What Does a Good Performer Look Like?

Before a musician plays a note, we have already started reading them.

They walk on, settle themselves, perhaps look towards the audience. There might be an easy smile, a deliberate movement, or a moment where their nerves are more visible.

Quite quickly, we can form an impression. They look confident. They seem comfortable up there. They have presence.

We still haven’t heard the music.

That thought stayed with us when we recently returned to research by Hannah Cresswell, one of our quieteers and a musician. Hannah’s undergraduate dissertation explored introversion, extroversion and musical performance. Alongside existing research, she surveyed 30 university music students taking performance modules and interviewed three professional musicians.

Her original concern was whether our preference for extroverted qualities might affect how we think about musicians and who we imagine belongs on a stage. We explored that part of Hannah’s research previously in Challenging the Myth of the Extroverted Performer.

Coming back to the research now, another question caught our attention.

How do we decide that somebody is a good performer in the first place?

We don’t only hear a performance

Technique matters in music. So do interpretation, expression and the ability to communicate something of the piece.

Hannah’s research reflects that. When her participants described good performers, they talked about musical qualities and technical ability. But they also talked about charisma, passion, engaging an audience and presenting themselves confidently.

The visual side of performing mattered quite a lot to them. Of the students who answered Hannah’s question about it, 91 per cent placed the visual aspect of performance in the upper half of the importance scale, with more than half selecting five on a six-point scale.

The professional musicians she interviewed took it seriously too. One spoke about visual performance as part of communication. Another pointed out something easily forgotten when we talk about music as though it exists only in our ears: making music is physical.

That feels important.

Watching somebody breathe before a phrase, seeing the movement involved in playing an instrument, noticing musicians responding to one another. These things are part of being at a live performance. If they weren’t, there would be little difference between going to a concert and listening to a recording at home.

So this isn’t really about trying to stop ourselves noticing the performer.

The more interesting question is: what are we actually responding to when we watch someone perform?

When our eyes have more influence than we realise

One study Hannah explored makes this particularly interesting.

Research by Chia-Jung Tsay asked musicians and non-musicians to identify the winners of classical music competitions after experiencing very short excerpts of performances. Some people heard the sound alone. Others watched silent video, while another group had both sound and vision.

People believed sound was the most important information for judging musical performance.

Yet they were more successful at identifying the actual competition winners when they watched the silent footage.

Even trained musicians showed this pattern.

There are sensible limits to what we can conclude from that. These were experiments involving elite Western classical music competitions. Identifying the performer whom judges selected is also not the same as proving that one performance was objectively better than another.

Still, the gap is fascinating.

What people believed they were judging and the information that helped them reproduce the judges’ decisions were not quite the same.

And that brings Hannah’s original question about quieter musicians into a different light.

Perhaps it isn’t only a matter of whether an introverted person is capable of performing well. We might also need to pay attention to the picture of a good performer that already exists in our minds before they walk onto the stage.

What have we learned to recognise as confidence?

We tend to read some behaviours as signs of confidence very quickly. Ease of movement, looking comfortable while people are watching, being visibly expressive, appearing unselfconscious about taking up space.

None of those things are inherently better or worse ways to be.

They also don’t necessarily tell us very much about the person underneath them.

One of the useful distinctions in Hannah’s research is between someone’s everyday personality and the person we see while they are performing. Musicians can develop stagecraft. They may behave very differently in front of an audience from the way they behave in ordinary life.

A quieter person isn’t somehow prevented from learning how to communicate with an audience because they are introverted.

But learning to perform does not necessarily mean learning to behave like our stereotype of an extrovert either.

Hannah discusses performance psychologist Noa Kageyama’s response to the research on visual performance. He draws an important distinction between looking engaged with the music and making large, dramatic movements. Some highly accomplished musicians move surprisingly little when they play.

That complicates the picture in a useful way.

Someone can be expressive without being flamboyant. Communication might show in concentration, a small change in expression, or simply in the relationship a performer seems to have with the music.

Another musician may be far more physically expansive and communicate brilliantly that way.

Neither tells us whether they are introverted when they leave the stage.

And neither style automatically makes the music better.

HushFest made this feel less abstract

We found ourselves thinking about Hannah’s research again because quieteers became performers at HushFest this July.

At the opening gathering in St Cubert’s Church, musicians and singer-songwriters shared original work alongside other live performances. The afternoon also included the premiere of A Little Bit of Hush, a song that had grown from words and reflections contributed by people across our community and developed into a collective performance.

We had spent quite a lot of time thinking about what that gathering was actually for.

It wasn’t simply about putting on a concert. We wanted people to experience some of the creativity and contribution that can emerge from quieter ways of engaging with the world. Music became one of the ways we could share that.

Skill and presentation still mattered, of course. What was different was the purpose of the performance.

Nobody needed to be the best person in the room.

People were bringing something they had created, practised or contributed to and sharing it with other people. The audience’s role wasn’t to rank those contributions. They were there to listen and experience what people had made.

We don’t want to make HushFest into proof of Hannah’s argument. It wasn’t an experiment, and we weren’t measuring how anybody’s personality affected the way their performance was received.

But having quieter people performing publicly made one part of her research feel much more real to us.

Creating the opportunity to take part is important.

It isn’t quite the whole story.

The standards matter too

We often think about inclusion in terms of access.

Can someone get through the door? Are they invited to contribute? Is there a way for them to take part that feels possible?

Those questions matter enormously.

Yet somebody can be welcomed into a space while the standards used to interpret their contribution remain unchanged.

This is something we have thought about more broadly at Quiet Connections too. In A Manifesto for the Quiet Ones, we explored the pressure quieter people can experience to make themselves heard according to communication norms that often favour speaking readily, visibly and frequently. Hannah’s musical research offers another place from which to look at that same tension.

Her research is specifically about musical performance, so we can’t use it as evidence for what happens in a workplace, classroom or community group. But it does make some familiar situations easier to notice.

Think about a meeting.

An immediate answer can carry an air of certainty. Somebody else might need a little longer to work out what they think before speaking. Their pause tells us something about the way they are responding in that moment, but it does not give us a simple measure of the quality of the thinking behind it.

The same distinction Hannah found in music seems worth keeping in mind, even if we can’t assume the research transfers neatly from one setting to another.

There is what somebody contributes.

And then there is the way their contribution looks while it is happening.

Those two things can become tangled together.

For quieter people, simply creating more opportunities to speak, perform or lead won’t always address that. If the person who appears immediately confident is still more readily interpreted as competent, some people are entering those opportunities with an additional expectation hanging over them.

That doesn’t mean confidence is a problem, or that expressive performers are somehow taking up too much room. It would make little sense to divide people into dramatic extroverts on one side and subtle introverts on the other. Hannah’s research itself makes that far too simple, because people can learn performance behaviours and their stage presence may tell us relatively little about their wider personality.

Maybe the more useful shift is in becoming a little more precise about what we are actually valuing.

Hannah’s professional musicians repeatedly came back to communication when describing good performance.

That feels different from looking for a particular display of confidence.

A musician might communicate through enormous physical presence. Another may barely move. Both might draw an audience deeply into the music.

Between those two are all sorts of other ways of being on a stage.

Perhaps that is what Hannah’s research leaves us noticing now. Not whether quieter people can learn to look confident enough, but how quickly we decide what confidence, presence and ability are supposed to look like before we’ve really listened.

_{Header image by Kaii Davison, showing the band Zalick.}