Uploaded March 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
As soon as I would step onto stage, everything would fall apart.
When I was doing my grad studies, I came across something that completely changed my life (and my stage fright)—which was Pauline Oliveros's writing on Deep Listening.
If you're not familiar with Oliveros, and if you're curious about sound, music, listening, and deepening your creative practice, look her up.
The biggest thing that shifted for me was realizing that I could change my definition and approach to live performance.
For years, live performance was all about displaying virtuosity. It was about executing a flawless performance of someone else's music. It was very objective: all the right notes in the right time and place, or the performance is a failure.
^^THIS kind of frame around performance was what gave me so much anxiety.
After readying Oliveros's writing, I realized that we all get to define what performance and music means to us, uniquely.
I decided to experiment with shifting my approach to performance from being less about me performing FOR an audience, toward being more of a SHARED listening experience. A gathering, an exchange, a collective exploration of sound.
Performing live is now one of my favorite ways to connect with people, and I'm so grateful for that shift in thinking—I was getting ready to quit, and instead discovered an entire new creative chapter.
This video is short clip from a recent performance I did at @uvicmusic - sharing the first of a series of new works for voice and electronics. More to come!
#experimentalmusic #trumpet #modularsynth #electroacoustic
As soon as I would step onto stage, everything would fall apart.
When I was doing my grad studies, I came across something that completely changed my life (and my stage fright)—which was Pauline Oliveros's writing on Deep Listening.
If you're not familiar with Oliveros, and if you're curious about sound, music, listening, and deepening your creative practice, look her up.
The biggest thing that shifted for me was realizing that I could change my definition and approach to live performance.
For years, live performance was all about displaying virtuosity. It was about executing a flawless performance of someone else's music. It was very objective: all the right notes in the right time and place, or the performance is a failure.
^^THIS kind of frame around performance was what gave me so much anxiety.
After readying Oliveros's writing, I realized that we all get to define what performance and music means to us, uniquely.
I decided to experiment with shifting my approach to performance from being less about me performing FOR an audience, toward being more of a SHARED listening experience. A gathering, an exchange, a collective exploration of sound.
Performing live is now one of my favorite ways to connect with people, and I'm so grateful for that shift in thinking—I was getting ready to quit, and instead discovered an entire new creative chapter.
This video is short clip from a recent performance I did at @uvicmusic - sharing the first of a series of new works for voice and electronics. More to come!
#experimentalmusic #trumpet #modularsynth #electroacoustic
