Emotions!

Music is highly emotional. In fact, everything that we are deeply invested in is highly emotional, which makes this topic relevant for more scenarios than performing arts. But since I am a pianist, let us talk about music.

There are two types of musicians: those who perform in an emotional state and those who remain distanced and analytical. Both have their advantages and challenges. The vast majority of musicians are emotional when performing. I certainly am one of them, and not only when performing but also when listening to music. The violin solo in Strauss' "Beim Schlafengehen" literally takes my breath away, and when Liu stabs herself in Turandot I want to run on stage and take her knife.

One of the fundamental challenges that arise from this is exactly the emotions we feel. Allow me to illustrate what I mean with an example. My wife and I once attended a concert. A pianist sat on stage, and it was clearly visible how much the music he played meant to him. His emotional involvement was expressed in his body language. However, the way he performed his repertoire was completely devoid of any emotion! It was flat and neutral, nice but not beautiful, dark but not haunting, light but not cheerful.

So how is that possible? How can we, as a performer, feel an emotion, but at the same time not express that emotion at all in our performance? The answer is in the way our brain works with memories or imagination. Very much simplified, there is no difference for our brain between something we imagine or remember and something we experience. The activity of the different areas in our brain is pretty much identical when we experience a situation and when we later remember that situation. That, of course, includes the emotional context. And it is even more so with something that we study as intensely as the content of a performance.

When we perform, we do both things simultaneously: we remember what we practiced and studied, and we perform what we remember at the same moment. As a consequence, our brain will instantiate the memory of the emotional context of what we are performing, independently of the emotionality of our performance! We will truly feel the emotions, but we might not at all express them in our performance.

We have all experienced that phenomenon. For instance, I am sure all of us have met that person that tried to tell a joke and broke down with laughter themselves, while leaving the rest of us wondering what the punch line was supposed to be. Some of us might have been in this situation ourselves when speaking at an event or presenting to a customer: we know exactly why this functionality is so cool, and we do feel the excitement, but somehow our audience doesn't get it.

The task we have when performing is to do what is necessary to make the audience experience the emotion - not to experience it ourselves! The good news is: when we get this right, we will be able to share our audience's experience.

One part to achieving this is observation. We need to be attentive to our own performance. We need to perform, and at the same time observe what we are performing as if we sat in our own audience.

The second part is concious planning of our performance. When preparing for that customer presentation, we will know the content of what we want to present, the slides, the demo screens etc. That is not our performance, just the content. Our performance includes things like our body language, tone of voice, the timing of our actions. Luckily, this is achieved easier than it may sound like. Once we know exactly what the purpose of a specific action is, we will perform this action in a way that is consistent with that purpose.

We need to know the 'Why' behind everything we do. Yes, true, there is craftsmanship involved, too, and good presentation skills classes will help us greatly to find ways to even better express the 'Why' to our audience. But the most important step is to just know the 'Why'.

Don't settle for knowing what you want to do. Be sure you know why you want to do it. The difference this makes is fundamental!