Blanking Onstage — What Happens in the Brain?

By Caileen W.

The performance is going well. You’ve hit your last three runs, your vibrato is smoother than you expected, and you’re more than confident approaching the next section. But when you reach it, your fingers freeze. Your bow skids on the strings. Your accompanist stops, confused. 

But why? You’ve nailed that section every time in the practice room, and there’s nothing particularly difficult about it compared to the rest of the piece. Why did you blank? 

In 2019, three neuroscientists — Ganesh, Minamoto, and Haruno — published findings on how anxiety affects motor performance for sequential tasks, like playing a piece of music. [1] In the study, the scientists had participants learn sequences of finger presses and then perform them under an anxiety-inducing condition. They then compared people who learned the entire sequence and people who learned separate sections and then later combined them.

The scientists found that when performing under stressful conditions, participants who learned separate sections were more likely to make mistakes during transitions in between sections.

This model is especially relevant to performing a piece of music, which is essentially just a long sequence of motor tasks, such as scales, arpeggios, and double-stops. But when we practice each of these techniques, we tend to hone in on separate sections. And while this is certainly helpful for focused and efficient practice, it can also lead to the major consequence shown in the study: decreased accuracy at the transitions between sections. 

In short, spending too much time practicing separate bits of a piece may be the culprit for you blanking in between sections while performing. 

So what can you do? Certainly don’t stop breaking up your piece into small sections — it’s always a great idea to hone in on specific sections to practice efficiently. However, as you practice each section, you should be spending a good amount of time practicing the transitions in between — for example, the timing between two phrases, your plan for cueing in your next entrance, or a shift connecting two tricky passages. 

For most musicians, performing will always be scary. But by understanding how our brain processes anxiety, we can hone our practice techniques, build confidence in our playing, and avoid the terrible trap of blanking onstage. 

CITATIONS

1. Ganesh, G., Minamoto, T., & Haruno, M. (2019). Activity in the dorsal ACC causes deterioration of sequential motor performance due to anxiety. Nature Communications, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-12205-6