Daniel Ramjattan: Transcript

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Daniel Ramjattan:

This work with music performance anxiety is helping me understand that as well. But to actually live that life and to actually have to play in a concert, I have to really be living out the strategies that I'm recommending for others, and use them and implement them. And get better at using them. And that's something that has given me a whole new lease on performing, it gives me a reason to want to improve constantly and to become as good as I can possibly be. Because the more I do that, the more that what I'm saying is true. And the more I can actually help other people. I can say, "See, it worked for me for this reason, these strategies are actually effective."

Leah Roseman:

Hi. You're listening to Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman. Daniel Ramjattan is a phenomenal classical guitarist, and this episode features some of his performances, as well as many valuable insights in his work as a performance coach and educator. And from his reflections on the significant challenges he's overcome in his life and career. Like all my episodes, this is available on your favorite podcast player, a video on YouTube, and transcript all linked to my website, leahroseman.com. I'm an independent podcaster, and I need my listeners help to keep the series going. The link to my Ko-fi page is in the description. I really value these long form conversations that allow for depth, and you can use the detailed timestamps if you prefer to jump to any topics or musical selection.

Hi, Daniel. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yeah, thanks for having me. It's really great being here. Yeah, it's a real honor. I've seen some of your other interviews with musicians as well, so it's really great to be on the podcast. It's something I've always wanted to be part of, so it's really great.

Leah Roseman:

Well, you have such an interesting story, as well as being such a beautiful player, and I know we're going to share some of your music a bit later. And I just can't wait to dive into the whole music performance anxiety thing-

Daniel Ramjattan:

Of course.

Leah Roseman:

... which has been such a huge thing for me. But if we could just start more at the beginning, because you experienced some real challenges growing up in terms of your musical education and everything.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yeah. It's something that I don't usually talk about a lot, but I am very open about it when people ask. It's because sometimes you have to camouflage, sometimes you don't really want everybody to know how the barriers you experience, because they actually expect less of you. That's something that, because they know the stats. The statistics say that you're not supposed to have a schizophrenic mom and then become a classical guitarist, that's not allowed to happen. You're not really allowed to grow up in a co-op or anything. Housing. We see a lot of minorities and people from all kinds of different gender minorities and different sexual minorities, minorities from all different walks of life, but they're almost all rich. They almost always not rich. They're almost all middle class, at the very least.

So it's very, very rare when musicians are actually from an actual lower class background with no property or anything. This is a very strange world, and it's something that I didn't really think was weird until I got older. I think when it really hit me hard, I was starting to get an idea. I started to see some patterns. I started to feel like I was a little bit different in terms of my background when I came to music school, because there were obviously cultural differences and stuff. And one thing I noticed was when I went to the national music competition the first time, and the second time, and I noticed that everyone there was fabulously wealthy, from my perspective. This is how I used to see middle class people. I used to think they were really rich, that's how I used to think that. I didn't really understand that I was really poor as I was, maybe, when growing up.

I was really shocked by how wealthy everyone was and how much support they had. Their parents were like... They were being flown in to do the competition, which I was as well. That's how I afforded to go. And I noticed that they all had their parents there somehow. Don't you live in Nova Scotia? How is that even possible? It's like, there's no way my parents would be able to do that. And they would've loved to. And I think that's what I was very lucky for, that's something I'm very grateful for, that my parents were very dedicated to me realizing the ridiculous dreams that I had. And then also being responsible enough parents to not make me as aware as I could be of my situation. To not say, "You can't do it because of this situation. There's no way you're going to ever make it work." This is not true. This is not what they did.

And so, yeah, there's a price to pay to be that kind of person. You have to be kind of psychotically obsessed with music. I think I'm a healthy, well-adjusted person otherwise in my current life. But I might describe myself as unhinged for a lot of my life. Just really, people would say, "What are you doing? Get out of my way, I need to practice." I used to be this kind of person, and I had to be like that in order to get anywhere. And I think it's unfortunate that it had to be like that, but I'm glad that I can... Any relationships I've damaged or things, I've worked hard to repair those.

Leah Roseman:

So your dad was an immigrant from Trinidad, Tobago.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yes. Yes.

Leah Roseman:

And he felt like you could do this, but you better be the best. So there was a certain pressure.

Daniel Ramjattan:

He's incredibly supportive. He's always been a cheerleader or whatever. He's always been there for me in all kinds of different ways. But he's a working class guy, and he doesn't say things in diplomatic ways. So when I was younger I would do a concert, and I'd play for something. And if I made a few mistakes or something, he'd be like, a lot of expletives. Just like, "What was that? What are you doing? Come on, don't you actually want to do this? What are you doing? Do you realize what you have to do?" And I don't think he really knew what I had to do, but I think he knew enough to know that I had to really try. I had to work a little harder than the other kids. I had to do things differently if I was going to get similar results.

To be on par with them in terms of opportunities, I would have to work twice as hard. So that's how he would... And everybody works hard. There's very few people I've met that don't work hard in music, but I think it meant having to exclude other things from my life. It was just having to not let distractions affect me.

Leah Roseman:

I was curious, because Trinidad Tobago is a huge percentage of people from an Indian background. Was it the indentured laborers that were brought over? Was it part of that colonial-

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yeah, it was from the former British Empire. And they gained independence from in 1962. My dad actually was born a British citizen. When he became older, he was three years old I think, not older, they got independence. And so my grandfather, I guess, worked in the sugar cane. But he actually made a life for himself, a quite nice life for himself. And he's really, on all sides of my family, one of the most inspirational people that I've ever met. He's kind of the reason I became a vegetarian and all these other things. He spoke Hindi, he learned Sanskrit, he could read it fluently. And he was a very, very interesting person. He was a devout Hindu. And he came to visit us in Canada at the age of about, I think he was in his 80s at that point.

And when he came to visit, he had never left his island before. He never left Trinidad, which is surprising because he was quite a cultured person. And he came to Canada just to visit my dad. And then he ended up staying with me and my mom, even though my parents were divorced. And he spent a month with us, and I saw his life. And I had always wanted to be vegetarian, and so he talked to me. And I said, "How do you do it?" And he said, "I just don't contribute to that." I said, "Wow, that's a great idea." So I just decided I'm going to do that. Yeah, Trinidad is a very interesting place. And Trinidad is a really a truly multicultural society. And because of the size of Trinidad, it's about the size of Hamilton.

Leah Roseman:

Okay, very small.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Not very big. It's not very big. Because Trinidad is so small and there are so many different communities that coexist. There's a Jewish community, there's a Muslim community, there's a Hindu community, there's a Christian community, and they're all actually forced to integrate. They can't actually be separated from each other, or live in silos where they don't acknowledge each other's existence. So they celebrate Diwali, they celebrate all of the different... Ramadan. They celebrate all of these different events. And many Muslims go to Hindu schools, or Hindus go to Christian schools, and so on. There's actually a lot of cross-cultural pollination.

If you talk to most people from Trinidad, they'll be able to tell you a lot about every world religion, and tell you some really compelling arguments from all of the different perspectives of those different religions. And I think that's a very fascinating thing. That's something I always really admired about Trinidad. And my dad grew up in that environment, and so he was able to find the classical guitar through his British teachers. And he thought that was a really great thing, even though he never learned it himself. And so when I was younger, he just had this... Maybe this is a white supremacist construct or something, but he thought this is the best type of guitar. And I don't agree, but that's what he thought. And so he said, "I think you should start with classical guitar." And so that's how I started, and I became serious about it very quickly.

Leah Roseman:

I read your dissertation mostly.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Wow.

Leah Roseman:

And one of the things that came up that it was interesting is Segovia being a tyrannical teacher. And also when I was doing research on him, that he was quite racist about flamenco music and wanted to-

Daniel Ramjattan:

100%.

Leah Roseman:

... eliminate it from the guitar repertoire.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yeah. He said one of his primary goals in life was to save the guitar from the hands of the flamenco guitarists. And this is really a... I have to say this caveat because I do have the unpopular opinion that we can separate artists from their beliefs sometimes. And I think that what he accomplished for the classical guitar was special, he did offer something. He did make it a concert instrument. We have schools for music all over the world. And every major conservatory has, well, with some very notable exceptions, has a classical guitar program. And that's because of Segovia. And that was one of his primary goals in life. That's a meaningful thing. And he still, by today's standards, he has done some impressive things in terms of his understanding of color and all these different things.

And he was denounced for a while. And now we're starting to understand his perspectives in some ways in terms of his technical abilities and things. It's coming back in some ways, but also, we see him for the man he was. And we see the flaws in his approach and his pedagogy and his ideology, which was strongly influenced by Franco's Spain, which was fascist. It was a fascist dictatorship until 1975. And so, Segovia was an avid supporter of Franco, and he harbored a lot of his kind of neo-colonial views. He believed that he could bring back Spain and bring back Spain's glory from the times when they were... He really had that going on. And so the flamenco guitar to him was this kind of... He was not able to understand how they perceive the world. But now we know that flamenco guitarists, any guitarist worth his salt, any good classical guitarists were their salt will spend some time with flamenco guitarists and try to understand what they're doing. Because their technical achievements are incredible, they are able to do things that... Their skills, their approach to sound.

So many of their technical abilities are far above the average classical guitarist, even when someone has only been training flamenco guitar for a short time. This is something that we all need to learn a little about. And that piece, Catharsis, on my album, is written by Raphael Weinroth-Browne, who studied flamenco guitar. He never studied classical guitar. We know him as a cellist. And anybody in Ottawa who knows Raph, or anyone around the world for that matter who knows Raph, will know him as a cellist most likely. But he is a multi-instrumentalist, and so he wrote the piece from the perspective of a flamenco guitarist trying to introduce it to classical guitarists. And this is fascinating. Because even when I first approached it, the opening of it, we're using Rasgueados and things like this. And he would always say, "No, you have to do it like this." And he would always show me how to do Rasgueados better, things like this. He's a very, very good guitarist.

Leah Roseman:

Daniel has shared a track from his album, Inspirations: New Music for Solo Guitar. Later in this episode, there are two more of Daniel's guitar performances, including a video for those of you watching. Check out the timestamps to navigate this episode. This first track is the first movement entitled Ire from Catharsis by Raphael Weinroth-Browne, who is a previous guest of this series, and is known worldwide as a versatile and powerful cellist. Raph has written that, "Catharsis was written in late 2012 at the request of my friend Francois Bergeron. It is a highly virtuosic piece that incorporates elements from progressive metal, flamenco, and Middle Eastern music. Thematically, it deals with transcending inner struggles and moving beyond past trauma and loss. Ire is pure anger. It is reactive and fiery."

Hi, just a quick break from the episode. I'm an independent podcaster who does all the many jobs required to produce this series, and there are a lot of costs I bear as well. Please consider either buying me a virtual coffee as a tip, or becoming a monthly supporter, starting at $3 Canadian, which is close to $2 US, or two euros, and getting access to unique perks. The link is in the description. Now, back to the episode.

Daniel Ramjattan:

With not a lot of training in flamenco guitar comparatively, but he's brilliant guitarist as a result of his flamenco training. And this is something I've noticed, I've had to study with flamenco guitarists as well for short periods of time and learn from them as well. It's really antithetical to the way Segovia used to see things. He would say that this pollination, which should be forbidden, but we have so much to learn from them. And in fact, classical guitarists do have a lot to offer flamenco guitar as well. And you see people like Vicente Amigo taking ideas from classical guitarists and trying to polish their sound in certain ways to get certain effects, not because they're trying to correct their sound, but because the polished, warm sound that you get from classical guitar is not always heard in flamenco guitar.

So bringing that into Vicente Amigo has benefited flamenco guitar. Bringing the technical expertise of flamenco into classical guitar has made classical guitar technique expand and reach new heights. And so we have something to learn from everyone. We have something to learn from Prog metal. We have something to learn from every single discipline possible.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yeah. And I think Segovia was not ready in his time for that. He was afraid of the electric guitar, he didn't even know how to respond to it when his prodigy, John Williams, openly embraced the classical guitar and started a rock band called Sky, which he used to tour with. It's very interesting to see how the world has changed since Segovia's time.

Leah Roseman:

You said when John Williams embraced the classical guitar, you meant to say, when he embraced the electric guitar?

Daniel Ramjattan:

I said, yeah, when he embraced the electric guitar. No, not a lot of people know this, actually, maybe diehard classical guitarists don't know about John Williams the guitarist, not to be confused with the film composer. Not a lot of people know about Sky, which was his side project that he created. I think it was amazing that John Williams, he told the world, because he was at such a high level as a guitarist that no one could deny him. He was able to say, I can do multiple things, I can be a versatile musician. I can try to communicate with every single type of musician and try to understand something from everyone and bring that into my playing. And I think that was really amazing.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. Let's just talk about Julian Bream for a minute, because the Leo Brouwer Sonata, we're going to share a movement of, it was dedicated to Julian Bream.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yes, the late Julian Bream. We lost him during the pandemic.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, but this was written in 1990, so he would still-

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yes. Yeah, Leo Brouwer wrote this for Julian Bream a long time ago. And actually, Julian Bream didn't record it for a bit after that. I haven't really listened to Julian Bream's recording of it because it's very hard to find. But yeah, it's become a staple of the guitar repertoire, this piece. It was just called the Brouwer Sonata for a while, and now Brouwer has written six sonatas for guitar, and they're all incredible. But this is the one that is probably the most popular of his sonatas as a result of being the first. I really wanted to record this for many years. I first studied it in my master's, and I wanted to bring it back. And so I contacted Drew Henderson who was the producer for my album, he did the audio engineering for it. And he's a great videographer as well, so he recorded this in the Church of St. Mary Magdalene. And was very excited to play it.

It was amazing. This piece was something that I have been playing for many years, but stopped playing for a while and then brought back. And recently, this summer, I went to Trinidad and Tobago, which I was mentioning earlier. And I went to a place called Caroni Swamp, which is a beautiful nature reserve, and it has a bird sanctuary in it. And it has the Scarlet Ibis, which is the famous Trinidad bird. They have flamingos there, that were there when we saw them. It was amazing. They have all these different beautiful birds. And I was so fascinated by the calls that they make, and the sounds that I was hearing in that part of the Caribbean, which is just so much different than the sounds you would hear in the forest in Canada. And I realize, of course, Leo Brouwer is from Cuba. This is the Caribbean. This is not really that far away from the world that he would naturally hear. And this music suddenly made so much more sense to me. The different bird call. The different motifs in it are really just bird calls, and it reminds you of Messiaen-ic moments for that reason. But there's a lot of beautiful things. He intersperses these Cuban rhythms with these bird calls in it. It's just beautiful.

It's ironic. All the movements in this work, they have odd names. The first movement is called Fandangos y Boleros, which these are different Spanish dance genres. And then the second movement is Sarabanda de Scriabin, and the third movement is Toccata de Pasquini. They're all written in this style, but with Brouwer's unique language. So, I think it's very well done. It's a great composition.

Leah Roseman:

Here is the Toccata de Pasquini, the third movement of the Sonata by Leo Brouwer, performed by Daniel Ramjattan. You can find the rest of the Sonata on his YouTube channel.

And he's endorsed your recording, I noticed it said.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yes. Yes. His manager contacted me the other day and said, "We want to congratulate you on what you're doing, but also you should let us know when you're doing this because of copyright things," and so I was glad they authorized the recording, which was great, officially.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, that's excellent. Maybe we should delve into your dissertation and your research on performance anxiety.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Of course.

Leah Roseman:

In some of the books you referenced, I had read quite a few of them in my quest to get over... Not over, but deal with my performance anxiety.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Manage.

Leah Roseman:

Actually, Madeline Bruser is going to be a guest very soon on this-

Daniel Ramjattan:

Excellent.

Leah Roseman:

... Series as well.

Daniel Ramjattan:

I believe I have her book just sitting on my shelf. That's funny. Of course.

Leah Roseman:

The Art of Practicing. And Gerald Klickstein, I'd actually tried, I reached out to him with no answer. I was hoping to have him too, but that book I think is really great.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yeah, he's less active these days, but that book is an incredible resource for anyone who wants to understand music performance anxiety, because it's written from the heuristic perspective of a classical guitarist and musician. It's not really directed at classical guitarists. It's for musicians. And it's just really one of the most useful resources you can ever have as a musician, I think. It teaches people how to approach ensemble playing for gigs and just be organized. It teaches people how to make a practice journal, very basic things. But the discussion of music performance anxiety was probably the most comprehensive discussion of it that we saw in any of the guitar literature written by classical guitar professors. That was what my dissertation found. That was what I was focusing on in my dissertation. He's a great... He has a really deep insight on that from many different perspectives, from a scientific perspective and a heuristic perspective.

Leah Roseman:

Could you remind me of the title of the book so people know?

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yeah, it's right here. Musician's Way: A Guide to Practice, Performance, and Wellness.

Leah Roseman:

Although when I was reading it, I remember when he was talking about choosing a appropriate repertoire, so it's not too difficult so you have things you're performing that are kind of in your wheelhouse, and I thought, you don't know what it's like to be an orchestra musician.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Of course.

Leah Roseman:

You don't get to pick anything because it's a totally different thing.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yeah, that's challenging. That's a really challenging situation because for many orchestral musicians, they're probably thrown into situations that they're not nearly prepared for, and then they just have to adjust, and so they never really get that comfort that they would get at a different level. And so you see, actually, that's very consistent with the research because we find that undergrad musicians tend to experience more prominent music performance anxiety compared to professionals, which is not really that surprising in some ways. But it's partly that professionals have gotten a handle over the repertoire, and they more or less know the really challenging excerpts having had to do auditions and all these different things, so it's more approachable for them. So the actual component of music performance anxiety that's preparation related is dealt with. Whereas if you ask someone to prepare something that's far beyond their level, they're going to get anxious whether they have music performance anxiety or not. That's just an anxiety rid activity. That's the definition of stress. You don't have enough resources to accommodate the task.

Leah Roseman:

I just wonder, Daniel, if there's a little bit of attrition going on there, because just so many people end up dropping out or do something different? So the people that they're checking who are actually are successful enough to be working professionally are the ones who succeeded at dealing with the... processing-

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yeah, 100%. There's a survival bias for sure, and we don't really know what people who have the most powerful examples of music performance anxiety or the most prominent or debilitating forms of performance anxiety... We don't always know how they approach it because they may have just left the field. It's a scary thing to think about, actually.

And I think it's a prevention problem, I think in that perspective. I don't really believe that anyone can... I don't believe it's a syndrome that you acquire from the air, and then suddenly it becomes worse like general anxiety. I don't think it's the same kind of thing. It's specific, task-related thing. So if music performance anxiety manifests, it's, in my opinion, preventable. And there are many factors that lead to music performance anxiety, which range from teachers, which range to mindset, range from parents' influence, range from all these other things that happen at the very first music lessons.

And we also see that some of the most ambitious, aggressive players, just this is something I've noticed, the most competitive players, they tend to be riddled with music performance anxiety because they're always tackling repertoire that's above their level. And this is a challenging situation because when you see an ambitious student like that as a teacher, you always want to help them. You always want to help them realize their goals, but sometimes they take on more than they can chew and they become overwhelmed, and this is challenging too.

Leah Roseman:

If they're aiming for perfection, but if they're... You know what I mean? It kind of depends on the goals of the student. If they're exploring music as a really fun hobby and they just want to play their favorite pieces, even if they can't quite handle it technically, that's a different mindset than someone who really wants to perfect it, right?

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yeah, for sure, for sure. And I guess one of the challenges of my dissertation is that I focus on people who are doing undergraduate in music, so a lot of those people are going to have professional aspirations in one way or another in a different way that you might experience in a typical music studio or with an older student that you work with that is just really passionate about music and is learning it as a hobby like you're describing.

Leah Roseman:

If we could just circle back a little bit to your life, I have to say, I hope a version of your dissertation could be published one day that's less academic and more... You have so many of your personal stories and insights. That would be amazing. Anyway, your story about when you went to do your ill-fated masters in Florida-

Daniel Ramjattan:

Oh, yeah.

Leah Roseman:

If you could share that.

Daniel Ramjattan:

I was living on borrowed dreams for a long time. I was a classical guitarist. And I don't know how I survived with no money for so long. It was basically loans and grants and things and just odd jobs and bizarre admin work and things like this. It was not really like I could afford to even be going to music school. I was drinking one coffee a day and just hopping on the bus illegally. Don't tell us OC Transpo, but all these kinds of things.

And so when I went to Florida State, I was like, "I'm going to go to the United States and study". I remember my girlfriend at the time who I was dating, she thought this was a crazy idea, and she was right. And she said, "What are you going to do? Are you going to have a job? You don't even drive." I was like, "Oh, I'm going to ride my bike. It'll be fine." Didn't really learn anything about the local culture. I visited for my audition. I didn't really know anything about what I was getting myself into. And I also didn't appreciate the culture shock that I was going to experience between Northern Florida, which is different than Southern Florida, and this part of Canada. I really was not ready for that culture shock. I kind of assumed that the cultures were more or less gradients of each other, if you know what I mean. Not that different. I would expect a culture shock going to Japan, but not Florida, whereas the opposite is what I found.

When I traveled there, I had to get a visa to go to the US, which you need to have someone claim that they have $20,000 in their bank account. And a very, very kind woman from Stratford who had seen my concerts, who I'd never actually met before but had seen me play many times, actually very kindly just said, "I can sponsor this person I can..." She didn't give me money to go, but she said, "I can allow them to go". So I went against all better judgment, and I stayed for a semester. And at the end of it, I applied to 40 jobs and I got a job finally that was on campus that I was allowed to work on. It was Dunkin Donuts.

Anyway, I went there and they called me and they're like, "We want to give you an interview to come and work for Dunkin Donuts". And this was December, and I had applied for 40 jobs about at this time, and I decided either I'm going to go back to Canada with the little money I have left, or I'm going to hope to the Lord that I can finish this program by just working at this job and just scraping up enough for the second semester, and then somehow getting my tuition paid and all these things. And they brought me in and had the interview. And they were so patronizing. They were like "We just want to give you a chance. We see where you're coming from and we just want to give you a chance, and I think this is our time to have you come in."

And I couldn't believe that I was doing this as I was doing it. You have those kind of out of body moments where you watch yourself acting in a way and you're surprised that it's happening. But I literally was talking to them and I said, "You know what? I'm wasting your time. I don't want to be here. I don't want this job. No part of me wants to be in this state. I don't need to be in this country. Life doesn't have to be this hard. I can start over and pick up the pieces and keep going, and I don't need to be here." And they were like, "What?" And I was like, "No, I don't want the job," and I just walked away.

And then I made up my mind then. It really clarified my decision. And I just took that money that I had, I got on a plane, came back to Canada the first semester, and then I stayed in Stratford for eight months, did some admin work there, had a very confusing time, did some concerts, and then I came back to Ottawa during my masters' and started again with Patrick Roux, who is a great teacher. I had a TA-ship there, and I had a lot of opportunities that I wouldn't have because I went there.

I received this Nalini Perera scholarship, which was fantastic, and it allowed me to go to Italy and study with one of the greatest guitarists that's ever lived, Lorenzo Micheli, and follow him around in Italy and Austria. And this was an amazing experience that I don't think I would've had if I went to Florida State, which is a great school for music, one of the greatest schools for classical guitar that's ever existed. And my teacher there, Bruce Holtzman, I had a very, very close connection with him. I still feel very close to him. He's influenced me in ways that I'm still unwrapping in a positive way. It would've been great to stay with him, but I think life had other plans for me. I think that it worked out once I was willing to accept that.

Leah Roseman:

And I was interested to read that when you went first went back, you were just busking, and that helped break down some of your anxiety because it didn't have to be so perfect.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yeah, something that I noticed was that when we go to music school... And this was something, by the way, I had been busking when I was in high school. I was busking regularly in the summers because there's a large busking scene in Stratford, and it's actually predominantly by classical musicians, busking by the festival and by the Avon Theater and the Stratford Theater and the main plaza in the center. And so I was doing that, and I had been very accustomed to that. So all these very difficult pieces that I was playing, I was able to run them multiple times for captive audiences. Some of them were more paying attention than others.

And this experience, I don't think it refined my playing by any stretch. And I think that was the drawback of it. It really kind of made that more difficult. But it allowed me to get to a point where I could just play through large amounts of repertoire and become very, very comfortable with being on stage in front of other people for long periods of time. And I would do this... I got a lot of hours in. Everyone has to do this at one point.

I found... It was a really funny story in the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, he talks about the Beatles. And when The Beatles were first playing gigs, they apparently were not very good by anyone's account. And they were eventually got this very strange gig at a strip club, and they had to play for eight hours, multiple times per week. They had to do eight-hour gigs. I couldn't imagine this today, and playing together. And so they would have to whip all this music together, and a lot of times they were improvising together, making songs on the spot and things like this. And eventually they became so good that, of course, the rest is history.

I'm not comparing myself to that, but I think that was a nice moment in my life where I was able to rediscover this challenging repertoire that I had spent all this time learning.

And of course, the difference between me in high school and the person I was after my undergrad was vastly different, especially after my training with Bruce Holtzman. So I was actually had a certain level of refinement in my playing at this point, I thought. And so I was playing pieces like the Bach Chaconne and playing the Mertz Elegie, and many pieces that I still play in concerts today, and playing those for an audience of just people going to the theater.

And so sometimes people would come by and say, "Well, what are you doing here? Why are you doing this? You're not a little kid playing Twinkle Twinkle Little star." But I thought it let me connect with all different types of audiences, which was very nice. I didn't have to connect with the typical classical music audience that we see, which is comprised almost exclusively of performers and other players or former music students, and just enthusiasts of classical music, people who are already very knowledgeable about the repertoire and very engaged with it and really love it.

And so I was able to deal with working class people who had no knowledge of classical music and be able to talk to them and have a regular conversation with them and just share that with them. And I found that the music truly is universal. They respond differently to the pieces that we consider great. Like the Bach Chaconne I find that... I used to play that after parties. I would go have a party and people would come over to my place after in the middle of the night, and I just play the Bach Chaconne for them. And this is not something I would normally do in any other place. But during that time, I learned a lot about myself and I learned a lot about the way I wanted to approach music and how I wanted to connect with people.

And so bringing that forward into a place where I am returning again to playing predominantly in these refined settings or whatever, I find that I have a different perspective on it, and I find that I can prevent myself from succumbing to pretentiousness and the barriers and gatekeeping that I often see happening in the field in the worst scenarios.

Leah Roseman:

I think sometimes people don't realize there's a great variety of musicians who busk. And I remember when I was in high school, and I was playing some solo Bach actually here in Ottawa. And this man came up to... I think he interrupted me, and he said, "I don't know if you realize how good you are. You shouldn't be doing this." I said, "Well, I'm just earning some money, and if you want to listen..." And he said, "No, but you should go into music as a professional". I said, "Well, that's the idea". We had this little discussion. He actually gave me a pretty nice tip at the time, but I was just... His attitude was kind of weird.

Daniel Ramjattan:

And I saw one older man who was a person who had been following my life for a long time who I greatly respected, who was very... Enthusiast of the arts, came up to me and he was like "Playing on the street, huh?" Just walked away. I've never really had that before, but that was a funny moment that I will not forget. And I think that was a portrait of the gatekeeping that we see. I don't think the gatekeeping is related to standards. I don't think it's related to these sorts of things. I think it's related to communities, and I think that's where it's truly problematic. It's when one community silos itself off from the rest and refuses to communicate with the others. And I think it fosters resentment and miscommunication and a lot of divisiveness that you wouldn't see otherwise.

I have found that some of the most unpretentious people I can possibly find really love classical music when they listen to it if you just play for them and don't try to make it this thing that they have to worship. They really enjoy it because everyone understands emotion. Nobody doesn't understand emotion. So if you just play with passion and you play with feeling, I think people respond to it, and it doesn't matter what their background is, it doesn't matter where they come from. And that's what I noticed. From my background, I'm being told that what I'm doing is for a class that I've never been part of, that I've never been really connected to, this kind of rich, upper class society that I was never really a part of. I was adjacent to in various times of my life as a result of classical music, maybe, but I never really was connected to that world. And I'm being told that I'm part of that, and it's not true. It's not true. It's very interesting.

Leah Roseman:

Another one of your recordings we're going to share is actually by your wife, the composer and percussionist, Naoko... Can you say her last name?

Daniel Ramjattan:

Tsujita.

Leah Roseman:

Tsujita. So there's two Gamelan inspired pieces. I thought we'd share number two.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yes.

Leah Roseman:

Is there other of her music that she's written for guitar that you've played?

Daniel Ramjattan:

Actually, this was her first piece that she wrote for classical guitar, and she hasn't written anything else y yet, but she's writing another piece for a great guitarist named Jelica Mijanovic who is here in Toronto, a guitarist from Montenegro. And Naoko is a great musician by all - . And she actually never wrote this piece for me, she wrote this piece originally for James Rennick, who is a classical as guitarist who recently moved to Montreal.

And when she wrote this piece, it was part of the Class Acts guitar workshop, which was organized by the Canadian Music Center. And Naoko is a real gamelan enthusiast. I think she's a kind of metallophone enthusiast. She's obsessed with everything that's bell-like. And she's not very talkative in general, but she will talk for long, long extended periods about bells of any kind. And she's very, very connected to Indonesian gamelan music. She plays regularly with the Evergreen Gamelan Club here in Toronto. And so she's done many different things with the gamelan and she also plays the carillon as well.

So she's most well known as a composer for the carillon. She's won numerous awards for her carillon works. And so the carillon is so connected to the guitar in its orchestration. A lot of music from guitar is as surprising as news to me is actually played by carillonists. So they take our repertoire and they play, which is fascinating to me. And this is also true of marimba, which is her instrument where she really has become kind of virtuouso in that instrument.

So she naturally wrote for guitar in a way that was just very authentic and idiomatic without really having to try that hard for it. And anyone who's a composer will tell you that that's a very difficult thing to do to write idiomatically for guitar without being a guitarist. I thought it was a very successful composition. I was really happy to play it.

Leah Roseman:

Here is Gamelan Suite, the Second Movement by Naoko Tsujita performed by Daniel Ramjattan from his album, Inspirations.

I saw some videos of her carilloning and it occurs to me, some of the listeners may not know what a carillon is.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yes.

Leah Roseman:

Maybe you could explain it.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yeah. Many classical musicians don't know what a carillon is. In fact, the truth is the reason I know what a carillon is because of Naoko. One of the most prominent carillons in Canada is actually in Ottawa in the Peace Tower in Parliament, and it's a giant bell tower that has at least 22 bells and they have a keyboard that's connected by wires and pulleys to these clappers, these balls that are connected to different bells. And these bells are very, very large. So the lowest bell, the lower the note, the larger the bell, is about 3000 pounds, three tons. It's amazing.

So she plays these with her feet and her hands. So she plays it like a keyboard but she can also play with her feet for the lower notes like an organ. And so they have these kind of broomstick like appendages that come out and you actually have to play them with your fist.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, they're punching down.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yeah, yeah, exactly because you have to press hard enough to make this giant bell ring. And it's interesting because there's dynamic considerations. Not all bells are tuned the same. Some of them are actually tuned as low as a minor third below concert pitch. So it's very confusing to listen to as a player. And when you're performing on the inside, she goes inside a giant bell tower, she has to climb a long winding staircase up a tower and then walk across a plank. It's very Hitchcock vibes when you see what she's doing. And then she walks across and plays this giant instrument and it's amazing to see. A lot of people don't really realize that they're hearing the carillon and a human is playing it. It's not actually a computer or anything. So she plays all kinds of repertoire on the carillon, many of her own compositions, but pieces is by Baroque composers, romantic composers, modern composers and everything in between. So it's really amazing.

Leah Roseman:

I grew up in Ottawa. So I think when I was younger I had the opportunity to see the carillon in action. I say this because then I think, was it a video? No, I think I got to see when they were actually performing. And then I did my masters at Indiana University in the States and they have a carillon there, so people study. And I remember walking across this quad or something and people practicing and it just sounding terrible because if you miss, of course it's quite... So instead of the polished version I had heard, Peace Tower's like - this cacophonous, someone actually practicing the carillon.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Right. And then she has ring time regularly. Because where we live here in Toronto just by fortune, honestly, I have no idea how, we live right in the middle of the two main carillons in Toronto. It's amazing that Toronto has three carillons. One is sponsored by Budweiser, ironically. And this one in Metropolitan United Church just south of here. And just north of here there's the one at the Soldier's Tower at the University of Toronto. So she regularly plays both of those carillons, as well as her teacher does. And it's amazing to hear her play it because she's very, very good at it and she's gotten very good at it so fast because she was already a great musician when she started. So she's been playing for five years and the language of music was already very well known to her. She just had to figure out the technique and she's really become a kind of rising star in the carillon. It's amazing.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. So maybe we could go back to performance anxiety. There was a couple of little things that I read in your dissertation that I found super interesting that they were sort of side notes of other people's research. One of them was that people who took beta blockers habitually experienced more pain in terms of injury because maybe they're sort of wound - I was kind of curious because if you're on beta blockers, which explain what those are, because non-musicians may not realize. It's like a heart drug that some people take at low dosages so that they don't get the physical manifestations of nerves. You probably can explain it better than that.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yeah, it's exactly. I don't need to add to that explanation. That was great. So the relationship to pain is probably not direct or causal. I think the situation in that study is identifying a core problem with beta blockers. And again, I don't advocate for beta blockers but I don't advocate against them either. I do performance coaching with people. And if they take them, I don't tell them not to. I would never tell someone to take them but I would never tell someone to stop either. So it's really a hard debate on what the best thing to do is.

And what we notice with beta blockers is that the problem with them and the one that is most often cited is that they interfere with exposure. Now, many musicians will tell me very quickly, "Well, it doesn't matter. I don't need to be exposed to anxiety. I'm anxious enough. You don't need to train me to fix this problem. I got bigger things to worry about. I got way too much rep to learn. I don't have time to be dealing with this." Fair, honestly fair. But if you are interested in getting to know what your anxiety has to say, if you are interested in getting to know what it can teach you about the way you respond to stress and the way that you react to stimuli, then beta blockers can interfere with that process because you have to fully experience the feeling and notice it without judging yourself in order to desensitize yourself to the fear. Just like any phobia. And we wouldn't do that all at once, of course.

If someone is afraid of spiders, we're not going to just say, "Oh, okay. Well, a way I'm going to fix the problems let's throw you in a room full of spiders.' That's not going to fix it at all. What you do is you start very slowly, you actually start with images or even having them imagine that they see a spider in front of them and having just... They will naturally get the feelings and then gradually lead them to have a picture of a spider just kind of far away in the screen. And eventually the spider's closer and closer in the image, not a real spider yet. Eventually you graduate to actually at the final end of the treatment, you probably have a real spider there and the person can even hold the spider, which is not something I'm not even ready to do.

So with music, exposure goes in a similar way. So beta blockers interfere with that process because they don't allow you to fully experience the physiological sensations. Now, if I'm unable to go to a caveat about the physiological sensations that we have, including the cognitive sensations that we have when we experience music performance anxiety, it really to simplify it, it's really exactly like a tiger attacking you. If a tiger is attacking you or you see an animal in the wild that is attacking you, your body is going to respond in a certain way. Your heart rate is going to increase because you have to be able to run. You might need to escape. You might have a fight response like I'm going to fight the tiger. It's probably a bad idea.

You're going to have a flee response like I should run away from this tiger. It's probably faster than you or you might have a flop response or a freeze response. Freeze response is like I'm going to pretend the tiger doesn't see me. And that's where our muscles tense up. The flop response is I'm just going to play dead because there's no other options. And this is what happens when sometimes people experience cataplexy and stuff when they play, which is very rare.

But you'll see people like vomit and they'll do... Horowitz used to vomit before going on stage. This is partly a flop response because this is a kind of thing that happens. Anyway, when we have these kinds of responses, these are called arousal responses, and they can happen in varying severities as we just said. But what's very fascinating about these arousal responses is that you can respond exactly the same way that you would when a tiger is attacking you versus when you see somebody on the street that you haven't seen in years that's like a good friend of yours. When you're having a great experience watching a movie or you're really excited about something or during sex or during all these positive experiences in life, they can feel exactly the same from your body's perspective. The difference is that when we experience music performance anxiety, we have a negative interpretation of those arousal symptoms.

So the same symptoms happen when we're excited. I'm talking to you in this interview, my heart's racing a bit because I'm excited to be talking and to be here. I'm pumped up about this, but I could experience the exact same symptoms and say, "Oh no, my heart rate is increasing. This must mean that something bad is going to happen," because we've created that association. But it doesn't intrinsically mean that. It's a subjective interpretation of arousal symptoms. And it becomes particularly powerful when we try to escape the feeling.

Often you'll see people who become desperate to make the feelings stop. They have to just stop the piece and escape. So this kind of thing is a very powerful example of us trying to escape that feeling. And when we avoid feelings, the irony is that they tend to come back stronger. And when we accept them and we name them and we get to know them with dispassionate curiosity, we actually... We don't always extinguish the symptoms because remember, it's not really good or bad that my heart rate is increasing or that I'm sweating or that I have cold hands or whatever. It's not intrinsically bad. It's an experience that I'm having.

Eventually you get to a point where those things don't go away but you become accustomed to them and they no longer impair performance, which is hard. It's hard to ask someone to do that. And that's why I say it's totally fair when people decide to take beta blockers. I mean, this is a long process and sometimes it gets worse before it gets better. And if someone is not willing to go through that process, it's a terrible idea to try to throw them into it. So if someone decides to use those strategies to help themselves, all the power to them. But that is the caveat, that is the challenge, that is the long-term problem that you invite when you don't allow exposure to take place.

And you may not even come into contact with all of the different factors that have led to caring so much about music, some of which are great and positive and meaningful. Music's been around for longer than we've had very basic things in life. It's been around for 40,000 years, long before math or science or any of these things that we care so much about. Music's older than everything.

Leah Roseman:

I was curious to ask you about improvisation because you'd written that it's more recent for you, which it is for me as well and it has also helped me with my performance anxiety. I often improvise on stage when the orchestra's warming up, I'll actually be improvising instead of playing what we're about to play and it calms me down quite a bit.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Excellent. Yeah. Well, improvisation is, to put it very simply, kind of extension of the flexibility that seems to help people so much with managing music performance anxiety. In terms of general wellness and wellbeing and all these different characteristics that we associate with mental health, having mental health, cognitive flexibility is one of the most powerful things that we can develop in our life. And improvising is an inherently flexible activity because you're constantly changing variables and adapting to them in real time. That's a very exciting thing.

It's also a very terrible thing to do if you don't have much flexibility or you don't have the resources available to become more flexible in the moment. So it's not something that you would throw someone into if they've never done it before right away. If they're very reticent towards improvising, it's very good to just start from a very simple scenario with very few variables. With my students, I try to just give them three notes and have them improvise over those three notes while I play a chord progression underneath or to just play open string basses while they improvise over just a few notes. And I have that little appendix at the end of my dissertation where I have these little exercises that I give students to help them improvise or introduce them to improvising in a more fixed way.

Free improvising is allowing you to let go of all of that and actually to let your conditioning just come through because you've been influenced by so many different musicians and so many different techniques and different things that you've experienced that this sound just comes out. And it's a really beautiful thing. So it's not very nerve-wracking for me to improvise at all compared to playing a piece, which is kind of the reverse of what I had before. So when I was younger I started improvising when I was busking actually because sometimes I just run out of repertoire. I didn't want to repeat it constantly.

So I found that after a while I got better at it as I kept doing it. Isn't that fascinating? I hadn't fully understood at that point that the more you practice something, the better you get it. I didn't really integrate that concept deeply when I was in high school. So once it started to come together, I realized, wow, it's not really a gift that people have, it's something that you practice and it's actually something that... Well, it's something that is more or less intrinsically done from the time you're a child. You see children, which kind of contradicts my statement that it's not a gift, but the idea is that it's something you can increase your skill with.

But when you see someone who is a child before they're socially conditioned to understand what is good or what is bad or what is a nice sound or what is bad sound, they will just hit objects, they'll try to make percussion with all kinds of different toys, they'll play with bells and all these different things to make sounds and those sounds may sound disjointed or atonal or whatever to us, but from their perspective they're often in a moment of deep focus that you don't normally see from children. If you watch them when they're improvising... There's a lot of great studies on children with improvising. You watch them during this process and it's disturbing to see the level of focus that they have. It's really like nothing else exists.

Leah Roseman:

I'm curious. Have you posted any of your improvs on your channel?

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yeah, I have. I actually did a improv at a concert not too long ago and I posted it on my Instagram and I thought it was actually better than a lot of the program. I had a lot more fun with it sometimes because I'm able to do things that I have been experimenting with because I often... I don't invent techniques, but I come up with ideas that I haven't seen in compositions or in compositions that I've made because when you spend enough time improvising, you will come up with idiomatic concepts that are unique. The task is different. You have to be in a special place.

And I think that's another thing that I've learned, which goes against that whole busking story that I was telling before. It's just this idea that you have to choose very closely and very carefully when you decide to play for people. And this is kind of challenging for some people. Some people you would say the opposite to them. They over prepare and they don't show their work to anyone. This is not good. But I used to be the kind of person who was the very opposite of that play for people under any circumstance and have bad experiences and then be surprised why I had bad experiences.

So I'm very, very proprietary about when I choose when to play and these sorts of things now because I think it's more valuable for me to have a good experience because the more you have bad experiences if you play or you're not prepared, then it sort of layers on you. So your confidence comes from having those good experiences.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, and hopefully connecting with your audience.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Exactly. Yeah, you don't want to feel like you don't care or struggling. It's not good.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah. I think when I had my worst struggle was when I felt like I needed to block out the audience rather than welcome in. And actually read reading Madeline's book, The Art of Practicing, really helped me with that.

Daniel Ramjattan:

I used to have the fight mentality versus the fight-flight mentality. I used to have more of the fight mentality, I needed to destroy the audience. I had this very hyper masculine kind of approach that was just like I would go out... I still kind of am like this a little bit but just I think of more of it like a gift. I prepare for the performance like it's a battle. But I try to say I'm giving a gift to the audience and I really like that analogy because the analogy goes very deep. If you say that something is a gift, it's like a child giving you a gift. If your niece or whatever gives you a gift and they wrap it poorly and it's not really something you could ever use, maybe it's a trinket that you'll never actually do anything with, you're not going to reject it when you receive it. You're going to actually be, "Oh, thank you." Because you understand that they took time to prepare this for someone. And that's generally 90% of the time how an audience is going to respond to you.

So that's how I prepare a performance mentally. I just say I'm going to give a gift to people. I'm going to share something. This is the fruits of my labor. This is the mental energy, spiritual energy that I'm in putting into this. I want to share this with other people. But also this is like a battle. I could just get knocked out anytime. So anything can happen. And so I'm prepared for that as well. And so I find there's this kind of dual nature about me about that way.

Leah Roseman:

And you're a Buddhist, you're practicing Buddhist.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yes, very much. Yeah. And I mean, that's a very core part of my life and it in informs basically everything I do to the deepest level. But yeah, I find that...

Leah Roseman:

In my ignorance, I didn't think that that attitude you have about preparing being a battle was very -

Daniel Ramjattan:

Very Buddhist.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Okay. So this is very interesting because the Buddha was a warrior. People don't really realize this. I mean, he was not a person who fought people. Of course he trained as a general in the military when he was younger long before he went on his journey and became enlightened as well. But before all that, he was training in this way. And later in life he is approached by Mara before enlightenment or whatever and Mara throws an army of demons-

Daniel Ramjattan:

Mara throws an army of demons at him and Buddha dispels them with, he turns them all into flowers. He turns all their weapons into flowers and so on. He's described in the Buddhist literature over and over and over as the great conqueror, because he's conquered Samsara. He's conquered this reality that we buy into, this reality of the self being paramount and the reality of the self being this fixed construct that is a static entity that we feel attached to, that we want to protect.

For me, and I think that in all religions, we see this appear over and over and over. In the Quran, you see this appear as well, this idea of there's this, we don't use this word in this way, but when the prophet talks about the Jihad, he talks about it, it's really like a battle, a holy war with yourself because to actually train yourself to become a person who is disciplined in any sort of way, especially if you're doing something that society doesn't intrinsically reward with money or fame or material objects, like music, if you're doing anything like that, if you're doing any kind of pursuit that people aren't paying you for, that is driven by your own intrinsic values, then you will encounter powerful resistance. That resistance isn't some sign of outside devilish force. It's actually you. Everything is a battle, and I think that's how I framed my life, also.

I think it's also just something that's, it's a working class mentality that a lot of people don't understand and I think that's fine. But the idea is that when I was a kid, I remember my dad freaked out when I told him I was a musician. I talked about this in my dissertation in this brief moment, but my dad said to me, he was like, "So you want to be a musician? What's wrong with you? You have to be a doctor." Because I was good at school and academics and stuff and math and all these different things, and he was like, "Why don't you be become a doctor? I don't understand."

I said, "He who goes into battle expecting to live will surely die. He who goes into battle expecting to die will surely live." I've found this to be true. I've found this to be true. If you feel like your back is to the wall, that's when you're the most powerful. Horrible things could happen, of course, but when your back is to the wall, you have special powers. When you don't have one foot in the door and one foot out, you have no other options available to you, there's no backup plans, this is when you are powerful.

If you go into a performance and you say, "I'm stepping onto that stage, and that is it, right? I'm ready for anything. I could be destroyed by this performance. I'm ready for it. I'm ready for the worst case scenario. I'm ready for the best. I'm ready for everything in between. I'm ready for it. Hit me with all you got." You come in with that. It's a very powerful thing. It allows you to be fearless because you're not trying to protect the self. You're not trying to protect this thing.

I think it's very interesting. I use violent analogies sometimes when I talk to myself about these things because... and you'll see anyone in my friend group will say these kinds of things a lot, but I wouldn't necessarily say that to every client that I work with or every coaching client, because everybody responds differently and everyone has different associations with those ideas. But I do find it very fascinating to see how people respond to those kinds of constructs. It's like, if you think about life as a dragon to be slain, it's like, wow, that's exciting. It's scary. It's terrifying. It's like, oh my God, so many horrible things happen but I'm going in there and I'm going to fight a dragon. That's really exciting, too. That's how I approach life.

Leah Roseman:

Daniel, you've done a lot of martial arts.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yeah, I have, for sure. That informs it as well.

Leah Roseman:

What are you presently doing in terms of martial arts?

Daniel Ramjattan:

I have a karate instructor that I work with, who's one of my best friends. He's a black belt. I just do karate with him. I'm not interested in getting belts or anything like this, but I do this and I was doing my Muay Thai for a while. Secretly, kind of closeted, I guess I'm uncloseting myself here, but I'm a low key MMA enthusiast. I'm very obsessed with these kinds of things. This is surprising to people, like, "Oh, you're a Buddhist. You shouldn't watch that. You shouldn't do this." But no, what they do is amazing. When I see two people go into a cage and I see them do the scariest thing, they're in front of all these people. They have performance anxiety just like we do, if not amplified in profound ways because they are preparing all their life. They have to condition their body in a certain way. They have to do all these things, and then they have to fight another human being who's fighting them. The crowd is cheering and all these things, and there's blood and it's horrifying.

Then at the end of it, what really is amazing to me, at the end of it, they're hugging each other in there and they say congratulations and they're shaking each other's hand. This is impressive to me. This tells me a lot about the best in human nature. If people were doing that more often instead of actually fighting for real, the world would be better.

I think that this is something that has helped my life a lot, just being able to find the fight inside myself and not be able to deny it, not be able to say that it's the evil part of me or something, but to actually look at deeply in the eyes and see we all have a destructive capability. We all have a part of us that we don't like or we are afraid of that we're not willing to acknowledge, but it's there. If you come into contact with it and you look at deeply in the eyes and you actually accept it, then it can't hurt you. It loses its power.

But if you allow, I've been through so many horrible things in life with my upbringing, all these things, and I carried a lot of anger when I was young. But martial arts has helped me. Really, the irony is violence has helped me. It's helped to let go of that, to actually see that this is a part of my existence, and it's okay for me to be this way. As long as I can control my body, I can work hard to control my mind. I can do the best I can and just look unflinchingly at my opponent. Then I won't be affected by rage and all these things that happen.

I guess this interview is getting quite intimate compared to anything else I've ever done, but that that's really the truth that I feel.

Leah Roseman:

Wilfred Laurier, where you're a professor now, you're teaching a course on performance anxiety. Is it a general first year course or is it more of a seminar?

Daniel Ramjattan:

Actually it was completed last year, last fall, and it was a third year course. It was very scientific based class, and it was a very challenging thing to design because I designed the syllabus myself, and I was very fortunate to have the administration approve it and be on board with something so challenging. I'm not actually aware of how challenging it would be to do this because we're working with people's vulnerabilities. We're working with people's deepest fears in some ways.

The fear of rejection and humiliation is a core fear. All animals have this. In fact, if you try to laugh at your dog when they do something silly, they will respond. It's a horrible thing. The fear of humiliation is a deep, deep, deep intrinsic feeling. When you work with people's vulnerabilities, you have to be very sensitive to the way they respond to distress. It's a very challenging thing. What was very challenging about the class was that every single person was from a different background, a different sector of the music program. We had some people in performance, some people in community music, some people in music therapy and education and all these other things.

That's what made it very challenging because I initially designed the class for performance majors, and I didn't realize that not all students had had preparation to actually really performed for people before. I wanted the class to be very hands-on. I didn't want the class to just be me talking and no doing, no actual engaging with the experience of performing. On the Tuesday, we had a lecture on different topic every week, and it was progressive. Then on the Thursdays, we would perform for each other and then talk about what we experienced.

It was really amazing because it is truly a universal phenomenon. We don't really find people who go into a performance and they feel nothing, and they just have this stone cold confidence that even when people seem like they're going into flow or all these different things, these arousal symptoms are universal. They're having those, even when the performance is going at top level or even when it's going poorly, people are always responding with similar themes that we see repeating over and over with variations.

It was really nice to watch how people evolved throughout the class, because I saw a lot of really powerful transformations that shocked me. I saw people start to understand what confidence means and actually become more confident when they were doing this. It was really, really a pleasure to see that happen.

It was a big class, too. I remember, the administration was like, "Yeah, you have this course, it's going to be great." I'm like, "Oh, that's wonderful." Then registration comes by and then a few weeks later, I contacted him. I was like, "Oh, do you know if anyone signed up for this course? Because I'm not sure how it was advertised." "Yeah, it's full, there's 50 people. Get ready." I was like, "Okay, good." Clearly there is a huge demand for this information, and I have noticed that because I've done lectures at all the major universities in Canada, except for maybe UBC, and I have noticed that people just really, really respond to it. They immediately respond to my proposals. It's pretty shocking at the response that I've been getting. What that tells me, because I'm not saying anything especially profound compared to my peers in the field of music performances. I'm talking about it generally in these lectures as a general topic.

What I'm finding is that there is a deep hunger for this information because it's not being discussed. I think the reason it's not being discussed is because teachers feel that it's a wrong thing to do, to discuss music performance anxiety with their students. It's a boundary that should only be crossed by a therapist. But you're a coach, and when you see someone in sports coaching their team, they're working with people's minds. This is supposed to be physical, but of course it's always mental. We have to be engaging with that.

Of course, if someone experiences trauma or they experience adverse symptoms like psychosis or things of this, you have to refer out. You have to know, this is where my wheelhouse ends, and this is where other professionals are qualified to do this. But when we're talking about the universal phenomenon that is music performance anxiety, is that is true, what I'm saying, and what I'm saying, that's a pretty radical statement, but I'm not the first person to say it. Diana T. Kenny, the world's leading expert on this has said the same thing. She's described it as a universal phenomenon. If it truly is true that is a universal phenomenon, then this is definitely in the wheelhouse of musicians.

This is something that is actually as... it's foolish to have this kind of distinction between technique and musicality, but if we are to think of a music lesson as addressing these core ideas, technique and musicality, well, there's a third thing that's obviously being missed. That's the psychology of performance. That's the experience of going up there. It's that gap between what you did in the practice room and what you did in the performance. That gap is something that we learned to address in one way or another, if we get to any kind of level as a player. Sometimes it feels more haphazard than others. Everyone feels like it's a random thing.

I think the most common answer that I get, which is, it's really not incorrect, this is really how musicians approach it, because this is what they know. They say, "Well, make sure you technically know it flawlessly in the practice room. Then when you go in, then you'll be able to do it." That's true most of the time, but what can often happen too is that we get on stage and we know it really well, but the doubt sets in. It's like, do I really know it though? Are you sure I know it? Then we talk ourselves out of actually knowing it. This can happen anytime with people.

We can do this with any kind of thing we find confident. Most people, like 99.9999% of the audience who's going to watch this is going to be able to hold a spoon, for example. They're going to feel pretty confident about holding a spoon. You're going to say, "Can you hold a spoon?" They're going to say, confidently, "Yes, I can hold a spoon," in one way or another. Are you going to think hard about holding a spoon? Probably not. You're going to feel confident. It's going to be below the threshold of difficulty for you. You're going to do it in a way that you may not even notice the spoon is in your hand. Now, if you take that level of confidence and you apply it to performance, if you bring the piece to that level, that's great.

But what about that spoon analogy again? What if I saw you holding a spoon and I said, "Leah, the way you hold that spoon is kind of weird. I don't know. Are you supposed to hold a spoon like that you're going to..." "What?" All of a sudden you're going to be analyzing yourself. You're going to say, "Well, maybe even the way I am holding, I don't know." You might find that you have some minor impairments in your ability to use a spoon for a moment as it confidence gets affected. The irony is that we don't have to have another person do that for us, although we easily can. We usually have ourselves doing that. We are kind of saying, oh, you can do it with someone's walk. Say, "You ever notice you have this weird thing when you walk?" People will suddenly, even though they've been walking their entire life or using their legs or something in some sort of way, they will find, oh, suddenly it's a challenge.

This is what we do to ourself when our preparation is large. How do we deal with, that self doubt, that judgment? That's really what music performance anxiety treatment is about. It's that gap, and that's what teachers can do. They can train people to have that confidence and hear that voice and be able to look that voice in the eye and say, "Hello, voice, I see you. I see what you're trying to do. I see how you're trying to help, but I don't need you to be here right now. I don't need you on the field with me. We've got this."

Leah Roseman:

For your clients who aren't your students, when you coach for performance anxiety, are you doing it over Zoom?

Daniel Ramjattan:

Yeah, always over Zoom, because I find it's much easier that way, but there's students at Laurier, my students, we inherently incorporate that into the lessons, maybe with less intensity or focus on that particular thing, but of course that's a core part of my pedagogy would be. When we address that, it's always unique to the person's instrument. I've worked with different instrumentalists and violinists. I was working with a French horn player the other day, violinists also. I found that they all have idiosyncratic approaches to music performance anxiety, but it's really the same concepts appearing again and again.

I think the most difficult thing for young people is that they play repertoire that's too hard, and they don't understand the fundamentals of what they're doing. The fundamentals is something we work on for the rest of our life, but just really being able to approach simple tasks and being able to do them with a level of ease that we hold a spoon. We often think that I have too many notes to learn for me to worry about how to just do this major second really in tune. It's think that's the challenge.

Leah Roseman:

It might be interesting to wrap this up. I'm just curious in terms of balancing your life, because you're teaching at the university level, and presumably private students as well as coaching. How do you keep balance in your own life so that you can get through each week?

Daniel Ramjattan:

My life's not that hard. I'm not a coal miner. That's hard. That's really hard. My life's pretty good. I play music for a living. I make all my money from music. What can I expect? It's great. Sometimes I get a little stressed out, but I'm very grateful, and I think that's the most important thing. I remain very grateful for what I'm doing, and just remember, put things to this perspective. Dude, you play guitar and you live in Toronto playing guitar. That doesn't make sense. That's a lot to be grateful for. Maybe I should expect more, but I think that that's a very, very nice thing that keeps me grounded, just to remember that I'm just a person who plays guitar and to be grateful for the fact that I'm able to do this and not have to work in a grocery store like many people who I know, who I respect, who are struggling to have to work in jobs that they hate to experience bosses that hurt them.

I see my students, some of them are wealthy and they come in and they hate their jobs, and they hate their lives sometimes, but they love guitar so much. To be able to just do this, I think it's easy to find balance when I put that into perspective. I don't always remember this, but when I do, it's very useful.

Another thing I find that is very helpful is to see my life as an arrow. I can't do too many things at once, but if I see everything in my life as serving one singular purpose, then I find that that's easier. Everything in my life is driven by the ethics that I've learned from Buddhism. Everything in my life is driven by this. If that's the arrow, then music is just a vehicle for me to help understand compassion for others. This work with music performance anxiety is helping me understand that as well, and it's given me a whole new lease on life for performing, because if I'm saying all of these things, I can talk all I want as an academic. It's very easy to be an academic because you don't have to do it. But to actually live that life and to actually have to play in a concert, I have to really be living out the strategies that I'm recommending for others and use them and implement them and get better at using them.

That's something that has given me a whole new lease on performing. It gives me a reason to want to improve constantly and to become as good as I can possibly because the more I do that, the more what I'm saying is true, and the more I can actually help other people. I can say, "See, it worked for me for this reason. These strategies are actually effective." Then that has really helped me a lot to find balance on.

But in other things, I just love learning languages. I love learning all these things. I'm learning Japanese. I've been learning Japanese for many years. I just try to spend time with people, talk to people a lot, spend time with people I like, and just try to work out. I find that fitness has helped me a lot in terms of managing myself. If I make my life purposely hard in my workout, then life itself is not that bad. That's another way I find balance, if I can describe that as balance.

Leah Roseman:

Yeah, I agree with all these things. They really resonate strongly with me. It's been really inspiring talking to you today. Thank you so much for-

Daniel Ramjattan:

Thank you so much, Leah.

Leah Roseman:

Your perspectives and also sharing your music, which will be a beautiful part of the episode.

Daniel Ramjattan:

Thank you so much. Yeah, I was really honored to be a part of this podcast. You're doing great things with all these diverse musicians that you're talking to, and it's just amazing to see the perspectives that you bring out of people, and you're very, very good at interviewing. You're able to get the really deepest part of people out very, very effectively, so I really enjoyed being part of that, and thank you for having me.

Leah Roseman:

I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Thanks for following the series on your favorite podcast player and sharing your favorite episodes with your friends, all of which help find new listeners. I have lots more episodes coming in this season three, with a fascinating diversity of musicians and their stories and music. I'm an independent podcaster who does all the many jobs required to produce the series, and there are a lot of costs I bear as well. Please consider either buying me a virtual coffee as a tip or becoming a monthly supporter, starting at $3.00 Canadian. The link is in the description. Have a great week.