Tag Archives: Practicing Saxophone

Learning To Trust Unlearning

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.

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.

Want To Clarify Your Musical Thinking? Start Singing

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One of the often overlooked skills that an improvising musician needs to develop is the ability to sing clearly, easily and accurately, any musical musical idea that comes to mind. Whether it’s a scale fragment, melodic sequence or an entire phrase from a transcribed solo, to play with connection to the music, you must be able to hear it first. To imagine it.

Yet you could be so focused on “finding the notes” (or “getting the notes under your fingers”) on your instruments that you might be not actually hearing what it is you’re intending to play. In essence there is a disconnect between aural imagination and physical execution.

When I teach improvisation, I can usually hear this disconnect. It’s as if the music just stopped coming out of the player and was suddenly replaced by mechanical rote. It doesn’t sound terrible; it just sounds, well, uninspired and unintended. Random. Arbitrary.

The great jazz pianist, composer and teacher, Lennie Tristano (who was known for his highly demanding, disciplined approach to improvisation), would insist that his students spent a considerable amount of their practice time singing the improvised solos of great jazz artists. He would have them do this before he would let them use their instruments to transcribe the solo.

As easy as this might sound, it can involve more than meets the eye (or ear, actually). It’s one thing to sing the general “shape” of a Charlie Parker solo, for example. But it is an entirely different discipline to sing each note with pin point accuracy. It takes a considerable time commitment.

Tristano had his students do this for several reasons:

It helped them to improve their ears and aural imaginations.

It helped them to deeply internalize the contours and structure of the solo, giving them insight into the compositional brilliance of the improviser.

It helped them to finally transcribe the solo with amazing ease.

Even with interpretive music this applies. If I find myself struggling over and over with the same phrase when playing an etude, I’ll stop and see how accurately I can sing it. Usually I find that my aural conception of the phrase is a little vague (at best!) I then take some time to really hear and sing the phrase. (I do nothing with my instrument.) Once I’m confident that I can really hear the phrase, with complete accuracy, I resume playing.

Practically without I fail I find that I can play the phrase with ease, and better integrate it within the larger musical context of the etude. I sing it, so I can hear it, so I can play it, so I can express something musical.

Here are some very basic things you can do to develop and apply your singing skills. You can hum, or “la la la”, or “dum dum dum”…whatever suits you:

Sing diatonic scales and arpeggios. These are the basic materials of melodic construction. Practice singing simple scale patterns. For example, thirds, 1-2-3-5 patterns, secondary triads (triads built from each degree of the diatonic scale) and fourths. You don’t have to sing them in each key, but pick a key each day and a pattern in that key and sing it accurately before you play it.

Sing altered and symmetrical scales and arpeggios. Sing simple melodic patterns on the scales that are often used in jazz improvisation: The eight note altered diminished scale (e.g., C, Db, Eb, E, F#, G, A, Bb), whole tone scales, harmonic major (major with the sixth degree lowered a half step), altered pentatonic scales, etc. Anything that sounds appealing, “modern” or otherwise interesting, make a point of being able to sing it. A good practice is to sing the degree of the scale or chord from the pattern which you’re preparing to play, imagine the sound of the pattern from that degee, then immediately play the pattern on your instrument. By doing this you strongly reinforce your tonal imagination, integrating it into your movements.

Sing an improvised solo. Pick something that you really, really like. Listen to it over and over again. Start by singing one phrase at a time. Don’t just sing the notes. Sing the inflection, the phrasing, the feel, the spirit. Go slowly and make sure you are hearing and singing each note accurately. Be patient. With Tristano’s students, this sometime took a matter of weeks. It’s worth the effort!

Sing an etude or piece. If you’re reading something, consider spending an entire week or more practicing singing each phrase accurately. Once you can do that, sing the entire piece. While this might seem easy on the more “diatonic” pieces, it might be a bit harder on a piece by Webern or Berg. But again, well worth the effort.

Sing your improvisation. Pick a play along track of a jazz standard and listen to it several times. Begin your improvisations with just quarter notes and rests (rests of any length). Aim for consonance first. Once you find that you can sing easily in consonance, start seeing if you can sing in and out of dissonance (ah…tension and release… the stuff of great melodic development). If you get good at this start using eighth notes and beyond. But don’t sing beyond what you can easily imagine and hear.

If you make singing a regular part of your musical practice, you’ll probably be amazed at how much clearer, deeper, consistent and authentic your entire musical expression becomes, whether you’re an improviser or not.

Master The Art Of Stopping To Improve How You Practice

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Recently a talented young violinist came to me for Alexander Technique lessons because he couldn’t play for more than about 10 minutes at a stretch without feeling significant amounts of pain and tension, particularly in his left shoulder area.

After listening to him talk about how he approaches practice, then observing his overall habits of movement and balance, I finally asked him to play so that I could take a look at what he was doing.

What I saw was no surprise to me based on what I’d already observed: A huge amount of preconceived tension that was not at all necessary to the act of playing the violin. In essence, his playing mirrored his general attitude and use of himself, being somewhat rigid and effortful, aiming for a narrow conception of perfection. He almost wouldn’t let himself move at all as he played, pulling downward as he “planted” himself.

His thinking (and therefore his energy) was being misdirected. Add to all this his rather inaccurate body map, specifically, misunderstanding how his arms worked in relation to the rest of his body.

He was a terrific student, bright, disciplined and motivated, and it wasn’t long before I was able to help him to play his instrument and otherwise move more easily. Each week he would report being able to play for longer and longer periods with no pain or exhaustion.

But the cornerstone of his improvement wasn’t improving his body map, or re-learning his balance and coordination, or even changing his erroneous preconceived ideas about playing the violin (just to be clear, he needed all these things if he were to improve, and all are VERY important). The most essential skill he learned was how to stop during his practice sessions.

I spent about 10 or 15 minutes during each one of his lessons just watching him practice. I wanted to see exactly how he practiced. What I noticed was that he rarely if ever stopped during an exercise, no matter what. I would see him flinch as he made mistakes, or as his intonation went awry, but that’s about it.

So we worked on getting him to stop more and play less during his practice sessions. We followed this rule: You stop the moment you notice yourself creating any unnecessary tension (going into your habit) or you stop because you don’t like something about your performance (intonation, wrong note, rhythm, articulation, etc.).

It took some persistence (from both him and me), but he went from stopping maybe once in a 10 minute period to stopping 20 0r 30 times. Each time he stopped, he gave himself a chance to notice what he was doing, prevent himself from doing the wrong thing (habitual, misdirected tension) and redirect his thinking in a more accurate and constructive way.

In essence, he learned the art of stopping. And he learned that every time he stopped and gave himself a chance to notice, prevent and redirect, that two things happened simultaneously: He weakened his habits of tension as he strengthened his new habits of ease and balance.

Each week I literally see improvements, not only in how he uses himself as he plays, but also, his musicianship: His intonation, flexibility with time, interpretation, dynamic range and more, all improving regularly. He can now play for very long periods without pain or exhaustion.

So learn the art of stopping. It is probably one skill that musicians neglect the most. Without stopping in a strategic way, you run the risk of doing the same thing the same way over and over again without any real chance of improvement.

Here are some guidelines to follow to help you cultivate your stopping skills:

Devote some time everyday to paying attention to yourself and stopping when something isn’t quite right. You can either notice things kinesthetically (“I’m starting to tighten my neck and raise my shoulder as I play.”), or aurally (“I’m beginning to rush.” or, “I’m playing this note sharp.”) Once you notice something that’s not quite right, simply stop playing and observe yourself. Then redirect your thinking toward ease, balance and expansion.
Notice how you react when you make mistakes. What do you do when you know you’ve made a mistake? Do you tense up? Where do your eyes go? What happens to your breathing? Does how you react help or hurt your performance? Learning how to make mistakes “without flinching” is an essential skill (especially for the professional musician!) If you can learn to make mistakes “graciously” during practice, you’ll take that skill right into performance.
Give yourself a chance to think. Once you’ve stopped, wait. I mean really wait. Make stopping, noticing, preventing and redirecting be your primary objective. As the great classical trumpeter, Rafael Mendez said about practice, “I used to practice 8 hours a day. Nowadays I only practice 3 hours every day, but I really listen to myself.”
Shift your thinking from the mechanical to the conscious. If you learn to stop more as you practice observing, preventing and redirecting, you can continue to strengthen the neuromuscular connections that lead to consistent performance. Forget “muscle memory”. Think about improving the connections between your brain and the rest of your body.

As I continue to progress as a musician, I find myself playing less and thinking more during practice sessions. This has served me very well, and I think it can help you, too.