Stress Research Of Piano Performance

It is a fact that piano performers always feel nervous, anxious and excited, which comes along with physical reactions. This fact might bring a positive or negative effect to the performing. In the past 30 years, there has been a lot of exploration and research of this subject in China, and certain achievements have been made according to the study. This essay mainly studies this fact by the theory of psychological stress which has been wildly used in many fields from appearance to essence, and theory to reality based on the summary of existing research. This essay consists of three chapters including introduction, analysis of the stress of piano performers and coping the stress in piano performance.The first chapter is introduction. Beginning with a summary of the evolution of the concept of stress, this chapter aims to set a foundation of meta-theory for the stress study in piano performance by finding and extracting the similarity and essence of the stress study in different fields. Then, this part gives an overview of the current research result, mostly about the stress study of piano performance, by analyzing the research of macro musical performance and micro piano performance, which focuses on three different aspects as psychological, physical and stress. This chapter presents the meaning of the stress study in piano performance based on meta-theory and literature review.The second chapter is the analysis of the stress of piano performers. It starts with an in-depth analysis of stressor of piano performance, comes up with two major types of stressor including the disciplinary and the anti-disciplinary, and conducts a concrete research about the nature and cause of stressor in different types. Afterwards, it analyzes the factors that influence the occurrence and strength of stress in piano performance by confirming the types of stress according to stressor. It also studies the reaction mechanism of stress in piano performance by examining the interaction of physical, psychological reaction and stress. Among which, the study of physical reaction mainly focuses on the physical changes in alarm stage and resistance stage of the stress in piano performance; the study of psychological reaction mainly focuses on the emotional and behavioral changes of the piano performer during the performance; and the study of interaction mainly focuses on the interaction of stressor, physical/psychological stress and physical/psychological reaction.Chapter Three is about coping the stress in piano performance. For one thing, it discusses the teaching of coping stress in piano performance from the perspective of teachers, especially analyzes the cognitive content and practice content of the teaching of coping stress in piano performance. It proposes that there’re three components of cognitive content, including cognition, stress and skill of piano performance. As to the practice content, there are training of students’ subjective initiative, performing habits and personality. For another, this chapter studies the coping practice of stress from the perspective of performers. It first brings specific cognitive method to all types of stressor, and presents specific methods to coping of stress in piano performance from the level of consciousness/memory and attention/memory.