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Exploring Being Wrong To Find Improvement

The errors of the great mind exceed in number those of the less vigorous one

– William Stanley Jevons, Economist

If you’re not making mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough.

– John Coltrane, Jazz Saxophonist

There is no musician in this world who has flawless technique, because there is no such thing as flawless technique. For an artist, technique is the means toward self expression. As the artist continues to grow, the technique must evolve to serve this expression.

The pursuit of perfection is more a direction to move toward rather than a destination. (It’s not about perfection so much as it is about improvement.) To paraphrase the great cellist Janos Starker describing his continued growth:

“All of the sudden, everything I worked so hard for is wrong, because I’ve found an even better way. A new level. But when I work hard and finally reach that new level, it too will become wrong.”

The fact that even very accomplished musicians still practice, still study, still strive, is, in a sense, an admission that they’re not completely right about their approach to playing music. There is always more. There is always a different way other than the way they already know.

The only way you can possibly reach your potential as a musician is to explore the possibility of being wrong. (But keep in mind that wrong might be nothing more than your immediate reaction, your perception, of something that is unfamiliar.)

The sound I currently have on tenor saxophone is a result of lots of physical changes and equipment choices that were wrong at one point in my development. And as right as they are now, they (thinking of what Janos Starker said above) may possibly become wrong at another point in the future.

Much of your sense of what is right is based upon belief and habit. F. M. Alexander (the founder of the Alexander Technique) said:

Everyone wants to be right, but nobody stops to consider whether their idea of right is right.

In regard to postural and movement habits, Alexander found that most people’s sense of right was based upon something he called a “faulty sensory awareness.” In essence, an inaccurate sense of what’s really going on in your body as opposed to what you think is going on.

Alexander found that because people are creatures of habit, they’ll typically cling to the feeling of their habit, whether or not that habit is counterproductive to their desired intention. They’ll do so because their habits always feel familiar. They feel right.

To change, Alexander said, you need to go from the known, to the unknown. (From the habitual and familiar, to the new and unfamiliar.) This can only happen by exploring the possibility of being wrong. By allowing yourself to explore wrong, you set the stage for change.

According to the principles of the Alexander Technique, the only time you’re ever actually “wrong” is when you interfere with the natural poise and coordination that you already possess to function well.

If you make something more complicated by excessively straining muscles, rather than using a more efficient coordination based upon your bodily design and its relationship to gravity, you’re probably wrong, whether or not it feels right.

Your wrong because ultimately, it doesn’t help you play any better. It in fact makes good playing even less likely. You’re wrong only because your reaction is in conflict with your desire (and with your design).

For many, it’s not always easy to notice habits in this way. (This is where a good teacher can help immensely.)

But if you can learn to avoid a few of the truly wrong things (according to this Alexander principle) you’re left with a vast field of possibilities of things that might be right, might be better.

And of course being different isn’t necessarily wrong.

In fact that’s part of the point I’m trying to make here. Paul Desmond had a sound on alto saxophone that was as different as could be from David Sanborn’s alto sound. But that doesn’t mean that one sound is right and the other wrong. They’re just different (and both highly unique and beautiful).

You can apply this same kind of open-mindedness to your own exploration of right and wrong as you practice.

Here are a few other things to keep in mind to help you explore your musical practice in this way:

Notice how you respond-What do you do when you play something that didn’t come out they way you intended? Did your body become tense? Did you stop breathing? Did you make a scowling face? Learning how to accept the unintentional with grace and balance is a great skill to cultivate. Besides making you a better performer, it will keep you much more open-minded in your practice. If you find yourself getting tense after trying something in a different way, stop and do it again with a less tense, less reactive response. You might be surprised to notice that it doesn’t seem so wrong after all, and is perhaps even better than what you had before.

Don’t rely exclusively on what feels right-Like Alexander said, what often feels right is your habit. Sometimes to really find what’s “right” (or at least better) you have to allow yourself to feel wrong (out of your habit). In exploring new techniques, approaches and equipment, try to base your assessments on discernible, objective criteria. “Am I able to control the pitch more accurately?” “Am I able to play with less strain on my entire body?” “Can I more consistently produce my altissimo?”, etc. Make a list of your objectives with of anything new that you try. Keep track of the pros and cons. Take your time and use your reasoning.

Understand why you do things the way you do-If you hold your posture, position your instrument, form your embouchure, practice in a certain sequence, etc., because some well-respected expert told you to do so, I encourage you to ask the deeper question of “Why?” The better you understand the physics of your instrument, your bodily structure and design (and your thinking), the better you’ll be able to discern the best choices for you. This is where honest self-inqury and basic scientific reasoning come into play. If you’ve been doing something the same way for years because of your deferment to a respected source, explore the possibility of not doing it that way. See what happens. Measure the results.

Let yourself sound bad-Sometimes to find a better way to play, you have to let go of your desire to sound good . If you start with discernment instead of judgement, you might find that sounding “bad” doesn’t really sound bad at all, just different. And even if you do sound bad (bad intonation, articulation, etc.) understand that it might just be a matter of you getting used to a less seemingly familiar coordination. It could be that as you get to know this new coordination, you play better than ever. (The current mouthpiece I play on tenor saxophone is a prime example of this. The only way I could make this mouthpiece work for me was to play in a more efficient, less strenous way than I was used to habitually.)

So as always, let yourself explore, have fun, be different, be wrong. Aim for a right direction (growth and improvement) instead of a right destination (perfection, which, as Janos Starker might say, doesn’t exist). Being wrong might just be the right thing for you. Let me know what you think!

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.

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.

Think Expansively To Play Better Music

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As both a performing artist and an Alexander Technique teacher, I tend to observe the physical manifestations of a musician’s performance with one simple inquiry: “Is this person mostly expanding or mostly contracting as she or he makes music?” In essence, I’m looking for whether or not she or he is primarily gaining or losing stature while playing.

To be clear, you’re always contracting muscles to play music. You have to. And even when you’re “expanding” your stature there is still muscular contraction (along with a lot of release) going on. The real question is: What are you mostly doing with yourself as you play music?

A simple way to begin to address this question is to notice yourself in reasonably neutral, easy balance (not playing your instrument), then see what happens the instant you go play. Whether sitting or standing as you begin to play one of two things will happen: Either you “bear down” as you play, pulling yourself downwards and inwards; or you release yourself upwards and outwards. You tend toward either contraction, or expansion.

Noticing this in yourself can sometimes be difficult, as you are very used to whatever it is that you do habitually to play music. Even observing it in others can be an exercise in the observation of subtlety.

With some performers, it’s very easy to see when they pull down and contract, creating a good deal of pre-anticipated effort and strain. Perhaps you even notice this in some of your music students. (Perhaps you even notice it in yourself.)

When performers move with expansion, it often goes unnoticed. It’s as if they are really doing nothing at all, just leaving themselves alone as they play. And in reality, that’s precisely what’s happening. You see, you naturally move toward expansion if you don’t interfere and just let it happen. It’s how your neuromuscular systems is wired. You expand as you oppose the forces of gravity.

And what generally accompanies this physically expansive tendency is freely expressive, dynamic music.

The truth of the matter is that many great performers are actually going back and forth between contraction to expansion. In a sense, this mirrors the movement of breath. Inhalation and exhalation. It’s also a metaphor for artistic expression. Tension and release.

The really great performers ride this tension/release cycle from the music, and from within themselves. But mostly they default to release and expansion. That’s the baseline.

Other performers tend to default mostly toward tension and contraction. That’s their baseline. Usually (but certainly not always) this manifests itself as over-efforted, sometimes awkward and inconsistent musical expression.

So notice what you do with yourself as you play. Do you mostly expand or mostly contract? Here are some guidelines to consider in the form of questions you can ask yourself:

Am I pulling myself downward and inward as I begin to play? If you are, just think about releasing upward and outward instead. As counterintuitive as this might seem, it makes perfect physiological sense. A boxer, for example, knows that the power of the punch comes from the whole body expanding upward and outward, creating greater leverage and velocity.

What am I doing with my head and neck? Again, are you stiffening your neck and pulling your head downward, or leaving your neck alone and letting your head release upward? When you stiffen your neck you begin to interfere with the entire process of expansion.

What am I doing with my shoulders? Are you picking them up toward your ears, or are you leaving them alone? Are you letting your arms release away from your body? Letting your hands release from your back and arms?

What am I doing with my lower back? Are you arching or otherwise straining your back as you begin to play? Let your back and pelvis stay neutral.

What am I doing in my legs and feet? Are you locking your knees by throwing them backward? If so, let yourself release your knees as your weight moves slightly back toward your heels. Let your feet expand onto the floor (Don’t curl your toes!)

How is my breathing? Are you gasping noisily to inhale? If you are, see if you can notice how this affects your entire stature (contraction or expansion?) Keeping your breathing easy and quiet can work wonders for maintaining your stature, ease and balance.

Watch this video of the great violinist, Jascha Heifetz, as he plays Hungarian Dance #7 by Brahms. What’s noteworthy here is what he is not doing: He’s not pulling his head down. He’s not narrowing his shoulders. He’s not pulling his arms in toward his body (notice how free his arms and hands are!) And so forth. What you see instead is expansive, expressive easy music making. He is clearly working in cooperation with his physical design. Enjoy!