Tag Archives: Alexander Technique for Musicians

The Power of the Pause

Freedom is the capacity to pause in the face of stimuli from many directions at once and, in this pause, to throw one’s weight (put one’s intentions) toward ‘this’ response rather than ‘that’ one.

-Rollo May, existential psychologist, from his book ‘Freedom and Destiny’

One thing that virtually every musician has to do in order to improve is to change what they are currently doing. This might mean changing your practice regime, changing your understanding of your instrument and pedagogy, changing your perception of sound, changing your quality of attention, etc.

It might also mean that you have to change the postural and movement habits you bring to playing your instrument.

Habits of breathing, standing and/or sitting, how you use your arms and hands, how you balance (or not), how you use your other senses, etc. It’s entirely possible (and even highly likely) that you are sometimes misdirecting your efforts in these areas as you play.

The Alexander Technique is a practical method of helping you to change your postural and movement habits for the better. And one of the most essential tools of the Technique is known as “conscious inhibition” (most students and teachers of the Alexander Technique just refer to it as “inhibition”).

In the simplest sense, inhibition is your ability to consciously prevent yourself from reacting in an habitual, unwanted way. Unwanted tension in your neck. Unwanted rushing of the tempo. Unwanted stiffening in your shoulders, Unwanted gasping as you breathe, etc.

By keeping the unwanted things “in check”, you are free to pursue what you do  want in a way that is more in accordance to your human design. You increase your odds for success.

From a neurobiological point of view, all skilled motor activity requires a balance between “volition” (muscles going into the desired, or helpful action) and inhibition (muscles refraining from undesired, or unhelpful action). Most inhibition in skilled activities takes place naturally and unconsciously (as it should).

But sometimes you need to use inhibition in a more constructively conscious  way in order to improve things.

Unfortunately, there can sometimes be a misconception about using inhibition consciously. To many people, conscious inhibition means “trying” to stop something from happening. It is exactly this “trying” part that can too often create a whole other set of problems when setting out to change movement and postural habits.

“Trying” sometimes means that you are struggling to stop yourself from doing what you habitually do. As if you have little or no control over it. Here’s something F.M. Alexander (the founder of the Alexander Technique) said about it:

When you are asked not to do something, instead of making the decision not to do it, you try to prevent yourself from doing it. But this only means that you decide to do it, and then use muscle tension to prevent yourself from doing it.

But that’s not at all the way inhibition is used in the Alexander Technique. Rather than “trying to stop” something, you learn to simply decide not to do it.

I know, I know…more easily said than done, especially when you have a deeply ingrained habit attached to playing your instrument. But still absolutely doable. That’s the skill you develop by studying and applying the Technique.

The first step in learning to use inhibition in a constructive way, is to embrace the pause.

It is within this brief instant before taking action that you can choose to redirect your attention and clarify your intention and effort. In that moment you come face to face with your habitual reaction, and can give yourself a chance to say “no” to it.

You can decide  not to do what you habitually do. And that’s where the magic lies.

Because if you decide not to react habitually you leave yourself free to find other ways to react. You move from habit  into the realm of choice.

It is the discovery, exploration and embracing of the pause that has given me tremendously powerful tools in managing (which I do quite well!) the focal dystonia in my left hand.

Without using the pause as tool for change, I wouldn’t be able to play saxophone at all any more with any kind of reasonable skill and control. Nowadays, I’m playing better than I ever have, thanks to the power of pausing and redirecting my attention. That simple.

But I gained so much more from the using the pause than improving the functioning of my left hand. Using the pause has helped me to practice everything I practice in a much more constructive, efficient and clearly intentional way.

And as an improvising musician, learning that I can pause, that don’t have to fill every second of my solos with sound, is liberating, and (at the risk of sounding dramatic) has been life changing for me.

I listen at a much deeper level when I play with others than I ever have before. I play with greater empathy, confidence, authenticity, passion, creativity and satisfaction.

All thanks to becoming more and more skilled at pausing.

And to be clear, “pausing” is not the same as “hesitating”. Pausing invites calm, reassured choice, where hesitation invites conflict, misdirected effort and a lack of confidence and clarity.

I use the pause countless times every day that I practice, and I bring it with me to rehearsals and to the bandstand.

When I’m practicing, sometimes I pause between iterations of something challenging that I’m practicing. Just a split second to stop and redirect my efforts makes all the difference.

And even in the middle of a performance, the “imagination” of the pause is always there, reminding me that I have more choice than I might have perviously thought.

So I encourage you to explore the pause. Before jumping right in to “fix” what you didn’t like about what you just played in your practice session (by starting over with the same misdirected effort that led to your dissatisfaction), give yourself a chance to stop, find ease and balance in your body, clarify what it is you want and don’t want, and begin again.

As I’ve said in some of my other blog articles, you’ll never waste time when you give yourself a chance to stop and consciously redirect your efforts. Embrace the quiet power of choosing to pause. Respond rather than react, and reclaim your freedom.

Be Mindful of This Very Important Connection When Playing Your Instrument

Whether giving an Alexander Technique lesson to a musician, or simply observing myself when I practice, I’ve come to notice one particular postural/movement habit that we all seem to have in common when faced with a potentially “stressful” stimulus when playing our instruments.

This is also something I can see as I watch musicians (and other performing artists) during performance.

When I say “potentially stressful”, I mean to include a wide range of things, from mild to powerful.

For example, a mildly stressful stimulus might be to slightly increase the tempo of a particular etude you’re practicing. Whereas a more powerfully stressful stimulus might be anticipating playing the first note of an important audition for which you’ve prepared.

In either case, there is an almost universal tendency  with respect to your movement and posture when faced with these types of stimuli:

You begin to lose your connection to the ground.

It is your connection to the ground that is the basis of support that encourages the freely fluent, agile and powerful movements you need to perform at your fullest potential.

Nearly all of our movement/posture, with respect to our human design (and with respect to our relationship to gravity), is based upon support (the ground) and suspension (the elasticity of our musculoskeletal system).

When you lose support, you also begin losing the elasticity  necessary for optimal suspension, and ultimately, optimal coordination.

So what does “losing connection to the ground” look like?

Here are a few examples when you’re standing:

  • You stiffen your feet and ankles, losing the mobility necessary to respond effectively to changes in balance.
  • You roll to one side or the other of either/both feet (this too, involves stiff ankles).
  • You hyper-extend (“lock”) your knees.
  • You clench your buttocks and/or compress you hips, while at the same time “lifting” yourself off the ground slightly.

And even when you’re sitting you can lose this very important connection to the ground. Here’s a few ways how you might do so:

  • You stiffen your legs, thereby diminishing the necessary contact of your sitting bones to the support of the chair.
  • You begin to push (or pull) toward one side or the other of your pelvis (and thus, your sitting bones).
  • You begin to draw your knees up into your pelvis (as your feet come up slightly off the floor).
  • You lift yourself up from the support of the chair by narrowing your entire torso. (This is something you also might to when standing.)

I should also mention here (with respect to the principles of the Alexander Technique) that when you’re engaging in any of the above listed posture/movement reactions, that you are at the same time stiffening your neck, interfering with how your head needs to freely balance on top of your spine (in order to allow optimal coordination).

And these tendencies are not only potentially problematic to the “mechanics” of your coordination, but are also (perhaps even more important!) evidence  that your quality of your attention is less than ideal. It has gone from being flexible, integrating and expansive (inclusive), to inflexible, disintegrating and narrow (exclusive).

(There is always a reciprocal relationship between the quality of your attention and what you do in your body. It’s sort of like, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” In any case, one conditions the other.)

But here’s the good news:

You’re not stuck with any of these tendencies.

Because they are only that. Tendencies. Or “habits” as we would refer to them in Alexander Technique jargon.

And habits can be changed.

Start by paying attention. Notice both when,  and how,  you lose your connection to the ground.

Notice what types of stimuli (thoughts, circumstances, conditions, etc.) seem to invite you to lose your connection (the “when” part).

Notice what you do with your entire self (including your attention) when you lose your connection (the “how” part).

Once you notice, you can practice pausing to gently redirect your attention, allowing yourself to be easy in your body and regain your connection to the ground. (And allowing yourself to reconnect to your intentions, and with the music itself.)

Finally, there is a difference between being “planted” (stuck hard and fast into the ground) and being “grounded” (surely, but dynamically connected to the ground).

Aim for being grounded, letting your weight pass freely down through your legs, through your feet, and into the support of the ground (when standing), or through your sitting bones as you allow the chair to support you (when sitting).

Then think of yourself as going up lightly, freely and expansively from your supporting surface. Let the earth play its role in helping you make music. Notice the difference.

You’ll Never “Waste” Time Practicing As Long As You Are Doing This

As an Alexander Technique teacher who is also a dedicated musician, one of the professional roles that I enjoy most is that of a practice coach. I get immense satisfaction (and joy!) in helping musicians discover and implement new ways to optimize their practice time and efforts.

Some of the musicians I coach come to me with considerable consternation about how much time they’ve “wasted” practicing in misdirected and inefficient ways. While my aim is to help them become more constructively directed and efficient, I have to be very clear from the start that they’ve most likely never wasted any of their practice time.

You see, learning to practice wisely and efficiently is not a straight line. It’s a process that unfolds over time through exploration and reflection. It goes without saying that sometimes you are going to work on things in practice that just don’t yield the results you are hoping for.

Or that you’re sometimes even going to work on things that make things worse, rather than better.

Or in a better case scenario, you’re going to work on things that actually do ultimately help you, but just not in the most direct and efficient way. (This is the category that many of my clients fall into.) There’s a lot of “two steps forward, one step back” in this case.

One of the main reasons you would probably seek out a great teacher of your instrument is to learn how to optimize practice efforts. To avoid the “two steps forward…” phenomenon.

And to be sure, that’s what a highly skilled teacher can help you with.

But with or without the help of a teacher, here’s something you can do, something you can aim for in your attitude, that will make it so that you’re never wasting your time as you practice.

Quite simply:

Whatever you practice, do with genuine curiosity and inquiry.

You might be thinking after reading that, “Well, yes, of course! Obviously!” But you might be surprised at how easy it is to lose either or both of these qualities when practicing.

In fact, one of the most insidious ways you can lose these qualities is when you’re practicing is when you’re working on something that you are 100% certain are practicing “correctly”.

Musicians too often go into “auto pilot” mode when working on basic things such as holding long tones, or practicing technical exercises. “As long as I’m going through the ‘physical’ process of practicing this, I’m on the right track with it.”

Yet these are the very types of activities that can be improved upon the most with more dynamic curiosity and inquiry.

As I’ve stated in many of my other posts, the quality of anything you practice is directly proportional to the quality of attention you bring to it as you practice.

So rather than looking at the “absolute best” way you can practice something, ask yourself this question instead:

“How can I optimize my experience with what I’m practicing right now, right in this practice session, right in this moment?”

This question can help you to form to other types of questions: “Why’ questions, and “what if” questions.

“Why do I practice this at this tempo?” Why do I practice these arpeggio patterns in this particular sequence?” “Why do I raise/tense my shoulders when I play into the upper register?” etc.

And,

“What if I practice this at a tempo that is more manageable (or challenging,  as the case may call for)?” What if I practice these patterns in a different sequence today, so maybe I can learn something new about them?” “What would happen if I didn’t raise/tense my shoulders as I play into the upper register?”, etc.

It’s not about finding the “right” answer to these questions as much as it is inquiring in a genuinely curious way. As long as you keep asking questions, you’ll keep finding greater efficiency, ease and satisfaction when practicing.

And if you seem to be getting stuck in your progress in working on something, whether in the moment, or over time, you can ask yourself these three simple questions in order to help you clarify your intentions and optimize your efforts:

1.“What is it that I want?” (Your intentions about what you would like to happen, about what you’d like to be able to do on your instrument. Make this as specific and lucid as possible!)

2.“What seems to stopping me from getting what I want?” (Identify the problem. Is it simply needing more time? Is it something that you’re doing with your body that is taking you away from your skill and coordination? Is it your attitude? Keep asking/experimenting until the answers emerge.)

3.“What do I need to do differently?” (This is where you take action. Change course, strategize, reflect, assess, redirect efforts, etc.)

Bear in mind that these questions (like the other questions I mentioned earlier) are meant to be dynamic and flexible. And what keeps them that way is your passion and intellect.

So don’t feel like you’ve wasted an afternoon in practice trying something completely new, no matter how shaky the results are. As long as you’re curious and inquisitive, you’re never wasting your time. Just redirect your efforts and continue to go on from there. Refinement, not perfection.

A Common Attitude That Too Often Interferes With Optimal Practice

The quality of your music practice is directly related to the quality of your consciousness when practicing.

Put simply, the way in which you pay attention  as you practice significantly impacts the success of your efforts. Perhaps more than you realize. Indeed, practice is not merely a “physical” act, but a “whole person” endeavor.

Whenever I’m coaching musicians who’ve come to me for help because of frustration with their practice effort/strategy, I nearly always hear this simple five-word phrase within the first minute of their description of their problem:

“I should be able to…”

“I should be able to attack the notes in the lower register with the same consistency as the other registers.”

“I should be able to play these scale patterns at a much faster tempo than I am currently able.”

“I should be able to memorize new music much more quickly than I normally  do.”

And so on.

And of course, nearly all of the “I should be able to…” assertions are accompanied by something like this:

“…especially for how long I’ve been working at it.”

So why is this a problem? After all, should you not aim precisely for what you want when you practice? Should you not have high standards?

Well of course you should! On both accounts!

So what’s the potential problem then?

In the simplest sense it’s this:

“I should be able to” places you immediately into the realm of expectation, too often taking you away from the reality what’s actually happening  in the present moment.

This phenomenon leads to two closely related negative outcomes:

1 Misdirected effort.

2 Frustration.

Misdirected effort, because when you get stuck on “I should be able to do this”, you limit yourself to discerning what’s already there. In essence, you lose your entry point into where  and how  you need to direct your practice efforts.

For example, let’s say that yesterday you were able to play this particular piece at quarter note equals 176 bpm on the metronome, but today you can’t get anywhere near that tempo without the whole thing falling apart.

What should you do?

Well, more often than not, if you insist upon continuing the tempo at which you can’t  play it, you just end up cultivating imprecision. You end up engaging in an activity that is just outside of your reach.

Both skill and conception get “approximated”, as the great pianist, Bill Evans would say. (“Garbage in, garbage out”, as my brother Ed, a highly skilled cabinet maker, would say.)

And of course this obviously leads to frustration, both in the short-run and in the long-run. (“But I’m working so hard to improve!”)

But if you first acknowledge what is already there, taking note of what you can already do (or can’t do), you discover for yourself this ever essential entry point.

And from this entry point you can also begin to examine your current conditions and explore and ultimately discern why you’re perhaps not  able to do today what you could do yesterday. You can ask yourself questions:

“How am I perceiving time/rhythm today?”

“How am using my body? Am I free and mobile, or rather rigid and planted? Where am I holding on too much?”

“Where is my attention going? Is it  flexible and dynamic, or too narrowly focused on one small part of the process (or on one part of my body, at the expense of neglecting the whole)?”

“How clearly am I conceiving of/imagining the dynamic nature of the music itself?”

And so on…

If you give yourself time and attention to notice, you’ll usually find where things are going amiss. Then you can ask this very constructive question:

“Where would I like to place my attention so that I can increase my odds of a better outcome?”

This question brings both your consciousness and your efforts back into the present moment, and back on track for optimal practice.

And from there you can aim for doing the best you can do in the moment, the best you can do in that practice session. You can bring things back within your reach.

In a broader sense this kind of shift in attitude can also help you to build a more constructive overall practice process and strategy that you can continue to develop for the rest of your life.

F.M. Alexander, the founder of the Alexander Technique described this attitude of “I should be able to” as part of an “end-gaining” process.

When you “end-gain”, you focus only on the desired result, without sufficient consideration to whether your efforts (the quality of process you use to pursue your result) are best suited to actually achieve the result.

Alexander encouraged us to give the “quality of process” (something he described as the “means-whereby”) top priority in pursuing our results.

In fact, when talking about experiencing a desired outcome in any activity, Alexander said:

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.

“Getting it, not having it…” is what I’m after whenever I practice. And that’s why whenever I’m having a “bad” day practicing (more specifically, when I’m playing below my normal abilities), I welcome the experience. Seriously.

“Bad days” are a golden opportunity to learn more about myself, and to learn to trust and rely upon my process.

This leads to both continued growth and confidence as a musician.

So how about replacing “I should be able to”, with:

“I’d like to be able to”,

and,

“I think I can find a way to”

and,

“I believe in my ability to redirect my attention and efforts to be able to.”

So aim high. Every day. But be kind to yourself and find that optimal entry point in everything you practice. In my experience both as teacher and as student, I believe this shift in attitude can empower you to do miraculous things!

New Service: Introducing “Rhythm Coach”

I’m pleased to announce that I’m now offering an educational service specifically dedicated to addressing and improving issues related to time, rhythm and feel.

I call it Rhythm Coach, and it represents the years of study, exploration and teaching experience I’ve acquired in helping musicians (including myself!) of all ability levels refine their sense of time, as well as cultivate rhythmic skills that significantly improve general musicianship, skill and coordination.

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you know that I’ve written a good amount of articles about time and rhythm. (I’ve even composed two e-books dedicated specifically toward improving both.) Anything related to time (including meter, pulse, feel, groove, etc.) and how we react to time (our skill/coordination) is a topic of endless fascination for me.

Over the past several years I’ve had a good number of musicians who have sought my help as an Alexander Technique teacher specifically because of problems they were experiencing with loss of skill and coordination (for example, problems associated with tremors, focal dystonia, injuries, health issues, etc; and sometimes just an inexplicable loss of skill).

Skill/coordination and time are so inextricably linked for a musician, that you can’t effectively address one without the other.

All the musicians I’ve encountered that have come my way seeking help with an unresolved  skill/coordination problem (“unresolved” here meaning the musician has been working to improve it to no avail) also have come to me with unresolved issues with time and rhythm.

As a saxophonist successfully managing focal dystonia, I myself have had to spend a good amount of time reclaiming my playing skills. I did this, in part, by going deeply into working purposefully and methodically on my perception of time, as well as how my perception of time informs my coordination (my “reaction”). The work I’ve done on myself has yielded nearly miraculous results. (If you’re familiar with focal dystonia, you’ll know what I mean by “miraculous”!)

Besides helping me regain my saxophone playing skills, this practice has also been immensely (and somewhat unexpectedly) beneficial for me as both an improviser and as an ensemble musician. So I’d like to share my skills and experience with you!

In Rhythm Coach, you’ll get one-on-one help in identifying and effectively addressing any challenges specific to you. I’ll help you customize your practice routine by giving you  notated exercises, as well as movement and thought explorations for you to measurably improve and gain confidence.

All of my work for Rhythm Coach is informed by continuous study (cognitive science, neuropsychology, etc.) and mindful inquiry, and is a continually growing, highly dynamic body of work.

So, no matter your current ability as a musician, if you’d like to improve your sense of time, groove, feel…or just expand your rhythmic skills in a methodical and comprehensive way (especially as an improvising musician), please consider Rhythm Coach!  I’d be honored and thrilled to help you!