Category Archives: Alexander Technique and Music

The Invisible Obstacles To Self Improvement

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“The things that don’t exist are the most difficult to get rid of.”

-F.M. Alexander, founder of the Alexander Technique

Serious musicians are typically filled with very strong beliefs. Beliefs about their pedagogy, beliefs about their equipment, and beliefs about themselves.

Part of my job as an Alexander Technique teacher is to gently and respectfully question the validity of some of these beliefs.

The easy part of this is calling into question things they happen to believe that are contrary to the physical principles of nature, such as what their diaphragm actually does, or about various acoustical elements involved in producing a sound.

Once I explain and demonstrate the science, they become clearer and usually discard their misconceptions.

But the more insidious type of belief that my students carry isn’t so easily discarded: what they believe about themselves.

For the musician, it usually manifests itself in three closely related components:

1. Physical necessity (“I need to do this to play well.”)

2. Learning style (“This is the best way for me to learn/practice to play well.”)

3. Potential (“This is what I’m ultimately capable of doing.”)

I say they’re closely related, because number one will have a significant impact on number two, which will then impact number three.

Now, to be clear, I think it’s wonderful when musicians have a good understanding of themselves, their own learning styles, and their potential. (In fact, its’ something that I aim to help my students improve through the work with the Alexander Technique.)

It’s just that if a musician goes on thinking something about him or herself that just isn’t true, it’s very difficult to change things for the better.

Let’s take for example the,  “I need to do this to play well.” Even after I demonstrate the physical reality of erroneously conceived ideas about anatomy/physiology as it applies to pedagogy (as mentioned above), musicians sometimes respond with a bit of a disconnect.

It’s as if they’re thinking, “Yeah, I can see that it works that way in nature, but it doesn’t necessarily apply to me.” Unless I can bridge that disconnect (and I usually can) they will continue to play with much more strain and effort than they think they need.

But it’s the learning style  component that can be more difficult to penetrate.

Thinking things like, “I need to practice it exactly this way to get the best result” can turn into a prison of sorts for some musicians.

On the one hand, it comes with an element of truth: You do, to a certain degree (perhaps a large degree), have a good understanding of how you learn and practice best. This understanding has helped you produce some good results.

But you are not yet an authority. Nobody is (including me!)

“Learning how you learn” is a lifelong, ever unfolding, dynamic process. I don’t know exactly  how I learn best. Instead, I’m always consciously aspiring to become a better learner.

And I can say with confidence that I’m a better learner today than I was two years ago (but not as good a learner as I will be two years from now).

This involves the underlying assumption on my part that there is always a better way for me to learn something, and hence, a more effective way to practice. I just need to stay curious, inquisitive, discerning (as objective as possible), organized and vigilant.

My false learning beliefs manifest themselves into lots of misdirected practice energy. Far too much time spent on the wrong things, not enough time on the right things.

When this is the case, my desire to improve is not optimally supported by my practice efforts. Simple as that.

Every time I let go of a false belief about how I learn, I move closer to my potential as a musician.

And that brings me to the belief about potential. To be truthful, I don’t know what mine is. I have a good sense of my strengths and weaknesses, my desires and discipline, but this gives me lots of room for possibility.

However, I do have an ever-increasing faith in my potential to to continue to learn, grow, and more clearly express myself musically.

As I let go of previously held misconceptions about my body, about acoustical principles, about what (and how) I need to practice to optimize my efforts, I move ever closer toward whatever my potential may be.

I describe these false beliefs about myself as invisible obstacles,  carrying with them a self-fulfilling prophecy that limits my growth. My work with myself is to question them, to bring them into the light.

How about you? What are your invisible obstacles? Until you can bring them into the light, you will continue to be powerfully shaped by them.

Start by questioning things that you perhaps accept as the absolute truth.

Strive to more clearly understand yourself and your bodily structure and human design. Study some basic anatomy as it applies to playing your instrument.

Take an Alexander Technique lesson in order to learn how to use your body in such a way as to optimize your practice efforts.

Study the acoustics of your instrument. Understand your physical role in relationship  to these acoustical principles.

But most of all, be ever flexible, curious, open-minded and humble about how you learn. You really have no idea of how far you can go. And that’s a good thing.

Ask Yourself These Four Questions To Make Your Practice Time More Effective

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One of the things that many highly accomplished musicians have in common is the ability to practice in an efficient and effective manner. This is a skill that is cultivated and improved upon over a lifetime.

As a practice coach, my main aim is to connect my client’s desires with their actions. In other words: “What kind of musician do you wish to become?”, needs to be connected to, “What are you doing every day to become that kind of musician?”

As simple as this sounds, I’m still struck by the number of  very good musicians who’ve come to me for help who aren’t as clear as they need to be about this. Some are quite frustrated that they’re spending lots of time practicing, but don’t seem to be getting anywhere through their efforts.

Effective and efficient practice comes down to two simple things: prescription (what  you choose to practice), and implementation (how  you practice what you’ve chosen).

Though there are many variables to consider here, I’ve come to realize that virtually any musician’s practice can become more effective if she/he keeps four simple questions in mind. Here they are:

1. Why am I practicing this? It’s not uncommon for me to ask this to one of my clients and have them struggle to find an answer. This should never be the case. You are either practicing something because of a short-term, “closed-ended” goal/obligation (I need to have this piece ready by next Thursday), or a long-term, “open-ended” one (I’d like to improve my sound). Of course, most of the problems with respect to this lie in the realm of long-term, open-ended goals.

Whatever you’re practicing, make sure you have the end  in mind. In the short-term, this is not too difficult (mastering the piece, the chord changes, etc.). In the long-term this means that you need to be  always mindful of the musician you are aspiring  to become (in as specific detail as possible) and that everything you’re practicing is clearly leading you toward that goal. This means lots of self-reflection, assessment and modification.

2. What would I like to achieve today  as I practice this? Have a clear aim in mind every time you set out to practice something. For example, “Today, I want to be able to play this at quarter note equals 142 with the precision and clarity that I know I’m currently capable of.”

Bear in mind that you might not achieve your goal. And that’s absolutely fine. Don’t feel bad about aiming low, either. It is okay to have small, easily attainable goals in your practice session (in fact, I prefer it). Giving yourself a chance to improve in even the smallest degree on a daily basis , not only encourages you, but also, helps you keep things under control and at the highest quality.

3. How am I practicing this? This goes to the core of the Alexander Technique principles of “use”. What are you doing with yourself  as you practice this particular thing? Are you allowing your neck and shoulders (and the rest of yourself) to be free and mobile? Is your breathing mobile, expansive and quiet? Are you letting the floor (or chair) support you as you let your neuromuscular system suspend you lightly upwards? The more efficiently you use yourself as you practice, the more effective the thing you practice becomes. It’s a matter of good  overall coordination supporting fine motor skills.

Also, you need to give yourself ample time and opportunities to stop. Stop and redirect your thinking. Bring it back to your intention and to your more conscious, improved use of yourself. I’ve seen far too many musicians jumping right from one attempt to the next as they practice a particular thing, with no chance for redirecting their efforts. This tends to bring them within the realm of Einstein’s definition of insanity: Doing something the same way over and over, but expecting a different result. Get better at stopping. You’ll be glad you did.

4. Have I finished practicing this? This is the one that most of my clients struggle with the most. When have you done enough work in this practice session to move on to the next thing? It’s time to move on either because: you’ve reached your goal for the day; or, you’ve done as well as you can reasonably expect for the day.

Learn to move on when the time is right. If you find yourself getting more and more frustrated as you practice something, it’s time to stop and redirect your thinking (see number 3, above). Regress the challenge of whatever your practicing to bring it back into your reach. All you need are a few good experiences each day with a particular skill to improve it. You don’t need to repeat that same scale pattern thirty times over and over in one practice session. Aim for four or five (or even fewer) good, consciously directed takes on a particular piece, then move on.

The clearer your aims are, and the more conscientious you are as you go after them, the more likely it is you’ll improve. These four simple questions can help keep you on track.

Teaching And Learning Music: A Built-In Problem In Exhanging Information

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The longer I teach the Alexander Technique to musicians, the more frequently one particular issue arises: the lack of clarity between cause and effect where practice and technique are concerned. Below is a brilliant description of this potential obstacle to progress:

The players/teachers do what they do; they tell the student what they think they do; the students think they heard what the teachers said about what they think they do; the students then try to do what they think the teachers said about what they think they do.

-Denis Wick, Retired Principle Trombonist, London Symphony Orchestra

Let’s look at this quote in detail.

“The players/teachers do what they do;”  Yes, they do. For better or for worse. Truth be told, there are a number of very fine musicians who play well despite  what they do. In other words, their misdirected efforts or sub-optimal overall coordination are obstacles that they’ve overcome well enough to let their skills shine through.

“they tell the student what they think they do;”  This is often where the confusion begins. It’s a matter of causality versus coincidence. Just because something happens while getting a specific result doesn’t meant that it was the cause of the result. For example, if you do this “thing with your tongue” every time you take a breath to play a wind instrument or sing, it doesn’t mean that “thing” you do is helping you produce an optimal breath. As a matter of fact, it might be even interfering with your breathing.

“the students think they heard what the teachers said about what they do;” So maybe you try to describe this “thing you do with your tongue” to your students, but because of their sensory perceptions/experiences, and how they take in your words, they completely misapprehend what you’ve explained to them. (In essence, they’ve misapprehended your misapprehension.)

“the students then try to do what they think the teachers said about what they think they do.” And the confusion continues. Because the students now “know” what to do, they try to carry it out, no matter how far it is from the original understanding/intention of the teacher, nor no matter how far it is out of accordance with their human design and/or with acoustics.

So now, this “thing with your tongue” that your teacher taught you not only doesn’t help you with your breathing, but also, it’s not even what your teacher thinks it is in the first place.

And this is how a good deal of misinformation is passed on from teacher to student. Some of these students themselves becoming teachers to further perpetuate misconceptions.

So how do you counter this tendency?

1. Question things. Try to understand the cause and effect relationships between specific efforts and results. Doing something a certain way just because a master musician says to do it that way may not necessarily guarantee success. Become a respectful, but healthy skeptic (like some of my favorite students). Same thing if you’re on the teaching side of things. Question why, and understand why,  you do the things you do as you play (especially before you tell your students to do likewise).

2. Study the science. The more you understand your design (more specifically your musculoskeletal anatomy and physiology), the easier it is to filter out (or at least re-frame) counterproductive advice. Same with understanding acoustics. If something is acoustically impossible or flies in the face of anatomical reality, you can simply discard it. Aim, as scientists do, to understand the “mechanism” of how and why something works they way it does. (This also applies to the point above about “questioning things”.)

3. Improve your sensory perception. This is where the Alexander Technique comes in handy. You’re often not doing with yourself exactly what you think you’re doing. Part of the study and application of the Alexander Technique is bridging this perceptual gap between what you think you’re doing, and what you’re actually doing.

4. Be wary of words. There can be so much flexibility in the meaning of even the most carefully chosen words. What you read, or are told, may not at all reflect the intention and understanding of whomever read or spoke them. When it comes to teaching and learning highly skilled activities, words without a direct and clear kinesthetic experience can often be misleading for both teacher and student.

So whether you are learning, are teaching, or doing both, staying cognizant of these potential communication gaps between teacher and student can significantly improve results.

Optimizing Practice: Habit Versus Choice

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After teaching the Alexander Technique to musicians for a number of years now, one thing I can assert with confidence is that there’s never such thing as a “typical” lesson.

In fact, I usually have no idea what I’ll be working on with my student at the beginning of a lesson. My only agenda is to follow her/his needs, as I observe and ask questions.

But there is always one underlying theme to any lesson I give in the Alexander Technique: habit versus choice.

The subject of habit versus choice is always front and center in any Alexander Technique lesson. The musicians who seek my help do so because, in the simplest sense,  their (primarily unconscious) habits are creating difficulties for them as they make music.

It might be excess tension that is leading to pain and/or injury. It might be an issue of coordination that is interfering with their skills. It might be that they’re just stuck in their progress, no matter how hard they’re working to find a way forward.

Whatever the reason, it all comes down to habit. So often, what I work on with my students is teaching them how to replace habit with choice.

Because many habits are so deeply ingrained, they can tend to fall below the consciousness of even the most self-aware musician.

This is partly out of necessity. I mean, after all, a habit is really just a response pattern that you learn in order to make a particular movement/gesture/posture immediately available. In a sense, it’s your nervous system’s attempt at efficiency. For example, you wouldn’t get very far if you had to completely reinvent how to hold your instrument every day. You can rely upon habit to do that for you.

Yet “how you hold your instrument” might be the very thing that is causing some of your problems, especially if you have chronic pain, or get easily fatigued as you play, or struggle with your technique.

This is where choice comes into play. Through choice, you can learn that there is a better way to hold your instrument, a way that is not only in agreement with your desired musical outcome, but also, with your human structural design.

This begins by bringing the unconscious (habit) into consciousness (choice). In fact, once you bring habit into your consciousness, you bring it into the realm of choice.

For the practical purposes of a musician, I categorize habits in two ways:

1. Reactive

2. Strategic

Reactive habit is what you do with yourself immediately, and unconsciously, as you begin to play your instrument, or sing (as I’ve explained above). It starts the instant you think  about playing, and manifests itself into a set of bodily reactions (posture/movement).

Many of these reactions are necessary to the act of playing.

Yet many others are not…

For example, if you stiffen your neck and pull your head down into your spine as you pull your shoulders up toward your ears as you are preparing to play, that’s an habitual response to the thought  of playing that will never  help you to achieve your desired goal (no matter your instrument).

What you’re doing in effect is interfering with your gross motor coordination as you attempt to carry out a skill of fine motor coordination. It’s simply counterproductive.

Many of the problems of pain, as well as coordination, that a musician struggles with are a result of their reactive habits (how they maintain posture and balance, how they move as they play).

A large part of my job is in bringing these reactive habits into my students awareness, and then teaching them a practical way to prevent them.

Strategic habit is how you steer your practice efforts in the long run, and in the moment:

How effectively do you choose, organize and carry out your work in the practice room? How well do you regress and progress an exercise to suit your need? How willing are you to explore being “wrong” to find the possibility of a new kind of “right”? How flexible are you in your practice process in general? In your daily practice routine?

Being habitually stuck with practice strategies is a huge source of frustration for many serious musicians. Bringing habit into the light can give clearer choices about how to proceed in a more productive and efficient way.

And of course, many “strategic” habits are supported by “reactive” habits and vice versa. (Rigidity in thinking goes hand in hand with rigidity in the body.)

So if you’d like to change, start by addressing your habits. Question things. Notice what you do with yourself as you start playing. What happens in your neck? What do you do with your balance? What happens in your breathing? What about your arms and shoulders? Your legs and feet?

Once you notice something you “do”, ask yourself, “Do I want to do that?” If the answer is “yes”, then ask yourself if what you do is helping you along, and is accordance with your human design (this is where a good Alexander Technique teacher can really help), and in support of your desired outcomes as a musician.

If the answer is “no”, you’ve just moved habit closer into the realm of choice by opening up the possibility of changing  how you respond. You can choose to rethink what you do.

When you choose, you make yourself free to improve, free to move toward optimizing your potential, free to believe in your ability to change and adapt, free to step with confidence into the unknown.

Practicing Music: There Are No Foolproof Exercises

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Musicians love to share advice in an attempt to help other musicians. (I’m no exception.) And it probably goes without saying that some of the advice is helpful, and some isn’t.

One of the most common forms of advice that I often take issue with is when a musician blindly prescribes a particular exercise to another musician to solve a particular problem.

It’s typically a generic, well-known standard form of exercise. Something like, “If you’re having problems with your intonation on saxophone, you need to practice overtones.”

Now, to be clear, as a saxophonist, I find great value in practicing overtones. Not only can regular overtone practice help with intonation, but also, it can help with tone color, control and resonance.

So you might ask, “What’s the problem?”

The problem is that unless you choose the exercise for the right reason (the most effective prescription) and carry it out with the right conception, it can actually create more problems than it solves. (Notice I said above that overtone exercises can help you; not will help you.)

Mindless, and/or misdirected practice is often more harmful than no practice at all.

Recently, I gave a Skype lesson to an excellent young saxophonist. He sought my help because of difficulties he was having with tone production and endurance. In short, he complained of working really hard when playing, often feeling exhausted after playing a long phrase.

I asked him about practicing. He told me that he spent lots of time everyday practicing overtones (sometimes two hours per day!)

When I asked why he did this, the mystery of his problems came to light.

In essence, he had the wrong conception about what the aim of overtone practice was. He thought it was (primarily) about “strengthening” the airstream coming from the diaphragm, abdominal and back muscles.

For that reason, he was pushing the air forcefully (very forcefully) into the instrument in an attempt to change pitches in the overtone series. It was all this excessive pushing of the air that was wearing him out.

So we had to talk about what the main objective in overtone study on the saxophone actually is: voicing. (specifically, voicing in conjunction with airstream)

Voicing entails the necessary changes in the oral cavity (soft palate, tongue, etc.) to accommodate the vibrations from the reed and mouthpiece. When a saxophonist has good intonation, a powerful and colorful sound, voicing is playing a major role.

When practiced with this aim  in mind, overtones help a saxophonist cultivate a responsive, flexible, well-coordinated oral cavity/vocal tract/ airstream combination.

But all this overtone practice was making this saxophonist work harder and less efficiently. His conception was that overtone exercises are about increasing strength, when in reality, they are about improving coordination.

So why did he spend so much time on overtones? Because that was the conventional advice given him by many well-respected saxophonists. To them, it was foolproof. “Work on overtones, solve your problem.” It’s a no-brainer.

Not necessarily, so it seems.

By clarifying the aim  of overtone practice, this saxophonist gave himself a chance to change his habits: less jaw tension (his jaw was doing the work of his vocal tract); less tension in his shoulders and back; better able to hear and respond to his actual sound.

And so it is with any exercise. As an Alexander Technique teacher, it is not unusual for me to encounter musicians who have religiously practiced exercises in a fundamentally misdirected way.

If you’ve been practicing the same type of “foolproof” exercise for many months (or even years), yet the problem you have that led you into choosing this exercise is not significantly lessened, you might want to reconsider your choices. Here are three things to keep in mind when considering an exercise:

1. Know why you’ve chosen a particular exercise. Try not to blindly trust the advice of others. Make it a point to understand cause and effect: “This will help me improve because…” You should be able to fill in the blank because you understand the physiological as well as the mechanical principles being brought into play. Is it an issue of strength? (it rarely is, by the way); Is it an issue of coordination? Hearing? Air flow? Time and/or rhythm?

2. Make sure you know what the specific aim of the exercise is. See that your conscious intentions (i.e., the desired outcome) is in line with your efforts as you practice. You should have a clear idea of what a successful attempt and outcome is as you practice the exercise. For example, “my resonance increases”, “my pitch becomes more stable”, “my execution of sixteenth notes becomes more even and balanced”, etc.

3. Pay attention to how you use yourself when you carry out the exercise. Don’t stiffen yourself in an over-efforting manner as you carry out the exercise. Let your head, neck, shoulders and back be free and mobile. No exercise in music should make your entire body exhausted from just a few minutes of practice.

Keep these things in mind, and remain a healthy skeptic when it comes to advice. In the end, it’s not so much what  you practice, as it is why  and  how  you practice it.