How the performer feels

‘I can attest to the fact that in all the days of my long life, I have never heard a single singer pronounce this happy truth: Today I feel well.’ This comment of an international authority on singing may seem amusing, but it also entails a number of important indications about what performers think about performance. There is, for instance, an undoubted connection between performance and the performer's physical and mental well-being. Making music has many well-documented therapeutic effects, but it is always a physically taxing activity, if also often highly invigorating. Western music makes considerable mental demands, for example of the memory and the ability to concentrate. It also requires control of the emotions – or so it seems, in that one would be surprised to see a tear trickling down a violinist's cheek at a particularly moving moment in a performance, despite the importance of facial expression in the overall effect of an observed performance. As one writer put it when discussing the sense in which a performance is a simulation, ‘performers at work may have their minds on any manner of things. In the spirit of professional entertainment, someone performing sensitively might simultaneously be bored to distraction and hankering after a restful career in real estate.’ Second, in the particular source from which the opening quotation is taken, the context is a discussion of what a singer should feel, and this represents a whole class of writings and other evidence by performers across the ages that performance has a ‘goal’ of some kind and is not a casual activity – not one that is, as it were, as good on a bad day as it is on a good day.