Category Archives: Musician’s Health

Skill and Coordination (They’re Not Necessarily the Same Thing)

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One of the aims of the Alexander Technique is to improve coordination.

And I would say more specifically for musicians, the aim of the Technique is to improve the quality of  overall  coordination that you use to implement your music making skills.

A misapprehension that many musicians have is that skill and coordination are one and the same thing.

Though they are certainly closely related, they’re not exactly  one and the same.

How so?

Allow me to clarify by offering my  working definitions of the two terms.

Your skill is your ability to carry out your desired task (for our purposes, playing music). It is manifested in tangible, sonic results: pitch, time, articulation, tone color, technical control, expression, etc.

Your coordination is what you do with your entire self  to carry out your skill. It is manifested in muscular effort, or more specifically, the quality of movement you apply to the task. (This includes balance, posture, breathing….everything you do!)

So it is possible to be a highly skilled musician (and yes, this does mean having highly cultivated  fine  motor coordination skills), yet have less than optimal overall, gross  motor coordination.

You can witness this in many instances, if you take time to notice.

Some musicians make it look easy, don’t they?

Truth be told, for most of these musicians, it is  easy. They typically appear effortless because their efforts are so singularly integrated into the skill of their performance. Virtually nothing they do interferes with their artistic intentions, with their desire of self-expression, nor with the acoustic and physiologic components involved in playing.

(I look upon classical pianist Artur Rubinstein as a glowing example: free neck, strong and flexible back and arms, moving easily, fluidly and naturally with the music. It is this beautiful, efficient coordination that is at the service of his skills.)

And I think we’ve all seen/heard virtuosic musicians who look like they’re fighting an imaginary foe as they play music: head compressed into the neck, raised (stiff) shoulders, rigid ribs and back, hard narrowed gaze, noisy breathing.

Yet they still deliver the goods. They still play devastatingly beautiful music. (No, I won’t point my finger at any one musician here, as a gesture of respect. But I so easily could!)

So should these musicians even bother with improving their overall coordination? Should you?

Yes. And for three main reasons:

1. Your overall coordination impacts your skill. When you are working in a less than optimally coordinated way, you are interfering with your brain/body’s ability to carry out your skill in the most efficient manner. In essence, you’re working against your human design, and not in accordance with it.  You might be able to do so. But you do so despite of, not because  of, your coordination. Improving your overall coordination invites greater skill. Or, as F.M. Alexander (the founder of the Alexander Technque) said, your improved coordination creates “the ideal conditions” for your skill to manifest itself through your bodily mechanism.

2. By improving your overall coordination, you reduce your risk of injury (and fatigue). This is why many musicians seek my help as an Alexander teacher in the first place. I have volumes of stories of very highly skilled musicians I’ve encountered who have career-threatening health issues that are related to the poor coordination they apply to their skill. As their coordination improves, so does their health, comfort, endurance and satisfaction.

3. By improving your overall coordination, you open yourself up to other expressive possibilities. This is the hidden gem of all this. As you improve your overall coordination, you also discover different ways to experience the music you play. You become less stereotyped (less “stuck”) in your interpretive choices, which, believe it or not, are highly conditioned by your bodily reactions. (This is especially true for improvising musicians!)

Our tendency as musicians is to sometimes become overly concerned with the parts that seem most pertinent to playing our instruments at the expense of neglecting the rest of ourselves. (For example, a flutist thinking perhaps too  much about the formation of the embouchure at the expense of not noticing neck and shoulder strain.)

If this sounds even remotely familiar to you, consider including  the quality of how you “use” your entire self (your overall coordination) into the consciousness of  playing your instrument.

Let your head be poised freely atop your spine (and of course, let your jaw be free). Let your shoulders release and widen. Soften your gaze. Let you knees unlock. If you’re standing, let your ankles be free and mobile (feet, too!) as you permit the ground to support you. Let your breathing be elastic, easy, reflexive and expansive.

Think balance, mobility and expansion, instead of position or  posture. A nice, lively, upward organization of your whole organism is the wish. Notice how these things impact your skill.

And of course, if you need any help in this area, consider finding a skilled Alexander Technique teacher. Allow your coordination to support your skill, and your expression.

This Change In Attitude Can Help You Play With Much Less Strain

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The main thing I look for whenever I’m giving an Alexander Technique lesson to a musician for the first time is preparation.

I want to see what my student does those brief seconds before she or he starts to play.

Playing music involves movement, and movement requires preparation, whether it is done consciously or unconsciously. In short, this preparation could be described as habit.

But before I observe my student play for the first time, I spend lots of time asking questions. I want to get an idea not only of the challenges that have led this student to seek my help, but also, the thinking involved in playing music. It is this thinking that is often the foundation of the habits.

These musicians will have a large array of preparation habits, and I’ve never yet encountered two musicians who share identical habits.

Having said that, I can say that all of the musicians who come my way for help have one habit in common: They begin preparing to play by tensing themselves up.

In other words, the movement organized to play that first note involves lots of muscular contraction. A good deal of this muscular contraction is not only unnecessary to sustain  the act of playing the instrument, but it is also unnecessary to begin  the act of playing.

Much of this muscular organization can be attributed to attitude and belief. If you believe you need to tense yourself up to play, then you certainly will, for better or for worse.

But here’s the thing about virtually all human movement: It can begin with release instead of tension.

That’s right, the movement can start by letting something go, but un-latching something in yourself.

For example, if you’re standing and you wish to begin to walk, you can tense your neck and shoulders as you pull yourself down into your pelvis onto one side of your body to de-weight the leg necessary to start the first step, then pull your leg up into your pelvis in order to bend your knee. (This is a fairly apt description of what many people do as they begin to walk.)

On the other hand, you can move from standing into a walk by having these three things coming into play:

1. The intention to walk.

2. A light, upward organization in your body from your feet to the crown of your head (which involves letting your spine lengthen by releasing up and away from the ground).

3. A release in your ankles to allow your upwardly directed weight to fall forward to begin the walk as you release your knee to bend a leg.

(Try this sometime, and notice the difference. You’ll most likely feel lighter, taller and freer as you walk.)

Now to be clear, this isn’t a matter of relaxing every muscle in your body before you move. Even if you were able to do so (you actually can’t), you would fall into a heap on the ground.

No, what I’m talking about is a very simple principle: By starting the movement from muscular release, the rest of your body is free to make the muscular contractions necessary to carry out the movement in a more efficient way.

You can take this model into other common activities. For example, to speak or sing, you can start by the movement by releasing your jaw to let your mouth open.

Even picking something up off of the floor, you can begin the movement by releasing the joints necessary to let you bend down to take hold of the object on the floor. And then as you take the weight of the object you, rise by letting your weight release forward and up over your feet as you also let your shoulders release and widen to accept the load. (Now the tension necessary to carry the load is in play.)

And so it can be with playing your instrument. All you need to do is observer and redirect. Here are few things to pay attention to:

  • You can start by noticing all the gestures you make as you go from a state of “not playing” to “playing” as you hold your instrument.
  • Notice in particular what you do with your head, neck and shoulders that brief moment before you begin to play. Do you brace yourself by tightening your neck and pulling your head downwards onto your spine? Do you begin to pull your shoulders down into your ribs? Or pull them up toward your ears?
  • Do you begin to lock your knees? Stiffen your ankles? Grab the floor with your feet? (instead of letting your feet release into the floor)
  • What do you do with your eyes? Does your gaze become intense and focused? Does your brow furl up?
  • Does your jaw begin to tense? How about your tongue? Your facial mask?
  • And how about your breathing? If you’re singing or playing a wind instrument, are you making noisy, gasping inhalations as you suck in the air by overly tensing your neck and back muscles? (And if you’re not playing a wind instrument, are you beginning each phrase by sucking in air?)

If you find yourself starting to play with any (or all) of these gestures of tension, start by changing your attitude. See where you can substitute muscular contraction  with muscular release.

For example, rather than tensing your neck and tightening your chest and shoulders to noisily suck in air before blowing that first note, think instead that the breath can come in as a quick and light reflexive movement made possible as a result of letting go of the muscles in your neck, shoulders, ribs and back. You might be surprised at how easily and how quickly and fully your inhalation becomes when this actually happens.

So pay attention to yourself as you play. Find ways to initiate those first movements of playing your instrument with as much release  as possible. Then let the muscles in your body respond naturally and effectively to the task at hand.

By changing your attitude about movement in this way, you’ll gradually begin to redifine how little effort is actually needed to play your instrument. In doing so you can expect a lifetime of growth, improvement and increased satisfaction.

Strength, Coordination And Endurance: Avoiding Confusion

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“Each faculty acquires fitness for its function by performing its function.”

-Herbert Spencer

A good number of musicians who seek my help as an Alexander Technique teacher do so because of a problem with endurance. In the simplest sense, they can’t seem to play for prolonged periods without fatigue and/or pain.

In many of these cases, these musicians have tried to improve their endurance by working directly  on increasing strength (with or without their instrument). This often proves to be ineffective. Here’s why:

For musicians who practice and play on a regular basis (regardless of instrument), most endurance problems are actually problems of coordination.

Playing cello and chopping wood

Yes, it does  take strong shoulder girdle muscles and back muscles to play an instrument like the cello. But it doesn’t take nearly the strength to play the cello as it does to chop a pile of wood.

Yet you might find a cellist who can chop wood all afternoon and not get nearly as exhausted in his neck, back and shoulders as he would practicing cello for an hour. (I actually had one such Alexander Technique student as this.)

If you take into consideration the quote above by Herbert Spencer, the best thing a cellist can do to develop the necessary endurance to play the cello would be to, well… play the cello.

According to Spencer’s principle, it is the activity of playing the cello  that builds the kind of muscular endurance specific for the task. (In exercise science, this is the training principle of specificity.)

So why does this cellist, who can chop wood all day, get fatigued so easily playing his instrument?

The answer is simple: He is coordinating himself in a way that is counterproductive to playing cello.

It is a matter of what he is doing with his entire body  as he carries out his skill.

In the case of this particular musician, he was over-straightening his spine, while at the same time stiffening his neck, as he held on rigidly to his elevated shoulders.

Because of all this holding on, his arms were not free to move out of his back. His shoulders were doing way too much work, and his upper back muscles (which are very well-designed for such a task) were doing far too little. His shoulders would get painfully exhausted after just 20 or 30 minutes of playing.

You could hear it in his sound, which tended to be small and sometimes brittle.

To make a long story short, as he began to improve his coordination (through his work with the Alexander Technique), he began to improve his endurance. Just that simple.

If you find yourself constantly struggling with endurance as you play or sing, it is likely a problem of coordination. You can take any very fit and strong person, have them carry out a task in a mechanically disadvantageous  enough way (poorly coordinated), and they’ll get exhausted in no time at all.

Strength and endurance

Now to be clear, strength most certainly has an impact upon endurance. But let’s also be clear about what strength and endurance are.

From a functional point of view, strength can be defined as the ability to exert force against an external resistance. Whereas, endurance is the ability to maintain low levels of force for extended periods of time.

In a well-coordinated organism, increasing muscular strength can have a marked improvement upon endurance. But for others, if these stronger muscles are not coordinated in an optimum way, there might be little to no improvement in endurance.

I’ve not yet had a musician come to me for help who has needed to “strengthen” anything, directly. They just need to rethink and re-experience kinesthetically, a more efficient coordination. This coordination comes about primarily by subtracting  unnecessary, habitual tension, and the lasting changes typically develop gradually, but surely.

What you can do

So again, if you struggle with endurance, or have students who do, here are a few things to keep in mind that might help:

  • The test of time-If you’ve been working for more than a couple of months on a particular exercise in an attempt to address an endurance issue, and you are noticing little or no improvement, you need to change course. Adaptations in strength and endurance come relatively quickly. If you’re going on for prolonged periods without improvement, either change the exercise, or (more important!) consider that your problem is one of coordination. (This is where a good Alexander teacher can help.)
  • Think of the whole instead of the parts-As I mentioned above, you are using your entire self,  your whole body, to play. Begin to notice where you might be unnecessarily tensing yourself or taking yourself out of balance as you play. See if you can begin to lessen the effort.
  • Specifity is best-If you think that you actually do need more strength to deal with certain demands of playing your instrument, aim at doing things that are as specific  as possible to the task at hand. For example, daily long tone exercises on a wind instrument to strengthen the facial/embouchure muscles are much more effective than a series of “tension” exercises without the instrument (like vigorously pressing and releasing your lips and corners in multiple repetitions). Specific activity leads to optimum functional strength.
  • Equipment-Sometimes what is making you exhausted is simply poor equipment choices. I recently gave a Skype consultation to a very good tenor saxophonist who was struggling mightily with fatigue. It turned out that one of the biggest factors was his mouthpiece. The lay and tip opening were just not right for his anatomy and his conception of sound. When he changed to a better mouthpiece, his problem was effectively solved. Stay open-minded about your equipment. As  your coordination improves, sometimes your equipment needs change (this is always a good thing!)
  • Health considerations-It is also possible that your issue with muscular fatigue might be of a medical nature. If you’ve tried just about everything (including my suggestions here), believe it’s not an issue of coordination, yet you still have problems and/or, your condition seems to worsen, by all means seek medical consultation. It could be a variety of issues, from neurological, to autoimmune, to orthopedic, or more. Get yourself the help you need.

So it’s fine if you want to do exercises every day to increase/maintain your endurance to play. The reason many accomplished musicians do so is because they get good results from their efforts.

But I can’t help but think about what Eddy Merckx (arguably the best racing bicyclist in the history of the sport) said when asked what the best thing a serious competitive cyclist should do to improve:

“Ride lots.”

And so it should be for us. Play lots. Improve your coordination. Enjoy the results.

Standing And Sitting To Play Music: Two Important Mechanical Principles

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Practically without exception whenever I give a musician an Alexander Technique lesson, I witness habits of imbalance and tension in the acts of sitting and standing that sharply impact the musician’s coordination, comfort and sense of control and satisfaction.

Because they are so deeply ingrained, the sensations of these habits fall below the kinesthetic “radar” of the musician (i.e., they don’t feel “wrong” at all.) In essence, there is general lack of an accurate body awareness involved in the music making process.

This lack of awareness is usually accompanied by a misconception about how their bodies function best in gravity. This is where I usually introduce two concepts (which are actually related mechanical principles):

support, and suspension

Support

Whenever I give an Alexander Technique lesson to a new student, I ask, “What is supporting you as you stand?” I get a variety of answers:

“My feet.”

“My legs.”

“My hips and back.”

“My entire body.”

(And sometimes, after some reflection by my student, I even get, “I have no idea.”)

But the truth of the matter is that when your standing, the ground (or the floor) is supporting you. Yes, that’s right. Gravity is drawing the mass of your body downward, and the ground is accepting and holding that mass.

Now, this is an important concept to grasp, because if you’re not allowing the ground to support you, you’re most likely tensing your body unnecessarily in an unconscious attempt to hold yourself up: stiff ankles, knees, hips, back, shoulders, neck…even your jaw.

It’s important that you let your weight pass through your bones into the floor (if you’re standing) or through your sitting bones (if your sitting). Let the stable surface of the floor or chair support you.

Suspension

But you need more than support to stay upright and in balance. You need an “anti-gravitational” energy source to counter the pull of gravity. This is where suspension comes into play.

Wired inside of you is a neuromuscular response to go up against the pull of gravity. (In fact, all organisms on the face of the earth have an anti-gravitational response system; even plants rise up from the ground, defying the pull of gravity.)

The muscles in your spine, from your pelvis to the top of your neck, and the muscles in your legs, are sending you lightly, yet powerfully upward you up as you stand.

If you let them. And this is where habit comes into play.

You see, you were born with (and cultivated in your earliest days after birth) this upward tendency: your head releasing at the top of your spine, your back lengthening and widening, your legs releasing out of your pelvis extending you upward, and your feet spreading out onto the floor. All of this upward suspension is  expansive, springy, flexible and responsive by design.

Yet, many of us lose this dynamic suspension as we get older through habits of bracing and/or collapse. When we un-learn these habits, our upwardly mobile suspension system returns to functioning optimally.

Why is this important?

No matter what instrument you play, if you are perpetually out of balance, you are creating tension that interferes with the freedom and functioning of the parts most directly involved in playing your instrument.

As an example, If you’re saxophonist (as I am) and you stiffen your legs as you play, you’ll also stiffen your pelvis (in an unconscious attempt to compensate for the lack of mobility involved in balance.) If you’re stiffening your pelvis, your shoulders will stiffen for the same reasons. If you’re stiffening your shoulders, your arms (because of their structual relaitonship with your shoulders), are stiff as well. If you’re stiffening your arms, you’re interfering with the freedom in your hands.

And so on. If you doubt this at all, as an experiment, stand on a very wobbly surface as you play your instrument (an Airex pad, or Bosu ball, for example). You’ll experience the above mentioned responses of tension immediately, and will have a noticeable loss of control over your instrument.

All this doesn’t even take into account the effect this has on your breathing. Can you play well with these habits of tension and imbalance? Sure. Skilled musicians do all the time.

But you’ll play better without them. I can vouch for that, both as a teacher and as a musician.

Integrating and optimizing

Support and suspension work best as an integrated system. Here are few things to keep in mind to help you take advantage of how your bodily design functions best in gravity:

  • Begin by thinking of yourself as being light. Seriously. There is a powerful connection between how you perceive yourself and your neuromuscular responses and organization.
  • Allow your weight to release into the floor (if you’re standing; if you’re sitting, allow your weight to release directly through your sitting bones onto the surface of the chair), as you imagine your head releasing lightly upward off the top of your spine.
  • If you’re standing, let your weight pass directly through your legs and through your ankle bones and heels into the floor. Think of your legs as releasing out of you hips. As you shift toward balance, your weight might shift slightly toward your heels. Let that happen as you also allow your feet to gently spread out onto the floor. Give yourself a moment to notice the stability of the floor.
  • Allow your ankles to be free and mobile to accept the support of the floor. The same with your knees and hips. No need to lock joints . Think that you have lots of space in your joints and lots of mobility (whether you’re sitting or standing).
  • Imagine each of  your feet as a three-legged stool (heel, base of your large toe, and base of your small toe). Ask yourself if you are putting too much of your weight into any one of these legs.
  • Think of your shoulders as widening, as they release one away from the other in response to your lengthening spine.
  • Don’t try to lift, or hold yourself up. Remember, “up” is already there in your body as a response to the pull of gravity. This is true, whether sitting or standing. Imagine unlatching yourself to release upwards.
  • Remain mobile, both in thought and movement. Don’t try to maintain posture. Instead, renew the wish for this springy, light upward organization in your body

It may seem counter-intuitive, but you’re allowing the weight to pass through your body as you direct your thinking in the opposite direction. In the simples sense, your weight goes downward, but your head releases your spine upwards. Two different directions, working together to integrate support and suspension, so you can play your best!

As a final thought, keep in mind that there is a difference between being grounded (supported, suspended, mobile and free) and being planted (held, stiffened and/or collapsed and immobile). Aim for being grounded, and you’ll improve your chances of success.

Six Quotes About Learning (And Unlearning) That Inform My Teaching And Practice

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Everything that I write on this blog, whether it’s about practicing more efficiently, improvising with greater skill and expression, or about how to avoid injury and strain, is based largely upon the ideas of a person who didn’t even play music.

Yet his ideas continue to serve me well, both in helping me to help my students, and in helping me explore more deeply my own process of growth and development as a musician.

The person I’m referring to is F.M. Alexander, known as the founder of the Alexander Technique.

In solving his own problems with using his voice (he was a stage actor), Alexander discovered several fundamental principles about how thought and movement are inextricably linked (in any and every human activity). And though he wasn’t a musician, his ideas are highly applicable (and highly usefu!) for any musician.

As a certified Alexander Technique teacher, I can say with great certainty that his ideas not only helped me to solve my own serious problems as a musician, but also, continue to influence how I approach teaching and practicing music.

So I thought I’d offer up six fairly well-known quotes  (well-known in the Alexander Technique world, that is) attributed to Alexander that exemplify some of the most essential ideas that I keep in mind as I do my work. Here they are, with a few brief elaborations beneath each one:

1. “You translate everything, whether physical or mental or spiritual, into muscular tension.”

There is an inextricable relationship between what you think and how you move (how your muscles react). The extra strain and effort you put into playing your instrument is a direct result of how you choose and organize your thoughts as you play your instrument. Improve your thinking, and you’ll improve your playing.

2. “Change involves carrying out an activity against the habit of life.“

The most powerful force (for better or worse) in playing your instrument is habit. Most pedagogical problems (especially for advanced musicians) end up calling for the subtraction of counterproductive habits. The only way this can happen is to come to the stimulus (the thought) of doing a particular activity (for example, singing  or playing a high note), and reacting differently. Most of this “reacting differently”, in the Alexander Technique, involves keeping ineffient movement/thought responses in check as you proceed in playing your instrument.

3. “Everybody wants to be right, but no one stops to consider if their idea of right is right.”

One of the biggest stumbling blocks that keep many musicians from  improving, is an almost religious reverence for the advice of a so-called expert, no matter how flawed the logic is in this expert’s advice. Unless you understand the measurable cause and effect relationship involved in any pedagogical principle, you can’t make an accurate assessment as to the  efficacy of the principle. Therefore, it’s a good idea to study and understand both the acoustical science of playing your instrument, AND, your anatomical and physiological makeup (and how these things work together). The better your understanding, the clearer you are about why things work the way they do.

4. “When people are wrong, the thing that is right is bound to be wrong to them.”

Alexander wrote about a faulty sensory appreciation, meaning that, because of habit, the wrong thing (e.g., excess tension, imbalance, etc.) often feels right (i.e., “familiar”) to the person with the habit. In fact, some musicians don’t even feel like they can play their best unless they “feel” all this excess tension and misdirected energy. For this reason it’s not such a good idea to be guided exclusively by what something feels like if you want to improve your playing. To experience change (to experience something new and more efficient) you must be willing to accept that you might  feel wrong (at first, anyhow). 

5. “When you stop doing the wrong thing, the right thing does itself.”

Much of my work as an Alexander Technique teacher is getting my students to stop doing the thing (their habit) that is interfering with their beautiful and efficient playing (the right thing). Rather than adding more “doing”, we’re primarily aiming at undoing (unlearning) these old habits. The results are consistently remarkable.

6. “The experience you want is in the process of getting it. If you have something, give it up. Getting it, not having it, is what you want.”

It’s not unusual during a lesson that a student has a wonderful new experience  of lightness and ease, and then wants to “hold on” to the experience, almost trying to “memorize” the feeling. This often leads to just another type of stiffness,  rigidity, and counterproductive expectations. I remind my students that rather than chasing the feeling, it’s more helpful to follow the process of thinking that led to the better result  (because ultimately, it was this change in thinking that produced the result). Our work is about examining and cultivating this new thinking. Pay attention to the quality of process, and the end result will take care of itself (as stated in number 5, above).

I hope I’ve given you some things to consider as you strive for improvement. The longer I stay with Alexander’s principles, the more amazed I become at what is possible. Just by changing my thinking.