The Riddle

Why this problem matters so much — and the eight young singers at the heart of it

Tagged:  🎓 For Researchers   |   🎵 For Teachers   |   💛 For Parents

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

I love a challenge — a puzzle to solve. And as a researcher, I’m driven to solve a problem that has (un)comfortably and quietly shared my space for pretty much my entire life.

Its voice got louder, more pressing in voice studios across my three decades of teaching, in moments I couldn’t quite make sense of. A young singer who could fly in the lesson and freeze on the stage. A child whose voice tightened the moment another young singer walked into the room. A talented student who slowly, gradually, stopped putting up their hand for performance opportunities — not because they didn’t love singing, but because they did, and the love had become inseparable from a fear they didn’t yet know how to name.

The question that began to form was deceptively simple. Why does music performance anxiety in young singers seem to operate so differently from everything the research had taught us to expect — and why do many of us as teachers and parents feel ill-equipped to support them? Why is it that the people a young singer most fears in the moment of performing are, very often, the other children in the room? And the people most able to support them, it turns out, may be exactly the same children.

That is the riddle. The same peers who can make performing feel unbearable may also be the ones who make it survivable. It is the question at the heart of this research — and before this series begins to share what the data revealed, this post explains why the question matters so much, and introduces the eight young singers whose voices, drawings and reflections turned it from a riddle into something this series can now share with you.

Why this is a problem worth solving

It would be easy to assume that performance nerves are a small thing — a rite of passage every young musician simply has to get through. The research tells a more serious story, and it is worth being honest about it.

Performance anxiety is not rare, and it is not a sign that something is wrong with a performer. By some estimates, it touches many musicians at levels serious enough to interfere with how they play or sing — and children are not exempt. Margaret Osborne and Dianna Kenny’s work with young Australian musicians found that, far from fading as students gain experience, performance anxiety often intensifies across adolescence. Time alone, in other words, is unlikely to be the cure. And an early difficult performance experience — particularly one a child goes through without support — can become what the research calls a sensitising experience: a memory that quietly shapes how every later performance is approached.

For singers, the stakes are especially high. Unlike other instruments, the voice cannot be put down at the end of the lesson. It lives inside the body, bound up with a child’s developing sense of who they are. When anxiety arrives, it is immediately audible — the breath shortens, the throat tightens, the note wavers — so that the fear and the instrument become, for a moment, the same thing.

Perhaps the hardest part is how quietly all of this happens. Young musicians rarely tell anyone they are anxious. The research of Ioulia Papageorgi, Susan Hallam and Graham Welch found that children are far more likely to blame a difficult performance on not practising enough, or simply not being good enough, than on anxiety — even when anxiety is plainly the cause. They carry the shame of a problem they haven’t been given the words to understand. And the real damage is often not the shaky performance itself. It is the slow withdrawal that follows: the hand that stops going up, the opportunity politely declined, the child who edges away, year by year, from something they once loved. A narrowing that can shape not only a musician, but a person.

In my Master’s research, six of the ten teachers I interviewed had quietly stopped letting parents sit in on lessons — because some children were not confident to sing in front of their parents

Sit with that for a moment. Children learn, long before they can name it, that their own voice is something to be hidden — even from the people who love them most. This is what researchers sometimes call the perfection myth: the belief that you have to be good enough before you are allowed to take part at all. It is rarely taught on purpose. It is inherited, passed down through the small silences of a hundred ordinary moments, and by the time a child reaches a voice studio, they are very often not the first in their family to have absorbed it.

This is why the problem is worth solving. Not because performance nerves are catastrophic in themselves, but because of what they quietly foreclose — who gets to keep singing, who gets to belong to music at all. And there is genuine hope in it, too. If performance anxiety is shaped by the relationships around a child, then those same relationships can be part of the answer. A growing body of work is beginning to ask not only what makes children vulnerable, but what protects them. And protection, this research suggests, might be something a community can build around a child, rather than something the child has to summon alone.

A finding that wouldn’t let go

Before my doctoral research began, I undertook a Master’s study in vocal pedagogy, in which I interviewed 10 experienced teachers who specialised in working with child-voice students. The question I asked them was deliberately broad: what, in your experience, are the most significant factors driving performance anxiety in the young singers you teach?

I thought I knew it all! I expected to hear about perfectionism. Parental pressure. Insufficient preparation. These themes appear consistently in the existing literature, and I went into the interviews assuming I would hear them again, and I was ready for it.

What blew my mind —what I heard, again and again, was something I hadn’t expected. The teachers kept returning to peer judgement — the fear of being seen to fail in front of other young singers — as the thing that most shaped their students’ anxiety. Not the parents in the audience. Not the examiner’s formal evaluation. Not even the child’s own demanding standards. Intense fear about being judged or laughed at by their friends and classmates.

That finding absolutely stopped me in my tracks. Not because it was implausible — but because of what it implied. If peer judgement is doing so much of the work, then peer relationships are doing extraordinary work in shaping how young singers experience performance. And if peer influence can make the experience of performing feel worse for our young musicians, the hopeful question presents itself: can they also make it feel better?

That question became the heart of my doctoral research.

What this research set out to do

The overarching aim, in the simplest terms, was to investigate how social relationships influence the experience of music performance anxiety among pre-adolescent voice students aged 7 to 11 years.

Inside that broad aim, three more specific questions took shape — each one corresponding to one of the three dimensions of a community of musical practice.

The first question explored how young voice students develop and sustain mutual engagement through their interactions and relationships in group vocal learning. This is the question of how connection forms — what allows a group of young singers, often strangers at the outset, to begin functioning as a relational system rather than a collection of individuals.

The second investigated how young voice students collectively negotiate and pursue shared goals and understanding around managing performance anxiety. This is the question of joint enterprise — of how a group comes to share an evolving sense of what performance is for, and how the anxiety inside it can be approached together.

The third delved into the shared practices, resources, and strategies that young voice students develop to manage performance anxiety through their collective music-making. This is the question of shared repertoire — of how a group builds, over time, the accumulated language, rituals and tools that let it navigate vulnerability together.

These are not abstract questions. In this research, they translated this into the close, sustained study of one group of young singers over eight weeks of group voice lessons, culminating in a public performance. What happened in that group — what the children did, said and showed — is what the next phase of this series will share.

The eight young singers at the heart of the research

I cannot wait to introduce you to my incredible, creative, talented and brave research experts. These fabulous humans shared a journey with me that required trust, commitment, and, at times, sitting with discomfort.

Eight unique young singers, aged seven to eleven years, took part in this research. Each came into the studio carrying their own relationship to singing, to performance, and to the experience of being a young person navigating something genuinely difficult. Each brought generosity, courage, and a willingness to talk honestly with a researcher who was also, importantly, their teacher.

Their identities are protected throughout this series and in the research by the pseudonyms Casey, Riley, Morgan, Quinn, Avery, Taylor, Jordan and Alex. Their words and drawings have been shared with care, with their parents’ consent, and with full ethical approval from Griffith University. What they shared with me, across eight weeks, has changed how I understand performance anxiety in young singers.

I’ll let each of them emerge in their own way as the series unfolds. For now, just a brief sense of who they were when they arrived.

Some came carrying a heavy burden of anxiety that presented as acute physical and psychological symptoms. One described the flutter that started in the tummy and travelled straight into the voice, until the notes themselves came out crackly — anxiety and instrument trembling as one. Another, on the morning of a concert, had quietly asked a parent if they could please just go home to get something they had forgotten, so that by the time they got back, it would be too late to be my turn.

Some came carrying a quieter, more composed kind of anxiety — the kind that doesn’t always look like anxiety from the outside, but lives in carefully folded drawings, in practised self-presentation, in the words a child uses to explain why they have to get over it because I’ve got to do this perfectly.

And some came because they knew they loved to sing, but they couldn’t bring themselves to share their voice for fear of being heard. Their parents had recognised them as anxious about performing, but the children themselves had not always had the language for what they felt. Part of what this research did, simply by asking and listening, was to begin giving them that language.

They came from different backgrounds, with different musical histories, different temperaments. Most had never met one another before the first week of the programme. By the end of the eight weeks, they had become something this series will spend the next several posts trying to describe.

Why their voices matter

There is a long tradition in research about children — and in research about young people and performance — that treats them as subjects of study rather than as genuine participants. Adults design the research, adults interpret what the children produce, and adults publish the findings for other adults to read.

This research has tried, from the beginning, to do something different. The young singers in this study were not a source of data to be extracted. They were the primary bearers of knowledge about their own experience. Their drawings, their words, their observations about what their classmates did for them — these were not raw material to be processed through adult interpretation. They were the most honest account available of what was actually happening in the room.

Music education researchers such as Margaret Barrett have argued for some years now that the field has leaned too heavily on the voices of teachers, parents and institutions when it comes to children’s musical lives. We need research methodologies that support and enable young participants to share their experiences so we can learn directly from their expertise.

This research stands on that conviction. The posts ahead will share what the data revealed, but the data, ultimately, are the children. And what they revealed — in their drawings, in the quiet moments between songs, in what they did for one another when no adult had asked them to — is something I hope this series can offer back to you with the seriousness it deserves.

Young voices matter. That, at the most fundamental level, is what this research set out to honour.

The title of this week’s blog post is from The Riddle by Nik Kershaw

Part of the Little Voices, Big Feelings series — an evidence-informed exploration of music performance anxiety in child singers, written for parents, teachers and music educators. Published weekly.

References

Barrett, M. S. (2011). Musical narratives: A study of a young child’s identity work in and through music-making. Psychology of Music, 39(4), 403–423.

Herman, A., & Clarke, E. (2023). It’s not a virus: Reconceptualising and de-pathologising music performance anxiety. Frontiers in Psychology, 14.

Kenny, A. (2014). Practice through partnership: Examining the theoretical framework and development of a “community of musical practice.” International Journal of Music Education, 32(4), 396–408.

Kenny, D. T. (2011). The psychology of music performance anxiety. Oxford University Press.

Osborne, M. S., & Kenny, D. T. (2008). The role of sensitising experiences in music performance anxiety in adolescent musicians. Psychology of Music, 36(4), 447–462.

Osborne, M. S., Kenny, D. T., & Holsomback, R. (2005). Assessment of music performance anxiety in late childhood. International Journal of Stress Management, 12(4), 312–330.

Papageorgi, I., Hallam, S., & Welch, G. F. (2007). A conceptual framework for understanding musical performance anxiety. Research Studies in Music Education, 28(1), 83–107.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press.

Yarnold, R. (2021). How does music performance anxiety (MPA) impact child voice students aged 5 to 12 years [Unpublished master’s dissertation]. Griffith University.

Yarnold, R. (2024). Singing together, growing confident: Social relationships and music performance anxiety in pre-adolescent voice students. Australian Voice, 25, 57–72.

Further Reading

Aubry, F., & Küssner, M. B. (2025). [Multidimensional review of the causes of music performance anxiety — volume/issue to be confirmed].

Barrett, M. S., & Stauffer, S. L. (2009). Narrative inquiry in music education: Troubling certainty. Springer.

Christensen, P., & James, A. (Eds.). (2008). Research with children: Perspectives and practices (2nd ed.). Routledge.

McPherson, G. E. (Ed.). (2006). The child as musician: A handbook of musical development. Oxford University Press.