Michael Goode knows stage fright: the dry mouth, the sweaty palms, the shaky hands and shivering legs. He’s suffered from bouts of performance anxiety all his life, but it became unbearable about ten years ago, while he was playing trumpet in the Danville Symphony Orchestra downstate. “We were playing Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien,” he says. “I started to get nervous, started to get the shakes. It really terrified me. I told myself, ‘I’ve got to solve this or get out of the business.’”
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Looking back, Goode doesn’t think his anxiety is surprising. When he was in fourth grade a colleague of his father’s gave him and his older brother a used trumpet. “My parents really despised music in all its forms,” he says. “My parents used to get in shouting matches in parent-teacher conferences with my band director in high school. He would tell them I should consider going into music. And they would shout back it wasn’t any of his business.”
In college at the University of Illinois, he majored in Spanish and Latin American literature, music, and business. He was still insecure about his talent, but he played music whenever he could. He even started a band, the Students, that performed around central and southern Illinois–Goode played lead guitar and sang.
He started studying stage fright in earnest in 1997, when he enrolled at the University of Chicago’s Graham School of General Studies. He’d heard that CSO director Daniel Barenboim believed that every musician who auditioned for the orchestra should have an advanced degree of some sort, because “he thought that would impart a degree of professionalism.” As he worked on his thesis he was surprised at how many people wanted to talk to him about his topic. Not just musicians, but also actors, artists, and writers, all of whom suffered some kind of performance anxiety.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Yvette Marie Dostatni.
