When Adequate Wasn't Enough: Finding Authority and Presence on Stage
- Gökçe Kutsal
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
* 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.
He's on stageü and he's prepared. He's running through the process he built years ago to keep himself functional under pressure: Hear the pitch, rehearse the rhythm internally, set the embouchure, take the breath, subdivide the time...
And the notes come out. They sound fine. From the outside, nothing looks wrong.
From the inside, he's somewhere just slightly behind the music. Watching it happen, tracking it, making sure the system runs smoothly.
This is the place a lot of experienced musicians end up after they've done the inner work to stop falling apart on stage... and it's a place that doesn't get talked about much, because technically, things are working. The performances are adequate. The career continues. Nobody listening could tell you exactly what's missing.
But the musician can. Something smaller than full on panic, and much harder to name. A kind of low-grade absence. Running on autopilot when what they actually want is to be there.
That's where this client was when we first met.
The Long Road Behind Him
He was a trumpet player in his thirties, fifteen years into his professional career, holding a principal seat in one regional American orchestra and an associate principal seat in another. By the standards most musicians would name, he had arrived.
But the road there had not been easy.
In his early twenties, just before graduating from a major conservatory, he'd had a panic attack on stage so total that he could barely produce a sound. In the years that followed, he'd taught himself to perform anyway — building, almost from scratch, a step-by-step internal process that allowed him to play the right notes at the right time even when his body was in a state of full alarm. He described it to me as learning to play "like a trained monkey".
And it worked. It kept his career alive.
In the years since, he'd done a remarkable amount of additional work. CBT. Years of psychodynamic therapy. Two performance psychologists. A hypnotherapist. Something close to a dozen books. He'd absorbed enough of the research literature to talk fluently about ACT, cognitive distortions, and self-distancing. Most of his old symptoms (like the panic, the rumination, the catastrophic thoughts) were genuinely gone.
What remained was subtler. And frankly, more interesting.
What He Was Actually Asking About
When he came to me, the question wasn't how do I stop being scared. It was something closer to: I've built a process that gets me through. I want to know how I can let go of it.
He could already perform reliably under pressure. He could recover when a conductor sprang a difficult passage on him with no warning. He could play through fatigue, hostile acoustics, exposed solo lines, and entire concerts of demanding repertoire without unravelling. The system held.
But he'd noticed something. In the situations where he played at his best, like concerts, chamber music, or just playing along to a recording at home, the system wasn't running at all. He was there. Breathing the music with the people around him. Reacting in real time to what was happening, the way you do when you know the song so well your body just plays it.
The moment a situation felt high-stakes enough to warrant The Process™, the process turned on. And the process, while reliable, also turned him into something he described later in our work as a computer running a code. Adequate, and controlled, yes... but not human enough.
He was asking essentially: Can the floor I built underneath myself be there without taking up the whole room?
Two Modes
Early in our first session, what came clear was that he had two distinct modes of attention available to him. One was doing — being inside the music, listening outward, reacting to what was actually happening. The other was watching — monitoring his own playing, evaluating it as it left his body, comparing it against an internal target.
Most musicians have both, and it's perfectly normal. Most use them in roughly the right proportions without thinking about it.
For him, after years of survival-mode performing, the watching mode had become hypertrophied. The supervisor he'd installed to keep him alive on stage had stayed on duty long after the threat had passed.
This supervisor wasn't the enemy. It was the reason he'd had a career at all. (I want to say this clearly because it's something I see people get wrong: The part of you that built the bunker isn't the bad guy, even when the bunker has started to feel claustrophobic.) So our work wasn't to fight it or get rid of it. We just had to update its job description.
Updating The Process
The first reframe was simple. When he played in a concert, he was already used to listening to the people around him and adjusting: They do something, I respond. They shift, I shift. We are making this together. That collaborative, in-the-moment posture was already deeply familiar to him.
The reframe was: You're doing that with yourself too. From the very first note, his body and instrument and breath were producing something specific that day — different from yesterday, different from the recording in his head. So the question wasn't supposed to be 'am I executing the version I planned'. It was: What's actually happening, and how do I respond to it?
This sounds small. But it changed quite a lot.
He wrote to me the day after our first session, after a morning concert and an afternoon rehearsal:
I thought a bit about how I'm never really playing 'alone' per se, that I'm always collaborating with myself, and I thought about modifying my expectations of myself to match those I have of my colleagues instead of demanding an almost inhumanly consistent level of technical and musical performance. The result was a feeling of energy and ease, and the conductor and several musicians told me I sounded particularly great yesterday.
The next idea sat on top of it: Range over single point. Instead of holding one rigid internal target for how each phrase should sound, holding a range of acceptable possibilities — and then, in the moment, allowing whichever one his body and the room actually produced to be the right one. There's a particular kind of perfectionism that calls itself "high standards" but is actually a refusal to let anything live in real time. Range over single point loosens that grip without lowering the bar.
The third idea (and this came from him, not me) was walking attention back one more layer of abstraction. He'd noticed that focusing on physical sensation made things worse (over-controlling). Focusing on sound was better (more responsive). But the deepest setting, the one he could only access in his best playing, was focusing on musical meaning — the character of the phrase, what it was trying to say, the proud Mussorgsky walking through a gallery in the Pictures at an Exhibition opening. When he was there, the body and the sound took care of themselves.
Three layers, descending in abstraction: What am I doing physically, what am I producing as sound, what does this mean musically. The deeper down the stack he could put his attention, the more the surface layers self-organised. Trust the body. Trust the technique. Then use the attention for the thing the technique is for.
What Showed Up
The most striking thing about his progress was the unsolicited feedback that started arriving from people around him.
A colleague stopped him after a concert and said, completely unprompted, that he'd "played with tremendous authority" and that his sound and technique were noticeably more "amazing". A former teacher he played for, someone whose opinion meant a lot to him, told him afterwards that he played with "so much musical presence".
I want to flag what's interesting about those particular words.
Authority and presence were exactly the qualities he'd most struggled to access. They weren't things you can practise into existence directly. You can't sit in a practice room and rehearse "presence" the way you rehearse a difficult passage. Presence is what's left when the watching mode steps back and the doing mode takes the room. It shows up when you stop running the process and start being inside the music.
The technical skill had always been there. What had changed was that he'd stopped narrating his playing to himself while doing it. The supervisor had stepped down a level, and now the musician underneath had room to walk forward.
What He's Carrying Now
He recently wrote to me with an update on his preparation for upcoming auditions, and I want to share it because the difference between what he's doing now and what he was doing when we started tells the story better than I could.
He's working out the technical issues in tricky passages by practising them the same way he'd practise anything difficult that came up on the job. That means not obsessing over them endlessly, but giving them what they need and moving on. For the rest of the material, he's limiting himself to playing each excerpt no more than once a day, and his focus has shifted to feeling ease, security, and confidence in his artistic interpretation rather than trying to drill an inhuman level of consistency.
In his words:
I feel better in preparation for some upcoming auditions, as if the work I want to do in preparation is neither overwhelming nor impossible.
Whether the auditions go his way is, as he himself put it, not something he can control and not his actual motivation. He's now clear about what is:
I just want to show up as myself and enjoy playing music even if I feel judged, rushed, and dismissed. It would be nice to win, but I truly am motivated to grow and learn primarily.
That sentence is, for me, the centre of this story. I know, it's probably not the triumphant outcome you expected, nor the reframe that makes the difficulty disappear.
But it's something invisible, and more durable: A musician who's learned to walk into the room as himself, with the process available if he needs it, and his attention free to land on the music — even if the room is judging, rushing, and dismissing him.
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.
