Music performance anxiety (MPA) is “the experience of persisting, distressful apprehension and/or actual impairment of performance skills in a public context, to a degree unwarranted given the individual’s musical aptitude, training, and level of preparation” (Salmon, 1990, p. 3). The condition affects 15–25% of musicians, with even higher rates in younger musicians (Robson and Kenny, 2017; Fernholz et al., 2019). This makes the diagnosis and management of MPA a key concern that has attracted considerable research interest. There are currently several psychometric tools that assess MPA, but there has been a neglect in the rapid assessment of the nature of MPA episodes, an issue this paper proposes to address through the reporting of a newly developed instrument.

In his review of MPA literature, Taborsky (2007) proposed that “numerous factors may influence the intensity of anxiety, often resulting in increased heart rate, state anxiety, and other physical symptoms” (p. 22). But Taborsky’s review reveals that the perception of the global intensity of MPA is not a significant matter in the design of the MPA measures currently available. While psychometric methods require a broad sweep of various, specific response items to facilitate a good estimate of the psychological construct under investigation, it is still surprising that direct questioning of global MPA intensity is not requested. There is compelling literature on small and even single-item measures as providing good approximations of aspects of psychometric constructs, particularly as initial screening tools (Williams and Smith, 2018; Casu and Gremigni, 2019; Turon et al., 2019). Otherwise, the psychometric scale relies on gathering data regarding a large number of possible individual facets that contribute to the MPA experience, and in doing so could become inordinately long, potentially redundant, or risk missing one or more key facets even before a diagnosis of MPA is made. As shown in Table 1, the most frequently used MPA assessment tools require between 15 and 58 items to be rated by the individual. A direct, simple interrogation of global MPA intensity would by-pass the need for such specificity as an initial step, and return to the root of MPA, which, as Salmon’s (1990) definition infers, is concerned with experience.

Of course, intensity alone is not sufficient to capture the experience of MPA. If an MPA episode is particularly long, then this would increase the MPA experience in comparison to a short MPA episode. Similarly, if MPA episodes occur frequently, at a given level of intensity, the overall experience of MPA would be more problematic than, for example, a single episode among many performances. A small number of MPA measures (Papageorgi, 2007, AMPAS; Papageorgi, 2021, MPAS; Sheriff and Yoong, 2015) have been cited that gather data about frequency of aspects of MPA episodes, however none have been cited that explicitly probe global indication of MPA experience (see Table 1). Frequency and intensity information is commonly gathered in extant (non-MPA) psychometric scales, both as simple global scales, and as fully fledged psychometric dimensions (e.g., Swain and Jones, 1993; Wisniewski et al., 2006; Kozel et al., 2008; Walker et al., 2010; Schneider and Stone, 2014; Van Lancker et al., 2016).

The studies cited that gather responses on global items tend also to include a third concept, which can be characterized as the burden of the experience, in other words, the extent to which the experience (in this case of MPA) creates a sense of seeking to avoid future such experiences. After all, one individual may experience considerable negative impact of MPA even with relatively low frequency and intensity of episodes while another may experience less negative impact even with the same frequency and intensity of episodes. Measuring the aversiveness tendency of the MPA experience was therefore considered essential. An early example of an MPA measure that explicitly makes this distinction is the MPAS (Wolfe, 1989; see Table 1), where helpful, adaptive anxiety and unhelpful, maladaptive anxiety were included as separate factors. This can be summarized in global terms as the impact that MPA has on aversion from performing, a commonly reported factor in MPA measures.

While such simple, global items may allow for rapid assessment of MPA, we acknowledge that they cannot replace comprehensive, multidimensional diagnostic tools. But the availability of global indications of MPA, and consequent rapid assessment of MPA experience would serve the research and clinical community. Furthermore, very short assessment tools can be sufficiently reliable, making their value potentially high. This paper therefore takes a first step in developing a short scale that assesses MPA experience. The aim of the study was to present a first step toward the rapid, reliable and pinpointed initial measure of MPA experience.

The M-MPAS was developed to address the need for a rapid, preliminary assessment of an individual’s Music Performance Anxiety (MPA). The five item scale gathers data on the global frequency and intensity of MPA episodes, as well as on the negative impact (aversion to future music performance) of the experience, and deliberately avoids matters concerned with etiology. The correlation analyses revealed that a strong relationship existed between the relevant, experience focused factors of the K-MPAI, suggesting strong construct validity of the M-MPAS (Cook, 1979). These K-MPAI factors may be viewed as capturing in greater depth the essence of the MPA experience, but consist of more items and time requirements than the M-MPAS (24 versus 5 items). Furthermore, we made an initial estimate of the cut-off above which an individual may be diagnosed as having high MPA. The five item scale has a possible range of 0–30, with scores at or above 11 proposed as an indicator of potential high MPA. The study has several limitations, and will need further investigation before it could be adopted for clinical use. For example, the question wording for three of the items (1, 3 and 4) referred to feelings experienced prior to, rather than during, performance. Ideally information about different stages of the performance episodes would be desirable, but for the sake of clarity, brevity and simplicity, we chose the antecedent time framing as the point of focus for these items. The reliability and validity analyses suggest this limitation is tolerable, but future work may seek to investigate the psychometric impact of modifications that identify and improve possible weaknesses of the scale. Access to an instrument that allows rapid, initial assessment of MPA is a matter of urgency given the prevalence of performance anxiety in a discipline that should above all be bringing joy and passion to its creators.

The datasets presented in this article are not readily available because the ethics committee has not approved distribution of the data collected. Requests to access these datasets should be directed to Emery Schubert, e.schubert@unsw.edu.au.

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the Human Research Ethics Advisory Panel of UNSW Australia. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.

IM designed the study, collected and analyzed the data, and wrote the drafts of the manuscript. ES assisted with the design of the study, analysis, and editing of the manuscript. Both authors were involved in determining the concept and rationale of the study. The study commenced while IM was conducting Honors research and considerably reworked as part of her Doctoral research program.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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