Confidence for Musicians

Upcoming Events:

• May 8-11, Clarimondo Clarinet festival in Staufen, Germany.

• May 17, Siemens Prize Ceremony Concert with Riot Ensemble in Munich

• June 20, Berio chamber works at the Royal Academy with Riot Ensemble

• June 27, Music We’d Like to Hear, London

Announcement: The Zöllner-Roche Duo are pleased to announce the four winners of their Composer’s Lab 2025: Annegret Mayer-Lindenberg (Germany), Luke Nickel (Germany/Canada), Jonah Haven (USA) and Melissa Vargas (Colombia). We can’t wait to work with them in October!

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Just over nine years ago, I got together with an Arsenal fan.

I’d probably watched 5 or 6 games of football in my life at this point, and now - somehow - I seem to watch at least two each week, have season’s tickets for Arsenal women, and I’ve started to have opinions on players and management styles. It is one of the great surprises of my life that I have become a football fan. That I enjoy it so much. Teenaged sport-hating me would be horrified.

And one of the things that’s struck me lately is how much time commentators spend talking about confidence. You cannot watch an entire came of football on television without the c-word being used.

If a team is being particularly team-y? “This is the most confident we’ve seen Arsenal all season”

Star striker not star striking? “Beth Mead is lacking confidence”

Unbelievable goal from a free kick? “Declan Rice has got his confidence back”

It is constant, this talk about confidence. And it makes sense. These players are playing in front of tens of thousands of people and often against some of the greatest athletes of their generation. If you need to run at Kylian Mbappé and challenge him, you need to have some, well, confidence.

But I wonder why we discuss the issue of confidence relatively rarely in music performance. When I was a young musician, I lacked confidence. I had none. And I listen back to recordings of myself when I was 22 and I can hear now how good I was: I had a great sound, good technique, and a huge willingness to go to extraordinary lengths to learn difficult contemporary repertoire. But zero confidence. And the result was a young musician with performance anxiety who in many ways avoided risk-taking.

In a way, it should be easier in music: after all, when I walk on stage there aren’t 60,000 fans of another clarinetist screaming at me in the hopes I’ll fail. (Although that’s no doubt given my subconscious a great idea for a future anxiety dream, looking forward to that one.)

I don’t have all the solutions here, because my road to becoming a confident musician was a long one - and I’m still not immune to phases of low confidence, or bouts of imposter syndrome. I need to play regularly, for one. I need to be warming up and feeling in shape. I need to play with colleagues I trust. I need good sleep and good nutrition.

Come to think of it, that sounds pretty similar to a footballer now, doesn’t it.

Question: How do you feel your most confident as a musician? And how do you help your students to increase their confidence?