Mindful Music
Trumpeter JoAnn Lamolino practices mindfulness alongside performance to ease performance anxiety
Photos courtesy of JoAnn Lamolino
Mindful Music
Trumpeter JoAnn Lamolino (BUTI’96,’97, CFA’00) practices yoga and mindfulness alongside performance to ease her nerves onstage
Trumpeter JoAnn Lamolino says her performance anxiety felt like she was operating a train, and suddenly she realized she didn’t know how to drive it. “Everything’s going way too fast,” she says. “Your mind is racing. You frequently can’t focus on the task at hand. You start second-guessing every little thing you’ve ever known about playing the trumpet or how to play in an orchestra or play an audition.”
Lamolino (BUTI’96,’97, CFA’00) started doing yoga as an undergraduate at BU, but she didn’t begin practicing mindfulness and yoga to ease her nerves onstage until after about 15 “crash-and-burn” orchestral auditions around the country a few years later. Integrating a daily mindfulness practice improved her focus and interactions with others. Before auditioning or performing, Lamolino would practice positive self-talk, center her mind and body as she sat down to play, and visualize herself playing beautifully.
“The improvement to my trumpet playing was actually quite significant,” says Lamolino, who lives in New Jersey but is associate principal trumpet in the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra and teaches at the University of Hawaii. “I started to advance in auditions. It got more and more fun, and then eventually I had my first [audition] win.”
When live performances ended at the start of the pandemic in 2020, Lamolino became certified in kundalini yoga—a process that took seven months and 220 hours of coursework—and in early 2021 began teaching mindfulness and yoga online. Many of her early students were fellow musicians, and she recognized that the inner work she had done could benefit other performers. Today, musicians from across the country can log on to Lamolino’s classes, seminars, and one-on-one sessions through her virtual Mind.Music.Sanctuary studio to learn exercises and techniques to reduce anxiety and increase the quality of their play. Lamolino also integrates mindfulness into her trumpet courses at the University of Hawaii and master classes she teaches around the country.
“Back when I was going to college in the 1990s and early 2000s, this stuff was still kind of taboo,” Lamolino says. “But I do think that being more open-minded to having a regular mindfulness practice really helps your day-to-day life, let alone operating a piece of metal on the stage.”
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