidence.

Christopher: And before we move on to the other areas, I wonder if we could just talk a little more about that one, because you had a fantastic story in the book. And I forget whether it was in Performance Success or College Prep For Musicians, but you were talking about an Olympic aspiring diver who, due to injury, could only practice mentally for a period leading up to a competition. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Dr. Greene: Oh sure. This was before the 1984 Olympic trials in platform diving. Platform diving is 10 meters. It’s three times higher than the high board at the swimming pool. It’s 33 feet up and 100 feet down. You’re going at the water at 35 miles an hour. It’s violent. I used to be a platform diver. When you try to hit the water you try to lock out your arms as hard as you can, and it’s an explosion. You can’t hold on to your hands. When I used to dive platform, it took me about 10 dives before I got a severe headache from pounding my head underwater.

Dr. Greene: So we were getting for the Olympic trials. There’s about two months before the Olympic trials, and we had the best team in the country. We had an Olympic champion, a world champion. We had seven women, two of which were likely to make it, four of which could. But this young 16-year-old didn’t have a chance. She was getting ready just for the experience. She was 16. She was very naïve, and we had a 23-year-old world champion on our team.

Dr. Greene: Anyway, so we’re at practice one day, and she’s on 10 meter, and she’s doing a back two and a half in pike. Back two and a half is where you turn around backwards on the platform, you get ready, and then you somersault backwards in pike, not in tuck, in pike, which is slower rotation. And you have to go aggressively off the platform to make the rotations. It’s two and a half somersaults. And instead of jumping real fast, she just kind of sat back into the somersault. And oh my god, the coach and I were sitting there. We just cringed because there’s no way. It’s a disaster about to happen.

Dr. Greene: So a lot of experienced divers would know that they’re way late and slow, and just curl up into the ball and hope for the best with minimal damage. But she was inexperienced and she stuck with her spots, where you’re supposed to see, and see, and then kick out. Well, normally she would kick out at three meters and have time to bring the somersault in. But she kicked out at one meter, and she just absolutely flat on her back. So much so that she bounced off the water. The water is hard. So that’s why they have stretchers next to the pool. Put the stretcher under her and pull her out of the water, convinced that her back was broken. Had to be.

Dr. Greene: Took her to the orthopedic surgeon, did the X-rays. And he came out and said, “Young lady, I don’t know why your back isn’t broken, but it’s not. But you’re going to be really sore, black and blue, for the next month.” And like any young Olympic hopeful, at 16 she said, “Yes, but can I dive at the trials?” Oh my god. You’re lucky to be standing up. He said, “Well, maybe, but you can’t practice for two months.”

Dr. Greene: So for two months she and I went to the coach’s office, and I laid her down and basically took her through a mental rehearsal. Not just that dive, but everything. Her warm ups, stretching, everything the other divers were doing for two months. So we went to Indianapolis for the trials. We got there two weeks early. She said, “Can I get used to the pool and dive?” And he said, “No.” So for two weeks we were in the trainer’s room. Same thing, we would walk up on the platform and check out the spots in the water and all, but no diving. Came to the trials, she said, “Can I do at least eight warm up dives?” He said, “No.”

Dr. Greene: So, platform diving is insane in the first place. It’s crazy to throw your body off there. And every day away from it it gets crazy. You’re convinced that it was stupid in the first place. Every day it gets worse and the fear builds. But, every other diver that was there had been missing dives and hitting dives for two months. Pam hadn’t missed a dive in two months. Every time she did it was great.

Dr. Greene: So the trials started, and she hit her first dive. And people went nuts because everybody knew the story. And it’s a small community. And she hits her second dive. The surgeon checks her out, she’s okay. The third dive. After the fifth dive she’s leading the competition. It’s the story of the games coming. This 16-year-old who hasn’t been on the platform in two months is beating the world champion, an Olympic champion, and two national champions. She hits her sixth dive. And only do eight dives. Seventh dive, the mondo, the surface of the platform gets wet after that many dives. And she slipped on it. Not her tough dive, but she went in at just enough of an angle that the surgeon looked at her and he said, “You’re out.” It blew my mind, because I was with her for two months. And I think she would have hit that back two and a half. She would have gone to the Olympics. It would have been the story. She wouldn’t have done well at the Olympics, I don’t think. She would have been on the team. And that’s the power of mental rehearsal.

Dr. Greene: And that’s why competent musicians need to spend less time physically practicing and spend some time mentally practicing by going through it, getting it correct so it builds your confidence. Not focus on the mistakes. Or playing mistakes which knock your confidence down.

Christopher: Incredible. Well, I think when I first came across the idea of mental practice, it seemed too good to be true. And when I heard people talk about rehearsing in your mind before the big performance, it just seemed like a kind of stress buster and nothing that would really have an impact. But when you talk in your book about in the College Prep for Musicians book, you split out mental practice and mental performance. And I wonder if we could just hammer that home for the audience. What’s the difference between those two, and how does each help you?

Dr. Greene: Well, like we were saying before about practicing practice or practicing performing, you should do mental practice for practice. In other words, going through it to make sure that you get all the pieces in your head right in a practice room, or working on things in a practice room to get better. But then you need to imagine yourself walking on stage nailing it, going to an audition nailing it. All the different things, what I call contingency planning. In other words, if they say, “No, don’t start with that, start with this solo,” well, what if the conductor asked you to do … Whatever, because things happen. It’s chaos. And rather than being caught off guard, this is the time to practice contingencies of anything that could possibly happen. Like in an audition, like having to wait half an hour to play. Or you get there and they say, “You’re on next.” Or, “Don’t start with the solo, start with the Mozart.” Okay. You need to go through every kind of contingency that could happen so it’s not a surprise and you’ve already worked it out. And this is easy to do just sitting at home going through this.

Christopher: Fantastic. I so enjoyed reading your work, specifically applied to that case of a high school musician preparing themselves for college auditions, because in a sense it’s the epitome of nerves and emotional insecurities and high stakes from the musician’s perspective. And you equip them not just with centering and that mental practice and mental rehearsal that we’ve talked about so far, but there a few other tools I wonder if we could share just briefly to give people and idea. One is the idea of a mental boundary to protect yourself from the judges or the chairs in the room.

Dr. Greene: Yeah. I believe that it’s a hostile environment, like people are shooting at you. Shooting nasty looks or asking to play ridiculous things. It’s a war zone. So what I believe is you put on armor around you. You put up a shield, a protective boundary to protect you from people’s thoughts or nasty looks and all. So things just bounce off of you, and you’re protected within this. And it can be a cone, an egg, a force field. One my horn players has tigers or lions facing out. The woman from the Met had a ring of fire. And the whole idea is that you have some sense of security within this boundary, and also to keep your focus in.

Dr. Greene: That’s the other part of it, because it’s easy to look out at the audience or the audition panel and get pulled out of your boundary. And this is to keep your focus in, because it’s all about what you do within your boundary and let your sound go out. Because you can’t control it after it goes out or whether people are going to like it. Maybe they don’t like your sound, maybe they don’t like your instrument. It doesn’t matter. You have to take care of what you do within your boundary and focus in there. That’s why I’m a big fan of it.

Christopher: Absolutely. And I think it’s one of those ideas where you hear it and it’s like, “Oh yeah, that will work. I will try that.” One of the others that jumped out at me was, I think, borrowed from the world of sports, which is the idea of a pre shot routine. Could you give the listeners an idea of how that works?

Dr. Greene: Oh sure, yeah. The last five or seven minutes before a big event, an audition or recital, in the last five minutes you can’t win it, but you can lose it. You can take yourself right out there. And by not having routine, a set or sequence of events that you do to get yourself ready, physically relaxed, mentally engaged in your right brain ready to play and handle what comes at you. So if it’s haphazard, you’re just going to be in left brain trying to figure things out, which is not going to happen. You won’t pay attention to your body. All the wrong things.

Dr. Greene: So a routine that you practice at home when you’re practicing practice and practicing performing, that you go through a sequence. And whether that’s focused on your breathing, doing a mental rehearsal, warming up your body, your embouchure, seeing it go well, all the things leading up to the first note. And it needs to do that because the first note or phrase is really critical. Because all the pressure leads up to the first note or phrase. And you can’t play it till you play it. And there’s no guarantees that it’s going to come out right. Nobody can guarantee. It’s always got an unknown factor in there, so the fear kicks in.

Dr. Greene: So you want to practice coming out of the silence, of breaking the silence. And again, when you’re practicing performing, I believe on working a lot on starts. If you’ve got 10 pieces in your repertoire, just practice the first two bars of every piece over and over. And then switching it from this piece, the first two bars, and first two bars, first two bars. Because my experience with musicians is if you get off to a get start, you can probably play the rest of the piece well. However, all the pressure builds up before the first note. It’s all right on that note. And if that doesn’t come out well, you’ve got the rest of the piece to think about it. So I’m a big fan of first notes, first notes.

Dr. Greene: So the last piece I do is called simulation training. And this is when you’re practicing performing, when you’ve got the piece or pieces up to speed, what you do is you turn a tape recorder on in a room and set up the room with your instrument and music, leave the room, get your heart rate up higher than it would be under the most pressure you’ve ever felt. And then start developing your routine. Maybe slow breathing, or shaking out your body, or hearing the music. Go into the room. The recorder’s already on. Pick up the instrument, take a deep breath, and go for it.

Dr. Greene: At first, play with reckless abandon. Just let it fly. Because it’s not going to be good. It’s just not going to be good for at least six or seven times. Don’t listen to the recording, it will sound like crap. But after you get used to starting with this extra energy, focused, you can watch your progression through those seven tapings. This is simulation training. This is how you get used to practicing performing with the assumption that you’re going to be nervous. You’re supposed to be nervous. People are watching you and listening to you. You’re the only one playing. You’re supposed to be good and there’s no guarantee it’s going to be perfect. That makes people nervous, or as I say, excited.

Dr. Greene: So if you can see that you can play better with this energy under control, then can when you’re, quote, relaxed. Then you become a fan of what I’m saying, that you can play better with the energy and adrenaline than you can when you’re relaxed. And when you hear that, it will make you a convert.

Christopher: And that little routine right before you dive into it, how important is it what goes into that routine versus just the mere fact of having a set routine that you’re going to do each time?

Dr. Greene: When I work with professional golfers, I spend the vast majority of time working on their pre shot routine. Their putting routine, their short game routine, and their driving routine. I don’t go on the course with them, I just, on the range, “Let’s get your routine down.” And they’ll go out and use the routine. So I spend a lot of time. It needs to be individualized, and that’s where some of the things from the assessments come in. Depending upon your scores, you should do that.

Dr. Greene: By the way, speaking about the assessments, we’re only up to number two, of confidence. The third one is courage. Fear, anxiety. And building courage, because that’s the solution to anxiety and fear is you build courage. And musicians have the ability to build courage. Opportunity every day in a practice room by going at something, or on a lesson, or on stage and set up a recital or a performance, and get used to performing. If you’re a performer, you need to perform and put yourself under increasing pressure until you see that the pressure is your friend. Your friend that can make you play better, sound better, with more focus.

Dr. Greene: Number four is focus. The ability to be in right brain, mental quiet, focused on a task at hand until it’s done. Otherwise, you cause mistakes. And the fifth one is resilience. The ability to hang tough, to be mentally tough. To persevere, to continue when they’re shooting at you, until it’s done. And this is something you build. Like courage, you build this. So, what you do in your daily life, and you practice. So those are the five parts of the performance mastery assessment. I found they’re more up to date, more helpful, more practical than the old.

Christopher: Tremendous. Well, I want to be respectful of your time today, Dr. Greene. And I said to you by email we couldn’t hope to cover all of your work in a short interview, But I hope we’ve given people a taste. And if I’m not wrong, winningonstage.com is the place to go for more information about your books and your courses. Maybe you could share a little bit about the courses that we haven’t talked much about so far.

Dr. Greene: Well, winningonstage.com has the centering course, the performance mastery assessment, and the half hour one on one session with me. The centering course, which is a two month self-study course. We have more coming, like on power learning, but they’re not up yet. But those are the two I’d recommend.

Christopher: Tremendous. Well, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading your books and taking on some of these ideas for my own music ideas and practice. And I’m sure our listeners will have got a lot from this conversation. Thank you so much, Dr. Greene.

Dr. Greene: Very welcome. It was a pleasure. All the best.

The post The Keys to Performance Success, with Dr. Don Greene (Winning On Stage) appeared first on Musical U.

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/about-the-12-bar-blues/
Sometimes simplicity can be a beautiful thing!

In this article we explore the 12-bar blues, a simple chord progression that is the foundation for most popular music today.

You’ll learn how to play the 12-bar blues in any key.

Click through and unlock a powerful songwriting tool for any genre!

https://www.musical-u.com/learn/consonance-dissonance-music/
Have you ever heard a song that just felt sort of “off”?

If so, you’ve already experienced the drastic difference between consonance and dissonance.

Learn more about the power of consonance and dissonance in this free article.

The mission of Me2/Orchestra is to erase the stigma surrounding mental illness, including addiction, through supportive classical music ensembles and inspiring performances.

As a society we are only just beginning to figure out how to talk sensibly and openly about mental illness. In this interview we wanted to be respectful and tactful while also addressing head-on some of the stigma that Me2/Orchestra is trying to mitigate, such as the assumptions people have about how an orchestra of people with mental illness can actually function.

We talk about:

• Caroline’s own story of music and mental health and how it led to her meeting the co-founder of Me2/, Ronald Braunstein.
• How after studying with the likes of Karajan and Bernstein, Ronald was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and encountered the stigma and discrimination which ultimately inspired the Me2/ project.
• And the specific ways Me2/ benefits its players and enlightens audiences – not in any kind of preachy way but simply by virtue of its existence and musical excellence.

One thing to clarify before we dive in – you might associate the phrase “Me Too” with the recent #MeToo movement about sexual assault but Me2/Orchestra was founded in 2011 and there’s no connection between the two. The name came from Ronald’s experience sharing his mental health diagnosis with other musicians and being surprised to hear them say “me too”.

Mental health is something we should talk more openly and honestly about. We are glad to have the opportunity to showcase this wonderful project. Whether this topic is of interest to you or not, there is a ton of insight packed into this conversation and we can all learn a lot from how Me2/ approaches running an orchestra.

Watch the episode:

Links and Resources

• • Me2/Orchestra Online
  • Orchestrating Change – Documentary Film about Me2/Orchestra
  • NY Times Article – Fighting the Stigma of Mental Illness Through Music
  • Al Jazeera news report on Me2/Orchestra

Transcript

Caroline: Hi, this is Caroline Whiddon from Me2/Orchestra and this is musicality now.

Christopher: Welcome to the show Caroline, thank you for joining us today.

Caroline: Oh, it’s my pleasure.

Christopher: So I have been really admiring your project, Me2/Orchestra from afar and I’m excited to have the chance to actually talk to you live about it. But before we dig into that, I’d love to understand a bit about your own musical backstory and where you came from as a musician.

Caroline: Sure. I grew up in a very musical family. My parents were professional musicians. They both are actually graduates of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. And some of my earliest memories come from hearing them recitalize as a really young girl. That was when I realized that music was going to be a part of my life forever. I would watch them perform and just felt so moved by it. And even though it would be several years before I would end up taking up my own instrument, which is French horn, I think it was those early years of just being exposed to music that really lit a fire in me.

Christopher: Terrific. And what was that process of learning French horn like for you, was it something you took to like conductor water? Was it a struggle? Was it the kind of classic childhood story of fighting with the parents over practice? What did it look like?

Caroline: I think it was sadly me deciding to play the French horn was kind of my rebellious stage as a youngster because my father was a pianist. My mother was a violinist. And so me deciding to be brass player was, no, that was my rebellious stage. Didn’t get much to work for me. It’s tough. I mean, I remember early on in middle school, sitting in my band director’s office after school and him working so hard with me struggling to play C in the staff and it was just so, so hard to do. But it was also so much fun. I had played piano for many years before that and it’s such a wonderful, but a very solitary practice to play piano. And so for me to be introduced to the joy of band playing and be on the horn and the band was really, it was very cool.

Christopher: Fantastic. And you went on to study music primarily after high school, is that right?

Caroline: I did. I ended up also going to the Eastman School of Music and receiving my bachelor’s degree in performance there. And I had such a tremendous experience at that school. I mean the opportunity to play with other great, great musicians, to tour internationally, to work with incredible staff, incredible faculty and staff there was really life changing. And then I had planned to go on actually and get my grad degree in performance but that was about the time that I was experiencing a lot of changes personally and would go on to be diagnosed with depression and anxiety. And I was actually having pretty serious panic attacks at that point. So it didn’t position me well to be a performing musician. I had to kind of rethink that plan. And at that point, my focus moved over to orchestral administration.

Caroline: I got a job working part time at my local symphony down in Columbus, Georgia and I was doing music library work and a little bit of marketing and communications and education work. And I absolutely fell in love with it. And so for the next 20 some odd years, that’s where my focus would be and where it continues to be really.

Christopher: I see. And I am curious to dig in a little more just because I think it’s pertinent to our overall conversation, but if we could go back to that stage where you made that change from, I’m a professional French horn player to moving into the more administrative side. You’ve made a comment to me in advance with the interview about French horn being a particularly challenging instrument or having a reputation. Could you talk a little bit about that? What was it about the life that maybe factored into you struggling on the mental health side?

Caroline: Oh gosh. I mean I think I was probably predisposed to some degree of anxiety and depression regardless of what instrument I played. My mother also during her lifetime suffered with symptoms of depression and anxiety. So I think to some degree that’s where I was headed regardless. But it is kind of funny to me that I chose to play what is such a difficult instrument. And particularly an instrument where you need to be able to breathe and anyone who’s struggled with any level of even just performance anxiety knows that you tend to sort of close yourself off and not take deep breaths. So here I was playing this beautiful brass instrument that’s such a beast to try to play and hit all the right notes and there’s so much pressure on you, it’s so exposed. And yet I was kind of closing in on myself because of the anxiety and the panic disorders.

Caroline: So the two really didn’t mix that well at the time and it just got to a point where I didn’t enjoy playing. So for me, when I made that decision to make a break from performing and teaching to go purely administrative within the orchestral world it actually, I remember I sold my horn to one of my students at that time and I had about a day full of tears. And then I never looked back for 18 years after that. I just loved being one of the people behind the scenes making the music possible.

Christopher: That’s tremendous that you were able to make that shift in such a positive way because I was about to ask a follow up question which was, how did you cope with making that choice? Because part of why I was drawn to your project is the fact that you were working to remove a lot of the stigma and misunderstandings around mental health and mental illness. And I know that a lot of what we’ve talked about on the show before in terms of the emotions and psychology of performing and learning music to a high level, becoming a professional musician, a lot of those issues can be so wrapped up with people’s identity and their sense of self and their sense of self-worth. I would have imagined making a major shift like that would’ve been really hard as a life transition, but it sounds like you moved on to something even better in a sense that you managed to put an entirely positive framing on it.

Caroline: I do feel like I found my place, the right place for me in the performing world. And I still very much love, the stuff that so many people are frightened of. The marketing, the fundraising, the production aspects, I really thrive on that part of it. And then it was just very interesting to me the way playing the horn kind of introduced itself back into my life after a very extended break because of my work with Me2. And with this very unique setting of making music with this social mission goal to erase the stigma around mental illness. I didn’t see that coming for myself. I never got back into this, into playing because I thought, well, I’m going to create an orchestra where even I will feel comfortable playing. It just happened.

Christopher: So tell us that story a little bit. Why did Me2 come into the picture?

Caroline: Me2/Orchestra came about because I met Ronald Braunstein, a brilliant conductor, a wonderful man who is living with bipolar disorder. And in the interest of full disclosure, he is now my husband. So yes, I am very biased. He is absolutely brilliant whether I am his wife or not. He’s a great musician. And Ronald had reached a point in his career where he was no longer employed and in fact was worried because of the discrimination that he had experienced. Discrimination and just really misunderstanding that he had experienced in the professional world. He was worried he’d never get back on the podium again. And it was clear to me that was the most important thing to him. So he came to me with the idea that in order for him to keep practicing music, he wanted to launch an orchestra of people like him.

Caroline: And in fact, his first statement was, “Caroline I have a great idea. We should start an orchestra for people with bipolar disorder.” And I said, “Well, you know we’re in Vermont and there’s probably more cows than there are people living with this specific bipolar diagnosis. So let’s talk about this idea. Let’s kind of massage it a little bit and see where it goes.” And what it came down to was that he wanted to be at a stigma free environment. He wanted to be in a supportive rehearsal area. And that meant that he wanted to bring in people who are also living with various challenges, especially mental health issues. And the more we talked about it, it was very important to both of us knowing Ronald’s history of workplace discrimination.

Caroline: We wanted to bring people with and without a diagnosis together to really show the world that it is entirely possible to work professionally right next, literally side by side with people who have bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, addiction, schizophrenia. And so that was the dream. Could we create a group of people who would work side by side and then utilize our performances to erase the stigma, to actually share our stories and change people’s minds about maybe what they thought it meant to live with a mental health challenge.

Christopher: I see. And I heard Ronald say something really interesting in an interview which was in the early years, maybe around the time he was first diagnosed. It maybe wasn’t obvious to people that he had a disorder of any kind because we have this image, this kind of romantic image of the Maestro conductor who has these intense mood swings and ups and downs. And I think part of what you were saying there about the workplace discrimination, part of the challenge I think is that we don’t always know where to draw the line and when is something a disorder and when is it part of normal kind of workplace stresses or mood swings. And I think probably a lot of people in our audience would be confused on that point. And I’d be really interested to know what your perspective is on that. Like how anxious should we be about whether someone has the label or doesn’t have the label?

Caroline: Yeah. I think you have to just pay really close attention to what a behavior is. Of course I didn’t know Ronald back in the earlier days of his career when he was very misunderstood. He was studying with Carianne, he was studying with Bernstein, with Seiji Ozawa and these, with people who are larger than life. And I think when you’re kind of in that place, in that zone, especially as a conductor, you can be somewhat flamboyant or even egotistical and larger than life, and people just say, “Oh, he’s just being a stereotypical Maestro type.” But for Ronald, there were times when he would just do things in rehearsal that were very odd. Rehearsing the same measure over and over and over again for like an interminable amount of time. And, the orchestra manager would come to him and say, “You’re not well. We can’t bring you back.”

Caroline: So there were people who were able to kind of pick apart what was maybe the stereotypical kind of Maestro behavior and what was really an indication of an illness. But back then people were not comfortable talking about it. So he has stories of people saying, “You’re not well, I think you’re sick.” And he was very confused by that because he would say, “Well, I feel fine. I don’t have a cold. What do you mean I need to go see a doctor?” And they wouldn’t take it from, you need to go see a doctor to I think you need to see a psychiatrist. And there were certain places you didn’t go in that time in terms of the language and in terms of just what you suggested to people. So he definitely had a big personality I think when he was manic and sometimes that was self-destructive in a professional sense in there.

Caroline: Ronald somehow has been very lucky in his career not to have ever really endangered himself in any way. I mean, you do hear some stories of people with unchecked mania that can take on some very risky behavior and Ronald’s actually never been hospitalized and he’s been able to sort of keep things within a certain reign of safety. It’s been better, the last probably 10 years I’d say. I feel like society is turning a little bit and people are becoming more comfortable with addressing what they think might be beyond just a little bit odd behavior, but to something that is actually an illness. And yet I was with Ronald when he was dismissed from a position 10 years ago and he ended up pursuing a lawsuit against our former employer because it was really clear that there was discriminatory practice happening. It’s hard to be too positive about the changes in society because discriminization and stigma it’s still real.

Christopher: Absolutely. And I really, I applaud the work you’re doing on that front to remove some of the stigma because there’s so much misconception and misunderstanding. A moment ago you threw out a bunch of diagnoses that people who joined Me2/Orchestra might have. And I think any one of those, our listeners and audience would have kind of mental image of what that means and like the extreme case of the behavior or how manageable or unmanageable it might be to work with someone who has that label. And I think it’s really valuable. Thank you for sharing a bit of that kind of backstory and behind the scenes of what it looked like for Ronald to have bipolar disorder and to have it in an industry where to some extent that behavior is tolerated or expected.

Christopher: But at some point, obviously it was helpful because I’m going to step in and question whether it was a healthy way for him to continue. I feel like we jumped a bit of this story from when you first met Ronald to this project coming about, how did your relationship with him develop and did you learn from him along the way? You’ve talked about how wonderful he is as a conductor and a musician and I’d be curious to know how things developed.

Caroline: I remember the very first time I sat and listened to him in rehearsal with a group. It was with a youth orchestra and there were about a hundred kids, mostly very advanced high school musicians on the stage. And I was immediately struck, they rehearsed a few measures and then he stopped and he got off the podium which first of all was … I mean that was just kind of different. You don’t see the conductor leave the podium that often. But he really got down into the front group of strings and got them listening to each other and got them playing. He said, “This is chamber music. I don’t care if you’re looking at me, look at each other. Look across the orchestra at each other. You’ve got to connect with them. You got to connect with her.” And I’ve never seen anyone on the podium do that.

Caroline: And then he just left and he said, “You’re on your own. You’ve got to communicate because no matter what I’m doing, if you’re not communicating with each other, we’re not going to make great music.” And the change in the sound of that orchestra over the course of 10 minutes was huge. And so right from the beginning, I feel like I’ve been watching him and getting this huge lesson on tackling orchestral music as if it is chamber music. And there’s just something about the way you listen across an orchestra. I think it’s very easy for so many of us if we’re one of 80 or 100 players to feel like we’re just one of a huger number of players and to sort of forget that we’re part of this huge moving living music-making organism and that it really does have to be kind of like a string quartet or a wind octet, and to really be paying attention and listening to the people around us as they breathe. And Ronald just has a beautiful way of bringing that out in people.

Christopher: Fascinating. And was that a contributor to you picking up the horn again, or did that come naturally out of starting Me2/Orchestra or?

Caroline: It didn’t occur to me that I would start playing the horn again until we were, I believe probably in the second season of Me2 in Burlington, Vermont, and I was listening to rehearsal one night and there were a couple of horn players in the room. And suddenly I just found myself thinking, I think I could help them a little bit. Which was pretty gutsy since I hadn’t even picked up a horn. I hadn’t owned a horn in 18 years at that point, but it was the first time that I had even contemplated wanting to play again. And I give Ronald that credit. I mean, he really, he created this atmosphere, this orchestra of complete support. So if you miss a note, if you kept something here or just forget to come in, it’s okay. And I thought, okay, now that’s an atmosphere I could make music in again.

Caroline: And besides that, he just really ignited my love of music again. It had kind of been muted in some way for many years. And yet as soon as I started listening to him rehearse, I found myself wanting to go out and buy scores for everything that he was rehearsing so I could just sit in the room and hear what he was doing and learn from it. And I hadn’t experienced that kind of hunger for music education in so many years, but he lit this dormant thing inside me. And so yeah, we got on eBay one night after this rehearsal where I kind of had this epiphany that I might want to play again and found a con 60 really beaten up listed for a couple of a hundred bucks. I mean, it looked like it had been rolled over by a truck and then they backed over and rolled over it again. And I said, “That’s my horn.” So I got it. I got a little duct tape on a little place where it probably should have a little bit of work done on it. But it’s so much fun to be playing again. And I just, I didn’t see it coming. But Me2 gave me that gift again.

Christopher: Awesome. And you commented on something there that’s distinctive about Me2/Orchestra which is the atmosphere and the attitude of the musicians and Ronald himself. I wonder if you could tell us a bit about the starting of the orchestra. I mean, obviously now it’s a very established project with multiple orchestras and it’s growing and growing. But if we go back to the early days, you and Ronald had this idea together or he had the idea and you jumped on board immediately, what did it look like to start that orchestra?

Caroline: We had very meager beginnings. I think there were probably between eight and 10 musicians at our first rehearsal and it didn’t grow a lot after that for several months. And it really, what we found is that it takes two or three years to have one of these orchestral programs really start to gain momentum. So it’s small in the beginning and for Ronald that was a challenge just in terms of finding music that would make sense for kind of a hodgepodge of different instruments and people of different ability levels. We were-

Christopher: Sorry, forgive the interruption. I wonder, is it a stupid question to ask, but how do you advertise for an orchestra where the defining trait is it’s accessible for people with mental illness? Do you just go out and brazenly say, look, this is what we’re doing. Come along.

Caroline: You just say it. Yeah. I mean we literally in the beginning wrote press releases and did press interviews that said, we’re starting an orchestra for people with and without mental illness and nobody has to tell us what they may or may not be living with. They’re welcome to. But we want everyone to know it’s a safe and stigma free zone. There will be no auditions, there are no fees. We want to remove all the barriers to participation. And then we kind of held our breath and waited to see what that would turn into, who would be interested. And it was so interesting to me from the very beginning that people would write me emails and say, hi, my name is such and such and I’m interested in joining the orchestra. Then they would tell me their diagnosis and in some cases would write like a complete medical history.

Caroline: And I thought, wow, I think there are so many people living with mental illness who are so hungry to be able to be open and talk about it. So when you say you’re in a safe place often you get an awful lot of information, which is really helpful. It lets us know, I mean, honestly it plays into where they’re seated and what kind of stand partner they might have because we want everybody to have the most supportive and warm and comforting experience they can have. So having as much information upfront is great. But then we’ve also had people join who, last year we had a violinist who came to several rehearsals, and I never knew her last name. Never knew a thing about her and it was kind of a fun mystery for me, but she would just come and sit in the back of the second violin section.

Caroline: She seemed to enjoy the rehearsals and then she would always get up and leave about five minutes before the rehearsal ended. So it was very clear she wasn’t looking to be quizzed or really to even make connections. She just needed to be, she needed a place to go once a week and be in a group setting but she wasn’t ready to connect with us on a personal level. And one of the things we’ve learned is to just kind of accept people where they are and so that was fine. We’ve had another violinist who played with us, played rehearsals for probably two years and never played one of the performances because they felt like that they weren’t ready for that. That was too nerve racking. And we said, “Great, you’re rehearsals only, that’s fine.” So it’s a very different expectation that we have of our musicians.

Christopher: Sorry, I interrupted you there. Please do continue. So you got started in your first season and musicians started to find you. You said it seemed to take a couple of years before the word really spread and people knew to come along.

Caroline: Yeah. And I think it’s been very interesting. Probably our most successful recruitment tool is word of mouth. It’s people coming in, they love working with Ronald. They form such great partnerships and friendships within the orchestra. And I think largely for the people who join us who don’t have a diagnosis, it’s so very interesting for them to be able to play in some of these nontraditional venues. Because while we do play in city halls and recital halls we also place a lot of emphasis on reaching places where people might be self-stigmatizing. In other words, mental health hospitals, recovery centers, correctional systems, prisons, so we try to split our time kind of 50/50 in terms of the audience. Whether we’re reaching a kind of a broad general audience with these stigma erasing messages, or reaching kind of our people, people who are living with a diagnosis and need to have a positive example in front of them.

Christopher: And I’m going to be totally honest, I’m sitting here trying to be very careful and respectful and tactful about what I say in this interview because as I said to you before we started, like this is a topic that’s really important to me personally and I want to make sure we present it in the most effective and impactful way. But for a moment I want to play the part of the baffled audience member and I’m sure there’s at least one who hearing that this project is a bit unsure how that could possibly work. If you have a room full of people all with their own mental health challenges, how can that possibly result in a concert ready performance?

Caroline: Right. And I think a lot of people come to their first performance and they expect much less from us. And for now that’s okay. I mean, that’s addressing the stigma. People expect less when they hear there’s an orchestra where at least half of the people are living with a mental illness. And so I think the first real aha moment for people is when they come in and they’re seated and I’ll do an introduction of the orchestra and explain that half of us are living with trauma and anxiety and addiction et cetera, et cetera. And you almost, you kind of see the light bulbs going off in people’s heads, like they’re scanning the orchestra. And we’ve even had somebody say to us, “Really, because I can’t tell who they are.” And I said, “Exactly. That’s the whole point.” And I don’t feel angry about that. I feel like that’s what we’re here to do.

Caroline: Because frankly, if they were watching Law and Order or any number of television programs last night or reading the newspaper, all you hear are the negative stories. You don’t hear about the gentleman with the bipolar disorder who is a successful attorney and goes home at night and cooks dinner for his kids and has won awards and has a wonderful family life. We don’t hear the good stories so it’s up to us to put those out there. So yeah it can be very shocking for people to be in our audience and to hear our stories and even just as I say, have that visual of this group of people where they can’t tell. They think they know what schizophrenia looks like and it turns out they don’t because it doesn’t have a look.

Christopher: Wonderful. And at the same time I wonder are there any practical considerations? I love the way you talked about the permissiveness of if you don’t want to do the performances that’s fine. Obviously that has to be balanced somehow with Ronald trying to organize a program, as you said, for a hodgepodge of players of different ability levels and who might have different desires or behaviors in terms of rehearsals or performance. How does that work on a practical level?

Caroline: Yeah, absolutely. There are sometimes accommodations that we make to help people be comfortable in this setting. And it’s really no different than the kind of accommodations that are required by law if you have someone with a mental health condition in your workplace. If someone says that they’re not comfortable with something, then we just find a workaround. So that may mean that they don’t perform. Maybe in every setting there may be someone who has some kind of trauma and does not want to go into a correctional facility with us. That’s fine. It’s a little bit trickier if that’s your principal flute player as opposed to one of a sea of violas or something like that. But we’ve yet to find a challenge that we can’t work around.

Caroline: Sometimes we will be in a rehearsal or in a concert setting and someone is just having a bad day. And that anxiety or even some type of hallucination can come to the forefront. And probably the most important thing that this orchestra and the people in it have taught me and that we’ve taught each other that we’ve all learned together is that when someone is not having a good day or if they are currently in a reality that is not the one that the majority of us are experiencing to put it in one way, the best thing you can do is just join people where they are. You just got to meet them where they are and meet them with compassion and friendship. I had someone early on ask me what kind of security we had at rehearsals. And I said, “Excuse me, what do you mean?” “Well, you’ve got all these people with mental illness, you must have security.” And I said, “No, we don’t have security. We are in no greater danger at our rehearsals than you are when you go into your place of business every day.”

Caroline: Again, it just feeds into the misconceptions that people have about what it means to work with people who have mental illness. And sadly, most of the people in our lives that we know are surrounded by people who are living with some type of diagnosis. And the only difference there is that they’re not talking about it because they live in fear of the ramifications if they were to be public in their place of work or their place of worship or their school. So we provide a place where people can talk about it. And honestly, I think that’s a much safer and healthier environment for all of us.

Christopher: That was something that really jumped out at me reading descriptions of the meet to rehearsals and the environment, the atmosphere, the attitude is, it’s not black and white. This is how the normal world does it. And this is how this weird orchestra does it. In so many ways you’re exemplifying what should be the attitude anyway. Like this is how we should treat human beings regardless of a label or disorder or classification.

Caroline: Yeah, I mean people say, “Well, if you don’t have auditions, how does that work?” If you’re not kind of feeding the competitive nature that is so natural. Even in community music organizations, I think a lot of amateurs go into community orchestras or choruses and you still experience a bit of that diva quality of people kind of looking around like, why is he sitting there and why did she get that solo? And we work really hard to just cut that off right at the beginning. We rotate people around a lot. And every once in a while we’ll have someone walk through the door and I’m not sure what they were expecting when they arrived, but if they were expecting a more competitive environment and some people really want that, they thrive on that in some kind of probably unhealthy way.

Caroline: Usually within a few weeks, they find their way back out the door because we just, we can’t accommodate that. We can’t have somebody always playing the cellos or always leading the section. It’s not in the DNA of the organization where we’re just, we’re there to support each other. We’re there to learn from each other. And that’s another interesting thing to me is that there’s so much learning and this addressing of stigma that happens not only when we get in front of an orchestra and we’re performing and we’re sharing our stories, but also every week when we’re, there’s kind of the interior work that we’re doing with this group of 50 or 60 musicians getting to know each other. And if you walk into one of our rehearsals, any week, it’s going to look like a community orchestra rehearsal. That’s all it appears to be.

Caroline: But then I think if you listen closely during the break, you hear some of the discussions about medication and doctor recommendations and heart-to-heart, how was your day kind of thing. Where the automatic reply isn’t just, “Oh, I’m fine.” That’s where it gets a little more serious and more supportive and helpful. So it’s just been a wonderful kind of experiment to launch this thing and to figure it out as we’re going along. Unfortunately, when you set good intentions out front, I think you automatically attract people who also have good intentions and are interested in going along on this ride and figuring things out. And it’s for both Ronald and I. I would say it’s our life’s work now. I mean, we’ve found what we were supposed to be doing.

Christopher: Fantastic. And I want to pick up in a moment on what you just said about setting the intention, but first you highlighted there how there’s a function of the orchestra beyond the music that it’s giving people that social environment and that opportunity to connect with other people. And obviously you’re also having this impact on audiences and the general public in terms of removing stigma and putting a new message out there about mental illness. But I wonder, can you talk at all about the particular benefits of music for doing those two things? You’re not organizing a stigma free soccer team, you’re doing an orchestra and obviously Ronald and you have that in your background. But do you see any ways in which music is unique for having that kind of effect on the audience and on the members of your orchestra?

Caroline: Well, I have to say that Ronald and I upfront wanted to make it clear to people, we are not psychologists, we are not researchers. We are professionally trained musicians. And so that’s what we have to offer this. So I can’t get, kind of too lofty in talking about, scientifically the benefits of music. Although I know there are a lot of wonderful people who are studying that right now. But what we really see on a weekly basis is that it’s so wonderful for people to have a place to go that gets them out of the house that has some communicating with other people. And quite frankly, when you’re playing Beethoven, you can’t think about anything else. You can’t be worried about the stressors of the week or the latest medication change you’ve gone through or how things are going at work.

Caroline: So there’s this wonderful quality of music just being completely immersive, I think. That’s what people say to me is that it really is an escape to play in this orchestra. That it’s a time during the week when they don’t have to think about being mentally ill. I would point out one of the other things that’s different about us is that we could have launched an orchestra that was completely for people living with a diagnosis, but by bringing together people who don’t have a diagnosis and really designing this fully integrated community, we become something else. Because so many people living with an illness already have a support group and support groups play important role. They can be very helpful for people.

Caroline: But what a lot of people don’t have is this way of kind of integrating back into society, especially if they’ve been sidelined, if they’ve been agoraphobic and unable to leave their home, if they’ve been hospitalized or even imprisoned for a certain amount of time. That reentry and that learning to trust people in their community again, can be so difficult. And this orchestra can serve as a way for people to make that reentry more comfortably. And I think, I’m going to say something sappy, but music is the universal language and there’s a lot that goes unsaid in rehearsals, I think around mental wellness. But when we can play Beethoven and Brahms and Dvorak together that’s just healing. And I’ll leave it to the scientists to tell you exactly why. But for Ronald and I, we just know that in our hearts.

Christopher: That makes a lot of sense. You mentioned a few minutes ago the importance of setting an intention and how when you have that intention of inclusivity and access, you attract people with the same kind of attitude and that goes a long way. I was particularly keen to ask you about the fact that Me2/Orchestra is not one orchestra in Vermont at this stage. You’ve got several orchestras and you’ve got resources and support for people who want to spin up their own Me2/Orchestra projects like this in music. And I’d love to understand what do you tell them? What did you tell the people who were going to take on orchestra number two? What do you tell people who say, “I want to set up Me2 chamber group in my local community?” In terms of the practicalities you mentioned rotating people around, so there are some that competitive diva vibe, but are there practical things that help set that tone in the community?

Caroline: Right. Well, I mean, isn’t it interesting? We started out with literally just a handful of people in Vermont and Ronald and I never knew from week to week, month to month, whether or not this thing was going to actually get any traction. And not far into it we got some good PR and started hearing from people around the country saying, “Oh my gosh, this sounds so perfect. Is there anything like this in Indianapolis? My mom would love to do this.” “Or in Miami, my uncle would be perfect for this.” And so we started thinking, well, could we empower other people to do this? And at the time we were just based in Burlington, Vermont, and we thought, okay, well Burlington is a quirky, quirky, hippy town. The weirder the better for any project we launch. So maybe we should try this in a different kind of atmosphere.

Caroline: So we decided that we could drive to Boston every week and then we would try it in Boston in a bigger population and just see what challenges or opportunities presented themselves there so that we’d be better prepared before we set out to try to duplicate the model. And the orchestra in Boston now has finished five seasons. It’s been hugely successful. And we actually have our first, what we’re calling an affiliate program that has been active in Portland, Oregon for gosh, a few years now. They started not long after we launched in Boston. And that’s kind of a, it’s a chamber music type group up to like eight or 10 players and they get together every week. And we have a small, kind of easy legal agreement that they’ve signed with us that lays out what they can and can’t do but also provides them with a certain amount of resources coming from us kind of coming from the mothership, which means every once in a while Ronald will Skype and coach them in a session.

Caroline: And, I was on the phone with them last week and I’m constantly making suggestions for performance spaces they might want to try or Ronald recommends repertoire and that sort of thing. So it’s giving them kind of the support that they need even from a distance to be able to mimic the kind of stigma reduction that we’re doing through music here on the East coast. And actually this fall we are launching a new orchestra in Manchester, New Hampshire, and hiring our first conductor on our staff to take over the Burlington, Vermont orchestra, which is a really huge thing. They have had Ronald at the helm with that orchestra for eight years. And one of the members said to me, “Wow, well we could look at this as a big loss, but I’m going to look at this as a graduation.”

Caroline: We’re graduating with the first Me2/Orchestra to now move on to help another conductor, kind of learn our culture and assume the stigma reducing roles. I just thought that was so beautiful and I think the group in Burlington is so well prepared. The musicians there are so well prepared to help nurture their next conductor and in the ways of Me2, which is such a beautiful thing. And I should also mention that we had such a long wait list of flutists in the Boston area who wanted to join the orchestra. And of course there’s only so many flutes you can incorporate into an orchestra. So we are now launching the Me2 Boston flute choir next month and have hired a wonderful director there. And we’re probably the only orchestra who’s ever posted a job listing with the words at the end of the job requirements saying, while lived experience with mental illnesses is not a requirement it will be viewed as an asset. And it’s meant that we receive some very interesting and revealing and wonderful job applicants for these positions. We’re growing and we continue to learn and we’re having a great time.

Christopher: Wonderful. And you have a new documentary coming out about Me2/Orchestra and the project and how it’s growing. Talk a little bit about that.

Caroline: We do. About five years ago, very early on in the work of Me2, I happened to run across a filmmaker online who had produced a beautiful documentary about a men’s prison chorus in Kansas. And of course with all the work that we’ve been doing in correctional facilities, I was very eager to see this little documentary that she’d done. And when I got in touch with her, she went to the Me2 website and said, “Can we talk? Has anyone told your story?” And I said, “Well, there’s not much to tell yet. We’re still very young.” But fast forward and still another co-producer, a friend of hers have spent three years flying in and out from LA over to Burlington, Vermont and Boston, Massachusetts and filming the growth of Me2 and that’s been in post production for some time now, but they are now finished with the film and there’s going to be some screenings in and around the Greater Boston area in October and November. And they are searching for hopefully a major distributor.

Caroline: We’ll see what comes with that. But we’re very glad to have the film project on and I hope a lot of people will be able to see it.

Christopher: Fantastic. And that documentary has its own website at orchestratingchangethefilm.com is that right?

Caroline: Correct.

Christopher: Tremendous. Well, we’ll have link to that directly and the Me2/Orchestra website in the show notes for this episode. Caroline it’s probably clear, but I am such an admirer of the work you’re doing and I hope it will reach more people, both musicians and audiences. So just wanted to say a big thank you for joining us on the show today.

Caroline: Well, it’s such a pleasure. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about the work. We really genuinely love what we’re doing and the opportunity to share it with people is really appreciated.

The post Side By Side In Music, with Caroline Whiddon (Me2/Orchestra) appeared first on Musical U.

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