When Soft Notes Stop Feeling Dangerous
- Gökçe Kutsal
- Apr 10, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
* This story is shared with care. To respect the client’s privacy, some details have been changed. The essence of their experience and the outcomes remain true.
When I first met this client — a professional flutist with a first chair in a major orchestra — what struck me was her quiet excellence.
She had built the kind of career most musicians spend a lifetime working towards: Deeply respected by her colleagues. Known for her preparation and precision, with reliability that meant a section could trust her completely. On paper, everything looked solid.
What wasn't visible was how heavy performing had become.
Years earlier, in a recording session, a conductor had made one of those careless, cutting comments — the kind that says more about the conductor than the player, but hurts anyway. The performance itself had been strong. That moment stayed with her regardless. From then on, certain situations began to feel charged in a way they hadn't before. Places like soft entrances, exposed lines... and especially solo passages that asked for restraint.
These were moments she used to enjoy. Now they felt like minefields.
Her body knew before she did: Her breath would immediately become unsteady, with her shoulders climbing. You know, the specific kind of being-watched feeling that turns even familiar repertoire precarious. And in the years that followed, there had been many more exposed orchestral passages where she felt judged — either by colleagues, by audiences, and sometimes by no one in particular but herself.
Each one reinforced the same message her mind and body system had quietly catalogued: This is dangerous territory.
She once told me:
“I kept hoping that if I just kept playing, kept working hard in these orchestras, then eventually it had to get better.”
But it didn’t.
The fear stayed lodged in the same places. And the more she tried to push through, the more stuck she felt.
The Weight Behind the Music
She didn’t come to me because she was failing at anything.
She came because she was no longer enjoying what she had worked so hard to build.
“This can’t be it... I’ve worked so hard to get here. Why does it still feel like this?”
She'd already done serious work, which I want to name clearly. Therapy had helped her make sense of earlier experiences. EMDR had been useful, to a point. Standard meditation practices, though, didn't quite land for her. In some cases they made things worse, sharpening the very self-monitoring that was already running too hot.
Her therapist was thoughtful. Just unfamiliar with the specific texture of professional orchestral life — how your breath gets shaky when you feel the weight of watching eyes, the inner aftermath of a recording session, and what it costs to walk back into the same hall where a conductor's comment had once cut you. She felt she'd hit a ceiling.
And I could hear the hidden fear underneath all of it: Maybe this was just how things would be now.
Separating Worth from Performance
We started gently.
For me, that doesn't mean trying to eliminate fear. (Fear is information. Part of my work is learning what it's saying.) It meant looking at what was actually at stake in those exposed moments — and noticing that for her, every soft entrance had slowly become a referendum on something far bigger than the note itself.
We looked at the standards she held herself to. The relationship she'd developed with an inner critic that had become almost constant.
What kept surfacing was this: Every performance felt like a test of worth. Not just musical competence, but personal legitimacy. The musician and the self had become one.
So a lot of our work focused on separating them.
We can't get there by arguing with the critical thoughts (that never works — you can't logic your way out of a survival response). But by learning to notice them as 'thoughts'. This means, to let them show up without taking the bait. To stay present when fear arrived rather than trying to outrun it. To rebuild a sense of choice in moments that had started to feel compulsory.
Luckily, none of this required her to become someone else.
When Standard Tools Don't Fit
We didn't assume the 'usual' playbook would work for her, and it's worth saying why.
Some mindfulness practices ask you to turn attention towards sensation. For someone whose system has spent years cataloguing every shallow breath as threat, that can sharpen the alarm rather than soften it. That's not a personal failing, it's simply a mismatch between tool and system.
So we experimented carefully. We tried orienting attention outward instead of inward — to the room, to the music, to the player next to her. We worked with the physiological sigh before exposed entries (full inhale, another quick inhale, long exhale, twice in a row... almost embarrassingly simple). We built a pre-performance sequence that didn't ask her to calm down but to get oriented (there's a difference, and her body knew it).
The question I kept asking, in different forms: Does this help you stay oriented when the pressure rises? If yes, we kept it. If not, we moved on. Tools earn their place by what they do, not by whether they should work.
The Alter Ego
One tool we built earlier than I'd usually introduce it, because she needed it: A performance persona. Not a mask, but rather a container.
The idea isn't to pretend to be someone you're not. It's to give yourself just enough distance from the personal stakes that the music can be offered as craft, as story, as something happening through you, rather than something being graded about you.
For her, this changed the colour of exposed playing entirely. The note could leave her body without taking her sense of self with it.
"It gave me just enough distance to play freely again."
This wasn't a quick fix though. We worked on it over weeks: What the persona felt like in her body, what she wore for it, what she said to herself walking onto stage.
Over time, it became reliable. Which mattered a lot for what happened next.
The Night She Forgot the Beta Blocker
Before a big solo, she realised the beta blocker she usually relied on was expired.
After a brief moment of panic (you know, the kind where your stomach drops because the safety net you'd planned around isn't there), she made a choice. She decided not to take it.
And she played anyway.
"It felt amazing! I was still nervous. I still had to manage my breath. But it was all under control. From that place, I could actually make something special. I used to think beta blockers were the only way I could survive performances. Now I see that maybe I don’t need them all the time."
That night wasn't an accident. It was the alter ego, the orientation work, the slow uncoupling of note from self... all of it showing up at once when the usual scaffolding wasn't there. Her system had alredy built something to rely on.
Beyond The Stage
I have to add, what surprised both of us most was where the work travelled.
In section meetings, where she used to hold back (half from politeness, half from a sense that her opinion needed earning), she started speaking up. It turns out the tools she'd built weren't just for the soft entries.
"Making music has become so much more enjoyable, even when I face difficult or intimidating tasks. I’m extremely grateful that I learned how to not believe my stage nerves and to stop judging myself for having them.”
The thoughts and fear didn't disappear, and I want to be honest about that because I don't think they're meant to. What changed was her relationship to them. She had learnt how to move alongside fear rather than fight it. How to recognise it without acting on it. How to perform without treating every moment as a verdict on her worth.
"The biggest change is that I enjoy music so much more. Sometimes more than I ever have."
That change came from having a reliable and steady toolkit, the kind that stays with you, even in the quietest notes.
About
I'm Gökçe Kutsal, a performance coach for professional orchestra musicians and opera singers, with an MA in Voice Pedagogy and over 2,100 hours of coaching and teaching experience. I work with principals, titled positions, and audition candidates across Europe, the UK, North America, and Australia — and I write about performance anxiety, audition preparation, and the craft of practice for musicians who already have the technique and are trying to work out why it doesn't always hold up under pressure.
