Is Conditioned Tension Hurting Your Playing?

You’re reading along in a piece of music and you see you’ve got a difficult note or passage coming up. Without even thinking about it, your throat tightens. Your fingers stiffen. You might even feel your neck and jaw become tense. And the note itself? You miss it completely.

Does this sound familiar? If it does, you’re probably experiencing conditioned tension.

What is conditioned tension? It’s an insanely common playing trap, one almost all of us have fallen into at one point or another in our musical lives. Basically, you attempted something difficult for you…. and you failed.

But instead of carefully and slowly untangling the causes of your failure, you simply tried again. And again.

And thus, very efficiently, you created and reinforced a connection between the difficult thing and the bodily experience of threat.

It’s classical conditioning at it’s finest, only instead of Pavlov’s dog salivating when a bell is rung, you’ve taught yourself to tense up in anticipation of one or more specific musical stimuli.

The problem is, tension doesn’t make your playing better– it makes it worse. Much worse.

A tight throat blocks the efficient passage of air. Stiff fingers move less quickly and less accurately. A tense tongue is more likely to make notes splat. And a brain taken up with nervous chatter has reduced processing power.

If you’ve conditioned tension, you’ve basically improved your ability to play worse.

So how do you undo it?

First, you need to identify where you’re experiencing conditioned tension Common sites include high notes, trills, cross fingerings– really any spot in which you struggled unproductively during your initial learning.

The ideal, of course, would be not to condition tension in the first place. For that, you must develop a habit of practicing intelligently and intentionally, especially in the learning stages of a piece. And yes, I have a webinar for that!

But if the damage is already done, all hope is not lost! The key is to repeatedly reinforce a new association– this time between the musical stimulus and physical relaxation. Essentially, you need to play the difficult thing as if it were easy. And you need to do it a lot.

I can hear the howls of protest now: The difficult thing is DIFFICULT! It is absolutely NOT easy and HELLO that’s why you conditioned tension in the first place!

That’s why it’s essential to figure out how to make whatever the difficult thing is easier for yourself. There are lots of ways. You can slow it down. You can break it up. You can isolate it. There are lots of tools in the toolbox, but basically, in order to undo conditioned tension, you must practice pairing ease with the difficult thing.

Here’s a concrete example.

Say you’re struggling with conditioned tension around leaping to a particular high D. To work on pairing this high D with a feeling of ease, you could try the following:

1) Finger the passage soundlessly, hearing a clear, effortless high D in your head as you approach and move through it.

2) Hang out on the high D, deliberately relaxing your body while keying in to the kinesthetic and auditory experience of relaxed and successful production.

3) Isolate two notes: the D and the note before the high D. Play these two notes in a relaxed way, in different rhythms and tempos.

4) Add the note before. And then the one before that. Etc.

It’s a painstaking and somewhat irritating process to come up with prescriptions like this for yourself, but it’s necessary if you want to undo habits of conditioned tension! And with time, it works.

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