Video by Eric Keith

Light played just beyond the curtain, inches from the performer’s feet. Anthony Glise took notice.

He would be announced into that light, onto the stage haunted by Horowitz and Stern, Bernstein and Mahler. None of Carnegie Hall’s ghosts rattled the guitarist, but he fixated, for mere seconds, on the sliver of dark between himself and the brightness on the other side.

“I remember thinking, the minute I step into that light, I’m on,” he says. And time slowed in this consideration.

Apart from the pressure of playing this esteemed New York venue, where he advanced as the first American-born winner of the International Toscanini Competition in 1991, Mr. Glise knew this feeling, embraced it as essential.

Having his first musical solo at age 8 (his mother started him on piano), he understood a performer’s discomfort as necessary for growth. The intensity and self-pushing expand the artist.

The step between dark and light becomes a step outside self. Performance, he says, is a shared moment between musician and audience. Once the self intrudes, often for lack of preparation, a wall goes up, a concert goes cold.

Feelings wrapped up in that step never change. Mr. Glise contends they can’t.

“The students I have,” he says, “they have no more or no less fear or stress than the greatest performer alive.”

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Who knew there would be a biker bar in Austria? Mr. Glise sat in its midst, doubting his choice of Vienna watering holes.

Patrons raised the noise level and a television blared a game show, some bizarre contrivance that entailed pushing cows into stalls and had as its guest a soprano from the famed local opera company. The host asked her to sing, and she obliged with an aria from Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.”

And the bikers in the bar sang along.

“They knew the words,” Mr. Glise says.

He recalls the incident not as a judgment about European versus American cultural education. (“We’re more active in pop music. They happen to be more active in classical.”) Rather, his presence in the Vienna biker bar reinforces what he considers an aversion to boredom.

Dedicated to the classical guitar, and its associated performing, composing and historical writing, Mr. Glise diverts his mind with fly fishing and sailing. In an earlier day, he worked as an emergency medical technician and volunteered with pediatric cancer patients.

He even taught fencing. “Jump around and stab somebody,” he says. “It’s great.”

Young men make a path for themselves in ways robust or timid. The 1974 Central High School graduate, who picked up the guitar as a teenager, forged his musical education with stops in Kansas City, then Boston, then Vienna, then points beyond.

When the musician showed up at the Austrian conservatory, he did so with no local acquaintances, little mastery of German and all of $35 in his pocket.

“You balance the concept of gutsy with stupid,” he says. “Somewhere in there, you just close your eyes and jump.”

Mr. Glise never stopped jumping, furthering his education at academies across Europe, playing recitals on two continents, earning commissions for guitar compositions, building a recording portfolio and even getting a seat on the French film commission.

Along the way, maybe 20 years ago in composing a guitar sonata, he found his “voice,” that harmonic structure a musician can identify as his own.

It provided a level of comfort and a sense of self, and it arrived like a lightning bolt. Enjoy it, Mr. Glise figured, but realize that unease stretches artists in their enterprise.

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Mr. Glise spends half his year in Missouri and half in a northern French village “with 500 people and 800 cows.” Hard against the Belgium border, the region has much akin to Northwest Missouri, an agricultural area where people look after their neighbors.

There, the guitarist can sit in a courtyard to work on his compositions; he has a commissioned Mass to finish this year. A fast train can get him to Paris in an hour, where he researches a book (due at year’s end) on the guitar’s history from the 15th century forward.

Back in Missouri, he teaches at Missouri Western State University and serves as founding director of the six-year-old St. Joseph International Guitar Festival and Competition. Performers have come from as far away as Australia, Ukraine and Brazil.

In July, the musician delivered a presentation at a French conference on “distorted time and motor control.” How did a Missouri guitar picker get in this room of neurophysicians, psychologists and researchers in the field of temporal displacement?

Turns out the adrenaline balances of performing artists can be studied, possibly for applications to pursuits ranging from combat to sports.

“We’re a glorious machine,” he says.

Action slows, colors brighten, the tactile sense grows more precise.

It is the feeling of that moment between dark and light, the stage awaiting.

Ken Newton can be reached at kenn@npgco.com.