Category Archives: Practicing Saxophone

A Hobby That Will Make You A Better Musician

Many years ago when I first met the great flutist and composer, James Newton, he impressed upon me the importance of a musician having a hobby. He felt that many musicians spend so much of their time and passion on music, that having a hobby was a great way to maintain balance and perspective as a human being.

His hobby at the time was studying visual art, painting in particular. He told me that besides giving him an enjoyable diversion from working in music, that ironically enough, it actually ended up expanding his conception of music. He learned this specifically through deepening his understanding of color and emotion, and brought that understanding to view his musical composition process in a new light.

I had no hobbies whatsoever at the time of meeting James, as I was so utterly consumed with playing, composing and studying music. But as a few years passed I did stumble upon a hobby that has not only helped me find balance as a human being, but also, has helped me tremendously as a musician: The study of foreign language.

Though I studied Spanish for a year in 9th grade, I really didn’t catch the foreign language bug until I was nearly 40 years old. At that time I was very interested in Bulgarian folk music, so I took a trip over there to hear this beautiful music first hand. What ended up happening was that I fell in love with the sound of the Bulgarian language. It seemed to so much reflect the sounds of the music I loved so much.

So when I returned home, I began to teach myself Bulgarian. I was totally shooting in the dark with my study, as I had no idea how to learn another language. But eventually I became conversant, and at one point, after much study and travel to Bulgaria, virtually fluent.

The benefits I gained as a musician from the process of studying another language became immediately discernible (I’ll talk more specifically about this below). I decided to tackle another language. I chose Russian, as it is in the same language family as Bulgarian (Slavic) and it uses the same alphabet (Cyrillic).

Russian was an even more challenging language for me to learn than Bulgarian, but it opened up my ears, mind and musicality even more. I was hooked.

To make a long story short, I ended up studying Spanish fairly extensively, and am currently working on improving my fluency in Brazilian Portuguese (my wife is Brazilian). Bulgarian, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese are languages that I’ve spent enough time with to become conversant to fluent in (as long as I stay in practice).

But I’ve also “visited” other languages just for fun: Estonian, Romanian, Eastern Armenian, to name but a few. I never had any intention of becoming conversant or fluent in these languages. I studied them purely out of curiosity, often rising from how pleasing the language was to my ear, or how interesting the grammar was. More like a taste test than a complete meal.

Every time I approach a new language, my musical skills are enhanced and broadened once again. Here are some of the benefits of studying a foreign language for musicians:

  • You greatly improve your ear-Language is sound turned into meaning. When studying another language, you learn to hear high degrees of subtly in sound. In short, your ability to hear and process sound becomes more sophisticated, richer. Everything from intonation, color and shape become clearer to you. This translates right into your musical activity.
  • You learn to create the physical gestures to produce new sounds-If you are to be understood in any language, you must learn to manipulate your vocal mechanisms (including, mouth, tongue, throat, jaw) to produce sounds in a different way. If you play a wind instrument or sing, this helps you tremendously to gain even greater control and insight into producing sound on your instrument. (It helps with your sound conception even if you don’t play a wind instrument.)
  • You broaden your rhythmic conception-Every language has it’s rhythm. And even within every language there are many different rhythmic pattern, depending on region (accent, etc.) By letting yourself find the rhythm of speaking a new language, you expand your own ability to imagine and control rhythm and time.
  • You deepen your understanding between sound and meaning-As you gain familiarity with a new language, you dramatically increase your capacity to turn sound into meaning. That’s the same skill you need to play well, whether as an improviser or as an interpretive musician.
  • You learn to think way outside the box about structure and meaning-One of the first things you come face to face with when you start learning another language is how different the structures of the language are than your native language: Grammar, syntax, idiomatic expressions are but a few of the ways your sense of logic is challenged. Again, this opens your thinking up even more as a musician.
  • You become better at improvising with new material-When you converse, you’re improvising. Learning to converse in a new language means learning to be able to take still unfamiliar material and express ideas, to communicate. This helps your brain immensely when it comes to improvising music with new ideas and material. In essence, you learn how to absorb and use new material faster, in more meaningful ways.
  • You get more comfortable being wrong-If you converse in the language you are learning, you’re going to make mistakes. Lots of them. You simply stop flinching or feeling bad when this happens. If you take that attitude and skill into your music making, you open yourself up to great possibilities.
  • You improve your overall brain fitness-All of the above keep your brain working in novel ways, which helps you to stay sharp for the rest of your life. Working memory (the capacity to hold and work with various pieces of information at one time) is crucial for language learning. (It also comes in pretty handy in making music.) My working memory  improved remarkably when I started studying languages.
So if you think you’d might like to try a new language (and have no previous experience), here are some guidelines to help you get the most out of your endeavor:
  • Pick a language that really appeals to you-This can either be because of the sound of the language, love and interest in the culture, and more. If you have genuine interest in the language you’ll always enjoy learning more. And don’t think you need to become conversant or fluent to gain some of the great benefits I’ve listed above. Don’t worry about how “useful” the language is. Let your interest be your guide.
  • Start with an “all audio” language course-Don’t start reading in the new language at the start. All you’ll do is bring your english speaking sound limitations to the language. Instead, learn to really hear and reproduce the sounds of the language. Pimsleur self-study language courses are an excellent option for this.
  • Sing, sing, sing-Learn songs as soon as you can in the new language. This will help you produce the sounds, as well as deepen your sense of meaning with the words.
  • Study grammar and structure-After you’ve spent some time just playing the new language by ear, invest some time in learning grammar and writing. You can either take a course in the community, or find a self-study course well suited for this purpose.
  • Watch films-Watching a film in the new language (with subtitles, of course) will significantly increase your understanding of all aspects of the new language.
  • Speak-If you can find a friend who speaks your new language, practice as much as you can with him or her. If not, consider finding an online community of other speakers and learners of the language to practice with. Remember, don’t be afraid of making mistakes. If you have a chance to travel to the country where your chosen language is spoken, you’ll find that the locals are gracious, helpful and flattered that you are making an attempt at learning their language.
So there you have it. I hope this post doesn’t seem somewhat off topic, but lately I’ve come to realize even more how my language study has deepened my musical experience. I think it can deepen yours as well.

 

Two Habits Of Thinking That Will Limit Your Growth As A Musician

If you ask an accomplished musician about what is necessary for continuous growth and improvement, you might well be met with a “to do” list: Always work on improving your sound. Find new ways to challenge your reading and technical skills. Keep expanding your repertoire with pieces that broaden your expressive capacities. Listen deeply to, and analyze great musical performances. And so on.

And for sure, all these are things you need to strive toward in order to grow. But what about the things you need to avoid in order to grow as a musical artist?

If you were to ask an accomplished musician this question, you’d most likely get a fairly extensive list of things to steer clear from, as well. (It’s even possible that this list would be longer than the “to do” list.) In essence, for you to grow, you must do certain things, and must consciously avoid doing certain other things.

It’s important to keep in mind that if you wish to change what you do, you must change how you think. In my experience both as performer and teacher, I find that the vast array of ways musicians interfere with their progress is often a result of two habits of thinking (attitude):

“I won’t let myself sound bad.”

“I’m doing well so far.”

Let’s look at these habits in detail:

I won’t let myself sound bad 

This is of course a habit based in fear. It limits your growth by not allowing you to try new things with an open mind. It radically shifts your emphasis from process to result as you explore musical growth.

For sure you’d like to sound immediately better when you try something new ( a good result). Who wouldn’t? But often enough, changing something to sound better starts with you sounding somewhat worse ( “worse”, at least,  in your current perception).

You’ll never improve by doing something the same way you’ve always done it (whether you think so or not). If you examine any musician’s improvement, it comes down to a continuous evolution of edification. What seemed like the “right” thing at one point turns out to be the wrong thing. You acknowledge this, then you move on, proceeding in a different way.

I’ve taught the Alexander Technique to musicians who were so afraid of sounding bad that they could not (at the start) allow themselves to play their instrument (even for an instant) without indulging in the particular habits of tension that were causing the very problems that brought them to see me in the first place. They simply believed that if they didn’t do what they thought they needed to do,  they would sound bad. Their fear of sounding bad was trumping their desire to improve.

One of the milestones of growth for my students is their gradual acceptance of allowing themselves to sound bad in order to allow for change. There occurs a  shift in thinking, and then the desire to change trumps the fear of sounding bad. When this happens, it opens up a huge, beautiful path toward expansion and upward development.

So when you change something as you play, don’t immediately jump to judging the quality of your result as sounding good or bad . Shift your judgement to, “Is this different than what I’d normally do?”

Then shift from judgement to discernment: “What am I not doing that I would normally do?” (Your growth will often involve you playing your instrument without indulging in your habits of tension and over-doing. Non-doing instead of doing.)

When this happens you put yourself in the frame of mind to make logical, objective decisions about your playing. If you can suspend judgement and stay with discernment long enough, you can choose most clearly that which serves you the best.

Some of the other manifestations of this habit are: a rigid practice ritual that aims toward maintenance instead of growth; avoidance of playing with better musicians; avoidance of challenging musical situations; a limited palate of musical self-expression . As you can see, if you’re afraid of sounding bad, you can’t really risk stepping into the unknown.  You can’t ever find something new to play. You can’t ever surprise yourself.

I’m doing well so far

This habit, in many ways, can be more insidious than the fear of sounding bad. Insidious, because what appears as self confidence (a good thing) can easily morph into self-deluded dogmatism (not such a good thing).

It limits your growth in a similar way, in that it robs you of your impetus to explore the possibility of doing something differently. I call it the curse of expertise. When you are absolutely sure that you are right in what you do, you can’t possibly change. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, the saying goes.

In my teaching experience, the most common manifestation of this habit is the belief that excess tension and strain don’t significantly impact musical success. Talent and practice does. “So what if I’m tightening my shoulders and neck as I play? I’ve seen Sonny Rollins doing the exact same thing and it doesn’t seem to make any difference in his playing. He still sounds great.” (I had a young saxophonist with a rather brittle sound tell me this as I tried to explain to him that his sound was colored by his excessive neck and shoulder tension.)

First of all, you’re not Sonny Rollins. Second (and more important), you have no way of knowing how Mr. Rollin’s habits of misdirected tension impact his playing. He obviously plays quite well despite his habits. But it’s possible that he could play even better than he does without them.

One of the things that virtually all truly masterful musicians have in common is that they believe that they can always do what they do in a better way. The great cellist and teacher Janos Starker talks about the importance of this idea, and the process by which the musician’s thinking is edified on the path toward improvement.

Other manifestations of the “I’m doing well so far” attitude are: lack of discipline where practice is concerned; an unwillingness to deepen self-awareness; a superstitious adherence to well-meant, but ultimately useless or counter-productive advice given them by other musicians; an inability to understand cause and effect with respect to their own bodies and the music making process; a perceived (by others) sense of self-satisfaction bordering on arrogance.

You may have noticed that these two habits of thought are closely related, and indeed they are. One often supports and blends in with the other, and both are based to some degree on fear of change.

So always keep in mind that what you do (and what you don’t do) for better or for worse, is conditioned by what you think. Aim at keeping your thinking clear and helpful by avoiding these two habits.

The Difference Between Playing Music Normally And Playing Music Naturally

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

F.M. Alexander

Whenever I teach the Alexander Technique to musicians, there always seems to be these revelatory moments when they find they’ve been wrong all this time about something that previously felt perfectly normal in playing their instrument. Typically, it’s something that they thought was helping them play better. Ironically, it more often than not turns out to be the very thing that is making playing more difficult.

Why would any musician hang on to a habit that is making things worse rather than better?

Simple. It’s because habits feels normal. And as long as those habits feel normal, there’s no impetus for change.

Many musicians are wary, even suspicious, when it comes to changing habits. “It doesn’t feel  natural to do it that way. I just want to play naturally.” I hear this on a regular basis as I teach new students.

But these musicians are confusing natural with normal.

Normal is what you do habitually, no matter if it’s in accord with the design of your bodily structure, gravity, and the physical laws of acoustics, or not.

Natural, on the other hand, is when you direct your playing toward being in harmony with these things. To let your playing be supported by the laws of nature.

So as I teach, I keep two objectives in mind:

First, to help my students learn what is natural, to help them understand how they function best within the laws of nature.

And second, to get them to stop relying solely on what feels  normal as a guideline for directing their efforts in playing music.

The first of these aims is fairly easy for me to implement. By giving students a chance to understand (both intellectually and kinesthetically) how their bodies work best to play music, they practically have no choice but to realize that their previous conceptions are somewhat inaccurate.

The second of these aims is a bit harder to bring to fruition. Because musicians are so driven to play by what feels normal, what feels  right, sometimes the only way they can open the door for constructive change is to allow themselves to feel wrong. Not an easy thing for musicians to do (nor anyone else for that matter).

Even if a musician can clearly and unmistakably  hear the improvement in that instant when they stop doing their habit, they can sometimes still haunted by that sense that “It doesn’t feel  natural to do it that way.”

But as the Alexander lessons continue, the student gets enough of these experiences with the unfamiliar sensations that they stop feeling wrong. When that happens, it’s an indicator that great changes have been made with regard to their old habits (and to the quality of their playing).

Usually at that point I make a little experiment. I’ll use my hands to guide them back into their old habits, just so they can the sense the changes they’ve made. When I do this I usually hear something like, “Seriously? I used to do that? That feels terrible! It feels  so unnatural.”

And of course, it is unnatural. But fortunately it is no longer normal.

When this shift in thinking occurs, the musician is solidly walking upon a path of continuous growth and improvement.

Here are a few things you can do to point your playing toward the natural as opposed to the normal:

  • Study the laws of nature-It is vitally important that you move in a direction of better understanding both your body and certain principles of physics that are relevant to playing music. Browse anatomy books to better understand your structure. Pay careful attention to the shape, location and function of your joints. Also, get to know and understand the essential physical properties that govern sound production. By getting a clearer understanding of the physical phenomena involved in playing, you can save yourself lots of setbacks, frustration and even injury.
  • Question things-If you study the laws of nature and acquire a good foundation in understanding your body and basic acoustical principles, you’ll be in a good position to question things. Place even the best intended advice (always respectfully, of course) under the scrutiny of the laws of nature. Also, question your own beliefs. Make sure you understand why you proceed the way you do.
  • Allow yourself to feel wrong-It’s very likely that when you change something for the better it will feel wrong (that’s not always the case). Again, compare what you are doing with what you understand about the laws of nature. If you are fairly certain that a new way to do something on your instrument is better, more efficient and effective, follow your intellect. If you stick with your decision to change, eventually the right thing will feel right (more important, the wrong thing will feel wrong).
  • Consider getting help from a good teacher-The Alexander Technique is an especially practical way of addressing your habitual patterns of tension and inefficient movement. You don’t need to find a teacher who plays your instrument, nor do you need to find a teacher who is a musician. You can read about the best saxophone lesson I’ve ever taken to find out more about my specific experience in learning from a non-saxophonist. If you don’t have access to a certified Alexander Technique teacher, find another well-respected expert to help you (perhaps another musician). Just seek out a person who is teaching in accordance with the principles of nature, and not in accordance with their own habits and beliefs.

Stay with these principles and you’ll find that your continued progress and growth will be supported by the confidence that your idea of right, just might be right after all.

Easy Precision

One sure fire way to get somebody to tense their bodies up is to tell them to hold a particular position. As soon as you say, “Good! Exactly like that. Now don’t move a muscle”, you can bet that they’ve stiffened themselves up and stopped (or at least significantly interfered with) their breathing, in an attempt to hold the perfect position. This clearly is never helpful for optimum musical performance.

Yet this is the same kind of mental direction many musicians employ when trying to play with a certain preconception of precision. You can even see in performance sometimes as a musician transitions  from playing the “easy” parts in a piece to the ones that he or she perceives as difficult.  From balanced, present and mobile, to tense, anticipatory and held. All because of a shift in thinking.

There’s no single thing, no single stimulus, that puts musicians in that “precision” mode. It could be fast tempos, challenging dynamics, elaborate articulation, breathing demands, or a host of other things.

For an improvising musician it can also be such things as unfamiliar or challenging time signatures, asymmetrical (or otherwise non-conventional) forms, harmonic complexity, etc. In these moments you can hear an artist go from intuitive and expressive to unyieldingly craftsman-like and mechanical (and that’s often when it goes “well”).

If you observe their bodies, you’ll likely see lots of holding and bracing as they try to “make the changes”, or whatever else they might be distracted by.

But if you ask most musicians (whether improvisers or interpretive musicians) about their best performances, they’ll often convey a different experience. You might hear talk about being in the zone, having an effortless freedom to play with remarkable precision. 

From a neurobiological point of view this makes sense. What happens in these “in the zone” situations is that the player is simply letting all the training and practice fall into place unimpeded by the often distracting over-desire to play everything precisely. This allows the brain to most effectively send out the right messages to the body to carry out the demands of a highly skilled activity such as music. The music almost seems like it plays itself when this happens.

There are, in the simplest sense, really only two things necessary for this to happen: an intention to play the music (obviously), coupled with the clarity in thinking to send the most helpful messages from your brain to the rest of your body to fulfill this intention.

In Alexander Technique jargon we call this good direction. Specifically, using your thinking in the best way to support the best outcome.

When you ask a musician (or athlete, or any other type of performer) what they’re thinking when they’re in the zone, you might hear something like, “That’s just it! I’m not thinking at all.”

But that’s not quite true. (As long as you’re not unconscious, you’re always thinking). What these people are really talking about is that their thinking is seamlessly integrated into their performance. In essence, they don’t notice their thinking. More important, they’re not distracted by it.

Now of course, any good performance is dependent upon good preparation. And even in practice (or especially in practice!) this issue of rigid precision is a challenge that must be dealt with. It’s a matter of how you think when you play. And a key principle in helpful thinking is this: Ease supports precision.

When people say the masters make it look easy to play, they’re quite right. To the masters, playing music is easy, precision and all. It mostly involves, balance, release and clear musical intentions.

Here are a few things to aim toward in helping you find your easy precision:

  • Notice your thinking and notice your reaction-When you are trying to play something that seems to demand from you great precision, take note of your thoughts. Where does your attention go? What is your self-talk like? What are you aiming for specifically? Then notice your bodily reactions. Do you stiffen your neck and shoulders? Do you hold your breath? Do you lock your knees? Do you tense your hands? What happens to your balance? Whatever your habit is, remember that it is preceded by your thoughts. Change your thoughts, change your habits.
  • Let yourself move-If you’re playing something that tends to put you into that “held” precision mode, see if you can change your response from rigidity to release. If you watch the great classical virtuosi, you see this time and again during performance. Let yourself move. That doesn’t mean you have to move in any particular way. Just allow for the possibility of movement. Allow yourself to respond to the demands of the music, to the ebb and flow of the music. You might move a little, a lot, or hardly at all. It’s all good as long as you’re not bracing yourself into place.
  • Take in the bigger picture-If the precision demands of the music seem to involve one particular part of your body (like your fingers for example) don’t fall into the trap of putting all your attention there. Sure, you need to be cognizant of the particular part, but you also need to expand your awareness to take in other things: the rest of your body, the sound of the music itself, the response of the other musicians you’re playing with (or the click of the metronome), etc. As a musician it is imperative that you actively practice building an inclusive, expanded awareness as you play (as opposed to a compartmentalized hyper-focus that works against your brains best functioning).
  • Don’t try to get past the precise part-Don’t let yourself get wrapped up into trying to get to the end of the difficult part. That should never be your intention. That just takes you out of the present moment, out of the zone. Always stay with process. Process means putting the quality of how you make the music at top priority. The process that will help you the most is what I’ve outlined above: managing your reactions, aiming toward release and easy movement, and utilizing an inclusive attention. If you practice staying with the process, the end result will always take care of itself in the best possible way. Always.
In reality, it might seem like this so called easy precision is elusive, inconsistent and difficult to find. In principle, it is available to you at any moment. And it’s all starts by changing your thoughts.

Be Wary Of Good Advice

One of the biggest challenges that arise when I teach the Alexander Technique to musicians is to get them to consider ideas about playing their instrument that seem to be contrary to what they believe to be absolutely true. Some of these ideas were imparted to them by well-meaning teachers.

Unfortunately, a certain amount of those  ideas are adding to (or causing!) the problem that motivated the student to seek my help in the first place.

I try never to directly contradict the advice that they’ve taken from their teachers. Rather, I aim at helping them have a different kinesthetic experience by not following that advice. (I of course am using my hands and words to direct them into a more efficient, natural use of themselves. This helps significantly.)

After they’ve experience this different, seemingly new way to play, I usually tell them something something like this: “So now you have a chance to go home and experiment. You can do it the way you’ve been doing it, or try it this other way. Then you can choose which you prefer, which way seems to help you the most.”

And that’s pretty much it. Far more often than not, the student chooses this newer, clearly less strenuous way to play. But it’s the student’s choice, not my insistent command.

For us as musicians, it’s natural to seek out advice from someone who has already solved the problems of playing our instrument that we still struggle with. And to be clear, most of the advice that master musicians give their students regarding pedagogy is immensely helpful, often saving the student years of misunderstanding and frustration.

But you always have to come back to this one question when taking advice from a great instrumentalist: Is this musician playing well because of what he or she is doing, or despite  what he or she is doing? (I ask my regular visitors here to forgive me for raising this question so often, but it really is fundamental.)

For example, you can play saxophone quite well if you curl your toes and grip the floor with vise-like effort. But this doesn’t help you play well. It doesn’t help you produce your sound. It’s not necessary at all to playing the saxophone. (In fact it actually interferes with your ability to play your best.) It’s a simple matter of the principle of cause and effect. Curling your toes is an effect  of your habit, not a cause  of your good sound.

But if you believe that you need  to do that to play well, it’s likely you’ll pass that advice on to one of your students as gospel truth. And this is often how bad advice is passed on from teacher to student.

Here are three guidelines you can follow when given advice about playing your instrument (from me or anyone else) to help you make better decisions for yourself:

1. Does it make sense with the laws of nature? Part of my job when I teach is to help my student better understand the music making process with respect to their bodily structures, and basic principles of physical science (mechanics, gravity, acoustics). I want them to have a clearer and more accurate body map, and want them to understand how their overall general coordination affects the specific coordination of playing music. I also want them to understand what it takes to produce sound on their instrument from an acoustic point of view, then always ask themselves if, or how, their habits might be affecting the production of sound. Again, the “because of/despite of” question. So many myths of pedagogy can be dispelled by simply cracking a book on human anatomy, or reading up on the acoustical princples of your instrument.

2. Does it mostly involve adding, or subtracting strain? This is an important question to ask, especially if you feel pain or fatigue after carrying out the advice you’ve been given. I’ve never yet taught a student who wasn’t creating enough  muscular effort to play. In fact, it’s usually a matter of getting them to stop working in such a strenuous, misdirected way. So when advice has lots “doing” words, as in, “pull  your shoulders down”, “grip  the floor with your feet to ground yourself”, “push  from your diaphragm”, “tuck  your chin in”, etc., go back to asking if, and how, these kinds of things work with respect to the laws of nature. Many times, well-meaning teachers are describing the perceived effect of what good playing looks like, as opposed to the bigger picture of what the cause of that visible bodily change is. For example, as a saxophonist, if I let my neck release my head into an upward balance off the top of my spine, my chin will appear to move inward toward my throat. But here’s the thing: muscular release is what is causing the change. That’s something entirely different than me trying to tuck my chin in toward my throat (muscular tension). Generally speaking in my experience, the more the pedagogical advice has to do with release and expansion (as opposed to added effort and contraction) the more effective the result.

3. Do you clearly understand the advice in the same way the advice giver does? This is quite often where things start to go wrong. I’ve many times encountered students who are not understanding and carrying out the advice the way the teacher understands it and carries it out. This has to do with the limits of language. I often find myself saying to my students as I teach, “You’ve just done what I’ve asked you to do, but it’s not what I want you to do. So, let’s see if I can ask again in a different way.” There’s no such thing as one ideal way of expressing your own movement experiences so that another person will experience them in the same way you do. This is where the art of teaching becomes fundamental. If you get advice and it seems to defy the laws of nature, and/or mostly involves more muscular effort, make really sure (in the most respectful way) that you ask your teacher to help you better understand.

And on that note…of course, any time you take a lesson or seek advice from someone, proceed with the utmost respect. Never argue. Simply ask genuine questions until you understand. But ultimately, you have to decide for yourself if the advice given is helpful or not to you, no matter what anyone says. It’s your choice.