Think ahead to your next important performance.  Maybe it is a jury, a recital, or an audition.  What are your expectations?  Do you hope to win?  Impress people?  Play better than you ever have before?  Play like you do every day?  What do you expect out of that upcoming performance?  Do you imagine it being described using a dazzling display of classical-music-reviewer buzzwords: golden, splendid, refined, glowing, mellifluous, daring, convincing, staggering?  Do you have your expectations in mind now?  Are you sure?  Okay.  Lose them.  Squash them, beat them, bury them, pop them, blow them up, destroy them any way you can.  They are your enemies.  Expectations can be the barrier between you and the performance you truly desire.  Do you have expectations?  Unexpect them.

At first glance, expectations may seem to be helpers on your pathway to success.  They may appear to be the things that keep you moving forward, that make sure you are aiming as high as you possibly can.  To allow yourself to continue to perceive them in that manner, however, would be folly.  In reality, it is having a sound musical vision and the ability to set challenging but reasonable goals that will give you the ability to maximize your potential.  Expectations are frauds.  They trick us into thinking that they are our friends; they make us think that they will help to influence the outcome of our next performance in a positive manner.  In reality, though, nothing could be farther from the truth. 

Expectations are traps.  They shift our focus from the process to the result and, in doing so, they remove us from “the moment”.  Yes, that moment, the same moment that we are always hearing about.  The one that people are always getting caught up in or lost in.   If you have experienced this yourself, then you know how powerful and beneficial it is; if not, hopefully this article will provide you that opportunity.  You want to become totally and utterly lost in “the moment”.  That is the place where nothing matters other than what you are doing right now: the shape of this phrase, the sound of this note, the length of these staccatos.  There is no future and there is no past.  Successful performances stem from the immersion of the performer into the music of the moment, and this phenomenon is the exact opposite of an expectation.

Expectations are focused solely on results.  They go hand-in-hand with evaluation and assessment.  They set the standard on which you will judge your performance.  If you believe you are capable of playing on one level, and then play at or above it, you will judge your performance a success.  On the other hand, if you play below your perceived level of ability, you will scornfully rate your performance using entirely different classical-music-reviewer buzzwords than those mentioned above.  This talk about reviewers reminds me of a review of a performance by the San Francisco Symphony during my time in that orchestra.  The reviewer stated that the conductor and soloist “conspired to stomp on the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2.”   Conspire and stomp -- not exactly words that you yearn to have in your next review.  It is funny, sure, but only when you are not the performer that is being raked over the coals.  In fact, it is reviews like this – made by our own mental judge as well as by others – that begin the long process of creating expectations that later become obstacles to achieving our best performances.

When you are so intent on achieving a result with a particular performance, you take your mind off of actually creating the performance and focus it on assessing it.  Obviously, given the insufficient attention devoted to creating the product, your performance will suffer.  Being so focused on outcomes, you notice this immediately, and you begin to tighten and force: attempting to hold your performance up by sheer power.  But sadly, that typically only makes matters worse.  The more you focus on judging your product, the less you focus on making the product, and the performance begins a long, painful, downward spiral from which it never recovers.

Sounds bleak doesn’t it?  In truth, it is often not quite so dramatic.  But what can you do to prevent any version of this kind of painfully regressing performance?  The answer is simple yet difficult.  To avoid this type of downward spiral you must refrain from judgment, and thus, from setting expectations.  If you focus your mind fully on the present moment, and the one that is immediately to follow, then you begin to undermine the demons of expectation and judgment.  That is the simple part.  The difficult part comes when you attempt to actually do this.  You will likely notice that your mind is rather an enthusiast when it comes to judging yourself.  It will have no desire whatsoever to relinquish its powerful bench, and it will scrap like an alley cat in order to maintain control.  There are, however, some things you can do to loosen its grip.  Listen to what you are playing right now.  Focus on how you want to shape this phrase.  Did you crack a note?  Let it disappear into the thick fog that follows the current focus of your mind, the fog that contains all of the music you have played so far, and which is no longer visible to your in-the-moment mind.  Keep searching for the most effective way to express what this music is trying to say.  Visualize what you want every to note to sound like.  Hold your conscious mind to this task with an iron glove.  If it begins to twist away, take a deep breath and double your effort.  Increase the vividness of your musical image.  If you can successfully do this for the duration of your performance, then I guarantee it will have been the best your abilities would allow.

At this point, you understand that expectations are detrimental and that they should be replaced by well-considered goals.  You may still be confused, however, as to the difference between setting goals and having expectations.  This confusion is understandable, because, in reality, they are both concerned with outcomes, and if your focus hangs too heavily in the realm of outcomes, and not heavily enough on the here and now, your performance will clearly suffer.  So how do you balance this? 

First, it is important to understand the difference between a goal and an expectation.  The Oxford American Dictionary defines an expectation as: a belief that someone will or should achieve something.  The same dictionary defines a goal as: the object of a person’s ambition or effort; an aim or desired result.  For the purpose of achieving peak performance, you should set goals that include an “aim or desired result,” and avoid anything that has any hint of a “should” in it.  Also, when setting your goals, differentiate between goals that deal with the performance as a whole and those that deal with specific elements of the performance.  Goals that deal with an entire performance can often be expectations in disguise.  For instance, if your goal for an audition is to win the job, and you then form a plan that will help you achieve that goal, it is easy to develop a belief that you should or will achieve that goal.  This, of course, is simply an expectation masquerading as a goal, and it can do far more damage than good.  Choosing goals that focus on specific elements of a performance, however, can be quite beneficial.  For example, if you decide that you need to double your current endurance level for a particular performance, you should set that as a goal and develop a plan that will help you realize it.  Executing this plan will go a long way toward eliminating endurance problems for your performance, although you still must be careful not to allow it to develop into an expectation.  In order to do this you simply need some criterion other than the quality of your performance by which to chart your progress; like being able to play through a certain etude 10 times, rather than 5, for example.

Second, you must separate the act of performing from the act of analyzing your performance.  The analysis should be saved for a time when you are not playing your instrument.  It should be a time of reflection that is dedicated only to comparing the vision of your musical intent to the vision of what you actually played.  Once you see the differences in these images and understand what you want to try to change, turn off the analysis portion of your mind, turn on the performing portion, and play what you visualize. 

If you have comments on this article, send them to : comments@livmusic.com

To discuss this article on LivMusic Interactive click here.