Dave Wirth
The concert for Bangladesh was in 1971. George Harrison played for 40,000 people when he was 28 years old. How did he do it? He just got used to it and rolled with it. The rest was luck and timing.
A collegue once told me that there are three levels of performance pressure. When you are playing music by yourself, when you are playing for a teacher (if you have one), and when you are playing for others. I think this is spot on. Each of them gets progressively more fun and/or difficult.
Playing music by yourself is stress free. There are only the walls that hear one's mistakes. Often, many people will say "Oh, if only I could sound like I did when I was practicing this song, then I would be great!" Indeed, mistakes are a bit more painful once the pressure is upped a bit. This often happens when we go to play for our teachers.
When we play for our teachers, (George Harrison had only one teacher: Ravi Shankar), the pressure is on. Of course they want to see you do well, although they may have different ideas of how to inspire you. Some teachers will encourage you to no end to keep at it, while other teachers will try to get you to give up while latently inspiring you! I've personally tried to avoid the latter; Mistakes are so much harder to handle around them. Even more stress-inducing is playing for friends.
Hugh MacLeod is fond of saying that good ideas change power dynamics in relationships, and I think he is absolutely right. A person who gets up and performs in front of an audience will likely be playing for a bunch of friends, and that is scary because the performer now has the attention of everyone. Performing when one's friends are in the audience changes perceptions that people have of them. This still gives me the willies to this day! Even though this is stressful it's fertile ground for accepting that mistakes will be made, like Yo-Yo Ma learned how to do.
Yo-Yo Ma once stated that he had strived for absolute perfection in his performances, that is until he received it of course. In addition to a note-perfect performance of classical cello pieces he also got the least inspired performance he can remember. He didn't like it because it felt like the energy was drained just for the pursuit of perfection. After that, he accepted mistakes along with a passionate performance. Doing that meant he didn't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Do you think George Harrison learned to do the same? You bet. He learned how to do this with The Beatles when they were playing the clubs of Hamburg, Germany. He learned how to do this on tour. He also did this for the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971, when he was a mere 28 years old.
There are ways of accepting the pressures as they come when one is performing, and loving it. George Harrison learned to accept and love that nervousness as part of the package of performing. Accepting mistakes along with the passion is the way to go; That's the key to performing like George Harrison.
