Monthly Archives: October 2014

The Power Of Deciding

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One of the things that has become clearer to me since studying and teaching the Alexander Technique is what it really means to make a decision.

To decide is not the same thing as to plan. Many people make plans about improving something in their lives (sometimes with elaborate details) that they will never carry out.

Why? Because they didn’t take the most crucial first step before making the plan: deciding.

Decision is a matter of commitment. It’s “closing the deal” without any way to turn back. As my older brother would say, after making a tough decision, “The ball has already been thrown; nothing to do now but wait and see where it lands”.

Though this can seem scary, it’s also empowering. If you can rely upon your ability to make a decision, and stick with it, you become your most trusted ally and advocate.

There are two types of decisions: The decision to do; and the decision not to do.

When I think of the decision to do, I think of a friend and colleague of mine here in Los Angeles, Vinny Golia.

Vinny is an internationally recognized multi-woodwind improviser, composer and teacher (CalArts). He is extraordinarily prolific, having put out dozens and dozens of recordings, many of them very ambitious in their scope (large ensembles, improbable instrumentations, multi-media collaborations, etc).

Once when I was on tour with Vinny, I asked him how he manages to plunge into these seemingly impossible projects (funding them, composing all the music, organizing the musicians, recording, promoting, etc.).

His reply:

I just make a decision to do whatever it is I want to do, whatever inspires me. I never wonder if I can or can’t. I always decide first, then figure out how afterwards.

Again, decision precedes planning to make the seemingly impossible  possible. In a sense, this is the very definition of ambitiousness.

But whenever I think of the decision not to do, I always think of the Alexander Technique. 

Sticking with the decision to not do something as I carry out an activity is the cornerstone of the Alexander Technique. This has been the skill that I’ve cultivated to help me solve some rather serious problems I was facing as a saxophonist.

Whenever I give an Alexander lesson to a musician, we always come face to face with the need (and the difficulty) of  sticking to the decision of not doing.

For example, I recently started giving lessons to a violinist who begins her sound (draws her bow across the strings) by stiffening her neck, shoulders and arms, thereby noticeably interfering with her technique, tone color and intonation.

My aim with this student is to get her to play without this habitual excess tension. As you might guess, it’s not as easy (at first, anyhow) as it sounds.

Too often it turns into a bit of an internally waged war, in which the student is trying hard to stop the habitual response of tensing up, only to create a different, yet equally tense response.

 F.M. Alexander (the developer of the Alexander Technique) sums it up accurately:

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.

And so it was in the beginning with my violinist. Her problem, too, was that she never really made a decision to play without her habitual pattern.

Why not? Well, first, producing her sound was so tied up into the excess muscular tension that she really had no idea what it might be like to play without all that extra effort. (Part of my job is to work with my hands to guide her into a different kind of coordination as she plays.)

Second, she (like most musicians) has a very strong aversion to sounding bad, and/or being wrong. Holding on to the tension was an unconscious security blanket that made her believe that she could get her sound, no matter the physical consequences.

She’s already (after about seven lessons) doing noticeably better with all this, as she gradually changes her practice process.

Specifically, she aims at giving herself permission to draw the bow only if she doesn’t tighten her neck and shoulders first. If she feels herself  preparing to play a particular passage with her habitual tension, she simply stops.

That’s right. She doesn’t start to play. She decides to proceed into playing only when she feels confident that she has started without all the extra junk.

It’s a decision she’s made and a commitment she stays true to. Now, to be clear, this is something she works on as she practices. It’s obviously not something she has the luxury of bringing into rehearsals and performances.

But the more she does this, the weaker (and more manageable) the old pattern becomes. By giving herself permission to stop, she no longer replaces tension with tension. Instead, she replaces excessive “doing” with an easy “non-doing”. Things will only get better for her. All because of her growing skills of deciding not to do as she plays here instrument.

So if you’d like to change, to really improve the quality of your practice, you can apply this same, highly effective principle. No matter whether you’re deciding to do, or not to do, staying with a decision is an important part of your continued growth and improvement.

Improving Technique: Aiming Toward The Expressive Instead Of The Mechanical

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A potential obstacle in improving technique for many musicians is the notion of “muscle memory”. Technically speaking, there is no such thing. Muscles don’t have the capacity to remember anything. But your brain does.

The thing most people call “muscle memory” is really about how the brain learns to communicates with the muscles, via the nerves, in a more efficient way.

When you practice a fine motor skill (like playing music) mindfully and diligently, the amount of conscious thought necessary for you to carry it out becomes significantly less.

In fact, it seems like you can do it with practically no thought at all, as if the muscles themselves are doing all the “thinking” for you (hence the term “muscle memory”). Kinesiologists sometimes call this “automaticity.”

But what has really happened as you learn a new skill is that the connections between the synapses (the little gaps between nerves that carry electrical impulses to send messages from the brain to the muscles) fire more readily.

The “synaptic chains” from  brain to muscles have become (as a neuroscientist might describe it) more “highly potentiated”. There is an actual physical change in the groups of neurons that work together to produce the movement, specifically, they become wrapped up together in a fatty, insulating material known as myelin.

This is part of a biological process known in neuroscience as “plasticity”. As the saying goes, “Neurons that fire together, wire together.”

And it is crucial that this higher potentiation takes place, so that the necessity of  conscious thought becomes lessened. You’d never be able to actually get very far in the music making process if all your conscious thought had to be spent on the motor/mechanical aspects of playing.

You’ve no doubt experienced how much more freely, expressively, skillfully and joyfully you play a particular piece of music, scale pattern, form, etc. (whether interpreted or improvised) when you don’t have to “think” too much to play it.

Yet there can be a downside to taking this “playing without thinking” idea too far into your practice process and routine.

Specifically, you can be tempted to reduce difficult technical movements to mindless mechanical repetition, as if you really were simply “training” your muscles. If this happens, there are three potential pitfalls:

1. You risk becoming less aware and mindful of what you are doing with your whole self as you play, inviting harmful, inefficient habits of movement to creep into your playing.

2. You hyper focus on the part of your body (e.g., your fingers) that is doing the work, which actually can interfere with your coordination as you play.

3. You put your musical/aural/expressive self in the back seat of the music making process.

All three of these things are interconnected, but I’d like to bring to your attention the particular connection between points 2 and 3.

When you over focus on the purely biomechanical process of “moving your fingers correctly”, for example, you are using your brain in a particular way that is not conducive to the holistic process of making music. Why? Because the aural/expressive component has been mostly removed.

When this aural/expressive context is absent, your brain coordinates the mechanical movement in a way that really has nothing to do with playing music.

It’s sort of like faking a smile. It seems like the same muscles are doing the same work in the same way, but your brain is organizing the movement (the smile) in a manner that has nothing to do with the natural responses that would elicit the smile (joy, pleasure, etc.) If you’ve ever had to “fake” a smile, you’ll probably remember that it feels forced, unnatural and full of excess effort.

Now, for sure, there is a time and a reason to take a challenging technical passage out of context, out of time, and into mechanical consideration. It gives you a chance to slow things down and observe. It can also give you chance to make better decisions (about fingering, breathing, articulation, etc.)

But once you’ve spent a bit of time in that analytic/mechanical mode, it’s time to put it back into the context of sincere musical expression.

It’s probably no mystery that many of the great classical virtuosi claimed not to have practiced mechanical, “un-musical” exercises (like running scales up and down their instruments for hours at a time). They instead, worked on practicing music.

This is perhaps one of the greatest values of playing an etude. Good technical etudes tend to turn mechanical challenges into meaningful music. They help to integrate the aural/expressive and the motor/mechanical seamlessly together in the brain.

Unfortunately, the “mindless motor repetition” practice can help to a certain degree, and that’s why (too) many musicians spend a good deal of time working this way. All this experience of repeated movement patterns can certainly help “potentiate” the movement itself more readily.

But it comes at a price:

Wasted time (there is definitely a point of diminishing returns here!)

Inconsistent performance (the good performances are always aural/expressive by nature)

Focal dystonias and other coordination issues (arguably caused, in part, from consciously attempting to micro-managing the motor activity in playing your instrument)

So take those few moments to deal with the mechanical. Then put it all promptly back into the context of making music. If you’re  working on a difficult passage from a particular piece, bring it back into the context of the entire piece as soon as possible, even if it isn’t as clean as you’d like it to be.

If you’re an improvising musician working on a particularly difficult technical movement, find a way to turn it into meaningful music, rather than just repeating it over and over as a sort of calisthenic.

And of course, any time you struggle to play a particular thing, make sure you sing it. This will help you crystalize the sound in your imagination, and will aid your brain in organizing the coordination necessary to play it.

Strive towards making even the most challenging passages part of your self-expression. Your technique will improve, and you’ll make your most authentic music.