Learning To Trust Unlearning

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Seven months ago my daughter Julia was born. One of the deepest joys in my life is watching her grow and develop. Of course that’s no surprise for anybody who has reared children. But what has surprised me is how much I’ve learned about movement and balance from observing her as she develops. And today that got me to thinking about why this is good news for musicians.

Skills, such as balancing her head on her spine, sitting up, turning herself over, coordinating her hands with her eyes, crawling…even the coordination of her breathing, are all being learned by trial and error. She tries certain things that don’t work, and she stops trying them. She tries other things that do work and she adds them to her movement and posture repertoire.

All of this seems to happen practically below the level of conscious thought. And as her skills improve, she moves with greater ease, efficiency, control and fluency. Her natural coordination emerges.

There is no other option: For her to function best in relation to gravity, she has to learn to move with respect to her structure. This “ideal” movement is what she has to default to. F. M. Alexander would call it a good use of her “primary control.”

It’s this natural coordination that she’ll bring into all her activities. That is until she gets older and starts (like most people do) to develop habits of mal-coordination that interfere with the beautiful natural coordination that she is learning now.

That’s not as bad as it seems. You see, if she does begin to lose this natural poise, all she (or you or anyone else) has to do is to unlearn her habits. Then her natural coordination will emerge, revealing itself to her as an old, reliable friend.

And so it is with playing music. To play any instrument, you have to call upon the repertoire of movements you’ve learned as a small child: negotiating your body’s relationship to gravity, coordinating your lips and tongue (if you sing or play a wind instrument), coordinating your eyes to your hands, flexing and extending limbs and fingers in coordination to create the movement necessary to play. And of course, breathing.

In a sense, you’d already developed all the necessary skills to play your instrument long before you even touched it for the first time. Those skills still lie there latent inside you.

When you watch somebody who you would consider to be a “natural” musician perform, that’s what you’re very often seeing.

Sure, as you learn to play music, you’re refining and integrating these skills even more. But the basic motor skills are already there. You learned them a long time ago.

Often when a musician with pain and/or performance problems comes to me for Alexander Technique lessons, my job is to help her or him rediscover this natural coordination. This (at the risk of repeating myself) involves unlearning.

Unlearning is a different process than learning. (It’s actually a different neurobiological process entirely.) Ask any musician which is more difficult when it comes to studying music: to learn something new, or to un-learn something old. Practically without hesitation she or he will say unlearning is more difficult. It takes more time. It takes more vigilance. It takes more persistence, etc.

Yet these same musicians are often reluctant to really trust this principle and follow it as far as it could actually help them. They’re often looking for some new form of doing.  Some new, yet undiscovered manner of muscular effort to lead them towards growth.

As a musician, you might be looking for some special thing you need to do, perhaps that you’d never done before in you’re life, in order to improve how you play. And maybe that really is what you need.

But if you can keep coming back to the idea that playing your instrument involves nothing more than the coordinated effort of all the motor skills that you’ve already mastered (that’s right, mastered!) when you were younger, it can simplify things tremendously. (Not to mention how it can change your outlook in a positive way.)

You can learn to trust that, as you unlearn some of the not so helpful habits you’ve acquired,  your playing will improve significantly. Your natural coordination will emerge. Combine that with artistic maturity and clear intention, and you have all the necessary ingredients for a great performer.

This morning as I was teaching I witnessed this yet again. As I was working with a new student on his singing, I simply helped him to stop interfering with his natural ability to use his voice. As I let him experience what it was like to sing without his habitual mal-coordinated efforts, his singing instantly improved. In a big way.

It was easy for both of us to hear the difference. More resonance, clearer intonation, beautiful color. This required no new vocal techniques, now new way to “imagine the sound”, no new form of effort, no new doing of any kind. Just undoing. And beautiful music emerged. He realized his path to improvement: Unlearn the habits, so the dormant, good coordination can be set free.

So if you wish to improve your technique, your sound, your time, your precision…learn to trust the process of unlearning and see what surprises await you.

 

 

To Really Hear Your Sound, You First Have To Accept It

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The other day when I arrived at the studio where I practice saxophone, I was told that I had to use a different room than the one I usually practice in. No big deal. The room I typically use is somewhat dead acoustically. I like practicing in it because it gives me brutally honest feedback about the center of my sound, my articulation and my technical fluency. But mostly I like it because I’m used to it.

Truth be told, I don’t actually enjoy the sound of my instrument in that room (as I said, dead and dry), but I’m familiar with it, and play comfortably in it. I’ve grown to accept the sound of me playing saxophone in this room.

The room I switched to was considerably brighter acoustically, and actually much nicer sounding than the other room. My sound came pouring out powerfully, resonating the room and my entire body. You’d think I’d be delighted.

Yet strangely enough, at first I couldn’t play very well in this room. It’s as if I didn’t even recognize my sound (although it sounded rich and beautiful).

I was surprised by my reaction. I mean, after all, when I go to rehearse or play a gig, I rather easily adjust to the room I’m playing in. Sure, there are some acoustic environments that I prefer over others. But since I have no real expectations it doesn’t create any kind of problem. In short, I accept my sound in the room I’m playing in. That’s my rehearsal and performance habit.

Why should it be difficult for me to play in this new practice room?

For the same reason I can be more flexible and adaptive with my sound at gigs and rehearsals: Habit. I practice everyday in that room. I do come there with expectations (conscious and unconscious) about my sound.

When these expectations weren’t met that day, I was thrown off a bit. I actually started working harder to try to “find” my sound, which is completely counter-intutive if you think about it.

Typically (for me and many instrumentalists), playing in a dead room tempts me to push harder to produce my sound. Through my work in the  Alexander Technique , I’ve learned to easily resist this temptation. But the point is that the more resonant the room (up to a reasonable point, of course), the less physical effort it should take to make a sound.

So what I learned in those strange first few moments  in that unfamiliar practice room was this: I’m not accepting my sound. I’m not even hearing it. What I’m doing is reacting to my sound without taking the time to accept it, to realize it. That reaction was based upon habituated expectations, and was manifesting itself in me as mal-coordinated movement.

So what I did was stop, and redirect my thinking.

I had to shift my aim, my intention. Rather than jumping into my intended practice routine (hoping to awkwardly, yet gradually adjust to the sound), I made it my sole purpose to take in and really hear my sound in that room. I wanted to hear it, not as I though I knew it, but as if it were a welcome stranger that held me in rapt fascination. I shifted from having predetermined expectations to having an almost childlike curiosity.

And of course, practically the very instant I made that shift in my intention, my playing became better…more integrated, expressive, facile, clean…easy again. I ended up having a marvelous practice session, full of surprise and delight.

I find quite often when I teach musicians who struggle with producing sound, that there is this disconnect between what they imagine and what they actually hear. Often this leads to excessive strain, dissatisfaction with the entire music making process, and even injury. All because of a gap between what they imagine (expect) and what they hear.

Part of my job is to help bridge that gap. And as you can see from what I’ve related about myself above, I need to help myself in the same way from time to time.

In fact when I first started playing music, it was on an alto saxophone. I was told to play alto because it was easier to handle than the tenor (even though that’s what I really wanted to play). The first three or four years of study, I could never play more than about 15 minutes at a single practice session without my chops getting totally exhausted. Finally on a lark, I switched to tenor. Playing was immediately easy. I could play hours a day.

In hindsight, I think I was struggling so much on alto because I wasn’t really hearing and accepting the sound of the instrument. I was imagining the sound of a tenor, and in doing so, was fighting the sound of the alto every step of the way. (Nowadays it’s easy for me to get a good sound on alto. I just had to learn how to hear it.)

I’d like to leave you with an excerpt from the book, Integrated Practice by Pedro de Alcantara:

The traditional approach to sound says, “First imagine a sound, then find the physical means to produce it.” The problem is that the search for sound is often predetermined by taste and habit. You like or dislike that which you know already, and the unknown is often unimaginable. Each gesture you make produces its own sound. By simply exploring gesture, you may well be surprised by new, unplanned and unimagined sounds. 

Ah…unplanned and unimagined sounds…the possibility of surprise and delight.  So see if you can approach your sound with curiosity instead of expectations. Accept so that you can hear and explore. It can make quite a difference.

 

 

Listening Better By Consciously Ignoring

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Recently I taught an introductory workshop in improvisation to a group of young (mostly high school and college age) musicians. All of the members of my class were primarily interpretive musicians (classically trained) and were already reasonably proficient players. All were quite excited and interested (if not a little nervous) about delving into the act of spontaneous music making.

The aim of this workshop was simply to get them to think about the human process of improvising (and for them to recognize that they already had skills they could use as to improvise).

What I noticed about most of the students in this group was similar to what I notice about many interpretive musicians new to improvisation: 

  1. Fear of sounding wrong (making a mistake, playing something completely non-musical (in bad taste, or “stylistically wrong”), or getting brain stuck and not being to play anything at all…etc.)
  2. A hyper-focused attention on what was coming out of their instruments at the expense of not hearing the bigger picture of the ensemble.

Now, for sure, these two things can manifest themselves in many musicians, in many musical situations. But in the world of improvisation these two things literally will hamstring you even more. If you’re interpreting a piece of written music, at least you have the notes on the page, the composition, to carry you through.

But when you improvise, you ARE the composer. So if you’re in a constant state of doubt, and, are effectively ignoring the other musicians with whom you’re playing…well, let’s just say it doesn’t even get off the ground.

To address the fear of “being wrong” I did two things: First, I told them that there is no such thing as “wrong” when you improvise. There are simply choices you make in the moment. Some of those choices are better than others, but you want never to worry about what you just played.

As the great jazz trumpeter Miles Davis said, “If you make a mistake, you might want to play that.” And so it is. It’s a question of responding, moment by moment, to what you hear. My best moments in improvisation are almost always “mistakes”, which lead me to other, uncharted possibilities.

The second thing I did was have the whole group start on a collective improvisation, as opposed to singling each participant out as a soloist with a supporting ensemble, which is more typical in jazz and many other genres of improvisation.

So I set some very easy and clear parameters for them all to follow in order to create a bit of spontaneous music: Simple rhythmic patterns with limited tonal choices. Something they could negotiate with ease without having to be overwhelmed with choices.

I had them all play on their own for a few minutes to master the rhythms and familiarize themselves with the tonality. We did this all together, as if we were “warming up to play” before a rehearsal. Pure cacophony.

After doing this for about ten minutes or so, I could tell that the musicians knew their material well enough to start. I could also sense that they were feeling more playful, bold and unafraid. Great!

Next I asked them all to start playing at the same time under my direction. I told them that the aim of this exercise is for them to listen to the other musicians, to the ensemble as a whole as it made music. Not to think too much about what they were playing.

What came out of this was no surprise to me. It was immediately clear that nobody in that room was listening to, or thinking about, anything other than his or her own process, totally eliminating the rest of the ensemble from consciousness. (I recorded our activity for future reference.)

I let them go on like this for a few moments then had them stop. I began to ask what they noticed about the sound of the ensemble. Silence and blank stares. I asked them more specific questions about the ensemble sound: dynamics, intensity, rhythmic flow, etc. More silence and blank stares.

This was so clearly reflected in what I heard. It was mostly noise, harsh and unyielding, not much different than the earlier warm up. It was apparent that each person was listening, thinking and looking, almost exclusively inward as the music (if you want to call it that) unfolded.

Even though the participants were asked to pay attention to the group as a whole, they became sidetracked by the concern of “what am I playing?”

To quote Pedro de Alcantara, from his book, Integrated Practice, “The desire to do trumps the decision to pay attention.” I was seeing and hearing this first hand.

So I implemented a different tactic. I assigned each person a partner. I told each participant that they could play anything they wanted. They could either play within the parameters of rhythm and tonality that I set, or they could ignore those parameters and play anything they felt like.

There was just one rule: “Whatever you play, it has to sound like it doesn’t fit well with what your partner is playing. It has to sound like you’re completely ignoring your partner. If it’s consonant, you make it dissonant. If it fits rhythmically, you alter your time and/or rhythm. If it sounds dynamically balanced, change your dynamic level to bring it out of balance.”

They began to play, and I immediately experienced  something quite different. I actually began to hear music. I heard tension and release, interaction, dynamics, and playfulness. Communication. Connection. (I recorded this too, for the sake of reference.)

After we finished this, I also saw a different group of musicians. They were excited, laughing, even self-satisfied. We listened to both recorded playbacks, and the participants were stunned by the contrast from the first to the second performance.

And they all learned an important lesson about listening: The only way you can “consciously ignore” somebody is by really listening to them.

As an improviser you learn that you ride upon not just your own intrinsic musical energy, but also, the energy of the group. You respond to the whole. (I think this is the same with all music.)

As fundamental as that might seem, it’s easy for an improviser to lose sight of, no matter how far along the path they are.

Practice Paying Attention To Yourself To Improve Your Performance

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It’s not unusual for musicians new to the study of the Alexander Technique to be a little bit wary of the idea of being more intentionally aware in order to change their habits when playing music.

He or she can be put off by the idea that paying attention in this new “Alexander” way (awareness, prevention of habit, and redirection of thought) will become a distraction that interferes with the music making process.

This is a valid concern (one in which I had at the beginning of my Alexander learning process). After all, what you want as a musician is freedom to express yourself, not a seemingly oppressive form of self-consciousness. You don’t need yet another “mental ball” to juggle.

For you to perform well as a musician, you already must be aware of many things simultaneously. Here are but a few:
• Your intonation
• The intonation of those with whom you’re playing
• Time and rhythm
• Notation (where applicable), including dynamics, articulation, form, etc.
• The quality of your sound, and/or attack
• The blend of your sound in the ensemble
• The conductor (where applicable)
• Your personal emotional expression

I could go on. The point is, you have to be aware of quite a few things. But understand that all these things are integrated together in your consciousness as the whole “experience of playing music”. (It is when you’re playing well, anyhow.)

But conspicuously missing from the above list is one of the most important things to pay attention to: How you are using yourself. More specifically, what you are doing with yourself in order to create music.

If you shift immediately to placing all your attention on yourself as you play, you’ll very likely play worse, feel awkward, self-conscious, and in general, disconnected to the music making process.

The idea is not to divide your attention by paying attention to yourself as you play, but rather, to gradually learn to integrate your self-awareness by expanding your consciousness.

Think about it. You’ve already developed your ability to keep many things in mind as you play (again, as an integrated whole). It’s therefore possible that you can learn to place an increased self-awareness into this whole. In my experience, I’ve found that self-awareness becomes the central organizing principle that helps me to be easily aware of everything else as I play.

In other words, self-awareness is the thing that integrates everything else (intonation, time, form, notation, etc.) into a clearer, whole musical experience. You need to include yourself into your attention if you are to play efficiently, expressively and safely (avoiding injury). And if you wish to improve, this is fundamental.

So how do you develop this ability to be more self-aware as you play music? Simple, you practice.

Here are some simple guidelines and suggestions for practicing paying attention:
• Devote 15 minutes per practice period to deal exclusively with improving your self-awareness. After that, go on to practicing whatever and however you like. By devoting your time to this on a daily basis, you shift your emphasis on “sounding good”, or “practicing something useful” to allowing yourself to pay attention to your use as you play.
• Pay attention first to how you pick up your instrument. Do you tense up (stop breathing, pick up your shoulders, stiffen your neck/jaw, etc)? You might be surprised to learn that you’re already indulging in your habitual playing tension before you even get the instrument into position. Any unnecessary tension you notice as you do this, you can make a conscious decision to prevent.
• Notice how you’re sitting or standing as you play. Do you find your sitting (or standing) balance first, before you pick or approach your instrument? Or do you find yourself coming down and forward toward your instrument as you “clamp down” to play? It’s important to find an easy balance first, before you bring the instrument to you.
• Notice what you do as you create sound on your instrument. Are you stiffening your neck? Are you lifting your shoulder(s) unnecessarily? Are you pulling yourself downward, maybe twisting through your spine to do so? Are you locking your knees? Are you holding your breath? Are you making a huge, noisy, tense inhalation to prepare to play?
• Notice what you do as you begin to connect notes. Do you lose your ease and balance? Do you begin to stiffen your neck and shoulders? Hold your breath? Stiffen your fingers and hands?

Anytime you notice yourself going into your habitual patterns of unnecessary tension in your 15-minute “awareness” period, you simply stop what you’re doing (even if it means to stop playing completely!) Every time you stop yourself from creating this tension as you play, you accomplish two important things:

First, you weaken the response from your brain that creates the pattern. If you do this over time, you gradually reduce the pattern to the point of elimination (it stops becoming your habit).

Second, you strengthen your skills in self-awareness. Your capacity to pay attention becomes more and more refined. The best thing about this is that after a while, you don’t have to make an effort to “look” at yourself to become self-aware. Rather, the awareness of what you do with yourself as you make music comes to your attention on its own.

In a sense, this is what has already happened to you with your sense of pitch. If you’re playing out of tune (or if the person next to you is), you probably don’t have any problem hearing it. In fact, it’s harder to ignore it than it is to hear it. This happens because your capacity to discern pitch has been highly refined. Through practice.

And so it is with your self-awareness. If you practice this way, you’ll get to the point where you’re old habits of bodily tension will become just as hard to ignore as the musician sitting next to you who is playing painfully sharp or flat.

So give yourself the chance to develop this very important skill. You’ll find nothing but growth and improvement if you do. In one sense, this is the chief aim of the Alexander Technique. Lessons in the Technique can help you discover an effortless way to integrate all the components of music making into a smooth running whole. (Your practicing and your performing will never be the same!)

Using Your Body To Play Music: Integrate Instead Of Isolate

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One of the common traps that many musicians fall into is in thinking that one part of their body is almost entirely responsible for their sound: If it’s a flutist, it’s the lips. If it’s a violinist, its the hands. If it’s a singer, it’s the vocal mechanisms, and so forth. But in reality, this is never the case, and thinking about it as such can actually interfere with optimum performance.

True, if you’re a violinist, the music ultimately comes through your hands. If you aren’t using your hands well, you’re probably not going to have your best results. 

But your hands are dependent upon your arms , which are dependent upon your back, which is conditioned by how you manage the relationship of your head and neck. And of course if you’re standing, your legs support your back, which supports your arms, which supports your hands.

This doesn’t even take into account how your eyes and ears influence all this.

When musicians come to me for Alexander Technique lessons, I typically see this over emphasis on one part of their body. Even before the first lesson, when we speak by phone, I often hear things like, “I’m having problems with the fingers of my right hand”, or, “I’m having jaw problems. My embouchure just seems stuck.”

And for sure, these musicians have identified the symptoms of a problem. But what they’ve really done is noticed the manifestation of a bigger problem: The coordination of their entire body is off kilter. They just haven’t realized that yet, and still think their problem is in this one, isolated part of their body.

Yet ironically, it’s this over emphasis and hyper awareness that is causing the problems. These musicians have effectively divided themselves into isolated, seemingly unrelated parts. All at the expense of excluding the whole of their bodies from the entire music making process.

In my own case it was the same thing. I took Alexander lessons because I had a serious problem with the functioning of my left hand, making playing the saxophone nearly impossible. When I came to my first lesson, my teacher listened very attentively and openly about my problem. She then begin to work with my head, neck and back.

Wait a minute! There’s nothing wrong with my head, neck and back (so I thought). The problem is with my left hand!

Well, fortunately for me, in that first lesson my teacher was able to show me (through the experience of movement) that my left hand problem was the end-result of the poorly coordinated use of my head, neck and back. As my head/neck/back relationship started to improve, the good functioning of my left hand began to return.

As the lessons continued, I grew to discover and understand how my legs, feet, eyes, hips…everything, was involved not only in how I used my left hand, but also, how I produced my sound, how I heard pitch, and even, how I imagined music and improvised.

Here’s a succinct and elegant description of this topic by Pedro de Alcantara, from his recently published book, Integrated Practice-Coordination, Rhythm and Sound:

” A violinist who plays a trill using two fingers of her left hand is, in fact, using both hands, both arms, both shoulders, and her head, neck, back and legs at the same time. If she doesn’t direct her back and legs to support her upper body, she’ll compensate unconsciously by stiffening her neck and shoulders, thereby affecting the fingers of her left hand. If she doesn’t command her right arm to bow smoothly and steadily, her left hand will lose some of its own stability. If she sways here pelvis forward and backward, she’ll hollow her lower back and shorten hers spine. Directly or indirectly, all these misuses will affect her trill.” 

There’s just no getting around this truth.

So examine your own thinking about how you play your instrument (voice is an instrument, too!) Is there a connection in your thinking to all the parts, or does the “main” part live in isolation?

Whatever that “main” part is (hands, mouth, etc.) see if you can trace it back to its most immediate connection.Then trace that back to its connection, and so on.  For example, if it’s your mouth, see how your lips work with respect to your jaw; then see how your jaw works with respect to your neck (and to how you balance your head on your spine); then notice how your head and neck work with respect to your back. All the way to your limbs, and even your eyes and ears.

You might find that there is some unnecessary tension in one or more of these connections. When you start letting go of these habitual tensions, you’ll indirectly improve the use of the main part, be it your lips, hands, feet…whatever.

So the aim here is to view your body as an integrated whole, not as a bunch of isolated parts. As you move toward integration of these parts into a unified whole, with a clear intention, you’ll make music in an easier, freer and more expressive way.