Category Archives: Alexander Technique and Music

Learning To Trust Unlearning

Seven months ago my daughter Julia was born. One of the deepest joys in my life is watching her grow and develop. Of course that’s no surprise for anybody who has reared children. But what has surprised me is how much I’ve learned about movement and balance from observing her as she develops. And today that got me to thinking about why this is good news for musicians.

Skills, such as balancing her head on her spine, sitting up, turning herself over, coordinating her hands with her eyes, crawling…even the coordination of her breathing, are all being learned by trial and error. She tries certain things that don’t work, and she stops trying them. She tries other things that do work and she adds them to her movement and posture repertoire.

All of this seems to happen practically below the level of conscious thought. And as her skills improve, she moves with greater ease, efficiency, control and fluency. Her natural coordination emerges.

There is no other option: For her to function best in relation to gravity, she has to learn to move with respect to her structure. This “ideal” movement is what she has to default to. F. M. Alexander would call it a good use of her “primary control.”

It’s this natural coordination that she’ll bring into all her activities. That is until she gets older and starts (like most people do) to develop habits of mal-coordination that interfere with the beautiful natural coordination that she is learning now.

That’s not as bad as it seems. You see, if she does begin to lose this natural poise, all she (or you or anyone else) has to do is to unlearn her habits. Then her natural coordination will emerge, revealing itself to her as an old, reliable friend.

And so it is with playing music. To play any instrument, you have to call upon the repertoire of movements you’ve learned as a small child: negotiating your body’s relationship to gravity, coordinating your lips and tongue (if you sing or play a wind instrument), coordinating your eyes to your hands, flexing and extending limbs and fingers in coordination to create the movement necessary to play. And of course, breathing.

In a sense, you’d already developed all the necessary skills to play your instrument long before you even touched it for the first time. Those skills still lie there latent inside you.

When you watch somebody who you would consider to be a “natural” musician perform, that’s what you’re very often seeing.

Sure, as you learn to play music, you’re refining and integrating these skills even more. But the basic motor skills are already there. You learned them a long time ago.

Often when a musician with pain and/or performance problems comes to me for Alexander Technique lessons, my job is to help her or him rediscover this natural coordination. This (at the risk of repeating myself) involves unlearning.

Unlearning is a different process than learning. (It’s actually a different neurobiological process entirely.) Ask any musician which is more difficult when it comes to studying music: to learn something new, or to un-learn something old. Practically without hesitation she or he will say unlearning is more difficult. It takes more time. It takes more vigilance. It takes more persistence, etc.

Yet these same musicians are often reluctant to really trust this principle and follow it as far as it could actually help them. They’re often looking for some new form of doing. Some new, yet undiscovered manner of muscular effort to lead them towards growth.

As a musician, you might be looking for some special thing you need to do, perhaps that you’d never done before in you’re life, in order to improve how you play. And maybe that really is what you need.

But if you can keep coming back to the idea that playing your instrument involves nothing more than the coordinated effort of all the motor skills that you’ve already mastered (that’s right, mastered!) when you were younger, it can simplify things tremendously. (Not to mention how it can change your outlook in a positive way.)

You can learn to trust that, as you unlearn some of the not so helpful habits you’ve acquired, your playing will improve significantly. Your natural coordination will emerge. Combine that with artistic maturity and clear intention, and you have all the necessary ingredients for a great performer.

This morning as I was teaching I witnessed this yet again. As I was working with a new student on his singing, I simply helped him to stop interfering with his natural ability to use his voice. As I let him experience what it was like to sing without his habitual mal-coordinated efforts, his singing instantly improved. In a big way.

It was easy for both of us to hear the difference. More resonance, clearer intonation, beautiful color. This required no new vocal techniques, now new way to “imagine the sound”, no new form of effort, no new doing of any kind. Just undoing. And beautiful music emerged. He realized his path to improvement: Unlearn the habits, so the dormant, good coordination can be set free.

So if you wish to improve your technique, your sound, your time, your precision…learn to trust the process of unlearning and see what surprises await you.

Practice Paying Attention To Yourself To Improve Your Performance

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It’s not unusual for musicians new to the study of the Alexander Technique to be a little bit wary of the idea of being more intentionally aware in order to change their habits when playing music.

He or she can be put off by the idea that paying attention in this new “Alexander” way (awareness, prevention of habit, and redirection of thought) will become a distraction that interferes with the music making process.

This is a valid concern (one in which I had at the beginning of my Alexander learning process). After all, what you want as a musician is freedom to express yourself, not a seemingly oppressive form of self-consciousness. You don’t need yet another “mental ball” to juggle.

For you to perform well as a musician, you already must be aware of many things simultaneously. Here are but a few:
• Your intonation
• The intonation of those with whom you’re playing
• Time and rhythm
• Notation (where applicable), including dynamics, articulation, form, etc.
• The quality of your sound, and/or attack
• The blend of your sound in the ensemble
• The conductor (where applicable)
• Your personal emotional expression

I could go on. The point is, you have to be aware of quite a few things. But understand that all these things are integrated together in your consciousness as the whole “experience of playing music”. (It is when you’re playing well, anyhow.)

But conspicuously missing from the above list is one of the most important things to pay attention to: How you are using yourself. More specifically, what you are doing with yourself in order to create music.

If you shift immediately to placing all your attention on yourself as you play, you’ll very likely play worse, feel awkward, self-conscious, and in general, disconnected to the music making process.

The idea is not to divide your attention by paying attention to yourself as you play, but rather, to gradually learn to integrate your self-awareness by expanding your consciousness.

Think about it. You’ve already developed your ability to keep many things in mind as you play (again, as an integrated whole). It’s therefore possible that you can learn to place an increased self-awareness into this whole. In my experience, I’ve found that self-awareness becomes the central organizing principle that helps me to be easily aware of everything else as I play.

In other words, self-awareness is the thing that integrates everything else (intonation, time, form, notation, etc.) into a clearer, whole musical experience. You need to include yourself into your attention if you are to play efficiently, expressively and safely (avoiding injury). And if you wish to improve, this is fundamental.

So how do you develop this ability to be more self-aware as you play music? Simple, you practice.

Here are some simple guidelines and suggestions for practicing paying attention:
• Devote 15 minutes per practice period to deal exclusively with improving your self-awareness. After that, go on to practicing whatever and however you like. By devoting your time to this on a daily basis, you shift your emphasis on “sounding good”, or “practicing something useful” to allowing yourself to pay attention to your use as you play.
• Pay attention first to how you pick up your instrument. Do you tense up (stop breathing, pick up your shoulders, stiffen your neck/jaw, etc)? You might be surprised to learn that you’re already indulging in your habitual playing tension before you even get the instrument into position. Any unnecessary tension you notice as you do this, you can make a conscious decision to prevent.
• Notice how you’re sitting or standing as you play. Do you find your sitting (or standing) balance first, before you pick or approach your instrument? Or do you find yourself coming down and forward toward your instrument as you “clamp down” to play? It’s important to find an easy balance first, before you bring the instrument to you.
• Notice what you do as you create sound on your instrument. Are you stiffening your neck? Are you lifting your shoulder(s) unnecessarily? Are you pulling yourself downward, maybe twisting through your spine to do so? Are you locking your knees? Are you holding your breath? Are you making a huge, noisy, tense inhalation to prepare to play?
• Notice what you do as you begin to connect notes. Do you lose your ease and balance? Do you begin to stiffen your neck and shoulders? Hold your breath? Stiffen your fingers and hands?

Anytime you notice yourself going into your habitual patterns of unnecessary tension in your 15-minute “awareness” period, you simply stop what you’re doing (even if it means to stop playing completely!) Every time you stop yourself from creating this tension as you play, you accomplish two important things:

First, you weaken the response from your brain that creates the pattern. If you do this over time, you gradually reduce the pattern to the point of elimination (it stops becoming your habit).

Second, you strengthen your skills in self-awareness. Your capacity to pay attention becomes more and more refined. The best thing about this is that after a while, you don’t have to make an effort to “look” at yourself to become self-aware. Rather, the awareness of what you do with yourself as you make music comes to your attention on its own.

In a sense, this is what has already happened to you with your sense of pitch. If you’re playing out of tune (or if the person next to you is), you probably don’t have any problem hearing it. In fact, it’s harder to ignore it than it is to hear it. This happens because your capacity to discern pitch has been highly refined. Through practice.

And so it is with your self-awareness. If you practice this way, you’ll get to the point where you’re old habits of bodily tension will become just as hard to ignore as the musician sitting next to you who is playing painfully sharp or flat.

So give yourself the chance to develop this very important skill. You’ll find nothing but growth and improvement if you do. In one sense, this is the chief aim of the Alexander Technique. Lessons in the Technique can help you discover an effortless way to integrate all the components of music making into a smooth running whole. (Your practicing and your performing will never be the same!)

Using Your Body To Play Music: Integrate Instead Of Isolate

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One of the common traps that many musicians fall into is in thinking that one part of their body is almost entirely responsible for their sound: If it’s a flutist, it’s the lips. If it’s a violinist, its the hands. If it’s a singer, it’s the vocal mechanisms, and so forth. But in reality, this is never the case, and thinking about it as such can actually interfere with optimum performance.

True, if you’re a violinist, the music ultimately comes through your hands. If you aren’t using your hands well, you’re probably not going to have your best results.

But your hands are dependent upon your arms , which are dependent upon your back, which is conditioned by how you manage the relationship of your head and neck. And of course if you’re standing, your legs support your back, which supports your arms, which supports your hands.

This doesn’t even take into account how your eyes and ears influence all this.

When musicians come to me for Alexander Technique lessons, I typically see this over emphasis on one part of their body. Even before the first lesson, when we speak by phone, I often hear things like, “I’m having problems with the fingers of my right hand”, or, “I’m having jaw problems. My embouchure just seems stuck.”

And for sure, these musicians have identified the symptoms of a problem. But what they’ve really done is noticed the manifestation of a bigger problem: The coordination of their entire body is off kilter. They just haven’t realized that yet, and still think their problem is in this one, isolated part of their body.

Yet ironically, it’s this over emphasis and hyper awareness that is causing the problems. These musicians have effectively divided themselves into isolated, seemingly unrelated parts. All at the expense of excluding the whole of their bodies from the entire music making process.

In my own case it was the same thing. I took Alexander lessons because I had a serious problem with the functioning of my left hand, making playing the saxophone nearly impossible. When I came to my first lesson, my teacher listened very attentively and openly about my problem. She then begin to work with my head, neck and back.

Wait a minute! There’s nothing wrong with my head, neck and back (so I thought). The problem is with my left hand!

Well, fortunately for me, in that first lesson my teacher was able to show me (through the experience of movement) that my left hand problem was the end-result of the poorly coordinated use of my head, neck and back. As my head/neck/back relationship started to improve, the good functioning of my left hand began to return.

As the lessons continued, I grew to discover and understand how my legs, feet, eyes, hips…everything, was involved not only in how I used my left hand, but also, how I produced my sound, how I heard pitch, and even, how I imagined music and improvised.

Here’s a succinct and elegant description of this topic by Pedro de Alcantara, from his recently published book, Integrated Practice-Coordination, Rhythm and Sound:

” A violinist who plays a trill using two fingers of her left hand is, in fact, using both hands, both arms, both shoulders, and her head, neck, back and legs at the same time. If she doesn’t direct her back and legs to support her upper body, she’ll compensate unconsciously by stiffening her neck and shoulders, thereby affecting the fingers of her left hand. If she doesn’t command her right arm to bow smoothly and steadily, her left hand will lose some of its own stability. If she sways here pelvis forward and backward, she’ll hollow her lower back and shorten hers spine. Directly or indirectly, all these misuses will affect her trill.”

There’s just no getting around this truth.

So examine your own thinking about how you play your instrument (voice is an instrument, too!) Is there a connection in your thinking to all the parts, or does the “main” part live in isolation?

Whatever that “main” part is (hands, mouth, etc.) see if you can trace it back to its most immediate connection.Then trace that back to its connection, and so on. For example, if it’s your mouth, see how your lips work with respect to your jaw; then see how your jaw works with respect to your neck (and to how you balance your head on your spine); then notice how your head and neck work with respect to your back. All the way to your limbs, and even your eyes and ears.

You might find that there is some unnecessary tension in one or more of these connections. When you start letting go of these habitual tensions, you’ll indirectly improve the use of the main part, be it your lips, hands, feet…whatever.

So the aim here is to view your body as an integrated whole, not as a bunch of isolated parts. As you move toward integration of these parts into a unified whole, with a clear intention, you’ll make music in an easier, freer and more expressive way.

Think Expansively To Play Better Music

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As both a performing artist and an Alexander Technique teacher, I tend to observe the physical manifestations of a musician’s performance with one simple inquiry: “Is this person mostly expanding or mostly contracting as she or he makes music?” In essence, I’m looking for whether or not she or he is primarily gaining or losing stature while playing.

To be clear, you’re always contracting muscles to play music. You have to. And even when you’re “expanding” your stature there is still muscular contraction (along with a lot of release) going on. The real question is: What are you mostly doing with yourself as you play music?

A simple way to begin to address this question is to notice yourself in reasonably neutral, easy balance (not playing your instrument), then see what happens the instant you go play. Whether sitting or standing as you begin to play one of two things will happen: Either you “bear down” as you play, pulling yourself downwards and inwards; or you release yourself upwards and outwards. You tend toward either contraction, or expansion.

Noticing this in yourself can sometimes be difficult, as you are very used to whatever it is that you do habitually to play music. Even observing it in others can be an exercise in the observation of subtlety.

With some performers, it’s very easy to see when they pull down and contract, creating a good deal of pre-anticipated effort and strain. Perhaps you even notice this in some of your music students. (Perhaps you even notice it in yourself.)

When performers move with expansion, it often goes unnoticed. It’s as if they are really doing nothing at all, just leaving themselves alone as they play. And in reality, that’s precisely what’s happening. You see, you naturally move toward expansion if you don’t interfere and just let it happen. It’s how your neuromuscular systems is wired. You expand as you oppose the forces of gravity.

And what generally accompanies this physically expansive tendency is freely expressive, dynamic music.

The truth of the matter is that many great performers are actually going back and forth between contraction to expansion. In a sense, this mirrors the movement of breath. Inhalation and exhalation. It’s also a metaphor for artistic expression. Tension and release.

The really great performers ride this tension/release cycle from the music, and from within themselves. But mostly they default to release and expansion. That’s the baseline.

Other performers tend to default mostly toward tension and contraction. That’s their baseline. Usually (but certainly not always) this manifests itself as over-efforted, sometimes awkward and inconsistent musical expression.

So notice what you do with yourself as you play. Do you mostly expand or mostly contract? Here are some guidelines to consider in the form of questions you can ask yourself:

Am I pulling myself downward and inward as I begin to play? If you are, just think about releasing upward and outward instead. As counterintuitive as this might seem, it makes perfect physiological sense. A boxer, for example, knows that the power of the punch comes from the whole body expanding upward and outward, creating greater leverage and velocity.

What am I doing with my head and neck? Again, are you stiffening your neck and pulling your head downward, or leaving your neck alone and letting your head release upward? When you stiffen your neck you begin to interfere with the entire process of expansion.

What am I doing with my shoulders? Are you picking them up toward your ears, or are you leaving them alone? Are you letting your arms release away from your body? Letting your hands release from your back and arms?

What am I doing with my lower back? Are you arching or otherwise straining your back as you begin to play? Let your back and pelvis stay neutral.

What am I doing in my legs and feet? Are you locking your knees by throwing them backward? If so, let yourself release your knees as your weight moves slightly back toward your heels. Let your feet expand onto the floor (Don’t curl your toes!)

How is my breathing? Are you gasping noisily to inhale? If you are, see if you can notice how this affects your entire stature (contraction or expansion?) Keeping your breathing easy and quiet can work wonders for maintaining your stature, ease and balance.

Watch this video of the great violinist, Jascha Heifetz, as he plays Hungarian Dance #7 by Brahms. What’s noteworthy here is what he is not doing: He’s not pulling his head down. He’s not narrowing his shoulders. He’s not pulling his arms in toward his body (notice how free his arms and hands are!) And so forth. What you see instead is expansive, expressive easy music making. He is clearly working in cooperation with his physical design. Enjoy!

Master The Art Of Stopping To Improve How You Practice

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Recently a talented young violinist came to me for Alexander Technique lessons because he couldn’t play for more than about 10 minutes at a stretch without feeling significant amounts of pain and tension, particularly in his left shoulder area.

After listening to him talk about how he approaches practice, then observing his overall habits of movement and balance, I finally asked him to play so that I could take a look at what he was doing.

What I saw was no surprise to me based on what I’d already observed: A huge amount of preconceived tension that was not at all necessary to the act of playing the violin. In essence, his playing mirrored his general attitude and use of himself, being somewhat rigid and effortful, aiming for a narrow conception of perfection. He almost wouldn’t let himself move at all as he played, pulling downward as he “planted” himself.

His thinking (and therefore his energy) was being misdirected. Add to all this his rather inaccurate body map, specifically, misunderstanding how his arms worked in relation to the rest of his body.

He was a terrific student, bright, disciplined and motivated, and it wasn’t long before I was able to help him to play his instrument and otherwise move more easily. Each week he would report being able to play for longer and longer periods with no pain or exhaustion.

But the cornerstone of his improvement wasn’t improving his body map, or re-learning his balance and coordination, or even changing his erroneous preconceived ideas about playing the violin (just to be clear, he needed all these things if he were to improve, and all are VERY important). The most essential skill he learned was how to stop during his practice sessions.

I spent about 10 or 15 minutes during each one of his lessons just watching him practice. I wanted to see exactly how he practiced. What I noticed was that he rarely if ever stopped during an exercise, no matter what. I would see him flinch as he made mistakes, or as his intonation went awry, but that’s about it.

So we worked on getting him to stop more and play less during his practice sessions. We followed this rule: You stop the moment you notice yourself creating any unnecessary tension (going into your habit) or you stop because you don’t like something about your performance (intonation, wrong note, rhythm, articulation, etc.).

It took some persistence (from both him and me), but he went from stopping maybe once in a 10 minute period to stopping 20 0r 30 times. Each time he stopped, he gave himself a chance to notice what he was doing, prevent himself from doing the wrong thing (habitual, misdirected tension) and redirect his thinking in a more accurate and constructive way.

In essence, he learned the art of stopping. And he learned that every time he stopped and gave himself a chance to notice, prevent and redirect, that two things happened simultaneously: He weakened his habits of tension as he strengthened his new habits of ease and balance.

Each week I literally see improvements, not only in how he uses himself as he plays, but also, his musicianship: His intonation, flexibility with time, interpretation, dynamic range and more, all improving regularly. He can now play for very long periods without pain or exhaustion.

So learn the art of stopping. It is probably one skill that musicians neglect the most. Without stopping in a strategic way, you run the risk of doing the same thing the same way over and over again without any real chance of improvement.

Here are some guidelines to follow to help you cultivate your stopping skills:

Devote some time everyday to paying attention to yourself and stopping when something isn’t quite right. You can either notice things kinesthetically (“I’m starting to tighten my neck and raise my shoulder as I play.”), or aurally (“I’m beginning to rush.” or, “I’m playing this note sharp.”) Once you notice something that’s not quite right, simply stop playing and observe yourself. Then redirect your thinking toward ease, balance and expansion.
Notice how you react when you make mistakes. What do you do when you know you’ve made a mistake? Do you tense up? Where do your eyes go? What happens to your breathing? Does how you react help or hurt your performance? Learning how to make mistakes “without flinching” is an essential skill (especially for the professional musician!) If you can learn to make mistakes “graciously” during practice, you’ll take that skill right into performance.
Give yourself a chance to think. Once you’ve stopped, wait. I mean really wait. Make stopping, noticing, preventing and redirecting be your primary objective. As the great classical trumpeter, Rafael Mendez said about practice, “I used to practice 8 hours a day. Nowadays I only practice 3 hours every day, but I really listen to myself.”
Shift your thinking from the mechanical to the conscious. If you learn to stop more as you practice observing, preventing and redirecting, you can continue to strengthen the neuromuscular connections that lead to consistent performance. Forget “muscle memory”. Think about improving the connections between your brain and the rest of your body.

As I continue to progress as a musician, I find myself playing less and thinking more during practice sessions. This has served me very well, and I think it can help you, too.