Rebecca Herman

Rebecca Herman trained as a cellist at the Eastman School of Music (NY) and the Royal Academy of Music, supported by major awards from the Countess of Munster Musical Trust and Help Musicians UK. As a Park Lane Group Young Artist, Concordia Foundation Young Artist and founding member of the Castalian Quartet, Rebecca performed at major UK venues, including Wigmore Hall, Kings Place, the Purcell Room, and the Cheltenham and Edinburgh Festivals. As a freelance orchestral cellist, Rebecca has worked all over the world with ensembles including the Philharmonia, BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Britten Sinfonia, the Irish Chamber Orchestra, Aurora Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Rambert Dance and English National Opera.

In 2017, Rebecca stopped performing due to increasingly debilitating stage fright. Her frustration with existing treatment modalities led her back to full-time education – in 2018 she completed an MSc in Performance Science at the RCM, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research council. Rebecca subsequently won an LAHP studentship to pursue doctoral research at the RCM’s Centre for Performance Science, where she is researching the impact of mindfulness training on performance anxiety, supervised by Professor Rosie Perkins, Dr Terry Clark and Professor Margaret Osborne. Rebecca has presented her research at the International Mindfulness Conference in Aarhus (Denmark) and the International Symposium for Performance Science in Warsaw, (Poland). Rebecca has also delivered performance psychology workshops to young musicians in the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Junior Artists’ scheme, the Street Orchestra of London and at the Royal Academy of Music Junior Department.

Rebecca returned to the stage in 2022 and is conducting autoethnographic research investigating the intersection between her own mindfulness and performance practices. She is currently based in Sydney and performing with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Opera Australia. Rebecca is also a mum of two (aged 3 and 1) and enjoys Klezmer music, experimental cooking and challenging misogynistic assumptions around parenting.

Publications

Herman R & Clark T (2023), It’s not a virus! Reconceptualizing and de-pathologizing music performance anxiety, Frontiers in Psychology,14 (1194873) [DOI].