Increasing competition among musicians on the contemporary scene means additional requirements in terms of preparing of versatile and competitive singers, i.e. students who have acquired stable and high-level technical skills and who cope with the competitive environment. Therefore the additional ability of the voice teacher emerges: that is to support the student emotionally in the lesson, and equip the student with knowledge to deal with performance anxiety.
Semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven eminent voice teachers and interviews with an ad-hoc-designed questionnaire were conducted with the students of classical singing at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre (14), at the Tallinn Georg Ots High School of Music (13), and with the singers of the Estonian National Opera choir (30). The five-point balanced Likert scale was used in the questionnaire. The collected data were subject to statistical analysis. Cluster analysis was applied to those correlations in the obtained data, which were statistically significant (p<0.05).
Analysis of interviews and answers to the questionnaire demonstrated that besides to the training of technical skills, attention must be paid to the psychological training of classical singers. Results demonstrate that younger students tend to expect more care from their teachers than their older counterparts. Almost all of the respondents are willing to obtain more knowledge about how to learn to cope with stress. The voice teachers admitted that the majority of their students have problems with performance anxiety. Educational institutions which prepare music performers, including classical singers, have to ensure that their students achieve a high level of technical skills and that they have the necessary mental skills to deal with the performance situation.