This content was created by The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. This content was uploaded by The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song. This is a YouTube episode titled "🎧 #TPPSeason5Rewind | Episode 11: Graham Fitch" (published 2025-07-21). The excerpt is a spoken monologue by Graham Fitch in English from a piano-focused podcast/interview (The Piano Pod Season 5 Rewind) in which he discusses performance anxiety and physical tension in pianists — explaining the body’s chemical stress response, how fear and unkind teaching practices contribute to muscular tension, and common technical causes (e.g., keybedding, isolated finger lifting, stretching/twisting) and remedies such as positive self-talk and collaborative teacher feedback.
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So with a fearful mindset, what happens is that the body is flooded with various chemicals. I think it's adrenaline being one of them, various other things that literally do take the blood supply away from the small muscles and give it to the legs and to that heart because we need to run away from the tiger that we're afraid of. We're endowed with superhuman strength, but not when it comes to playing the piano. Rather gets in the way of playing the piano. So I experienced tightness in my muscles and stiffness, but it was because of the chemical that my brain had pumped out into my body. So, you know, I will find that positive self-talk and positive talk from the teacher, both those can go a long way to alleviating some of the negative stuff Often teachers are just very unkind. You know, I thought I told you before that that should be the— you should do this fingering or whatever, or no, no, no, no, that kind of thing. Rather say to the student, I see you're still having a little problem with that. Let's see if I can help you loosen that up or something. In other words, the attitude of let's roll up our sleeves together and collaborate on sorting out this thing. Rather than acting from an egotistical place, which a lot of teachers do. And I think it's because they've received that themselves. They've received a kind of baggage from their teacher who's— it's probably unresolved psychological stuff from the teacher that didn't get resolved properly. So then it gets thrown out. I can't handle it. It's all unconscious anyway. So the student then has to deal with it. And the student then, if they're smart, will sort it out before they pass it on to their students. But it often doesn't happen that way. So yes, tension. I think tension can come from all those things that we looked at. Keybedding, in other words, pushing into the keyboard, physical tension. I mean, lifting the fingers in isolation from each other. That's horrible. And yet it's part of our tradition. Stretching between the fingers, you know, that twisting, all those things that are just physiologically bad for us, will cause physical tension. But it's— I don't think physical tension is exclusively physical. I think a lot of the time it comes from our mind.
