2026.8 | Lorna McGhee
Do elite performers actually feel as confident as they look? In this conversation with Boston Symphony principal flutist Lorna McGhee, we ex...
Radio and PodcastLive Radio & PodcastsScience & Medicine
The Bulletproof Musician
Ever wonder why you can practice for hours, sound great in the practice room, and still be frustratingly hit or miss on stage? Join performance psychologist and Juilliard alumnus/faculty Noa...
Episodes
20 of 417 episodesJoanna Fong-Isariyawongse: The Science of Sleep for Musicians
What if one of the most overlooked factors affecting memory consolidation, emotional regulation, practice efficiency, and performance consis...
Paul Baxter: Why Bad Habits Keep Coming Back (And a Faster Way to Change Them)
Have you ever had the experience of fixing something in the practice room…only to have it come back in performance? Maybe it’s a passage whe...
Micah Killion: The One Thing Artist-Level Musicians Do Differently in the Practice Room
How should musicians actually practice to improve faster? In this conversation with researcher and trumpet professor Micah Killion, we explo...
How to Start a Performance with More Accuracy (Without the Onstage Warm-Up)
One of my teachers often used to say that no matter what you’re playing, when you’re on stage, the beginning of a piece is always the hardes...
When You Can’t Get Yourself to Start Practicing, Try This
In some years it feels easier to begin the new year with a lot of energy and enthusiasm. Other years, it can be difficult to get going and b...
The Central Strategy Expert Musicians Use to Practice Difficult Passages
We all get stuck on problem passages from time to time. And it can be very natural to simply throw more repetitions at it, in hopes that thi...
How a Small Change in Self-Talk Could Improve Performance Under Pressure
The voice in our head can be an asset at times - but also kind of a jerk at the worst possible moments. And like that one person in the “qui...
A Learning Method That Outperformed Traditional Practice
A few months ago, when a sportswriter published an article in The New York Times about an unusual and “revolutionary” practice method that N...
How Much Perfectionism Do You Really Need to Succeed?
A friend recently asked if it's true that becoming a virtuoso performer requires being a perfectionist. Well, spoiler alert, it's...
Pallavi Mahidhara: On Practicing for Flexibility, Not Perfection
Playing for other people, whether it’s an audience of one, a dozen, or several hundred, can be a stressful thing! So it’s easy to focus on t...
What Happened When Musicians Slept 90 Minutes More
Sleep and recovery is an aspect of preparation that athletes prioritize, with teams hiring sleep consultants, and many athletes going to gre...
Why Being Too Quick to Offer Feedback Could Inhibit Learning
I remember a lesson many years ago, when my teacher told me that her job was to teach me how to teach myself. So that I would one day no lon...
Fewer Repetitions….But More Rapid Progress?
Whether we’re baking a cake, driving to a new restaurant, or putting together a puzzle, we can usually get to the goal more efficiently and...
Ida Kavafian: Habits That Separate Good Musicians from Great Ones
This episode with violinist Ida Kavafian is packed with key points about effective practice, plus fascinating nerdy details about bowing and...
Can Memorizing Music Make You a More Expressive Performer?
One of the arguments often made for why we should memorize music, is that performing from memory facilitates more expressive performances. B...
Two Approaches to Memorization (Beware: One Could Leave You Stranded!)
Memory can often feel like a mysterious, unknowable phenomenon. Something that happens magically by itself at times, with great effort at ot...
A Hidden Reason You Forget Music on Stage
Mistakes on stage are never fun, but missing a note here or there, or playing out of tune is over and done with pretty quick. Having a memor...
Jane Ginsborg: On Building Stronger and More Reliable Musical Memory
Talk to anyone who has ever performed from memory, and you’ll probably get a story of a time when their memory failed them. For instance, I...
How to Use Focus Cues to Play More Freely on Stage
A pianist once told me the last thing their teacher said at their final lesson after years of study: “Now forget everything I ever told you....