Why are some performers exhilarated and energized about performing in public, while others feel a crushing sense of fear and dread, and experience public performance as an overwhelming challenge that must be endured? What are the factors that produce such vastly different performance experiences? Why have consummate artists like Frederic Chopin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Pablo Cassals, Tatiana Troyanos, and Barbra Streisand experienced such intense music performance anxiety? This is a disorder that can affect musicians across a range of genres and of all standards. Some of the 'cures' musicians resort to can be harmful to their health and detrimental to their playing.
This is the first rigorous exposition of music performance anxiety. In this groundbreaking work, Dianna Kenny draws on a range of disciplines including psychology, philosophy, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and performance theory in order to explain the many facets of music performance anxiety that have emerged in the empirical and clinical literature.
This book will lay a firm foundation for theorizing music performance anxiety and be of enormous value interest to those in the fields of music and music education, clinical psychology, and performance studies.

1: Phenomenology of Music Performance Anxiety
2: Conceptual framework
3: The Anxiety Disorders
4: Defining Music Performance Anxiety
5: Epidemiology of Music Performance Anxiety
6: Theoretical Contributions to Understanding Music Performance Anxiety
7: Treatment
8: Severe Music Performance Anxiety: Phenomenology and Theorizing
9: Common Themes in the lives of performing musicians
10: Prevention and Pedagogy

Dianna Kenny , Professor of Psychology and Music, Faculty of Arts, University of Sydney, Australia

Dianna Kenny is a Professor of Psychology and a Professor of Music at the University of Sydney, Australia. She was the Founding Director of the Australian Centre for Applied Research in Music Performance at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney, a post she held for five years. Dianna is interested in interdisciplinary research and has combined her own disciplines of psychology and music to progress the scientific study of music performance anxiety. Dianna has published widely in both disciplines, and has over 200 books, edited books, book chapters, journal articles, monographs and commissioned reports.

`I cannot recommend strongly enough this extremely important volume of latest research and recommendations from the world's leading expert on MPA, surely as important to musicians and psychologists as any of Freud or Jung's work. Kenny will doubtlessly go on to offer MPA sufferers hope and solutions to the complex issue of music performance anxiety.' ISSTIP Journal