Monthly Archives: July 2011

Prevention As The Key For Improving Your Technique

Bill Green, who was legendary in Los Angeles as a wise teacher and master of woodwind instruments once said to me: “You know, it’s a shame, but many musicians spend the first half of their lives learning to play, and the last half unlearning the habits that came along with learning to play.” And so it is with most of us, especially with respect to instrumental and vocal pedagogy.

In an ideal world (and what Bill Green was advocating) was to start off well on the learning journey, always developing habits that help us to make music instead of interfering with the process. I couldn’t agree more with this approach.

Unfortunately, not all of us have had the good fortune to have a clear-thinking, vigilant teacher always by our side to help us along the way. Many musicians find ways to improve despite what they’re doing, not because of it. (I’m no exception to that.) And even those musicians who have had brilliant teachers often still find ways of developing habits of misdirected effort that come with making music.

When I teach a class in the Alexander Technique to musicians, I like to go around the class and ask each person which aspect of pedagogy (technique, intonation, etc.) he or she would most like to improve. Practically without fail all the responses I get from the students have one thing in common: the need to stop something habitual from happening while playing music.

I hear things like, “I’d like to be able to play in the upper register without clenching my jaw.”, or, “I’d like to be able to play pianissimo in the bottom octave without stiffening up and going sharp.” In other words, these musicians are hoping to unlearn the habits that are contributing to their playing challenges.

Even the musicians who don’t directly use the “without doing” language still want something that calls primarily upon prevention of habit.

For example, “I’m awkward with my arpeggios. I’d like to increase my speed and fluency.” As I begin to work with the student he or she comes to realize that to do this involves stopping the habitual pattern of misdirected tension that interferes with the speed and fluidity of playing arpeggios. Again, prevention.

This preventative approach involves unlearning habitual response patterns. Once the student gets into the frame of mind to unlearn instead of learn, the true road to improvement is opened.

I call this subtractive practice.

Rather than adding some new thing to do in order to improve technique, the aim here is to subtract (prevent) something old (your habit) from happening as you play music to help you improve.

This has become a fundamental principle of how I practice everyday, whether it is something specific to saxophone technique or an improvisational concept. From this I’ve been able to find consistent growth, satisfaction and surprise along the way.

F.M. Alexander (the founder of the Alexander Technique) said, “If you can stop doing the wrong thing, the right thing will do itself.” With respect to instrumental or vocal pedagogy for so-called “advanced” or “artist level” musicians, this is true in many cases. (You already know how to play. It’s just a matter of attenuating a few habits to help you play even better.)

I encourage you to consider this idea as you approach your practice. Ask yourself: Are my habits interfering with my progress? If the answer is yes, I want you to know that you can begin to change that any time you wish. Here are a few things to keep in mind to help you:

Make a list of what you wish to change-Write down the 3 or 4 things (or maybe just one thing or 10!) you’d like to change to improve the technical aspects of your playing. It could be anything from cleaner articulation, to better intonation, to a more speed and fluency, to….

Reframe these changes from a point of view of prevention-With respect to each area of improvement you wish to make, see if you can notice if you have a habit of tension associated with it. For example, if you wish for faster and cleaner single tonguing articulation, see if you notice yourself tensing up as you “try” to play faster. Notice particularly what you do with your head (including your jaw and lips), neck, and shoulders. If you find yourself tensing up unnecessarily, see if you can understand how this tension not only doesn’t help, but might actually be interfering with your progress. If it is, then you know specifically what you need to prevent to improve. Almost without fail, sloppy technique goes hand in hand with misdirected muscular energy (too much tension here, not enough there). Make your desired aim be, “I’d like to stop tightening my jaw (for example) as I increase the speed of my articulation.” Reframe your other desired changes from your list in a similar way.

Allow yourself dedicated time each day to consciously work to subtract or lessen your habits-Don’t spend each moment of your practice time doing nothing but trying to stop your habits. Besides making you a little crazy, it can get boring and frustrating very quickly (I’m probably stating the obvious here). Just dedicate a certain amount of easily invested and manageable time each day to working specifically against each habit.You can say, for example, “For the next 10 minutes I’m going to practice making a conscious decision to prevent my jaw from tensing up as I gradually increase the speed of my articulation. That will be the aim of my practice. I’ll go no faster than I can go without tightening my jaw.” Over time your old habits of tension will become weaker and weaker, and your playing will improve. It’s that simple.

Allow yourself to stop-There’s nothing to be gained from doing your habit over and over if it is not helping you. Learn to stop at the very moment you notice yourself going into an unwantd playing habit. Every time you stop, you weaken the pattern. And you improve.

Allow yourself to sound worse-Anytime you change how you play your instrument, you run the risk of sounding worse. Now, keep in mind that this doesn’t always happen. Very often you’ll sound immediately better if you play with less tension. In fact, that’s the norm. But sometimes just changing one little thing you do habitually can throw you off for a minute or two. Don’t let that discourage you. Look upon this as an experiment. Give yourself a chance to adjust to the changes. See if you can understand specifically what your doing that might be making things worse. Are you trying too hard? Thinking too much about one thing? Tensing something else in your body unnecessarily as you play. You have another learning opportunity right there if you can do this.

I’ll talk more in future posts about bringing prevention into the aesthetic aspects of playing, particularly as they relate to improvisation. In the meantime, see if you can make a shift in your thinking from doing to prevention. You’ll be surprised by how much you can grow.

Juilliard Music Students Talk About The Alexander Technique

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One of my greatest satisfactions in life is being able to use the Alexander Technique as a tool help musicians. If you’re a musician, the Technique is useful for everything from teaching you how to avoid injuries and play with less pain and strain, to improving your coordination and skill, to helping you hear and respond more effectively to the music around you, to giving you a way of finding and developing your authentic expressive voice as a performer. It has helped me to improve as a musician more than anything else that I’ve yet discovered in my life.

Here’s a very nice video made by Lori Schiff, who teaches the Alexander Technique at Juilliard and at the Aspen Music Festival. She doesn’t try to describe the Technique so much as she just let’s the students (she also has a few working professional musicians speaking as well) tell about how they’ve been helped by the work. If you have experience with the Alexander Technique, you’ll likely appreciate (and relate to) what the various musicians are saying about the work. If you haven’t experienced the Technique, I hope this at leasts piques your curiosity. Enjoy!

Want To Improve Your Time? Call Upon Your Imagination

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To me the most fundamental skill for an improvisor to have is good time. Specifically, being able to perceive and control tempo. It’s probably impossible to create rhythmic interest and thematic development without first having a strong internal clock as a point of reference. (You never hear a beautifully improvised solo where the player’s time is unsure and squirming all over the place, do you?) Even when you’re playing with some kind of outside time keeping source (whether a rhythm section, conductor or metronome, or?) you have to be able to internalize and respond to the time.

Good time in music is always flexible of course. If you’ve ever played with a rigid, metronomic drummer, you’ve probably found the time to be less than inspiring, and even somewhat suffocating. The tempo needs to be clear, but it needs to be able to breathe, too. That said, the good time keepers have a tremendous internal sense of the default tempo of the piece they’re playing and don’t stray too far from it, always seeming to come back to it. Doing so helps maintain the integrity of the music.

For the improvisor, one of the fundamental skills is to seamlessly integrate melodic thinking and construction (pitch choices) with the perceived (internalized) tempo. Of course, playing with other musicians means being able to be primarily responsive to the collective tempo by the group. This, too, demands the ability to hear and imagine the collective push and pull of the time.

If you listen to Thelonious Monk, you can often hear the rhythm section pushing against his very strong sense of tempo. Monk was a master of finding the tempos in the “cracks” (you know, those tempos that are either a metronome setting too fast or two slow to stay at comfortably). Whereas most players would default up or down with the tempo to get out of the cracks and back into the “comfortable” (familiar is more like it) tempo, Monk would just sit there in the middle of it. This is what often created such excitement in his music and often characterized the piece he was playing.

To develop this kind of strong internal sense of tempo you have to be able to clearly perceive time as it passes inside your body and mind. That is a matter of imagination. Imagining how the time passes is what it really means to “internalize” the beat. I’d like to offer three exercises (games, really) to help you to imagine the time more vividly (and accurately). They involve working with a metronome, with and without your instrument. I’ve presented them in a sequence, the idea being that you build one skill solidly before you proceed to the next. Here they are:

Canceling the click-Set your metronome to about 80 beats per minute. Listen for at least a minute to the clicks. In your mind, really try to hear each oncoming click before it actually arrives. Now clap your hands on each click. If you can hear the click, you’re either early or late. If you hear nothing but your hands clapping, you’ve landed precisely in the middle of the beat, thus “canceling” out the sound of the metronome. See if you can clap for at least 30 seconds without hearing the click. If you can make it to 30 seconds, slow the metronome down to about 76 and try the same thing. Each time you’re able to cancel the click for at least 30 seconds, lower the tempo setting more. See if you can make it all the way down to 30 beats per minute (this might take weeks to master). If you can imagine the time at this slow tempo, you will have really strengthened your internal clock, and your sense of time will become noticeably better.
Finding the cracks-Take a standard song that you know well, or choose a mode or theme to improvise over. Start at the most comfortable tempo and play a chorus or two (or if it’s an open ended form, just play for a minute or two). Next, move the tempo down one metronome setting and play a chorus. Notice if it’s any less comfortable to play at this tempo. If it is, then stay at this tempo and improvise for a while until you find comfort. Then keep moving the tempo down in increments until you find the tempos that are difficult to internalize. Make a note of these metronome settings. You can do the same as you increase the tempo. Obviously as you increase the tempo upward you’ll run into other challenges with technique and with improvising good quality material. The aim here isn’t to see how fast you can play. You’re just trying to see if it’s (for example) more difficult to improvise over Confirmation at 182 beats per minute as compared to 186 beats per minute.
Fading the click-Find one of those “in the crack” tempos that is challenging to internalize. Set your metronome to click on beats 2 and 4 (in 4/4 time) in that tempo. Improvise for about 4 or 5 minutes in that tempo. Then, turn the metronome off as you continue to improvise in real time, not missing a beat. Improvise for about a minute or so, then turn the metronome back on to see how close you are to the original tempo. If you can stay fairly close to the metronome tempo for a minute, work on increasing your time away from the metronome. The more vivid your imagination of the tempo becomes, the longer you’ll be able to improvise with a solid sense of the original tempo.

These are just a few basic ways to get started in improving your time. In my experience both as performer and teacher I’ve found these to be the most fundamentally effective. I’ve since devised many other games to play with the metronome to expand upon this. I’ll be sharing those in future posts. Enjoy the exploration!

Being Still Is Not The Same As Being Stiff

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Playing music involves movement. No matter what instrument you play (even your voice!) you have to be able to move to make music. How would you describe the quality of your movement when you play music? Are you fluid and free, or are you somewhat stiff and strained? Do you “plant” yourself in one position, or do you sort of “dance freely” as you play? I notice in myself that as time goes by I tend to be a bit more still as I practice and perform music.

Some years back you could see me flying all over the place as I played, going up and down, side to side, twisting in rotation, raising and lowering my saxophone as I followed the dynamics of my musical expression. What you’d likely see when I perform now is relative stillness. Yet, ironically, I’m far less stiff in my stillness than in my excessive movement. I still move as I play, but usually not much more than a gentle sway that ebbs and flows with the music.

To be clear, I think it’s okay to move around a lot when you play music. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to confuse movement with freedom and ease. In my own case, a great deal of these movements of “expression” were primarily patterns of tension trying to hide the fact that I was not comfortable with stillness. Stillness (I believed) was the same as stiffness. (I also find this to be the belief of many of the musicians to whom I teach the Alexander Technique.)

For me this was largely because I never really learned to find balance as I played: Locked knees, tight shoulders, stiff neck and strained breathing to name but a few of my habits. I was in a constant battle with gravity. As I began to study the Alexander Technique, I gradually began to find true, reliable balance. And over time I found myself being in a state of easy stillness as I played.

Watch this video of the legendary jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker as he improvises a stunning solo over the tune, “Hot House”, from 1952. He’s certainly moving as he plays.

But notice what he’s not doing: He’s not hoisting his shoulders up toward his ears; he’s not collapsing or raising his chest; he’s not pulling his arms tightly inward toward his body; he’s not craning his head forward.

For sure he’s gently swaying with the music, but not in any kind of excessive manner. His movement looks organic and natural. He’s relatively still, but not at all stiff. Even on (or especially on!) his blindingly fast passages he is calm, balanced (notice his hands, too) and completely present:

As Parker plays you can see that he stays in balance with his movement. His head is always poised above his pelvis. And you can easily get a sense that he could move in any direction he wanted. He’s not locked down. All this supports his playing, providing a fluid yet stable foundation for him to work. All his energy is directed efficiently into the act of making music.

You could easily contrast his playing to other saxophonists (who shall remain nameless) who flail like mad in what looks like a series of ever-stiffening contortions. Even if they play well (and many do!), I think it’s fair to say that their postural and movement habits don’t support their performance. Specifically, they are not directing their energy efficiently towards the act of making music.

So think about what you do as you play. If you’re moving a lot, see if you can notice any excessive tension as you move. Do you move from one strained posture to the next? See what happens as you become still and play. Do you get uncomfortable? If so, ask yourself “why?” It might be because you’re unable to find balance and stability in stillness. If that’s the case you can begin to seriously consider how you’re dealing with balance as you play.

Conversely, if you barely move a muscle as you play, ask a similar question: “Am I holding myself here in this position with a good deal of effort?” See that your jaw is not clinched, that your neck is free and that your shoulders are balanced over your ribs. Make sure you’re not locking your knees and holding your breath.

If you continue to explore the quality of your movement as you play, you’ll open a door to not only a less stressful way to make music, but also to greater expression and clarity.

What Does It Mean To Be Persistent?

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When it comes to improving at anything (especially music!) through practice, I often think of Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity. I’m paraphrasing here, but it goes something like this: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again the same way, but expecting a different result.”

Or as a dear friend of mine would say: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.” This is precisely the trap that many musicians fall into when it comes to practicing.

As human beings we are constantly trying to make sense and find order in our world. For this reason most of us love to have a routine (even though we may complain about it from time to time).

Practicing music daily is a form of ritualistic behavior, a manifestation of routine.

It is more than just preparing for performance. It is reconnecting to our instrument, to our aesthetic impetus, to our most personal and expressive selves.

And with most of us, it’s a constant quest for growth and improvement.

But there is often a conflict within us: We want to grow, but we don’t want the process of growth to be too unfamiliar. We want to feel each day that we’re stepping into the known territory of our beliefs about what makes a “productive” practice session.

For that reason we tend to solidify our practice routines into something that seems symmetrical and tangible. “First I do this, then that, then that for 15 minutes, then that in these keys, in this order…”

The truth of the matter is that for you to improve you have to be willing to step into the unfamiliar.

Or as F.M. Alexander (the founder of the Alexander Technique) said, in order to learn we must go from the “known to the unknown”.

As obvious as that seems, you might be surprised to see how reluctant you are in your practice routine to step too far from what you know.

This doesn’t mean that you’re only practicing things that are easy for you to play (if you are, understand that that’s one of the main obstacles towards growth).

It might also mean that you are struggling with the same thing in your music making, whether it be something technical or artistic, even though you’ve been working on it for years.

If you’ve plateaued in your progress with a particular technical (or aesthetic) aspect of your playing, not really improving for a long time, it’s probably because of what you’re practicing (and/or how you’re practicing it). You’ve been persistent in your effort to improve in this particular area, but to no avail (see Einstein’s definition of insanity above).

But here’s where you have to be persistent in a different way: You have to be persistently re-evaluating the effectiveness of your practice routine.

This means always aiming to change what you do in your practice to find new ways to grow and improve. Here are a few things to consider to help you with this:

Don’t spend too much time practicing the things you can already do-Musicians often waste a considerable amount of time practicing things they can already play. For example, if you can play a particular exercise or pattern fairly easily in all twelve keys except for Db and Gb, don’t spend an equal amount practicing it in all twelve keys. Spend the bulk of your time on the unfamiliar (in this case, Db and Gb).

Learn to stop– There’s no point in “playing something through to the end” if you’re encountering the same difficulty in the same place every time you practice it. Get comfortable with stopping the moment something isn’t going quite right. Then give yourself a chance to discern what the problem is so that you can do something different to solve it. Once you’ve come up with a new strategy to approach this problem, apply it a few times to see if it’s going to be helpful.

Let yourself be wrong-Learn to sound bad without loosing your composure: lose the tempo, play out of tune, play the wrong notes, let the articulation fall apart, etc. Getting comfortable with hearing yourself make mistakes while you practice will open up a whole new world of growth possibilities. It will encourage you to try new things, and shift the focus of your practice from immediate results, to quality of process. Often I find great new exercises by “mistake” in this manner.

Understand clearly what you’re practicing, and why you’re practicing it-Be clear in your objectives about how you wish to improve and grow. As you approach each exercise in your practice routine, ask yourself, “Why am I practicing this?” and, “How will it help me?” You should be able to easily answer this if your clear about your objectives. What you choose to practice either serves your objective or it doesn’t.

Evaluate the quality of your practice over time-As stated earlier, if you’re playing the same exercise day after day for many weeks or months (years, even!) to help you with a particular aspect of your musical skill, and you’re not showing any improvement, consider throwing that exercise away. Never mind that somebody you really respect recommended it to you. Just because it works for them doesn’t mean it works for you. Explore and find something else.

Be flexible with the order of your practice routine-Once you’ve warmed up, allow yourself to change the order of what you practice every day. You might be surprised in doing this that you find greater efficiency, focus and enjoyment with your practice. There is no such thing as the best order that works for every practice session. How you’re feeling and playing that day can help you determine the most logical (and most productive!) order of your practice routine.

Balance the known with the unknown-It’s important that you have a satisfactory experience when you practice. As you explore and re-evaluate your practice routine, try to keep a balance between what is comfortable and what pushes you into new terrain. If all you do when you practice is seek the unfamiliar, not only will you never solidify what you practice, but also, you”ll never let yourself have a chance to enjoy sounding good. So reward yourself at every practice session with the kinds of things that are easy to play and bring pleasure to you.

If you keep persistent in your evaluation of your practice routine, you’ll find it much easier and more rewarding to practice your way into continuous growth. That in itself is a kind of reward that will keep you excited about practicing every day.