FRIENDS OF MUSIC AT ST. THOMAS’S

Q & A WITH CLASSICAL GUITARIST DANIEL RAMJATTAN

On Saturday March 22, 2025, at 4 p.m., Friends of Music at St. Thomas’s will welcome Canada’s classical guitar ambassador, Daniel Ramjattan. He will perform repertoire by Bach, Mertz, Tsujita, and more. There will be a post-concert chat followed by a light reception. Daniel teaches guitar at Wilfrid Laurier University and at the Oscar Peterson School of the Royal Conservatory of Music, as well as privately. He also teach methods for managing music performance anxiety. Find out more in this interview.

Friends of Music: We’re very much looking forward to your recital on March 22. And you’ll be giving a post-concert chat as well, correct?
Daniel Ramjattan: Yes, it will be on music performance anxiety, which was the topic of my doctoral dissertation.

FoM: You teach on this subject at Wilfrid Laurier University, I understand.
DR: Yes, in 2022, I developed this special topic in performance. I believe it’s the first university course of its kind. I've given private courses as well, and when I travel to perform, I usually do guest lectures on the topic. I just played a concert for the Winnipeg Classical Guitar Society, and when I was there, I did a lecture at the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Music.

FoM: How do you approach teaching this topic?
DR: The core idea comes from acceptance and commitment therapy – the concept that we can't necessarily change what we may experience physically when we are about to perform, but we can change our reaction. What's really important to know is that anxiety and excitement create the same physiological phenomenons. Let's say your heart is racing when you're about to sing, or you're about to play a guitar concert and your hands are shaking. Anxiety looks at that response and says, “Oh no, there's something wrong. This shouldn't be happening! How can I escape this feeling?” It's an avoidance reaction. But a person having the same physiological experience could instead say, “Oh, this is lightning flowing through my body, making me powerful. How exciting. I'm pumped up to play. I'm pumped up to sing. This is what it feels like to be galvanized, to be ready to share my music with others.” That is a completely different experience, even though physiologically excitement and fear are coded the same way in our body. It's only how we interpret the feeling in our mind that makes it anxiety or not.

FoM: What practical steps can one take to embrace that positive reaction?
DR: It's something we have to work on daily. When we're practising, we have to notice when we experience what Buddhists refer to as “craving and aversion.” When we have feelings we like or that feel pleasurable, we tend to crave them. We want them to continue and ask ourselves, “How can I get more of this? How can I get back that feeling I had in the last concert? It felt so awesome.” This is craving, and as Buddhists teach, it makes us suffer. The other reaction is aversion: “How do I escape this feeling? I don't like it.” We're always vacillating between the two. And when we practise, that's typically how we approach learning. We either say to ourselves, “I don't like that sound, fix it,” or we think, “Oh, I love this sound, how beautiful – how can I get more of it?”

FoM: So what can we do to overcome “craving and aversion”?
DR: Instead, when we practise, we can say, “Oh, this is nice but it’s not the sound I expected to hear, so I'm going to shelve it for later.” And then we ask ourselves, “How can I get to the intention I originally had?” I find that if I'm always following my intention and know why am I making a decision, then there's a confidence that results. So during practice, if 10 times out of 10, you play a passage cleanly and musically, and you achieved the intention you wanted, then most likely you can do so on stage – you can bet on those odds. But if in rehearsal you got it the way you wanted only once out of 10 times and you stopped practising, those are not good odds. That's how I think about it.

FoM: How have your students reacted to your teaching?
DR: You know, they're always very surprised. They think that because I study performance anxiety, I'm going to be really soft on them! Of course, I try hard to help them relax during lessons, but then when they get closer to an event, I amp up the intensity quite a bit because I want them to feel what it's like to actually play with difficulty.

FoM: What do you mean by “play with difficulty”? How does it help them perform as well as, or better than, they did in the practice room?
DR: The answer is simple. If I were a weightlifter who was going to lift 200 pounds in front of an audience, I would train to be able to lift 240 pounds. If I were training for a marathon and I wanted to increase my time, I might consider running with weights or making it more difficult. So I get students to do difficult things that actually contribute to their musical product while they play. I have them sing the notes in solfege and play them at the same time. And I also make sure that they can count the beats out loud while they play: 1 and 2 and 3 and 1 and 2 and 3…and so on.

FoM: That way the music is really locked in.
DR: Yes. What I'm asking them to do is objectively more challenging than just playing the music. If you can play a passage cleanly while having this extra distraction [of singing or counting beats], then you can play it well on stage when you won’t be singing and counting at the same time. When a student is doing these exercises, sometimes I’ll suddenly say, “What time did you get up this morning?” or “What is 3 x 5?” It takes the person a moment to answer because they’re already using 100% of their brain’s resources. When performing, if you’re using 100% of your mind and body’s reserves, that’s actually not good. When you go on stage, you need to use 80% of your reserves, because so many things can happen in performance and you need to be able to shift on a dime. You have to be in just the right place. We call this the flow centre.

FoM: Besides guitarists, who has taken your course?
DR: I have students from different music disciplines – French horn players, singers, pianists, and violinists, for example.

FoM: I'm sure you've seen some students make great strides.
DR: Yes. This year I took my Laurier students to the Guitar Alla Grande Festival in Ottawa and they performed in concerts and masterclasses. It was amazing to watch one student who has always been very anxious break out of his shell and do really well.

FoM: Tell us a little more about your approach to teaching.
DR: There are three things we need to help our students develop. The first is so important: self-compassion. We need to be willing to bet on ourselves and know we're worthy of succeeding. Christians say we're made in God's image and therefore we are deserving of love. We have to give ourselves love. Buddhists would say that we have a Buddha nature: an inner part that is inherently good. So we have to believe in our potential.

FoM: What is the second element?
DR: Psychological flexibility – a measurement of mental health across multiple domains. It means being able to reframe an issue, to experience difficulty in the service of our values but not run away from what matters to us. Sometimes it’s what matters to us the most that can hurt us the most. We have a relationship with music that is very strong. We've invested so much in it, but it has the potential to really hurt us if things don’t go well. But that's actually why we should pursue it – it matters to us! We may simply need to be able to reframe the way we think about it, as I said earlier. We can tell ourselves, “This is not me being anxious. This is not a feeling I need to escape. This is actually lightning flowing through my body, making me powerful, making me ready.” That's flexibility – being able to solve problems in unique ways.

FoM: And the third?
DR: Mental toughness, which athletes know a lot about. You can also call this resilience. It's your ability to commit to a plan you make for yourself and to move towards challenges purposefully because they help you grow. It's the ability to know that whatever happens, you have a devil-may-care attitude and you can handle it, that you will be intact in the core of your being. It's about your willingness to accept that you can work on yourself. You're a ship on the ocean. You can't control the ocean, but you can control the boat as much as possible. You can be honest and tell yourself, well, this concert didn't go well, but it wasn't just because I was having a bad day. It was because I didn't plan my day properly and I didn’t go to bed early. I didn't practise this section the way I had planned. Therefore I can see how that led to the performance not going the way I wanted it to. Always take responsibility for what is going on. We call this an internal locus of control. The only way to really develop and strengthen mental toughness it is to do difficult stuff on purpose. That means doing things we don't feel quite ready for. We say yes to them before we're ready and then we make ourselves ready.

FoM: How did your journey as a guitarist start? And what prompted you to research music performance anxiety? 
DR: I started lessons as a child and about two or three years later, after listening to recordings and attending concerts, I knew it was what I wanted to do with my life. When I was in high school and well into university, I struggled a lot with music performance anxiety. I heard somewhere that meditation works. Mindfulness is a core part of developing psychological flexibility and really does help with craving and aversion. I thought, well, Buddhist monks might know something about that. So I went to a Buddhist temple and even though I was very skeptical, I learned a lot and found it helped me with music performance anxiety. After six months, I couldn't disagree with anything they were saying. And I was trying very hard to!

After a few years of meditation practice, I fell away from it a bit. I moved cities. I lost touch with my original group. I had some dark periods. A friend of mine, who had returned from doing a viola performance degree at the Curtis Institute, committed suicide. I was, at the time, starting my doctoral dissertation on composer R. Murray Schaffer, and I switched to music performance anxiety. Anxiety had been a huge factor in why my good friend took his own life. So I became focused on it, and it allowed me to heal a little bit. If there's something you’re really passionate about, really motivated to do, it's a calling. It was a very, very important topic to me. Over the years, many musician friends have said things that indicated to me there's a big problem. One even said: “I've never seen someone hate music as much as a student in music school.” It’s the pressure, the way that one’s sense of individuality can feel threatened. When the thing that makes you special is being a music student, that’s what defines you. But if we sometimes don't get the results we want, the ego is threatened. If my whole identity is “guitarist” and everything reinforces this self-image, but then I don't have a good concert, then who am I, especially if I have no life beyond music? You combine that with the difficulty of that period of life in general, from age 18 to 25 – there’s so much pressure. You’re trying to ascertain what your real values are. You're trying to figure out what really matters to you. And you know, we actually use the word “jury” to describe the final performance test in music school. That’s literally a term related to court! Musicians can feel like they are on trial when they perform!

FoM: You’re trying to help your students find perspective and balance then.
DR: If I can say something so bold, I feel it is my purpose in life is to help my students realize that one can become a successful musician and achieve an excellent standard of playing while also having health and wellness in life. You don't have to sacrifice one for the other. That’s what we should be teaching in music school. We typically learn two things: technique and musicality. Teachers are excellent at those aspects, but they aren't excellent at teaching students how to cross the gap between the version of themselves in the practice room and the version of themselves on stage. That gap is what we call music performance anxiety.

If your heart is racing or your hands get sweaty, there's a temptation to believe there's something wrong with you. But virtually everyone who performs experiences this to some degree. If everyone does, then it’s just a normal response. Being able to manage that response so that it doesn’t impair performance is really what matters. Training students to do that is, I believe, one of the core responsibilities of a teacher. I'm really privileged to have done this research because it's helped me a lot personally and in my approach with students. If I, myself, don’t follow the practices I teach, then I don't play as well.

FoM: You're also passionate about premiering new works. I know we'll be hearing some contemporary music during the concert, including a work you recently recorded.

DR: Yes, “Echoes from the Sea” was commissioned by the Ontario Arts Council for me to premiere. It’s by Naoko Tsujita, who happens to be my wife! It is an amazing large-scale work. This is the second piece by Naoko that I've played in concert. The first, “Gamelan Suite,” is on my album. “Echoes from the Sea” blends two disparate Japanese folk traditions. One is called the ushibuka haiya dance, a fun song women sang as their husbands went off fishing for months at a time. This is in stark contrast to the “hidden” Christian chant that was occurring in Kyushu, in the southwest part of Japan, where Naoko is from. The Portuguese and Spanish arrived in that part of the country first, in the late 1400s and early 1500s, and a large Christian population developed. When Christianity was outlawed in Japan and punishable by death, some people persisted with their worship, “hiding” their chants within Buddhist music. The piece is about the relationship between the fun ushibuka haiya dance and the disturbing hymn happening beneath it. It’s a kind of corollary for where we are in society now. We're having to pretend things are not going south really fast. We're trying to pretend that horrors beyond our comprehension are not everywhere around us. We're having to smile through the pain and carry on as usual while orders beyond our comprehension are being created and planned and executed. The piece makes you ask the question, “What is life like when you have that duality?” I think it's one of the greatest solo guitar pieces I've ever played by a 21st-century composer. And it's music that everybody can enjoy – it's very accessible. From time to time, the writing makes the guitar sound like a shamisen or a koto, Japanese folk instruments. It's one of my favourite pieces on the program.

FoM: Does Naoko compose for other instruments?
DR: Yes. She’s very well respected. You know, people in guitar circles know her as my wife, but in carillon and composition circles, I'm known as her husband! She's had pieces premiered around the world. She is also a professional carilloneur who plays at Soldier’s Tower at the University of Toronto, and at the newest carillon in Canada, at Yorkminster Park Baptist Church. In this city, we have four carillons, which is a third of all carillons in the country!

FoM: We look forward to meeting both of you at the concert and hearing more during your post-concert chat! Thank you so much, Daniel.