Minnesota Varsity: Christopher Weinberger

Instrument: Alto Saxophone

Hometown: Eagan, Minn.

Piece: Pierre Lantier — Sicilienne

Why do you love to perform?

Performing is more than getting up on stage and playing a piece of music. Performing is years of dedication, hundreds of hours of practice, and then one polished snapshot of the skills that were acquired. But most importantly, for me, performing music is an outlet. It's a way of expressing emotions, thoughts, and ideas, without verbally saying them. A performance is unique in that respect: it's often the only time that others are able to see my truest emotions come through. It's not that I hide anything I feel, but when I play and perform music, any feeling that I have will show in a pure form. This past year, I auditioned and got accepted into the All-State band camp. There, I heard a very interesting and influential speech about performance anxiety and what it means to perform. The speaker there told us how important she believed meditation and introspection to be. Often, she described, musicians get overwhelmingly nervous before performing. She said, instead of viewing the performance as a situation to be nervous for, view it as a situation to release the nerves. I truly believe that for musicians, performing is their form of release. A form of emotional and cognitive expression. This different outlook at performance has altered the way I think of it. I used to view performance as a burden, and an unnecessary component at the end of so much practice, I now realize its importance. Performing is a way to share the beautiful art form created, and to share emotions and ideas with the world.