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 Combating Stage Fright With Beta BlockersBy PAUL KWAK
It is not often that one encounters thorny ethical questions in the performing arts, so the recent surge in attention to the effects of beta blockers provides a fascinating opportunity for such moral inquiry. Last October, The New York Times ran a substantial piece in its Arts & Leisure section on beta blockers and the musicians who variously swear by them or vehemently renounce them; National Public Radio recently broadcast an extensive feature on the subject. Inevitably, the discussion draws parallels to performance-enhancing drugs in the sports world—an issue currently in the spotlight as Congress investigates steroid use by baseball players—and ends up questioning whether such parallels can actually be made. The central problem, however, is that such dialogues can be confusing and ill-informed, as the subject matter is so inherently scientific and not particularly accessible to the layperson.
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| Paul Kwak |
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Beta blockers are known medically as beta-adrenergic blocking drugs; they inhibit the effects of adrenaline on the body's beta receptors. These receptors affect nerve impulses through the heart, so that their inhibition effectively prevents the fight-or-flight response induced by the activation of adrenaline. (It is important to note that beta blockers are prescription drugs and should not be taken without a doctor's supervision.) Some musicians take them prior to performance to avoid what can be debilitating anxiety and stage fright. According to the Times article, the late pianist and Juilliard faculty member Samuel Sanders said in a 1980 interview that taking Valium (which is not a beta blocker) before a performance would "bring him down from wild panic to mild hysteria."The controversy—if it can be called that—stems from the implications of beta blocker use in competitions. Some argue that the use of beta blockers gives competitors an unfair advantage, the same way banned steroids enhance performance in competitive athletic events. The analogy is ill-drawn, however, because of the fundamentally different natures of athletic and musical performance. An athletic performance is inherently a function of physicality and the body, and steroids do the unnatural work of physical enhancement for a scientifically proven net benefit to the competitor. Officials declare such enhancement unfair because it effectively makes an athletic performance inauthentic. The competitor is not representing herself, but a pharmaceutically amplified version of her body.While the effect of beta blockers can be similarly understood as artificial incursions on the natural processes of the body, their ethical results are less clear because physicality is less inextricable from the performance of art, particularly music. (Dancers, I am sure, would take issue with this point.) While some performers might benefit from a reduction of pre-performance anxiety, others consider the butterflies-in-stomach a boon to their performance, providing an edge that augments it. Surely no one would consider it unethical that such performers benefit from their positive disposition to performance, and it would be absurd to imagine that they would ever be disqualified from a competition for being "good performers." Indeed, for them, beta blockers might actually detract from performance. In such complex and individually determined scenarios, there can be no clear moral imperative.Perhaps this is why, ultimately, there are few discussions of ethics in artistic performance—because performance remains a black box of psychology, emotion, and physicality that scientists have yet to open successfully. Still, in an endeavor that is motivated largely by ideals, ethics can aspire to such idealistic vision and emerge directive in spite of individualistic challenges. If the goal of performance—and more narrowly, competition—is to inspire the performer to his best and most authentic representation of himself and the art he presents, it is not wrong to allow him a medical mechanism for inhibiting his inhibitions. That is, where steroids create an artificial alter-ego, beta blockers can make way for a more uninhibited and true self. It is difficult to conceive the harm—or ethical wrongdoing—therein. Paul Kwak is a master's student in collaborative piano.
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