It’s oh so quiet…

This series draws on peer-reviewed research in music psychology and music education. Full references are listed at the foot of each post. Where findings from my own doctoral research are shared, this will be clearly indicated.

You know the moment.

The car ride to the concert is unusually still. The child who sang through breakfast, through dinner, through every car trip for the past three months — goes quiet. They fidget with their costume. They ask, for the fourth time, where you’ll be sitting.

Something is happening that isn’t quite excitement.

For many young singers, the days and hours before a performance bring a particular kind of stillness — one that parents and teachers often sense long before anyone names it. It shows up differently in every child. Some become clingy or tearful. Some go flat and distracted, as though they’ve stepped slightly outside themselves. Some complain of stomachaches, headaches, or suddenly remember a very important reason they can’t possibly perform today.

Others hold it together beautifully in public and fall apart quietly in the car on the way home.

What you’re witnessing is real, it’s common, and it has a name: music performance anxiety. And one of the most important things you can do — as a parent, as a teacher, as anyone who walks alongside a young singer — is simply learn to recognise it.

More than first-night nerves

There’s a version of pre-performance feeling that’s healthy and even useful. A little activation, a little aliveness — that edge that sharpens focus and brings presence to a performance. Many professional musicians describe this as part of the craft, something they’ve learned to work with rather than against.

But for some young singers, what they experience goes beyond useful nervousness. Australian music psychologist Dianna Kenny — whose work has shaped much of what we now understand about performance anxiety in musicians — and her collaborator Margaret Osborne have documented across more than a decade of research that for a meaningful proportion of young musicians, pre-performance anxiety becomes a significant and persistent barrier. It interferes not just with individual performances, but with a student’s broader musical development and willingness to engage with performance opportunities over time.

This matters more than we often realise. The voice is not like a violin or a flute. It lives inside the body. For child singers especially, the instrument and the person are inseparable — which means that anxiety about performance can feel, to a young singer, like anxiety about themselves.

Why this conversation is worth having

Research into music performance anxiety in young singers is a growing field. For a long time, much of what we understood about MPA came from studies of adult professional and conservatoire musicians — the work of researchers like Dianna Kenny and Aaron Williamon has been foundational here. Valuable scholarship, but work that doesn’t always translate directly to the developmental realities of childhood. Children are still forming their musical identities, their relationship with risk, and their capacity to regulate complex emotional experiences. The pressures of performance land differently at eight or twelve than they do at twenty-five, and the field is only beginning to catch up with that distinction.

This blog series exists to bring some of that emerging research into the open — in language that’s useful, not clinical. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing insights from my doctoral research into music performance anxiety in child voice students, alongside practical perspectives for parents and teachers who want to support the young singers in their lives.

Not with quick fixes. But with understanding, tools, and a genuine belief in every child’s capacity for growth.

If you recognised your child in these words

You’re already doing something important — you’re paying attention. That attentiveness is the beginning of everything.

In the posts ahead, we’ll explore what music performance anxiety actually is, why some children are more affected than others, and — perhaps most importantly — what kinds of support genuinely help. The answers may surprise you.

For now, if your child goes quiet before a performance, let that be a moment of curiosity rather than concern. There’s a lot we can learn together.

This is the first post in the Little Voices, Big Feelings series — an evidence-informed exploration of music performance anxiety in child singers, written for parents, teachers, and music educators.

The title of this post comes from the song It’s Oh So Quiet by Björk