These tips are simple and yet very powerful, with one caveat: they need to be practised in advance to be of any use when it really matters.

I am currently celebrating the 10th anniversary of this blog, also my newsletter.

As teachers of instrumentalists or singers, it can be very easy to overdo it and end up being in a situation where you burn out.

I took part in a fascinating discussion recently on the psychological pressure of performing in front of others.

I could see what had happened. He had been clenching the table tennis racket hard and transferring that tension to the piano.

You are a student in your last year at conservatoire. Your career is about to take off. Nothing could be better. And then the pain starts.

A musical score is a strange thing. It is a brilliantly worked out method of keeping music for posterity but it certainly does add a few cha

We live in a society that prizes exams, so let's consider how to manage the various pitfalls exams throw up, for students & teachers.

Breathing for musicians to help performance nerves and musical expression

Fresh approaches to music making. I recently decided to get back to choral singing. My musical life doesn't involve group music making

Loving what we do: I haven’t always loved playing the piano; in fact, there has been time, when the instrument that inspired me caused

Performing disasters. What a musician considers to be a performing disaster is very personal

Drawing out colours in jazz piano playing I spent a day last week working with jazz piano students at the Royal Academy of Music in...

Practice time as sacred. How can we best create the right environment for practice and performance?

Listening in music is a strange one. It is as elusive a concept in normal everyday communication as it is in music. When do we really...

Music is simply an integral part of a ceremony and it is rarely performed on its own. The gamelan concerts are only for the tourists.

I agree wholeheartedly with playing music to the highest of standards. What is important to me is 'how' those standards are reached.

What if we let ourselves play around with the music to find the freedom we need to be musically expressive?

When I mentioned the word performance anxiety to a Balinese man, he simply laughed. They don't have it!

It is essential to give performers the experience of managing their nerves in front of an audience which feels emotionally safe to them.