Indirect procedures : a musician's guide to the Alexander technique [2 ed.] 9780195388596, 0195388593

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INDIRECT PROCEDURES

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INDIRECT PROCEDURES A MU S I C I A N ’ S GUI D E TO THE AL E X A N D ER TEC H N I Q UE

S ECO N D E D ITIO N

Pedro de Alcantara

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1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

© Oxford University Press 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Alcantara, Pedro de, 1958– Indirect procedures : a musician’s guide to the Alexander technique / Pedro de Alcantara. — Second edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-538859-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-19-538860-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Musicians—Health and hygiene. 2. Alexander technique. I. Title. II. Title: Musician’s guide to the Alexander technique. RC965.P46A43 2013 613.02378—dc23 2012035898

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

In memory of Patrick Macdonald

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PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION

Several friends and colleagues expressed puzzlement when I told them I was planning to rewrite my first book, Indirect Procedures: A Musician’s Guide to the Alexander Technique. They were fond of the book and seemed a little afraid I might spoil it by changing something that, in their view, didn’t need changing. The original Indirect Procedures was published in 1997. Its conception, however, dates from much earlier. In 1985, when I was training to become a teacher of the Alexander Technique, I obtained a research scholarship from a foundation in my native Brazil. The subject of research was the application of the Technique to music making. I wrote a paper at the end of my studies, and several of its ideas and formulations found their way into the original Indirect Procedures. Fast forward to 2013, twenty-eight years later. Naturally enough, I learned many things over the decades, in good part thanks to those friends and colleagues I met following the book’s publication. My musical horizons expanded tremendously. I also gained experience by writing several other books, culminating with Integrated Practice: Coordination, Rhythm & Sound, which OUP published in the summer of 2011. Given my expanded horizons, I wanted to revisit Indirect Procedures and see if I could open it up, too. Most important, I wanted Indirect Procedures and Integrated Practice to become companion volumes, so that a reader might study both together in a coherent fashion. The older book, however, would need to “catch up” to the new one. I retained part of the book’s structure but shifted many sections around. I added new exercises and concepts throughout. The original version contained several chapters that included music examples. In this new version I regrouped everything with music examples into a single chapter. This may be helpful to nonmusicians who’d like to read Indirect Procedures, because now they only need to ignore that one chapter in the whole book. The old version had a lot of quotes drawn from many sources, including the writings of F. M. Alexander and other authorities. Although the quotes were indeed interesting and useful, their sheer number seemed to suggest I myself

didn’t have that much to say. For better or for worse, I’ve decided to use fewer quotes and share more of myself with my readers. I changed my tone of voice as well. In my youth I was quite dogmatic, and I liked using the words “always,” “never,” “should,” “must.” Now they seem too absolute and prescriptive to me. Generally speaking, I believe it’s more constructive to let go of certainties and explore the world of possibilities instead. In the original version, I issued a warning about the difficulty of learning the Alexander Technique from a book, as opposed to one-on-one lessons with a teacher. I’ve come to think that I was actually trying to discourage my readers from reading my own book! The new version contains no warnings of any sort. This book is for you to read and understand, or misunderstand, in any way you wish, although of course I hope that you’ll find it useful and enjoyable. My friends Jodi Forrest, Rosangela Mesquita, João Mourão, Lindsay Newitter, and Rebecca Young provided invaluable technical support. My editor, Suzanne Ryan, makes things possible, and I can’t thank her enough for it. My wife, Alexis Niki, gives me companionship, inspiration, and love. I’m a lucky man. Pedro de Alcantara Paris and New York April 2013

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PERMISSIONS

Extracts from F. Matthias Alexander’s Man’s Supreme Inheritance, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, The Universal Constant in Living, and Articles and Lectures by permission of the Estate of F. M. Alexander © 2012. Photo credits: man jumping: © Jolanta Vaitkeviciene, Dreamstime.com. Child in quadrilateral action: © Petr Cihak, Dreamstime.com. Boy preparing to jump: © Valentyn Leshchymenko, Dreamstime.com. Archer: © Dimitry Shironosov, Dreams time.com. Smiling girl: © Martin Novak, Dreamstime.com. Young girl lying on her back: © Zestmarina, Dreamstime.com. Dog pulling boy: © Photoeuphoria, Dreams time.com. Man hailing taxi: © Arenacreative, Dreamstime.com. Lionel Messi: © Natursports, Dreamstime.com. Elderly Chinese woman: © Flashon Studio, Dreams time.com. Man raising both arms: © Felix Mizioznikov, Dreamstime.com. Boy reading on lawn: © Grafoo, Dreamstime.com. Couple arguing: © Martha Bayona, Dreamstime.com. Ray Charles: by permission of Guy le Querrec and Magnum Photos. Marie-Madeleine Duruflé: Courtesy of Archives Chevalier. Dissection of the face muscles, by Jacques Fabian Gautier d’Agoty: by permission of AKG Images. Photos of F. M. Alexander © 2012, The Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique, London. Man looking at art: © Adriano Castelli, Shutterstock.com. “The Thinker” by Auguste Rodin: © St Niki, Shutterstock.com. Child ice skating with chair: © Jason Kasumovic, Shutterstock.com. American football player: © Pete Saloutos, Shutterstock.com. Man underneath car: © Everett Collection, Shutterstock. com. Arthur Rubinstein: © Coqueux/SPECTO. The author has made every effort to contact all copyright owners and would be happy to amend these acknowledgments in later editions of the book.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

 1.1  1.2  1.3  2.1  2.2  2.3  2.4  2.5  2.6  2.7  3.1  5.1  5.2  5.3  5.4  6.1  7.1  8.1  8.2  8.3  9.1

F. M. Alexander 5 Physical and mental unity 7 Necessary tensions 10 The poise of the head determines success or failure 19 The head leads, the body follows 20 Pablo Casals 22 Janos Starker 23 Art Blakey 23 The simplified skeleton in living 25 The lively neck brace 32 Stimulus and reaction 42 George Balanchine and Arthur Mitchell 60 Flowing direction 66 Intention and direction 68 Flying arms, open back 72 Lionel Messi 84 Positions of mechanical advantage 92 The monkey 98 The lunge 105 Eugen Reiche 108 Leopold Stokowski 112

 9.2  9.3  9.4  9.5  9.6.  9.7 10.1 10.2 11.1 11.2 11.3 15.1 15.2 15.3 15.4 15.5 15.6 15.7 15.8 18.1

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William Primrose 113 Reaching out without losing yourself 120 Quadrilateral child 123 Establishing quadrilateral transfer 125 Marie-Madeleine Duruflé 126 Ray Charles 127 Oppositions between the face and the jaw 135 Muscles are interconnected 136 Using mechanical advantage 146 Constructive rest 147 Working on yourself 152 Imitating daddy 177 Arthur Rubinstein 180 Jascha Heifetz 180 William Primrose 181 Emanuel Feuermann 181 “The Thinker” 184 A model of intelligence 186 Energy embodied 188 Circuits of opposition 225

Illustrations

CONTENTS

Introduction xv

PART I

THE PRINCIPLES

1. The Use of the Self

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2. The Primary Control: Head, Neck, Back 3. Sensory Awareness and Conception 4. Inhibition and Non-doing

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5. Direction 6. Action

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PART II THE PROCEDURES 7. The Learning Experience

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8. The Monkey and the Lunge: Back, Pelvis, Legs, Feet 9. Reaching Out: Shoulders, Arms, Hands, Fingers

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10. The Whispered “Ah”: Lips, Tongue, Jaw, Breath, Voice

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11. Constructive Rest

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12. Working on Yourself

PART III

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THE APPLICATIONS 165

13. Technique

14. Aesthetic Judgments

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15. Imitation

16. Daily Practice

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17. Integrative Practice Strategies 18. Stage Fright Conclusion

Notes

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Bibliography 237

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INTRODUCTION

A child prodigy who once played like an angel loses his innocence and becomes selfconscious about his instrument, his music making, and his adoring public. Despite much soul searching, he’s unable to prevent his performances from becoming ever more erratic. A young woman of flair and ability is marketed by her record company as a classical-music sex kitten. She admits to having developed three distinct personalities— with her family, on stage, and by herself—to cope with the expectations and demands made upon her. Many orchestral musicians live in a state of apprehension and insecurity. Some drink heavily before and after performances (and during the intermission as well). Others take tranquilizers and anxiety suppressants. Most complain of multiple illnesses seemingly related to work, including backache, headache, tendonitis, and a plethora of nasty mental conditions. The behavior of many eminent conductors, singers, and soloists deviates sharply from accepted standards of human decency. The temper tantrums, canceled performances, and generally outrageous comportment of the diva make the stuff of gossip columns. We’re told that this is a necessary evil, a sign of an “artistic temperament.” In sum, the waste of talent, the shortened careers, the inadequate performances, the objectionable behavior, and the frustration, suffering, and pain are the norm of the music profession. Why is this so? Many explanations come to mind: too much stress, the limits of the human body, the harsh exigencies of modern life, music competitions, other people. In Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient, Norman Cousins wrote that “the most prevalent—and, for all we know, most serious—health problem of our time is stress, which is defined by Hans Selye, dean of the stress concept, as the ‘rate of wear and tear in the human body.’ This definition would thus embrace any demands, whether emotional or physical, beyond the ready capability of any given individual.”1

This very definition of stress is problematic. Let’s borrow a concept from engineering. A bridge is under the stress of traffic flow, for instance, or of the action of the elements. Responding to the stress, the bridge strains—bending here, buckling there. Over time the bridge suffers wear and tear and may finally crack or collapse. What causes it to collapse? Not stress itself, but the way the bridge strains under stress. Stress alone can’t cause a bridge’s collapse; proof of it is that many bridges have withstood centuries of unremitting stress without suffering much at all. It may be difficult to define stress unambiguously. People react so differently to the same stimulus that we can’t affirm that any one thing is, in itself, absolutely stressful. Some musicians, for instance, tremble at the thought of public exposure, while others enjoy going on stage and baring their soul in front of thousands of listeners. Performing in public, then, isn’t necessarily stressful. An orchestra packed with musicians who live in pain will have a number of players who enjoy their job. Playing in an orchestra, too, isn’t obligatorily stressful. The stimulation of life is permanent and inevitable, and in itself it’s neither negative nor undesirable. In fact, without stimulation there is no life. Something becomes stressful to you only if you react to it in a certain way. Depending on how you think about it, then, stress—that is, stimulation—is a really good thing. Ultimately, it’s the strain that hurts, not the stress. When Hans Selye defines stress as the rate of wear and tear in the human body, he seems to be talking about strain, not stress; a response, not a stimulus. It’s an all-important distinction, and understanding it can change your life. You may argue that well-built bridges withstand stress by design and construction, but that the human body wasn’t designed or constructed to bear what is made to bear today. A small body isn’t made for playing the viola, a small hand isn’t made for playing the piano, the human voice isn’t made to sing above the sounds of a modern symphony orchestras. Here, too, things aren’t so clear-cut. The violist William Primrose wrote that, for playing the viola, “having a large hand and being of medium to large stature is an advantage, but certainly not a requirement.”2 The pianist Heinrich Neuhaus, whose students include Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels, and Radu Lupu, went further. He wrote in The Art of Piano Playing: The anatomy of the human hand is . . . ideal from the point of view of the pianist and it is a convenient, suitable and intelligent mechanism which provides a wealth of possibilities for extracting the most varied tones out of a piano. And the mechanism of the hand is, of course, in complete harmony with the mechanism of the keyboard.3 Small hands with a small stretch have quite obviously to make much greater use of wrist, forearm and shoulder; in fact the whole of the “hinterland,” than large hands, particularly large hands with a large stretch. . . . Sometimes this is just why gifted people with small and difficult hands have a better understanding of the nature of the piano and of their “pianistic” body than

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the large-handed and broad-boned4. . . . In short, they turn their drawbacks into advantages.5

The human body, wondrously beautiful and richly endowed, is capable of meeting all the demands of music making. To paraphrase Neuhaus, the secret lies in acquiring an understanding of the nature of music making and of your musicianly body, and in turning all potential drawbacks into advantages. The human body may be perfectly designed for music making, you might say, but not for the exigencies of the modern world. Have you tried to sit for six hours on the crappy chairs typical of a rehearsal hall? Have you gone on long tours? If our lifestyles are unnatural, it’s inevitable that we’ll hurt and suffer. Horrible chairs are horrible, of course. But would a better chair eliminate our health problems? In Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the Clown speaks a few lines that help us recognize the limits of furniture design: “It is like a barber’s chair, that fits all buttocks,—the pin-buttock, the quatch-buttock, the brawn-buttock, or any buttock” (II.ii). Such a chair will never exist; there are too many types of buttocks out there. But even the most perfectly designed chair can’t give you health if you don’t know how to use it. Badly designed furniture increases the likelihood of discomfort, and well-designed furniture decreases it; no certitudes arise from either. Indeed, the whole world redesigned to perfection will not give you health if you don’t know what to do with the world. The logical consequence of blaming modern life for our problems is to wish to go back in time—a sneaking desire we all feel on occasion. Indeed, people already felt this way thousands of years ago. And, already then, it wasn’t a good idea to yearn for olden times, as illustrated in the Bible: “Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this” (Eccles. 7:10). In other words, yearning for the past isn’t smart. If our capabilities to meet life’s demands are inadequate, then we need to increase our capabilities, rather than decrease the demands made on them. Competitions are another scourge. You might say that competitions have poisoned the music profession, destroyed the careers of young musicians, and perverted the tastes of the public. In truth, competitiveness is an irrepressible human instinct, and every culture at every junction of history has had a competitive element. Would music be better served had the great singers of the bel canto era not been pitted against one another in competition? Should Wales outlaw its annual Eisteddfod, the competitive and yet celebratory festival of music and poetry? Realistically, we can’t blame competitions themselves for the woes of any musician, young or old, winner or loser. It’s the attitude of the competitor that makes competing either beneficial or harmful. Rod Laver, the great Australian tennis champion, said about winning and losing: You do the best you can. If you don’t play your own game, you’re going to lose it anyway. If you start to worry about the importance of the win before it

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happens, you’re going to have yourself in a complete panic. You play the shots as you see them. That, and don’t start wishing the shots to go in. When you start wishing, you are in trouble.6

In a few lines Laver said many wise things. “Do the best you can.” “Play your own game.” “Play the shots as you see them.” “Don’t start wishing.” In other words, let go and be yourself. Laver’s words apply to the game of tennis, the game of music, and the game of life. Another favorite explanation for a musician’s problems is other people. Pushy parents, you might say, cause young people to “lose it.” Record-company executives pervert the public’s tastes. Conductors and administrators run orchestras into the ground—unless it’s the fault of the musicians’ union. Strangely enough, there exist happy and healthy musicians who had lousy parents, and emotionally wrecked musicians who grew up in a loving environment. Other people certainly play a big role in your life, but they don’t determine your life outright. Stress, human design, civilization, and other people, then, have all been considered part of a musician’s problems. For each of these causes, appropriate therapies suggest themselves. Pushy parents cause psychological problems; the solution is psychotherapy. Small hands cause tendonitis; the solution, physiotherapy. Bad chairs cause backache; the solution, ergonomics. The stress of concert life causes performance anxiety; the solution, beta blockers. Modern life causes unhappiness; the solution, a return to Nature. A diagnosis implies a remedy. Get the diagnosis wrong, and the remedy may threaten the patient’s life. We can safely say that the way musicians diagnose their problems has become part of the problems themselves, since stress, body design, and furniture are demonstrably misleading factors. Frederick Matthias Alexander (1869–1955) had a crippling health issue in his youth: he tended to lose his voice when performing as an actor on stage. Doctors and coaches couldn’t help him, so he set out to learn for himself what was causing the problem. His years of self-observation and experimentation led not only to a permanent cure for his vocal ills but also to insights on the essence of all human ills. Alexander found the cause of our troubles not in what is done to us but in what we do to ourselves. He saw that the problem was not in the stimulation of modern life but in our response to it; not in the stress, but in the straining. The straining he called misuse of the self—its cause not human design, civilization, or other people but end-gaining. I explain both terms and their relationship in the next chapter. Alexander found the common thread to apparently disparate problems. Instead of saying that pushy parents cause neuroses, Alexander would say that end-gaining causes misuse . . . and neurosis is but a form of misuse. Alexander didn’t think that bad chairs caused backache. On the subject of children’s desks and their alleged harmful effect, he said that “what we need to do is not to educate our school furniture but to educate our children.”7 Alexander would similarly reformulate the equation between body design and tendonitis, civilization and stress, and the other explanations that we habitually give ourselves for our difficulties. In all contexts, xviii

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Alexander offers a single equation: end-gaining causes misuse, and misuse causes our malfunctioning—that is, our aches and pains, and also our unhappiness and even despair. What is the solution to end-gaining and misuse? The answer is simple but elusive. It’s called non-doing—a powerful concept that bridges the physical, the psychological, and the metaphysical, and that offers profoundly satisfying answers to our quest as musicians and as human beings. Non-doing, like all important existential concepts, is difficult if not impossible to define—and, needless to say, difficult to learn as well. In Indirect Procedures I offer you my understanding of Alexander’s insights, with a mixture of intellectual argument and practical suggestions for you to explore creatively. The gist of Indirect Procedures is that you carry within yourself the solutions to your problems, most of which are of your own making to begin it. My companion volume, Integrated Practice: Coordination, Rhythm & Sound, takes what might appear at first a contradictory view: music itself is a sort of map toward health and integration. If you know how to read the map and follow it, music will heal your hurts. We might reconcile these two views by saying that your habitual response to music causes problems; if you learn how to respond to music differently thanks to non-doing, you might become able to solve your problems. Integrated Practice is supported by a dedicated website with 72 video clips and 25 audio clips illustrating its concepts and exercises. Indirect Procedures and Integrated Practice are self-contained books; you don’t need to read one to understand the other. Nevertheless, you might find it useful to study both together, or in alternation or in sequence. To help you link their materials, throughout Indirect Procedures I refer to the relevant sections of Integrated Practice, with an emphasis on the video clips that you can, if you wish, watch without having to read their explanations within the book. Non-doing merits your attention over the long run. Study the materials on these two related books over a few years. If they don’t help you, then you’ll be fully justified in buying an expensive chair and firing the cheap conductor.

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PART I

THE PRINCIPLES

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CHAPTER 1

THE USE OF THE SELF

We tend to compartmentalize different aspects of our lives. Into one box we put things that we consider physical: the body, movement, posture, tension, and relaxation. Into a second box goes all that we consider psychological: moods, emotions, feelings, opinions, and suppositions. And into a third box goes all that appears to be metaphysical: symbols, metaphors, and spiritual concepts that transcend our everyday existence. This determines many of our behaviors. For instance, we visit the osteopath to deal with the physical, the psychotherapist to deal with the psychological, and the priest to deal with the metaphysical. The separation of the physical, the psychological, and the metaphysical, however, is illusory—and potentially handicapping. In much of what we do in our daily lives, we musicians tend to cling to these illusory separations. Off the top of our heads, we define technique (such as piano technique) as the physical means to actualize a musical conception. But don’t the mind and the heart enter into it? We’ll look into technique in Chapter 13. A fine violin teacher writes of stage fright as having physical, mental, or social causes. Pigeonholing the causes of stage fright, she sets up compartmentalized solutions as well. Would a solution for your problems work when it chops you up into the body here, and the mind there? We ponder the question in Chapter 18. The simple act of brushing your teeth, for instance, appears to be purely physical, involving your mouth, one of your hands, and little else. But it’s humanly impossible to do any one thing without there being a psychological dimension. The emotions associated with brushing your teeth are varied and intense, going back to your childhood and involving memories, fears, desires, pleasures, and displeasures. The act contains faint or not-so-faint connections with every visit to the dentist, every meal and its aftermath, every moment of vanity or shame regarding your teeth and your smile. Further, brushing your teeth is a ritualistic act of cleansing that prepares you for talking to someone intimately, for appearing in public, for going to bed at night and entering the land of dreams, and so on. In truth, brushing your teeth reflects the intertwined and inseparable coexistence of the physical, the psychological, and the metaphysical—or to put it differently, body, mind, and soul.

Sir Charles Sherrington, who received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1932, wrote compellingly about the fundamental unity of every human being: Each waking day is a stage dominated for good or ill, in comedy, farce or tragedy, by a dramatis persona, the “self.” And so it will be until the curtain drops. The self is a unity. The continuity of its presence in time, sometimes hardly broken by sleep, its inalienable “interiority” in (sensual) space, its consistency of view-point, the privacy of its experience, combine to give it status as a unique existence. Although multiple aspects characterize it it has selfcohesion. It regards itself as one, others treat it as one. It is addressed as one, by a name to which it answers. . . . All its diversity is merged in oneness.1

Elsewhere he wrote that “the formal dichotomy of the individual [into ‘body’ and ‘mind’], . . . which our description practiced for the sake of analysis, results in artifacts such as are not in Nature.”2 To put it differently, body and mind don’t actually exist as separate entities; these are artificial concepts that we humans invented in a futile bid to understand the way in which we live and function. To become an integrated and healthy musician, you don’t need to become better aware of your body or to sing and play in a more physically relaxed manner. Instead you need to bring together all your capabilities in a balanced whole, in which body parts are interconnected, body and mind are interconnected, player and instrument are interconnected . . . and player and music become one. Enter F. M. Alexander.

THE USE OF THE SELF Frederick Matthias Alexander, called F. M. by all who knew him, was born in Wynyard, on the northwest coast of Tasmania, in 1869 (Figure 1.1). He spent part of his childhood on his grandfather’s country estate, where he developed a lifelong love of horses. At the age of 20, Alexander moved to Melbourne, where he pursued a career as an actor. He thrived early on, touring Australia and Tasmania. Nevertheless, he was hampered by vocal problems, in particular hoarseness on stage. Doctors and vocal experts were unable to help him. Faced with the prospect of uncertain surgery, the young Alexander, in a stroke of genius, decided instead to find out what he did to himself that caused his troubles. His search led to insights and discoveries that we’ll study throughout this book. Alexander moved to London in 1904. He met with great success as a teacher, counting among his pupils George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, Sir Stafford Cripps (chancellor of the exchequer in the 1940s), and other luminaries. He published his first book, Man’s Supreme Inheritance, in 1910. From 1914 to 1924 he shared his time between England and the United States and wrote two further books: Conscious Control and Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual. Later they were amalgamated and republished under the second title. During this time, Alexander started 4

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THE PRINCIPLES

FIGURE 1.1: F. M. Alexander

a friendship with John Dewey, the American philosopher of education. Dewey was strongly influenced by Alexander’s teachings and wrote prefaces for several of his books. Alexander ran a teacher’s training course from 1930 to 1940, when he moved to America on account of the war. His third book, The Use of the Self, came out in 1932, and his fourth and last, The Universal Constant in Living, in 1945. Alexander returned to England in 1943 and resumed training teachers in 1945. He died in 1955, aged 86, having taught up to a few days before his death. Teachers trained by him have trained other teachers in turn, and today the worldwide Alexander community of teachers is several thousand strong. Alexander’s writing style is a little hard for modern readers to get into, as he favored long and tortuous paragraphs, constant use of capitals and italics for emphasis, and complicated formulations for his ideas and concepts. And yet his books are full of well-argued insights and instructive anecdotes. Reading his books and taking lessons from a qualified Alexander teacher would go nicely together. Alexander was a farsighted man. His genius was manifest not only in his theories and practices but in his vocabulary as well. On the one hand, he relied on very little technical jargon; a glossary of the Technique wouldn’t have more than half a dozen terms. On the other hand, he refrained from using words that imply a separation of body and mind, such as “body mechanics” or “mental states.” Instead, he spoke simply of “the self ” and its use and functioning. The self is the whole of you. You react from moment to moment to life’s constant stream of stimulation. Whether healthy or unhealthy, your existence is a never-ending series of reactions to what you sense and imagine, leading you to choose “to do” or “not to do.” In all of your reactions, it’s impossible to separate body and mind. Imagine yourself talking with a person you know (Figure 1.2). The subject matter is unimportant; so is the identity of your friend. In this situation both of you are speaking. Each voice has its timbre, color, resonance, diction, and inflection. Both of you use your vocal mechanism, lips, tongue, jaw, the breathing apparatus, and the whole body besides. Each of you has a personal choice of words, grammar, and points of view and ways of arguing them. You swear, or not; you stammer, stutter, whisper, shout, laugh; or not. You gesticulate; you laugh by throwing your head back; you interrupt your friend. Your friend lisps and drools. You’re loud, brash, unreasonable, angry. Your friend is timid, hesitant, unclear. At no point during your discussion would it be possible for you to say that speaking is purely physical or purely mental. The way you use your voice is a concerted activity of your entire self. In fact it might be better to refer not to the way you “use your voice,” but the way you “use yourself while speaking.” The principle applies to everything you do. For instance, you don’t quite play the violin; you “use yourself while playing the violin.” Ideally, then, you wouldn’t work on the violin; instead, you’d work on yourself as you play the violin. Working on yourself involves a mixture of perception and intention. How do you sense the situation, and what are you going to do about it? The situation includes a lot of information that you interpret and react to: the violin as an object; the technical and coordinative 6

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FIGURE 1.2: Physical and mental unity

challenges of playing the violin; the stream of input from your teachers, colleagues, and family; the weight of history when you approach Bach and Brahms; the immensity of music itself. The situation is also pregnant with the assumptions you make about the violin (how “hard” it is to play, for instance, or how “hard” you have to practice), aesthetic judgments you make about every note you play (“beautiful,” “ugly”), and value judgments you make about what you do and who you are (“good,” “bad”). Once you factor in all these elements, it becomes clear that you can’t quite practice the violin as such; inevitably, you work on yourself as you practice the violin. The secret of existence is simple: you’re whole and indivisible, and everything in your life comes from how you react to every situation—that is, how you use yourself. Alexander put it succinctly: “Talk about a man’s individuality and character: it’s the way he uses himself.”3 To achieve integration and good health, you need to grasp the unity of life and the role of your reactions, decisions, and choices in shaping your life.

INTELLIGENCE AND POSTURE We tend to equate intelligence with the workings of the mind, and posture with the workings of the body. It may be useful to reconsider these ideas in our quest for integration. The Use of the Self

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Defining intelligence isn’t easy. A scholar who writes clearly and elegantly on an academic subject drinks himself into a rage and beats his wife. Is the scholar truly intelligent? Michael Brady, a professor at Oxford University, states that “[the ability to reason or think] is not what intelligence evolved for. I think sensing and action— not thinking—are the very well-spring of intelligence.”4 Heinrich Neuhaus, the piano teacher, concurs: “When I speak of the ‘knowledge’ of an artist, I have always in mind an active force: understanding plus action. Or simpler still: acting correctly on the basis of correct thinking.”5 If you use yourself constructively, you are intelligent. If you use yourself destructively and pay a price for it in health and happiness, it won’t matter how beautifully you write that academic paper . . . you aren’t that intelligent, after all! Generally we understand posture as a bodily position we hold, consciously or unconsciously, for some length of time. Mention “good posture” to an unsuspecting friend, and he’ll immediately straighten his back, push his shoulders back, and hold himself rigidly, in an imitation of a stereotypical soldier or a bad dancer. Posture, however, is inextricably linked to a set of attitudes, thoughts, and feelings, most of which you develop from the inside out and not from the outside in. Suppose you want to find a good posture for sitting at a chair and playing long orchestral rehearsals. You can’t quite go about it by simply arranging body parts. You sit in a certain way so that you’re open, so that you can communicate, so that you can see and be seen, so that you can wait and listen comfortably if need be, so that you can maximize your latent potential for musical, intellectual, and emotional action. Sitting comfortably is far from a purely physical pursuit. Posture and attitude, then, are closely linked. Posture and movement also are more closely linked than generally believed. The biologist George Coghill knew Alexander and supported his work. He wrote that “in posture the individual is mobilized (integrated) for movement according to a definite pattern and in movement that pattern is being executed. [The differences between posture and movement] are relative, and one phase passes over imperceptibly into the other.”6 In short, there’s nothing to separate posture from attitude, nor posture from movement. You’ll be healthier if you let go of the idea of good posture as a fixed arrangement of body parts, and if you embrace instead the unity of body, mind, soul, posture, movement, and attitude.

TENSION AND RELAXATION Neuhaus wrote that “the best position of the hand on the keyboard is one which can be altered with the maximum of ease and speed.”7 You might assume that you need to relax physically in order to find these good positions. In truth, everything you do is psychophysical, including the pursuit of relaxation; leave your mind out of your physical pursuits and you’re unlikely to achieve the results you’re looking for. Physical relaxation, then, is more or less impossible. “Psychophysical relaxation” may be possible, but is it desirable? 8

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Tension is a prerequisite of all human endeavors, and of life itself. Remove all tension from your arterial system, for instance, and you’ll die. Take a musical instrument such as the violin. Its taut strings exert tremendous tension on the instrument’s body, which is set up in order to resist and oppose the strings’ tension. In the absence of tension, the instrument would be completely unplayable. Music itself is a form of tension—melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, and aural. Viktor E. Frankl was a psychiatrist who survived the concentration camps thanks to his innate ability (which we all share) to make choices even in the most harrowing circumstances. In Man’s Search for Meaning, he wrote that mental health depends on a certain degree of tension: the tension between who you are and who you can (and perhaps must) become. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, “homeostasis,” i.e. a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. . . . If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined together more firmly together.8

Neuhaus wrote that musicians “sometimes mistake the concept of ‘favorable position,’ ‘convenience,’ for the concept of ‘inertia’ [i.e. relaxation]. These are not only two entirely different things, they are also contradictory. The attention required for ensuring well-ordered, organized playing . . . excludes both physical and spiritual inertia.”9 In short, tension creates and sustains life, and then carries it forward. On the road to integration, you need to be not relaxed but in a more or less permanent state of dynamic tension. If you suffer from pain—in your shoulders, for instance—you’re likely to think you have too much tension and you need to relax. “Too much tension” most often means the wrong kind and amount of tension, in the wrong places, for the wrong length of time. Counterintuitive as this may be, the cause of wrong tension is most often the lack of right tension. In such cases it’s fruitless to try to relax these wrong tensions directly. The solution lies in creating the right tensions, and letting relaxation come about of its own (Figure 1.3). Suppose you stiffen your neck, shoulders, and arms when playing the piano. It’s likely that you do so to compensate for a lack of necessary tension elsewhere—in the legs and back, for instance. If you invest your legs and back with the energy you need to support the arms and shoulders, your neck will relax itself. It’s also likely that you stiffen your neck and shoulders because you’re aiming for a particular aesthetic and musical effect. You won’t be able to relax your neck and shoulders if you don’t let go of your habitual aesthetic goals and seek a different way of making music. You become relaxed—or you appear relaxed, or you feel as if you were relaxed— only when you bring many tensions into collaboration. Giovanni Battista Lamperti wrote in his book Vocal Wisdom: The Use of the Self

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FIGURE 1.3: Necessary tensions

Relaxing a muscle is beneficial only to educate and discipline outermost muscles to do their part in the process. Otherwise it is weakening to the final output. It is co-action, not non-action, that causes controlled effort to feel effortless. . . . Singing is accomplished by opposing motions and the measured balance between them.

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This causes the delusive appearance of rest and fixity—even of relaxation.10 . . . The singing voice in reality is born of the clash of opposing principles, the tension of conflicting forces, brought to an equilibrium.11

What characterizes good use, then, isn’t relaxation but the right tension—right in type, amount, placing, and timing. We’ll give further thought to the question of positions, directions, tension, and relaxation throughout the book.

THE END-GAINING PRINCIPLE Why do we misuse ourselves? We’re forever tempted to blame our misuses on education, civilization, modern life, family life, religion, the lack of religion, or any number of sources, most of them having to do with other people, or with things that happened in our lives at some point in the past. Alexander believed otherwise, having realized that the problem lies not in what is done to us but in what we do to ourselves. We tend to pursue the wrong ends for ourselves, or to pursue worthy ends in the wrong manner. The ultimate cause of misuse, in Alexander’s understanding, is the universal habit of endgaining. Aches and pains, as well as problems of all sorts, come about because of our goals and intentions. We “do” things wrongly because we “want” things wrongly. Therefore, we can’t change our doing if we don’t change our wanting. Without your being aware of it, it’s possible that you have preconceived ideas as to what you want, or what you should want, or what other people want from you. It’s only too easy to internalize goals other people set for you, without fully realizing that those aren’t your own goals. Then you pursue goals from a misunderstanding of who you really are or what you really want. The average musician performing the mainstream repertory often doesn’t realize that “average” and “mainstream” can be prisons for the mind, body, and soul . . . and yet this is what family, peers, and teachers expect you to pursue in your musical life. Your goals in life can come not from your loves but from your fears, in which case most of your wants are compensations rather than worthy goals. Perhaps you play the violin just because you’re afraid of disappointing or enraging your father, who so wanted you to succeed where he failed. Then it won’t matter how “physically relaxed” you try to play the violin, because your motivation—the want, the goal, the end you pursue—is existentially unhealthy. It’s possible for you to hide behind a goal, which becomes “bigger than yourself.” Some musicians have busy concert careers behind which lies an artistic or existential vacuum. Their careers are bigger than themselves, and to pursue such a career is to pursue an unhealthy goal. From time to time, a famous musician decides to quit his or her career, much to the puzzlement of the fans and the media. Quitting, however, can make a lot of sense when it’s liberation from end-gaining.

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You can be so invested in a goal as to reach obsession or psychosis. It’s easy to see this “craziness” in other people, but a lot harder to see it in yourself. You play a passage you perceive as being difficult. Then you struggle with the passage. The fact is that your very struggle is the reason the passage seems difficult in and of itself. Your struggle is the difficulty! This is end-gaining, and it’s crazy. But we all do it, over little things and over big things. End-gaining is the most prevalent of all habits. It’s so widespread and insidious that most people don’t realize that they, and others, are end-gaining all the time. To drive a car on the hard shoulder of a traffic-clogged road is to end-gain. Weight-loss diets are end-gaining; a healthy diet helps you attain your ideal weight, but a weightloss diet is usually unhealthy. To blame others for the results of your own actions is to end-gain. To try to change others rather than change yourself is to end-gain. The father who screams at a crying child for her to stop crying is end-gaining. Likewise the conductor screaming at the seemingly disobedient orchestra. In truth the out-of-control orchestra reflects faithfully the out-of-control conductor and can’t therefore be called disobedient. You can enter a music competition as an end-gainer, or not. Alexander recounts this anecdote about a match involving a tennis player called W. H. Austin: At one stage in the game, [Austin] was playing so badly he decided not to try to win the set but as soon as he had made that decision, he began to play up to his usual form. In consequence, he decided that now he would try to win the set after all, and immediately reverted to the indifferent play that had cause him “not to try.” It does seem sometimes as if human beings not only like to be fooled by others but are keen on fooling themselves.12

To go directly for an end (to win) causes a misuse of the self (the indifferent play), which makes the end unattainable. Enter competitions, then, wishing not to win but to do your best, which may or may not assure you of a prize. End-gaining pervades all the arts. Let’s take an example from the movies. Sister Act features Whoopi Goldberg as a lounge singer who evades a sticky situation by hiding in a convent. There she coaches the resident choir and transforms a bunch of tone-deaf geeky nuns into a competition-winnin’, hip-swingin’, soul-liftin’ chick ensemble. The movie is inspiring, funny, tightly constructed, and skillfully directed. Sister Act 2, the sequel, features Whoopi Goldberg as a lounge singer who . . . well, we don’t need to describe its plot. The sequel is mindless, implausible, and peopled by imitations and caricatures of the original’s cast of characters. It tries to reproduce the effects of the original by manipulating the creative process, which becomes not an organic act of the imagination but a mechanical pushing-of-buttons and pressingof-levers. It’s end-gaining from the first frame to the closing credits. It’s possible to end-gain in the process of composing a score, in the process of learning it, and in the process of performing it. This means that there exist endgaining compositions, rehearsals, and performers. End-gaining, in fact, knows no limits. It’s possible to end-gain in your choice of a concert dress, a concert program, a route as you drive to the concert hall, and so on. 12

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End-gaining is multilayered and all-encompassing. It’s such a complex entity that we can’t comprehend it to the full. Pondering end-gaining and trying to overcome it, you’ll bump into contradictions, paradoxes, enigmas, and existential challenges of every sort. Can you live daily life without goals? Probably not. Can you have any one goal without end-gaining? Probably not. Should you just give up and end-gain anyway? That may be costly to your health. What to do, then?

THE MEANS-WHEREBY PRINCIPLE Alexander contrasted the end-gaining principle with a different approach to life. Simply put, it calls for you to create and employ the best possible means to achieve any given end. This involves the ability to wait and to make reasoned choices before acting, permanent awareness of your own use, and willingness to give up achieving your ends by direct means (such as yelling at a child to stop her crying) and go about it using indirect procedures. This is the means-whereby principle. Frank Pierce Jones, a teacher who trained with Alexander’s brother in the 1940s, gave an interesting definition of the principle in the glossary of his book Body Awareness in Action: Means-whereby—The coordinated series of intermediate steps which must be accomplished in order to attain an end. The means-whereby principle is the recognition in practice that these intermediate steps are important as ends in themselves, and that the most important step at any time is the next one. Application of the means-whereby principle involves awareness of the conditions present, a reasoned consideration of their causes, inhibition of habitual or end-gaining responses to these conditions, and consciously guided performance of the indirect series of steps required to gain the end.13

I disagree with one item in this definition. In a series of steps, the most important step at any time surely is the one you’re performing at that very moment, in the “here, now.” Imagine that there are five steps to execution of an exercise. If, for instance, you’re going through the performance of the second step, it and it alone is foremost in your mind—not the last step, not the outcome of the combined steps, not the end you want to achieve. Another definition of the principle is subtler and more powerful. It equates the means-whereby principle with your own use. In other words, your use—your thoughts, perceptions, actions, and reactions—is the ultimate means to achieve your aim. To conquer a problem, you don’t work on the problem; you work on yourself as you face the problem. Confusing as this may sound, to work on a problem can become a problem! It takes time, practice, and multiple experiences to really grasp that working on yourself is more efficient than working on the problem. Once you understand the principle, however, you’ll be on your way to becoming a master problem solver. The Use of the Self

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To focus on the means is not the same thing as to give up on all goals. In truth, nothing gets achieved in the absence of a goal. Without a goal, Beethoven wouldn’t have composed his symphonies; without a goal, the symphony orchestra wouldn’t be formed and maintained; without a goal, the theater house wouldn’t be built; without a goal, the concert wouldn’t take place; without a goal, the listeners wouldn’t show up at the right time and place. Goal setting, then, is fundamental, inevitable, and desirable. Nevertheless, you can achieve every goal in a variety of ways—some healthy, some unhealthy. Drawing a bow across the string is a goal. Your awareness risks attaching itself to “bow, string” and slip away from “you in the here, now.” Then you might neglect the factors that contribute to a successful bow stroke: the coordination of your whole body, the rhythmic impetus that animates your gestures, your capacity to listen and observe, your connection with sound and vibration. The difficulty, then, is balancing two things: the goal (a bow stroke) and the means whereby you achieve the goal (the way you use yourself). Suppose you have a short-term goal: to hit a high note that you have often played out of tune in the past. If you keep playing the note again and again, and if you keep missing it, you’re concentrating on the goal and developing bad habits. Now suppose you back off the goal and improvise variations on the passage without the high note. You relax about the fight, the difficulty, the anticipation of failure. You open up your field of perception, and you start listening more openly and broadly. In the midst of this process, without further thought, you make a simple decision to play the high note as part of your improvisation. You succeed beautifully. Then you’ll say, “I didn’t do anything! It just happened!” This is the difference between end-gaining and non-doing. It’s so marvelous that it’s literally “unbelievable.” It takes trust and faith to accept that success in achieving your goals comes from giving up your goals—at least your goals as you see them habitually.

USE AND FUNCTIONING We tend to be concerned with symptoms and effects, and less concerned with their causes. For instance, “my shoulders are tight” points at an effect. “I’m tightening my shoulders” points at a cause. Let’s call the effect your functioning, and the cause your use. They’re very intimately related: your shoulders will stay tight as long as you tighten them. This sounds like wordplay, but it states a deep truth. Alexander wrote that “the influence of the manner of use is a constant one upon the general functioning of the organism in every reaction and during every moment of life. . . . From this there is not any escape. Hence this influence can be said to be a universal constant in a technique for living.”14 How you use yourself affects how you function. If something is wrong with your functioning—for instance, if your shoulders feel tight—you need to change how you use yourself, which means how you react to the world around you and to your own 14

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thoughts and desires. It’s not your shoulders that give you trouble, but you who give them trouble. In every aspect of your life, you’ll end-gain if you work on your functioning. The only practical approach is to work on the use that regulates and determines the functioning. As Alexander says, from this there is not any escape. A voice teacher asks her pupil “to sing in the mask,” or “to bring the tone forward.” A singer who sings in a certain way might subjectively feel as if she were placing her tone forward, but this would be a result of her singing technique rather than a technique in itself—an effect, not a cause. Frederick Husler and Yvonne RoddMarling wrote: The sounding of a resonating chamber [in this case the so-called mask] is always a secondary manifestation, the result of muscle movements in the vocal mechanism. . . . It goes without saying that the first causes for the various acoustic phenomena that occur in singing lie in the vocal organ itself, and it is these that the voice trainer must learn to hear.15

The sounding of a resonating chamber is an aspect of the singing voice’s functioning. It may be more productive to leave the mask alone and work on those aspects of your voice that are more accessible to actual control—for instance, the combinations of pitch, vowel, and intensity that create sounds and vibrations that give you the sensation that you’re singing in the mask or placing the tone forward. An orchestral conductor conceives an interpretation in his mind’s ear. The music as he imagines it awakens certain emotional and bodily responses in him. Then, much as a child marches enthusiastically to martial music, the conductor choreographs his bodily reactions to his conception of the piece, in the hope that the orchestra will reproduce the sounds that made him react this way in the first place. Yet an orchestra can’t possibly become a cause, after the fact, to the effect that the conductor mimics. The harder the conductor tries to make the orchestra obey his will, the worse the orchestra plays. Soon the conductor throws one of his infamous temper tantrums. The orchestra sounds no better at the end of each rehearsal. As for the concert, it’ll be in God’s hands. Mary Wanless writes in Ride with Your Mind: Often, when I was riding a horse who seemed rigid and unyielding, a better rider would take over, and I would watch the horse transform before my very eyes, becoming far more beautiful in his movement, more proud in his carriage, and more willing in his demeanor. . . . When I rode him he was completely inflexible, but in the hands of one of these good riders he became a malleable medium, ready to be molded into whatever shape and movements the rider chose for him.16

The better rider doesn’t scream at her horse or whip him; nor does she tighten her legs on the horse’s back to make him obey. Rather, she uses herself well, and the horse responds accordingly. The Use of the Self

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Like a horse under different riders, an orchestra changes almost miraculously under different conductors, thanks in good part to the differences in their use. If a conductor wishes to improve his orchestra’s behavior, first and foremost he needs to use himself differently, because the orchestra’s behavior is a function of his use. It’s an inescapable fact: use determines functioning. I once attended a concert by a youth orchestra in which the first half was conducted by an eager, puppylike young conductor and the second half by Neeme Järvi, a towering musician with a magnetic, authoritative presence. Under the puppy, the orchestra sounded thin and shallow. Before the orchestra played a single note under Järvi’s command, however, its silence already sounded different, just because of Järvi’s steadying presence at the podium. He stood still in front of the orchestra and the musicians lit up in anticipation of untold marvels. And indeed, once they started playing everything was new and different: sound, rhythm, phrasing, emotion, and meaning. It was hardly the same orchestra. Understanding the relationship between use and functioning is the key to freedom. Your use is your reaction to the world; your functioning is the result of that reaction. Aspects of your functioning, such as difficulties and health problems, are so visible, audible, and tangible that they completely absorb your attention and prevent you from being aware of your use. But you can’t conquer your difficulties unless you change your use—which isn’t your posture or your body mechanics, but your integrated reaction to the world.

USE AND FUNCTIONING: A CASE HISTORY Joanna was an accomplished concert pianist and teacher who sought the help of the Alexander Technique after she was diagnosed as suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome, a painful and potentially handicapping condition of the wrist that includes pins-and-needles, numbness, weakness of the thumb, and other disagreeable symptoms. Medical diagnosis suggests that it is caused by hormonal factors, arthritis, an injury to the wrists, or wrist overuse, although the Penguin Medical Encyclopedia states that “there is no obvious reason for it.”17 To treat it, medicine offers the choices of rest, physiotherapy, cortisone injections, and surgery. Alexander teachers propose a different perspective. Carpal tunnel syndrome isn’t caused by overuse of the wrists, and not even by misuse of the wrists, but by misuse of the whole self. To rest the hands isn’t a solution; as long as the misuse persists, the problem will recur after the period of inaction. Localized wrist exercises could become part of the problem, if they concentrate on a part while ignoring the whole. Cortisone (which alleviates the pain without altering the condition itself) is a powerful drug with serious side effects. Surgery doesn’t address the problem of misuse. Joanna’s wrist problem was symptomatic of a larger picture. In everything that she did, at the piano and away from it, she misused herself. She habitually contracted her head into her spine; twisted her trunk; shortened, narrowed, and curved her back; lifted her shoulders; and created excessive tension in all her limbs. 16

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Her use (her “individuality and character,” in Alexander’s words) had other defining characteristics. Joanna was a volatile woman who reacted intensely to whatever happened around her. Her speech was often agitated and suffused with sentiment. Joanna, like many people today, was addicted to stimulation of all sorts: intellectual, emotional, sensorial, gastronomic. She ate quickly, consumed large amounts of sugar and chocolate, had digestive problems, and was several pounds over her ideal weight. She was a talented and well-trained pianist, technically proficient, musically sophisticated, and comfortable in front of an audience. She was bright, imaginative, and enterprising. The level of her misuse was average, but it was catching up with her and causing pain—as it usually does, sooner or later, in the average person. For an Alexander teacher to treat her wrist and leave everything else untouched would be unthinkable. Yet it would be equally preposterous to work on all her habits of speech, digestion, interpersonal relationships, and piano playing, one by one, until the habits were conquered. As habits, these are all manifestations of the same constant: Joanna’s use and its influence on her functioning. Obviously the solution to her problems lay in her stopping the end-gaining that caused her misuse. In due course her good use would exert a constant, beneficial influence on her functioning, including that of the wrist. Besides demonstrating the relationship between use and functioning, Alexander showed that there exists a certain mechanism of the head, neck, and back that affects the total use of the self. He called it the primary control, and we’ll study it in the next chapter (where we’ll see that the primary control isn’t a physical mechanism but a psychophysical one with metaphysical dimensions). My work with Joanna consisted largely of helping her change the use of her primary control, according to the principles and procedures outlined in this book. We didn’t address her wrist directly. Neither did we work on her speech, her dietary habits, or her piano playing. And yet, over a period of time, she started eating differently and losing weight. She became considerably less reactive, without losing her latent ability to react. She reported finding new, startling colors at the piano. She changed her piano teaching, which up to then had been dominated by pedagogical formulas and the drive for quick results. She became less antagonistic in her relationships. Her good use helped her have a trouble-free pregnancy. Mountain climbing, one of her hobbies, became easier. She effected positive changes in every one of her habits—of work, food, love, and play. Needless to say, she saved her wrist from harmful cortisone injections and an iff y operation, and she saved herself from early retirement as a pianist. Learning how to work on herself rather than on her problems took Joanna a lot of time and thought, but its rewards were immense. If you’re willing to work on yourself, you too can look forward to great rewards.

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CHAPTER 2

THE PRIMARY CONTROL Head, Neck, Back

Mark, a cellist, plays for me in a lesson. His sound is scratchy at the heel of the bow and feeble at the tip. His intonation is faulty, and his left-hand changes of position are unreliable. His breathing is agitated and noisy. Mark tires easily and suffers from stage fright. His back hurts, and his left wrist shows signs of tendonitis. Undoing every one of his problems seems like an impossible job. Fortunately for Mark, Alexander discovered a mechanism that regulates the use of the whole self. This mechanism involves the poise of the head and neck, and their relationship to the spine. Alexander called it the primary control. When Mark plays the cello, he tends to look intently at his left hand. To do so he twists his head and moves his neck down in space. His shoulders tighten as a result, and the tightness spreads to the torso, the arms, and the legs. All these problems start from how Mark “wears his head and neck.” Logically enough, wearing his head and neck without so much contortion would allow Mark to solve the problems. This is how Alexander put it: “I [cannot] enable my pupils to control the functioning of their organs, systems, or reflexes directly, but by teaching them to employ consciously the primary control of their use I [can] put them in command of the means whereby their functioning generally can be indirectly controlled.”1 It isn’t easy or simple to “employ consciously the primary control of your use,” but once you get the hang of it, many things in your life will change for the better without your having to initiate every change individually.

FROM THE HEAD AND NECK TO THE WHOLE OF YOU The orientation of the head and neck not only influences the coordination of the body but determines it outright. Observe a baby learning how to walk. The baby won’t find her balance unless she figures out what to do with her head and neck (Figure 2.1). Test it for yourself: while walking, place your head and neck in an exaggeratedly lopsided position. You might feel so uncoordinated as to walk into a wall.

FIGURE 2.1: The poise of the head determines success or failure

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FIGURE 2.2: The head leads, the body follows

Just as misusing your primary control discombobulates you, using it well structures you. Suppose you’re standing still and you decide to point your head somewhere in space, magnetizing it toward a particular destination—the ceiling, for instance. If you direct your head affirmatively, your whole body also responds affirmatively, organizing itself as if commanded by the head. Suppose you start walking or dancing. The well-directed head now spurs the body into well-organized movement. In posture and in movement, “the head leads, the body follows” (Figure 2.2). In a healthy animal, the neck exists as a completely integrated part of the spine, rather than something distinct from it. Observe little kids walking, running, and playing. Their necks seem quite elongated, while the neck of the average adult appears shortened in comparison. In fact, adults tend to break the unity of neck and spine and create a unit between the neck and the head instead. One of the main characteristics of the primary control, then, is that it integrates the neck to the spine while allowing the head to remain mobile and somewhat autonomous relative to the neck. The toddler moves her head to look at something or to prepare to stand up, and her spine (which includes the neck) doesn’t move that much to begin with. In fact, the better to remain a unity with the spine, her neck refuses to move in a unit with the head. In the organization of the primary control, then, there’s an opposition of energies or tendencies in which “the head goes, but the neck stays.” The toddler’s poise of head and neck is inseparable from her personality. Her primary control is the meeting point, so to speak, of attitude, posture, movement, energy, thought, and emotion. The same applies to you: your primary control is so 20

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tied in with your identity that we might reasonably say “you are your neck,” a point we’ll return to later. To improve your primary control doesn’t entail your doing the right thing. Rather, it requires that you stop doing the wrong thing. This doesn’t involve the same type of muscular acts you use to lift an object or open a door. Instead, you first need to stop contracting your head into your neck, and then prevent this contraction from recurring. The process isn’t physical but psychophysical, and it involves letting go of those wishes and desires that cause your neck to contract in the first place. To put it succinctly, your task is to pass from doing to non-doing. Chapter 4 discusses non-doing in detail. The photographs of Pablo Casals (Figure 2.3), Janos Starker (Figure 2.4), and Art Blakey (Figure 2.5) illustrate that there is no right position for the head. Casals’s head drops forward slightly, Blakey’s backward; Starker’s is straight. Yet all three men use their primary control well. Their bodies are oriented upward, their energies outward. Their spines are neither contracted nor slack. Their necks remain an extension of the spine, allowing their heads to move freely on the joint between skull and neck. Their backs are lengthening and widening, their shoulders broadening. Positioning your head and neck won’t help you coordinate yourself; but directing your head and neck certainly will. Chapter 5 covers directing in detail.

THE SIMPLIFIED SKELETON The simplified skeleton is a practical way for you to sense yourself in action. I offer it not as an anatomical and physiological construct, but as a tool that is useful even if some of its features might seem vague and ambiguous to the scientifically minded. The spine has a lot of built-in flexibility. All along it, the vertebrae are capable of bending and moving. This is a good thing, of course, but like everything else in life it carries risks and dangers—for instance, the danger that you’ll bend your spine too much or in a direction that isn’t completely safe. You can get away with it for a while, until too much becomes too much and you hurt yourself. It may be better for you to keep your spine’s flexibility as a latent capability held in reserve, rather than something you employ too frequently or too freely. In good coordination, the neck is so completely integrated with the spine that they form a single unit. Moving the neck too far or too often will tend to disconnect the neck from the spine and bring it into a unit with the head instead. This is a major cause of discomfort, and ultimately illness and pain. Think to yourself, then, that when the neck and spine are integrated it’s easier to develop the collaboration between the head and neck. Watch a little kid pushing a cart, and you’ll see how he or she keeps the back and shoulders solid and employs the arms as extensions of the back. Watch an awkward conductor move his or her arms, and you’ll see how he or she loses the connection between the back and shoulders and instead allows the shoulders to form a blocky unit with the arms. In ideal coordination, the back and shoulders form a unit similar to the unit between the spine and the neck. The Primary Control

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FIGURE 2.3: Pablo Casals

FIGURE 2.4: Janos Starker

FIGURE 2.5: Art Blakey 

Think to yourself, then, that when the back and shoulders are integrated it’s easier to develop the collaboration between the shoulders and arms. Watch a good tap dancer, and you’ll see how he or she keeps the pelvis relatively immobile, despite the frenetic movements of legs and feet. In ideal coordination, the back and the pelvis are integrated into a single unit. In principle, the pelvis is highly mobile. If you allow your pelvis to move too much or to be floppy, however, you risk doing something with your legs (in locomotion or otherwise) that would cause the pelvis to move away from the back and to form an awkward unit with the legs. A little resistance at the point where the back meets the pelvis might do you a lot of good. Think to yourself, then, that when the back and pelvis are integrated it’s easier to develop the collaboration between the pelvis and legs. In brief, the simplified skeleton highlights three bits of information that give you a starting point to work on your good use: 1. Give priority to connecting the spine and the neck. It’ll make it easier to develop the collaboration between the neck and the head. 2. Give priority to connecting the back and the shoulders. It’ll make it easier to develop the collaboration between the shoulders and the arms. 3. Give priority to connecting the back and the pelvis. It’ll make it easier to develop the collaboration between the pelvis and the legs. These three points of connection integrate the spine from top to bottom. Literally and metaphorically, they give you your backbone—the source of your strength and individuality (Figure 2.6). The primary control is equivalent to item 1 on the list. In this chapter we’ll study four exercises related to it. We’ll cover the connection between the back and pelvis in Chapter 8, and between the back and the shoulders in Chapter 9. Before we look at exercises for your primary control, we need to know a little more about what integration is, what it looks like, why we tend to lose it, and how we might be able to cultivate it.

CONVEXITY AND CONCAVITY You’re standing in a normal, relaxed manner, when someone suddenly pushes you from behind, leaning hard on your spine. If you’re a typical human being, you’ll yield to the push, stumble forward, and then regain your balance. At the moment when you yield to the push, inertia will cause your body to enter a pattern: your head will fling back, dragging the neck with it and pushing the throat forward; your shoulders will fling back, causing the upper back to narrow; and your pelvis will sway, causing the lower back to curve and contract. In other words, you’ll lose the three main points of connection within the body. It’s a very disagreeable sensation. Test it by walking a bit sloppily around and asking a friend to push you hard from behind without warning you. 24

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FIGURE 2.6: The simplified skeleton in living

When you fling your head back and down into your neck, the space between the skull and the neck collapses, creating an exaggeratedly concave curve. When you fling back your shoulders, you create an equally concave space between your shoulder blades. When you sway your pelvis and disconnect it from the spine, you create an equally concave space in your lower back. If these collapsed and contracted spaces are concave, then the contrasting spaces, which are built up and integrated, will be convex. The word space is better in this context than the words position or posture. A space is something you occupy and inhabit; a position or posture is something you hold. You can project your energies The Primary Control

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into a space, much as you can project your voice in a concert hall. It means you can direct the energies of your head, neck, back, shoulders, and everything else in your body while avoiding rigid positions. All spaces within and around can be concave or convex. If you push your knees far back and hold them locked, they behave in a concave manner; if you let your knees move forward a little or a lot, they occupy the space in front of them in a convex manner. Bend your thumb back, and it goes concave; bend if forward, and it goes convex. Collapse the region underneath your armpits and next to the top of the rib cage, and it becomes concave; lengthen and widen your back, and the armpit region becomes convex. I propose that we define concavity and convexity as spaces and attitudes, with corresponding physical energies that are, in fact, inseparable from the attitudes. Concavity is a form of inward collapse and submission, in which the absence of a steady inner core causes your energy to disperse, leak, and run out. Convexity is a form of outward affirmation, in which your steady inner core is a self-renewing well of energy you can direct and propagate as you wish. Concavity is other-directed, and convexity is self-directed. Paradoxically, in concavity you’re self-absorbed—but in convexity you can be truly attentive to others. The concave state means that you allow other people’s ideas and energies to “come at you” and sink inside you. You “bend over backward” to accommodate other people. You aren’t sure of what you want, and you try to suss out what other people want from you or expect from you. You’re forever changing or trying to change, trying to adapt to other people, or to your perception of what other people want from you. It’s an uncertain business. To put it simply, you worry too much about other people. The contradiction here is that someone who worries too much is simply self-absorbed, preoccupied with his or her own insecurities—therefore not so able to be truly attentive to other people. Convexity comes from an inner core that is solid and stable, which can appear to some observers as a sort of arrogance, or even a threat: the convex person seems to occupy too much space. It’s not possible to make an unambiguous assessment of qualities of modesty, insecurity, confidence, and arrogance. Many people prize the virtue of modesty, but sometimes they confuse modesty and insecurity, seeing the lack of insecurity as “immodest.” You go backstage and congratulate a friend who played a beautiful concert. The friend says, “Oh no, it was terrible. I sucked.” Is this actual modesty? Is it a desirable quality? It’s important for all of us to have a good idea of who we are—to know our weaknesses and also our strengths. Not to see our own strengths and not to use them for constructive purposes is a form of blindness. Some versions of apparent modesty, then, are “concave”—that is, hollow and unhealthy. (We’ll return to issues of modesty and immodesty when we discuss stage fright in Chapter 18.) As an arrangement of bones, the spine contains an alternation of concave and convex curves. Roughly speaking the neck is concave, the top of the back is convex, and the bottom of the back is concave again. To put it differently, there’s a hollow curve at the neck and at the bottom of the spine, and a protuberance at the top of the back. This creates an apparent contradiction between simple anatomical realities 26

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and the overall model of concavity and convexity that I propose here, since I’m decrying concavity as inherently negative. This is because I’m defining concavity not as a physical curve but as an attitude and as a space in which energy circulates. When you start working with the concepts of convexity and concavity, at first you’ll think in terms of bodily positions, believing that there’s a posture in which the space between the shoulder blades is concave, and a different posture in which the space is convex. You might assume that if you place your shoulder blades just so, you’ll achieve convexity. This isn’t totally false, but it’s an unhelpful idea on several counts. First, all body parts interact continuously, and if you try to place your shoulder blades in a specific position your sternum, your neck, your lower back, your ribcage, and a bunch of other body parts may rebel. Second, it’s not really possible to hold body parts in specific positions for very long; daily existence is too varied for it. The body part is held in place by a command of the mind, and the mind too will rebel sooner rather than later. Body and mind both recognize it as an unnatural and unhealthy effort. Third, if you take convexity and concavity to mean literal arrangements of body parts, you risk not seeing that it’s possible for you to curve your back, for instance, into what looks like a concave curve, but keep it in what is a convex path of energy. Holding yourself in place, then, is generally counterproductive. Directing your energies and projecting them in space is preferable. We’ll study directions and energies in Chapter 5.

TRIGGERS OF CONCAVITY AND CONVEXITY There exists a concave use of the voice and a convex one, a concave thought process and a convex one, a concave personality type and a convex one, a concave way of dealing with a police officer giving you a speeding ticket and a convex one, a concave way of smoking a cigarette and a convex one. In fact, every last thing in your life can be concave-making or convex-making. In order to inhale, most people suck in air through the mouth or the nose (a little bit like a vacuum cleaner), often with an audible noise. The sucking-in of air is a concave moment. Most of the time it’s accompanied by a movement of the head and neck: the head goes back and down toward the neck; the neck yields to the weight of the head, the throat is constricted, and we can hear the constriction in the form of a gasping sound. It’s possible to breathe differently and just to relax your ribcage and open the spaces inside your abdomen, in which case air rushes in without your having to suck it in at all. This makes for “convex inhalation.” Chapter 10 considers these issues in greater depth. You can open your mouth by moving the jaw away from the skull or moving the skull away from the jaw. The latter risks triggering a concave-making contraction in your primary control: the skull moves back and down and drags the neck with it, disconnecting the neck from the spine. Given how many times you open your mouth The Primary Control

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in everyday existence, it’s quite useful to become able to open the mouth in a convex way, without collapsing or stiffening your neck. When you lift your arms in front of you, you risk lifting your shoulders and hollowing your back, causing your body and the rest of yourself to go overly concave. Many musicians “dance to their own playing” and hyperextend the spine as part of their expressive choreography, creating an overly concave space in their backs. The sounds of a hyperextended spine are necessarily different from the sounds of an integrated spine. The concave posture lacks power and resonance. Musicians create compensatory patterns for their lack of resonance, putting ever-greater effort into their expressive dance and getting ever-smaller sonic returns. Not accidentally, this results in severe health problems and curtailed careers. Wearing high heels tends to force the body into an overall concave pattern. Is it possible to wear high heels and not misuse yourself? This is difficult to answer. It may be more productive to think that there are risks and dangers in every situation, without exception: there are risks and dangers in wearing high heels, just as there are risks and dangers in wearing flip-flops or going barefoot. If you understand what the risks are, if you fail to navigate the risks successfully, if you see that you misuse yourself when you wear high heels, and if you decide to keep wearing them, then it comes down to a matter of choice: high heels make you concave and trigger a lot of potential or actual pain, but you prefer wearing them to not wearing them. Pain becomes your choice. The only thing is, people in pain will often deny that they chose their pain to begin with. Convexity contains elements of opposition and resistance, without which inertia will cause disconnection and concavity as you move. I once went to Disneyland Paris with a nephew, and I took the “Magic Mountain” ride. It’s a rollercoaster ride in the dark, with the train moving at high speeds up and down, and changing directions suddenly. It was sheer torture, and I hated it. Two years later I had to take another nephew to Disneyland, but now I had a strategy for the treacherous ride. I held on firmly to the security bar in front of me, and I pushed my back into the seat and my feet down into the floor. So I “braced” myself from head to toe, becoming one with the seat. The ride was much less terrifying and uncomfortable, because no body parts ever got jerked. With nephew number one, the ride caused me to go concave. With nephew number two, I managed to stay convex. This is an extreme situation for which I devised an extreme strategy, but the principle is the same in normal daily life: an overly relaxed spine and neck cause body parts (the head and neck, but also the shoulders and the lower back) to suffer various degrees of jerking and jolting when you move or when you’re moved. What happens to a conductor with a floppy spine when she indicates a strong downbeat? She goes concave. What happens to a string player with a floppy spine performing a tremolo? He goes concave. What happens to a trombonist with a floppy spine who moves the trombone’s slide? Passing from position to position becomes a trigger of concavity. The integrated person is convex, with energies circulating outward from a steady inner core. The disconnected person is concave, with energies collapsing inward because of the absence of a steady inner core. The integrated individual has a backbone; the disconnected individual is spineless. The integrated (convex) individual 28

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directs “forward and up,” and the disconnected (concave) individual directs “back and down.” These directions are physical, psychological, and metaphysical; “forward and up” or “back and down” are contrasting postures, attitudes, and paths in life. Resistance and opposition help you pass from concavity to convexity, and from disconnection to integration.

FOUR PRACTICAL EXERCISES An exercise is beneficial or harmful according to how you perform it. Misusing yourself is only too easy, even when executing simple actions. The exercises in this book are meant to help you use yourself better, but the difficulty remains that you risk bringing your habitual misuse to performing them! Start from where you are and go forward from there. Taking lessons from a good teacher is helpful. Approaching every task with imagination and humor isn’t a bad idea either. 1. THE DANCE OF HEAD AND NECK

You can move your head along three planes: 1. Turn your head from left to right, and vice versa. 2. Tip your head laterally, making an ear move down toward a shoulder or up away from it. 3. Tilt your head up or down, for instance by lifting your nose up or tipping it down. Your neck can also move in any number of ways. Useful as it is, the mobility of the neck sometimes ends up sabotaging the poise of the head and the integrity of the spine. When you slump, for instance, you move your neck forward and down. When you hold a phone between the ear and the shoulder, you move your neck laterally, taking the head with it. Suppose you decide to tip your head forward to look at your shoes. It’s almost certain that you’ll move your neck forward as well, possibly straining both the neck and the top of the spine in the process. Normally it’s better if the neck and the spine remain so connected that the neck ceases to exist as an independent body part. The neck becomes simply the visible upper end of the spine. The idea is not so much to make the spine immobile, but to connect the neck and the spine and let this entity called “neck-spine” stay whole in everything you do, including movement, posture, rest, and so on. Then when you move your head here or there, the neck-spine stays in place, and you strain them rather less. You can observe where people habitually break the connection between neck and spine. Look at the back of the neck, for instance, and you’ll see lines in the skin and flesh, or bulges and protuberances that sometimes are quite discreet and sometimes very exaggerated. The top of the back may have a visible hump, and beyond The Primary Control

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the hump there may be an awkward curve of the neck. The problem may not be in the hump itself, but in the joinery between the back and the neck. Some people may need to learn how to bring their neck back in space, others how to wear the neck in a more forward position. Either way, a “new neck” requires adjustments both physical and psychological. For instance, changes in the connection between the neck and spine affect how clothes fit. Alexander used to warn his students not to buy expensive clothing while they were in the early stages of learning or training, as clothes that “fit the habit” would not “fit the nature.” From photos and videos, and also from looking at yourself in the mirror, you might notice that you have a habit of holding your neck somewhat off-center: leaning it to the right, the left, forward, or back. Suppose you tend to wear your neck to the left (perhaps on account of playing the violin). Command your neck to move slightly up in space and to the right, the better to integrate it with the spine. Then give your head a command: tip the chin, tip the ear, or turn the head a little. What happens to your neck? You probably neglect its new direction and revert to habit instead. Alternate giving yourself commands for your neck to connect to the spine and commands for your head to move, until you can move the head without disconnecting the neck from the spine. Use different combinations of small gestures; for instance, point your neck up in space, tip the chin down, and turn your head to the right. Or point your neck up in space, turn your head to the right, and tilt your left ear down. Over time, you’ll develop a broad database of positions and movements, and you’ll sense how the collaboration of head and neck affects your overall posture. The ability to keep the neck closely connected to the spine as you move your head will alter your personality and the unfolding of your life, much as it did Alexander’s. 2. PRACTICING THE NECK-SPINE

Just about everything in your life is a challenge to the relationship between your head and your neck-spine. Looking at a computer screen risks making you lose the neck. So might locomotion, speech, playing the violin, or conducting an orchestra. Say the following sentence out loud: To be, or not to be: that is the question.

A few people might nod their head for every syllable. Each nod causes the connection between the neck and spine to suffer a little or a lot, depending on how much energy the speaker puts into the nodding: To (nod) be (nod), or (nod) not (nod) to (nod) be (nod) . . .

Admittedly such people are rare, but they do exist. More common is the pattern of speech in which only the stressed syllables receive a nod: To be (nod), or not (nod) to be (nod) . . . 30

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Every nod has a kind of rebound: the head goes down and then comes up. Or perhaps it’s the other way around: the head goes up on the unstressed syllable, then down on the stress. Either way, you risk tightening your neck and shortening your spine. In silence, commit to keeping the neck and spine relatively still. Say one word, checking in a mirror to see whether or not you keep to your first commitment. Commit to the connection between neck and spine and say several words, checking to see whether or not you keep the commitment. By now you’re probably involved in the “act of speech,” and you forget or neglect the “act of directing the neck and spine.” You nod, despite your heartfelt decision not to! Become silent again. Commit to the connection between head and neck. Think about saying a few words but decide not to say them, because for now the connection between the head and neck is more important than speech. Commit to the head and neck, think about saying a few words, and speak a single word. It’s a kind of compromise between total commitment to head and neck and actually speaking. Now you have many choices at your disposal: you can direct your head and neck in silence, you can speak freely without thinking about the head and neck, you can decide to speak but withhold the decision at the last second, you can decide to speak several words but speak only one or two. Do this many times and you’ll become better able to sense and control the behavior of your neck as you respond to a stimulus. You can apply the same exercise to anything in your life, including your music making. 3. THE LIVELY NECK BRACE

You can practice the following exercise on both sides of the body, although for the sake of convenience I’ll describe the procedure on one side only. Stand in a normal posture. Make a cup of your left hand, with fingers spread gently apart—as if you were holding an invisible grapefruit. Bring the hand to the right side of your face, placing it against your head and body in such a way that your thumb is snug against the left side of the jaw line and the other fingers touch the region from the collarbone to the pectorals. Exert gentle pressure with all fingers, and resist the pressure with the jaw, collarbone, and chest. Beyond the jaw, your head will become engaged in resistance; beyond the collarbone and pectorals, your whole torso will become engaged in resistance. This creates an opposition of forces between the head, the neck, and the back. Keep this posture, in which your left hand is up against your jaw and collarbone, and hold your left elbow with your right hand. Use the right hand to pull the left elbow rightward, and resist this pull with your whole left arm. The play of pressure, resistance, and opposition becomes more complex (Figure 2.7). Now speak or sing. You may be surprised at how resonant your voice has become. This is partly because your whole body is energized, and partly because your voice’s vibrations travel all along your arms and hands through the process of bone conduction, in which sound waves travel through your bones. Your voice appears bigger than usual (because you capture more of its vibrations) and is bigger than usual (because you’ve become well coordinated). The Primary Control

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FIGURE 2.7: The lively neck brace

Keep your lively neck brace on and, in silence or while speaking, pace the room. You may be surprised at how stable your whole body feels in locomotion when you trigger these oppositions between the head, the neck, and the back. The violin or viola, placed against your head and shoulder, can have a similarly energizing effect on the head and neck—and, indirectly through them, on the whole body. 4. OCCUPY THE SPACE AROUND YOUR HEAD

Have two normal, medium-size party balloons at the ready, blown up and with their spouts tied into knots. Use your right hand to hold a balloon against the right side of the head, its bottom touching the region around your collarbone; and the left hand to hold another balloon against the left side. 32

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If you try to move your head too far to each side (tilting an ear toward a shoulder, for instance), the balloons will prevent you from doing so. In effect, the balloons become like a buttress holding the head in place, but allowing it to move to a certain degree. The overall result is paradoxical: “Move—don’t move!” “Hold—don’t hold!” “Firm—bouncy!” Ask a friend to hold the balloons in place against your head, so that you don’t have to lift your arms. Sit, stand, or walk while your friend holds the balloons. Much as it happened with the lively neck brace of the previous exercise, the play of oppositions between your head and neck as they resist the balloons stabilizes your primary control and allows a surprising degree of freedom throughout the body. Speak while holding the balloons against the sides of your head. The balloons capture and magnify your voice’s vibrations. Your voice will become louder than usual, both in reality (a listener will tell you that your voice is bigger) and in your perception of it (you’ll feel as if your voice is quite a lot bigger!). The balloons help you perceive your voice as a vibratory phenomenon. Without balloons against your head, your voice would still be a vibratory phenomenon; the balloons simply make the phenomenon more explicit and perceptible. Let go of the balloons, but retain a memory of their presence—as if you wore “latent balloons” around your head and neck. The imagination is a powerful entity. To imagine these balloons and their gentle, elastic, friendly pressure against your head and neck may have the same effect on your coordination as employing actual balloons. In Chapter 5, we’ll explore your imagination’s energizing capabilities in greater depth.

THE PRIMARY CONTROL AND YOUR IDENTITY Suppose you’ve long worn your neck a bit back and down, and you now decide to wear it just a little forward and up. How does it feel from a sensorial point of view? Right, wrong, comfortable, uncomfortable? And how does it feel from an emotional point of view? Could you really wear your neck in this new way for the rest of your life and be the same person you’ve been for decades? Direct your neck into its new relationship with the spine, and say a few words. Oops! You moved your neck back to the old position! Move it back to the new position, keep it there, and say a few words again. Oops! It seems that you can’t speak with your new neck. You are your neck. You can’t change the orientation of your neck without changing everything else in you and your life. The “right” or healthy neck may well feel wrong to you, and the “wrong” and disconnected neck may feel right. The primary control is more than just a physical position requiring a few small adjustments. Every decision you make passes through it; in some way, the primary control is the seat of “yes” and “no.” Fear contracts the primary control. What happens if you learn to prevent it from contracting? Your fear changes or dissolves. Are you really ready to let go of a fear you’ve lived with for years or decades? The primary control is a center The Primary Control

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of energy. It’s directly involved with speech, which is a big part of your identity. It gives you your status in social settings. Why do army commanders in the movies bark orders without moving their necks? It gives them a lot of authority. What do the slackers and village idiots do in the movies? They let their necks “hang.” Suppose you’ve let your neck hang a little (or a lot) most of your adult life. To stop doing it would change your personality, your social status, and the way people react to you. To make significant and long-lasting changes to your primary control takes time. The needed changes seem simple, but to install them is complex. Habit will fight dirty. Alexander worked in front of a set of mirrors for several years, observing himself in action and figuring out what he was doing and how to change it. To work on your primary control is to work on yourself, to know yourself, to know how you react to the world, to observe and sense yourself in action.

CONTROL AND CHANGE Someone who recognizes the existence of an undesirable habit normally expresses a wish to control the habit, rather than being controlled by it. The very term primary control would seem to indicate the possibility, and desirability, of control. This merits discussion. There used to be a widely accepted image of human functioning that compared your body with an automobile and your brain with its driver. Today we think of the brain as a computer, where certain behaviors of yours are hard-wired and thought is a form of software. These images imply a cleavage inside you: a driving, controlling force, and your actual behaviors. Alexander often employed the expression “conscious control.” One of his books is titled Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual. In his view, however, conscious control “does not necessarily imply any distinction between the thing controlled and the control itself.”2 This invalidates the metaphor of the car and the driver, which are after all separate entities. Alexander sees conscious control not as something you impose upon your behaviors and habits, but as something that arises logically from your good use. He writes that conscious control is “a plane to be reached rather than a method of reaching it.”3 This idea has baffled many readers, but a passage by the singing teacher Cornelius L. Reid (writing about vocal control) clarifies it: A reasonable estimate of vocal potential can be made by observing the physical accomplishments of those who have achieved the highest levels of technical excellence. Among them are 1) an equalized tonal range extending over two and one-half octaves, 2) flexibility, 3) resonance and carrying power, 4) breath economy, 5) a sustained vocal line, 6) an even and unobtrusive vibrato, 7) durability, and 8) an ability to execute a messa di voce. These attributes come with a built-in control system which cannot be willed into being when vocal faults are present.4 34

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The great singer has great vocal control: he or she has reached a “plane of conscious guidance and control.” But this control is the result of a voyage, not the means used to undertake the voyage itself. If control is a plane to be reached, not a method of reaching it, what exactly is this method of reaching control? Let’s choose a situation in which a specific act is desired: lifting an arm, saying a word, playing a musical phrase. Gerhard Mantel, in his book Cello Technique, refers to this as a “goal-oriented movement.” He writes: Any body movement is based on the following scheme: 1. We conceive a goal. This conception may be visually or acoustically determined, or it may be derived from our movement memory. 2. The brain sends motor impulses through the nerve pathways to the muscles. We need not go into the physiological details of those nerve pathways, except to say that each motor impulse consists of a series of point-like single impulses. The frequency of the impulses and the number of muscle fibers involved determine the amplitude and the force of the movement, respectively. 3. A second system of nerve pathways reports success or failure to the brain, i.e., whether the goal was reached (feedback). In response the brain sends out correcting impulses. Their success or failure is also reported to the brain. We must imagine this circuit in uninterrupted activity.5

We might summarize this chain of events as think, play, judge. Alexander proposed a different scheme: In the performance of any muscular action by conscious guidance and control there are four essential stages: 1. The conception of the movement required; 2. The inhibition of erroneous preconceived ideas which subconsciously suggest the manner in which the movement or series of movements should be performed; 3. The new and conscious mental orders which will set in motion the muscular mechanism essential to the correct performance of the action; 4. The movements (contractions and expansions) of the muscles which carry out the mental orders.6

Alexander presupposes that feedback is constant (although unreliable, as we’ll see in the next chapter). We’ll call his scheme conception, inhibition, direction, and action. For a musician, this means think, get rid of wrong thoughts, think differently, and play. Contrasted with Mantel’s scheme, Alexander’s has two distinct features: inhibition and direction. If conscious guidance and control is a plane to be reached, inhibition and direction are the tools that will help you get there. Before studying them, however, we need to look at the relationship between our sensations and the way we conceive the world.

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CHAPTER 3

SENSORY AWARENESS AND CONCEPTION

I walk into the house of a stranger. At once I’m struck by several smells: disinfectant, wood polish, cat litter. Meeting the stranger, I smell cigarette smoke in his hair, alcohol and garlic in his breath, aftershave on his skin. All these smells, and many more, help me navigate the environment, analyze everything that comes into my sensorial sphere, and make decisions to do or not to do something. After fifteen minutes in the stranger’s house, I excuse myself and flee, having figured out that I’m in a hostile environment. Sight, sound, touch, and taste are just as essential. Indeed, to live is to sense. Every last one of your actions is determined by the information you gather through your senses. It’s a never-ending cycle: you sense and decide, sense and decide, every day, all day long. What if your nose is blocked and you can’t smell the gas leak that, undetected, could lead to a fatal explosion? As it turns out, end-gaining and misuse—two universal habits—affect sensory awareness negatively. A vicious circle then ensues: because we sense things, people, events, and situations incorrectly, we make awkward decisions; because we make awkward decisions, we end up sensing things ever more incorrectly. The smells at the stranger’s house are strong and unmistakable to a first-time visitor. Yet the stranger can’t feel either the smells of his house or those he himself gives off. This example illustrates a faulty sense of smell, but in fact all of our senses give us messages that we misinterpret or ignore. We’re often surprised and displeased to hear how different our voices sound on a tape recording from how we imagine them to be. We see photographs of ourselves, and we can’t believe our own eyes. Faulty sensory awareness is a double phenomenon: what is wrong feels right, and what is right feels wrong. Sometimes after a lesson, a master class, or a performance, you’re convinced that you played badly, only to hear your friends assure you that you played beautifully.

Before we look further into faulty sensory awareness, we need to highlight one of our most important and yet overlooked senses.

PROPRIOCEPTION We all learn in school that we have five senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. Current neuroscience research considers this list too restrictive and too compartmentalized, but for our purposes we can hew to the familiar concepts—as long as we add another sensory mechanism to them. This isn’t the “sixth sense” popularly synonymous with intuition, but proprioception—the body’s feeling of itself. Proprioception encompasses all aspects of muscular activity: orientation in space, relative position of body parts, movement of body and limbs, the gauging of effort and tension, the perception of fatigue, static and dynamic balance. Obviously, proprioception plays a huge role in our lives. Suppose you lift your arm. Proprioceptors, which are sensory receptors scattered throughout the body, sense and analyze your arm movement and help you make unconscious adjustments in posture and balance throughout the body. Proprioception, then, is a sort of relay mechanism for gathering and distributing muscular information. Your neck is particularly rich in proprioceptors. This is only logical, given how the primary control (of which the neck is a major component) regulates the coordination of the whole body. The vestibular system in the inner ear plays an important role in establishing and keeping balance, but it doesn’t bear sole responsibility for it. Dr. Oliver Sachs writes: Proprioception, to a considerable extent, can compensate for defects in the inner ears. Thus patients who have been surgically deprived of their labyrinths . . . may learn to employ and to enhance their proprioception quite wonderfully; in particular, to use the sensors in the vast latissimus dorsi muscles of the back—the greatest, most mobile muscular expanse in the body—as an accessory and novel balance organ, a pair of vast, wing-like proprioceptors.1

Musicians prize their hearing above all. Nevertheless, it’s possible for a musician to be virtually or completely deaf and yet, partly thanks to proprioception, adept at music making. In the classical-music world, perhaps the most famous deaf performer is the percussionist Evelyn Gleannie. Deaf listeners can also enjoy music, perceiving the vibrations of sound with their bodies and bypassing the ears altogether. If you’re void of proprioception, however, it’s impossible for you to make music. Dr. Sacks writes that “if proprioception is completely knocked out, the body becomes, so to speak, blind and deaf to itself—and (as the meaning of the Latin root proprius hints) ceases to ‘own’ itself, to feel itself as itself.”2 Proprioception, then, is in some ways more important than hearing—even for musicians.

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As Alexander struggled with his vocal problems in his youth, one of his key discoveries was of his own proprioception and of how unreliable his “reading” of proprioceptive information turned out to have been. He was absolutely sure that he was doing something (keeping his head poised) when in fact he was doing something else (pulling his head back and down). Until he understood how his unreliable sensory awareness was contributing to his serious problems, Alexander took no notice of proprioception. Like the young Alexander, we all tend to take our proprioception for granted, much as we do with digestion and circulation: something that exists in the background. Like the enlightened Alexander, however, we all need to stop taking proprioception for granted. George Coghill wrote: [Alexander] has . . . demonstrated the very important psychological principle that the proprioceptive system can be brought under conscious control, and can be educated to carry to the motor centers the stimulus which is responsible for the muscular activity which brings about the manner of working (use) of the mechanism of correct posture.3

Coghill is right about the motor, muscular, and mechanical aspects of proprioception. More important, he hints at the psychological echoes of proprioception. You form your thoughts, opinions, and tastes according to information that passes through your senses. Since proprioception is such a fundamental sense, it necessarily affects your view of yourself and of the world. You play the viola in a string quartet. During a rehearsal the first violinist tells you that you play out of tune. You’re quite sure that you play in tune. You then form an opinion of your colleague’s musical competence and general character: he’s wrong, you’re right, you don’t much like him. This opinion has been shaped at least in part by a sensation or feeling. Alexander wrote that “we have to recognize . . . that our sensory peculiarities are the foundation of what we think of as our opinions, and that, in fact, nine out of ten of the opinions we form are rather the result of what we feel than what we think.”4 What happens if you filter your sensations inaccurately? Obviously, the opinions built on those sensations will be twisted in some way. Sensations are vital, of course; the problem lies in misinterpreting sensations and then rushing to judgment or conclusion based on those misinterpretations. Let me give another example. Your viola teacher asks you not to raise your shoulders when you play forte, and she points out that your sound becomes scratchy whenever you do so. Here you decide that your teacher is wrong on two counts. You’re quite sure that you aren’t raising your shoulders; and your sound is, of course, beautiful. Needless to say, you form an opinion of your teacher, much as you did of your colleague. In addition, you also form an aesthetic opinion concerning the beauty of sound. As long as sensory awareness is faulty, taste risks being faulty too. We’ll further study taste later in this chapter, and in greater detail in Chapter 14. Proprioception forms your conception and to some degree predetermines your experiences. You play a phrase at the cello. You receive muscular and aural impres38

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sions from your own playing. You may like it or dislike it; in either case you’ll form a conception in your mind of how you wish to play this phrase. Next time around this conception will shape your playing. Thus experience shapes conception, and conception shapes experience. Proprioception, then, pretty much determines what you feel, what you choose to do or not to do, and what you think is right or wrong. You can’t perform an act correctly until you’ve had the experience of performing it, and you can’t have the experience without performing the act. This vicious circle, kept closed by faulty sensory awareness, is one of the great stumbling blocks of musical pedagogy—and, indeed, of life. Every time a music teacher (or vocal coach, or conductor) asks you to do something, you interpret the teacher’s instructions according to your habitual, faulty sensory perception, execute the now-distorted instructions with your habitual misuse, and judge the results of your own playing through faulty sensory perception. If your sensory awareness is faulty, most of what you do takes you away from achieving your goals. To see how we can reeducate our sensory awareness and thereby make it reliable, it’s useful to understand how it becomes unreliable in the first place.

THE CAUSES OF FAULTY AWARENESS There are several distinct reasons for the malfunctioning of our senses. First, the mind has an innate tendency to seek out the stimulation of the new, which crowds out the old. Wittgenstein wrote that “the aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.”5 Once we become used to something, we’re likely to stop noticing it. Often it’s only when a certain sound stops— the humming of a refrigerator, for instance—that we realize it was there all along. It’s useful to think of background and foreground: we push the habitual and familiar to the mind’s background, so that the new and unfamiliar can take its prominent place in the foreground. Thus I smell the odors of a stranger right away, and I forget my own rather too easily. Second, the senses may become desensitized through overuse, underuse, or plain abuse. Perhaps you’ve had the experience of eliminating refined sugar from your diet and finding out that ordinary foods, such as carrots and tomatoes, taste remarkably sweet. Your gauges can be fine or gross, and if you eat a lot of sugar your gauge for sweetness becomes gross. The stranger of my example drinks and smokes heavily, and his nasal passages are blocked. His gauge for smells is gross, so to speak. Proprioception, too, can be fine or gross. It’s easy to tell the difference between a 10-pound weight and a one-pound weight, but harder to tell the difference between a 20-pound weight and a 21-pound weight. With practice, however, you can make your proprioception ever finer. Third, the senses may be inadequate at birth, or become so through illness and accident. Sensory Awareness and Conception

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Forth, and most important, the senses become unreliable whenever you misuse yourself. Imagine that you’re standing and holding the 20-pound weight with one hand. If your back and legs are collaborating with your head and neck, most body parts will contribute to how you hold the weight, which will seem relatively light to you. If your back and legs are disengaged, your neck and shoulders will scrunch in an attempt to hold the weight by themselves. The weight will seem much heavier to you, although it’s the same 20 pounds that you started with. In the first instance you’re “working on yourself to hold the weight,” lengthening and widening your body, and allowing your proprioceptors the freedom to gather and distribute information. In the second instance, you’re “holding the weight,” shortening and narrowing your body, and throwing your proprioceptors into disarray. Your proprioceptors will be on red alert, as it were—freaking out about everything that’s going wrong inside you and unable to gather and distribute information accurately. The contorted body, the red alert from your proprioceptors, and the psychology of holding something seemingly too heavy and dangerous all meld into a complete psychophysical reality. In many ways, “you are your proprioception.” Often without knowing it, you make assumptions about how hard something is to accomplish. You unconsciously brace yourself to prepare for the task. Then the task actually becomes harder to accomplish, since bracing triggers the “proprioceptive red alert” of our example above and throws the whole organism out of whack. Do an experiment with a friend: place an empty milk carton on a table, without telling the friend it’s empty. Ask the friend to lift it. He or she will assume it’s full and will lift the light object with more energy than necessary. Faulty sensory awareness, then, arises from how you approach each task—that is, from your reaction to a situation, from your suppositions and assumptions, from the choices and decisions that you make. The ultimate reason for faulty awareness is the universal habit of end-gaining and the misuse it engenders.

DISCERNMENT WITHOUT JUDGMENT There are no easy ways out of faulty sensory awareness, but you can start by “feeling more, judging less.” Suppose you’re a pianist. Take a short passage from your repertory and decide that you’re going to play it in at least ten ways: sitting up ramrod straight, slumping, sitting very close to the piano, sitting very far from the piano, wrists low, wrists high, elbows low, elbows high, every note loud, every note soft. This is just an illustration; it means that you can, in fact, do any one thing in many ways. Play, then, in these ten varied and possibly funky ways. Stay with each experience for as long as it lasts: five seconds, thirty seconds, five minutes. The important thing isn’t to have the right experience but to be fully in the experience you’re having, regardless of the experience. Each experience will come with its own sensations. Have those sensations, allow yourself to like or dislike the experience and its sensations, but—this is crucial!—draw no definitive conclusions from the experience or the sensations that come with it. When you judge an experience and its sensations, you risk 40

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closing down the path to new (and possibly necessary) experiences and sensations. “I like this, so I’ll settle for it and won’t do anything else.” “I don’t like this, so I’ll never do it again.” Both responses will prevent you from further exploration. Needless to say, you may also be receiving distorted information from the experience, so all judgments risk being mistaken anyway. A wide database of experiences and sensations makes it easier for you to exercise discernment constructively. After you play a passage in ten ways—and each way performed ten times—you become better able to compare a range of experiences and choose those actions and decisions that give you the most freedom at the piano, or the most energy or most pleasure. Having many new experiences helps you understand your habit by a form of retroactive comparison: now that you’ve played this passage in so many ways, you begin to feel that your old, habitual way of doing may have been be a bit awkward, or stiff, or shallow, or perfectly adequate—whatever the case may be. In short, comparison is an important element in sensory awareness. A splash of yellow will seem very different when placed against a splash of green or a splash of black. The actual color doesn’t change, but your perception of it definitely does. To “know your yellows,” then, you need to see them in many contexts. It’s the same thing with your proprioceptive sensations. The wider a database of sensations, the better informed your reading of these sensations will become. The development of sensory awareness usually goes through three phases. We might call them past, present, and future. At first you feel the aftereffects of your actions, but not the actions themselves. In other words, in the middle of playing a passage at the violin you can feel that your shoulders are tight, but you don’t remember when or how exactly you tightened them in the first place. The feeling of tightness is a sort of memory of the gestures and reactions that caused the tightness. As you gain experience and knowledge, you become better able to feel things as they’re happening. You lift your arms to place the violin in playing position, and you can actually feel your shoulders tightening—or, more accurately, you can feel your tightening your shoulders. In due course you become able to feel things as they’re about to happen. You think about lifting your violin and you sense a desire to tighten your shoulders. This is good, because you can finally start preventing the tightening to begin with. Most important, now you’re sensing not only the misuse (“I’m tightening . . .”) but also the end-gaining that animates it (“I want to . . .”). The solution for faulty sensory awareness is the same solution for end-gaining. It entails your stopping the “wanting” that causes the “doing” that causes the faulty sensory awareness! We’ll cover this in greater length in the next chapter.

I MAY BE WRONG I used to have a very low opinion of the painter Paul Gauguin. I thought his depiction of the human figure was amateurish and his sense of perspective distorted. My wife, who has a background in art, told me several times that I was wrong, but I knew Sensory Awareness and Conception

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what my tastes were like and I knew what Gauguin was like: I “saw” the clumpy nudes, I “saw” his flattened perspective. My wife gave me a postcard of a painting of his in the Metropolitan Museum in New York which was . . . well, quite attractive. Subsequently I saw the actual painting in the Met, and I grudgingly admitted to myself that this one painting was in fact beautiful, though that didn’t mean that all paintings by Gauguin were beautiful or that Gauguin was altogether a good painter. Then I saw, at a friend’s home, one of Gauguin’s notebooks about his stay in Noa Noa, and flipping through its pages I came across the most magnificent watercolors. The scales fell from my eyes, so to speak. Shocked and elated, I passed from hate to love in a more or less sudden way, and I realized that I had been simply wrong about Gauguin for years and years—or, rather, that I hadn’t looked at Gauguin at all. Instead I had projected upon his images my own visual, aesthetic, and sensorial prejudices. I confused my preconception of the thing with the thing itself—or to put it differently, I confused my reaction with the stimulus (Figure 3.1). I bought a copy of the Noa Noa diaries and put it on my

FIGURE 3.1: Stimulus and reaction

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bookshelf, its cover facing the room so that I’d be reminded of how wrong I was, and so that I’d stop being too certain about being right or wrong. Every time you’re absolutely sure of something, a possibility exists that you may be wrong about it. For instance, you can be absolutely sure that you placed the car keys on the mantelpiece when in fact they were in your pocket all along. It may be useful for you to make a list of recent instances where you discovered, in one way or another, that you were wrong about something: the misplaced car keys, or the answer to some simple question (“What’s the capital of Turkey?” “Istanbul.” “Are you sure?” “C’mon, everybody knows it.”). In every dimension of your life there’ll be instances of the phenomenon: you can be absolutely sure that you’re playing in tune when you’re playing out of tune. You can be absolutely sure that you said “Yes,” and yet all participants in the conversation will attest that you said “No.” The best way to deal with this phenomenon is always to remember that you may be wrong, however sure you are of being right; and that you may be right, however sure you are of being wrong. We might call this the principle of “I may be wrong.” Embracing it makes it much easier for you to change your mind about something or someone, once you find out that you were wrong in the first place. It gives you a certain degree of inbuilt flexibility, as you let go of absolutes. Fully embraced, uncertainty can actually make you quite confident in yourself. Precisely because you know that you can change your mind once you find out that you’re wrong, uncertainty allows you to take risks and initiatives that you might not otherwise take. “I may be wrong, but I’m going to start this phrase fortissimo. Oops . . . it doesn’t seem to work very well. I may be wrong, but now I’m going to try it mezzo forte. What do you know . . . it’s better than I expected. I may be wrong, but now I’m going to start mezzo forte and finish pianissimo. I like it a lot. But I may be wrong! Tomorrow I’ll do it differently.” As you can see, the process entails your letting go of the moment, letting go of prescriptive judgments, and letting go of successes and failures, big and small. In the next chapter, we’ll look at non-doing and inhibition, without which there can be no improvement to the end-gaining that causes your faulty sensory awareness. Subsequently we’ll look at direction, which is a special form of thinking that frees up your sensorial channels. Then we’ll return to the issue of judgments of right and wrong and how they affect your actions.

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CHAPTER 4

INHIBITION AND NON-DOING

Robert, a cellist, has a constricted and irregular left-hand vibrato. The more he tries to control his vibrato, however, the more constricted it becomes. Anne, a pianist, wants to play with a bigger sound. But every time she attempts a chord in forte dynamics, she tenses up and her sound becomes smaller and uglier. Kathryn, a talented and well-trained singer, is keen to please her audience. But when she goes on stage she presents herself awkwardly, sings badly, and becomes thoroughly disheartened. The problems experienced by these musicians have several points in common. An unruly vibrato, a small sound, and stage fright are all manifestations of general misuse. In Robert’s case, for instance, it isn’t only the mechanics of vibrato that are problematic. His left-hand position changing is jerky, his left-hand articulation imprecise, and his intonation unreliable. As he tries to concentrate on improving a problematic vibrato, his bow arm becomes unsteady. Further, when he plays he contracts his neck, lifts his shoulders, and stiffens his legs. Robert’s vibrato is a function of how he uses himself—in other words, a partial component of a total pattern. So are sound production and stage fright. To eliminate a faulty partial pattern, you need to coordinate the total pattern that activates and regulates the partial one. To put it differently, you need to find a way to address the whole in order to improve the part. Another characteristic of Robert’s vibrato is that it’s a habitual and automatic reaction to a certain stimulus. Every time Robert decides to vibrate, he triggers the misuse of the vibrato mechanism reflexively. Likewise, every time Anne decides to play loudly an automatic reaction takes place. And so too with Kathryn and her desire to please her audience. Since Robert’s very wish to employ vibrato sets an automatic misuse of his whole body, mind, and soul, the only way he can change his vibrato is to stop wanting to employ vibrato in the first place. Anne, too, has to stop wanting to play loudly in order to find a bigger sound, and Kathryn needs to stop wanting to please her audience since this is the very source of her awkwardness.

There is only one way to go from misuse to good use, from contraction to expansion, from disabling pain to good health: by refusing to respond to the triggers of misuse, contraction, and pain. These triggers lie in our wishes, intentions, and desires. To do something better, or to do it well, you have to stop wishing, intending, and desiring in your habitual way. The solution lies in what Alexander called inhibition, used in its meaning as the contrary of excitation, rather than the more common meaning of disabling selfconsciousness. Inhibition is a rich and multidimensional concept that means different things to different people. In fact, inhibition is so rich it’s impossible to define in a concise manner suited to all sensibilities. We’ll cover the subject in multiple ways, and at the end of the chapter we’ll attempt a summation. Let’s start by looking at Robert’s vibrato in detail.

DISTANCING YOURSELF FROM YOUR HABITS Cellists can improve their vibrato in connection with other functions of the left hand, such as articulation, pizzicato, and shifting. They can use certain mechanical exercises with the help of a metronome. They can rely on imitation, if the conditions are right. The method I describe below is one of many possibilities. Its interest comes partly from the way it illustrates the principle of inhibition. 1. I invite Robert to spend some time not worrying about the vibrato—and not even playing the cello. Instead he gets to “play Robert,” which is a whole other instrument. By this I mean that he works on his coordination and attitude away from the cello, becoming comfortable with himself in body, mind, and soul before sitting at the cello again. Robert has to inhibit his desire to fix his vibrato and “work on the problem.” It’s not so easy to let go of a problem and empty one’s mind of anxieties and desires. It might take several lessons before he agrees to stop thinking about his vibrato. 2. I ask him to play a sustained note without vibrato. This turns out to be surprisingly difficult! He is so invested in his vibrato that he can barely relax his left arm and hand. This is a common problem for string players, for whom continuous vibrato is a sort of holy grail (which, like the Holy Grail of legend, may involve the quest for something unattainable). He needs to carry on inhibiting his desire to “play the cello” instead of “playing Robert,” and now he also has to inhibit his desire to vibrate while playing. 3. The action of the right arm affects the action of the left arm, and vice versa. We call this interdependence bilateral transfer (which we study in Chapter 9). Robert’s vibrato will invariably be faulty as long as he neglects his bowing arm. I ask him to become attentive to his bowing, using confident, firm motions that produce a sustained sound in forte dynamics. To get the hang of this feeling, Robert has to keep in check his desire to concentrate on it, lest he neglect the coordination of his whole body—without which his bowing will never be steady. His tasks of inhibition grow by the minute.

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4. Now I place my left hand on top of his. While he plays his sustained notes without vibrato, I move his left hand gently back and forth so that he can receive the experience of a free vibrato unimpeded by his habitual desire to vibrate. This experience may be made clear through repetition, multiple verbal and hands-on instructions, and variations in the speed, amplitude, and direction of the vibrato. Robert can also experiment with the very mechanism of vibrato: initiating the vibrato with the finger, the wrist, or the forearm, exploring the angle of the left hand relative to the string, and so on. What makes vibrato “right” is not a right mechanism but a healthy way of using a mechanism, be it of the forearm, wrist, or hand. Robert has to keep inhibiting all the previous desires, plus the desire to react to my hand on top of his, as well as his desire to understand, analyze, and memorize an experience that remains in flux and ever-changing. He also needs to inhibit his desire to pass emotional and aesthetic judgments on the experience, since these judgments are the ultimate triggers of end-gaining. 5. Once the new experiences of vibrato become clearer, I ask him to take over the responsibility for activating the vibrato. Much like a little kid who stops using training wheels on a bicycle, Robert suddenly obtains his freedom and vibrates in a healthy and musical way. And, much like the little kid, Robert will find the experience elating and confusing. The bicycle seems to have a will of its own, and the kid can control it only by giving up the desire to control it and instead going with the flow. Robert, too, needs to agree to a sensation that seems outside his control. Now he needs to inhibit his desire to shut down the unfamiliar experience, and perhaps even the excitement he may be feeling on account of his newfound freedom. If he gets too excited, he’ll forget to keep the channels of energy open, and his new vibrato will succumb to a surge of unneeded tensions. Without inhibition, none of the steps in our procedure is constructive. Robert  needs to learn how to inhibit before, during, and after this and every other procedure—and, in fact, throughout his creative life.

DOING AND NON-DOING Robert’s new vibrato is so different from his familiar one that he feels it isn’t a “real” vibrato, but some other sensation, some other musical effect altogether. Indeed, he feels as if he weren’t vibrating at all; the vibrato seems to be doing itself. These feelings point at the intimate relationship between a mental command, an act, and a sensation. Let’s perform a thought experiment, the better to understand the issues involved. Suppose I ask you to sit down. If you do so in your familiar manner, you’re likely to contract your head into your spine, thrust your chest forward and your bottom backward, raise your shoulders, and constrict your breathing. You might do some of these things or all of them, and you might do them discreetly or exaggeratedly, and you might be vaguely aware of them or completely unaware of them. But if you’re a normal human being your actions will almost certainly resemble my description. 46

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What to do? Stand in front of a chair, facing away from it, ready to sit down. Resist the temptation to sit down. Ignore your own desire to sit down, ignore the accumulated memories of all previous performances of the act of sitting down, ignore the very thought of the chair behind you. Instead, change your focus from the act of sitting, which is something that is about to happen in the near future, to the here and now, to how you’re standing in preparation for sitting down. Your overall latencies, so to speak, are the springboard of all action: the distribution of tensions and energies up and down your body, your thoughts and sensations, the multiple possibilities of moving or not moving. In the here and now, when you stand in front of a chair, these possibilities are more important than the chair itself. Now that you’ve shifted your attention from the chair to yourself, make a simple decision and, without further thought, tell yourself to bend your knees. In a strange way, you’ll find yourself sitting without having given yourself the command, “Sit down.” Sitting down and bending the knees are distinct acts. One is habitual, performed mostly without awareness, and characterized by the pattern of misuse I described earlier. The other act is unfamiliar, performed with awareness and uncontrolled control, and characterized by the coordinated working of your whole self. The second gesture isn’t an improvement on the first one; it’s a new entity altogether, animated by a new thought, resulting in a new action and accompanied by a new sensation. To inhibit is to stop the old in order to allow room for the new to come in. Inhibition closes the door to default reactions and opens the door to infinite possibilities. To inhibit is to say “no” to the tyranny of habit, so that you can say “yes” to the freedom of choice. Inhibition shifts your focus from the chair to yourself, from external forces and situations to your inner resources, from reaction to proaction, from what you do to what you can do, from who you are to who you may become. It might be useful to consider inhibition as a physiological process. Sir Charles Sherrington wrote that “any path we trace in the brain leads directly or indirectly to muscle.”1 To inhibit means to unclog and empty the pathways so that you have the possibility of choosing which messages to send from brain to muscle. Inhibition doesn’t consist in doing something new, but in not doing something old. Paradoxically, this non-doing is in itself activity. Sherrington wrote that “it has been remarked that Life’s aim is an act, not a thought. Today the dictum must be modified to admit that, often, to refrain from an act is no less an act than to commit one, because inhibition is co-equally with excitation a nervous activity.”2 If we consider inhibition deeply enough, we soon enter a world in which the physical, the psychological, and the metaphysical merge in complex and paradoxical ways. Robert might say, “I’m not doing my vibrato; it’s doing itself.” Or, even more paradoxically, “I’m not doing my vibrato; it is doing me.” Yet he’s doing a great many things. Besides taking care of his overall coordination, his bowing arm, and his left hand, he’s constantly deciding not to end-gain, not to misuse himself, and not to “do” anything in the old, habitual way. To put it differently, non-doing is affirmative Inhibition and Non-doing

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and concrete, leading to an actuality in which you feel you’re doing nothing at all, though you’re fully invested in the actuality. In non-doing you achieve a balance of opposing forces, a balance between the parts and the whole, a balance between your goals and the means you employ to achieve them. Although non-doing is difficult to comprehend and put into practice, it’s your portal to integration and good health.

INHIBITION AND TIMING If you don’t inhibit your familiar reactions to begin with, new reactions don’t stand a chance. Inhibition, then, contains an element of timing: it needs to happen before anything else. In the early stages of your Alexander studies, when inhibition is brought to the fore, it may well be necessary to wait some time after choosing a given act (sitting down, turning your head, playing a bow stroke) and before actually proceeding with it, the better to prevent misuse. Many Alexander teachers like saying that to inhibit is “to stop and say ‘no.’” In this sense inhibition is synonymous with waiting. Waiting, or the temporary suspension of activity in daily life, makes social intercourse possible. Many conventions require it—stopping at a red light, for instance, or forming a queue at the cashier. Musicians have long appreciated the value of stopping and waiting. Singers, for instance, are familiar with the old saying, “Think ten times and sing once.” (We study several applications of inhibition-as-waiting in Chapter 17.) You need inhibition-as-waiting in situations where the activity taking place is eminently intellectual. Take the example of ear training. I play a four-bar melody four times. I ask you not to try to write it down the first time around, but simply to listen to it. The second time around, I ask you to establish the key of the melody and write down its rhythms. The third time around, I ask you to discern melodic patterns and underlying harmonies. And the fourth time around, I ask you to write down the complete melody. This makes the exercise logical and easy. Yet in most ear-training classes there are students who panic and feel utterly incapable of taking down dictation. They so worry about the last step of the exercise that they try to write down the complete melody after the first playing of it. Needless to say, they fail more often than they succeed. The solution to their woes is to inhibit: to wait before responding, and to stop wishing to get it right. Although timing is an element of inhibition, true inhibition isn’t simply the temporary suspension of an activity; it’s the lessening of the very wish to act, and perhaps even its disappearance. In inhibition you don’t wait a while before doing the same old thing; instead you stop doing the same old thing, and you also stop wanting to do the same old thing. We might go further and say that in inhibition you stop “wanting,” period. Suppose you’ve often been angry with a friend, an in-law, or the violist in your string quartet. To swallow your anger for a few seconds, only to let it explode again, isn’t to inhibit at all, even though you’ve introduced a moment’s waiting. If you get angry but choose not to show your anger or not to act upon it, you 48

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aren’t quite inhibiting either. But if you figure out how not to become automatically angry to begin with, then you’re inhibiting. Inhibition gives you the choice of being angry, not being angry, showing your anger right away or at some later time, not showing your anger, acting upon your anger, not acting upon your anger . . . and a thousand other possibilities, all born of your giving up “wanting to react habitually” in the first place. Inhibition is continuous in two ways: it’s something you do nonstop, and it’s something you continue to do at the same time you act. To say that inhibition precedes every action is not to say that it stops once the action takes place. Robert inhibits his desire to vibrate in his habitual way before he starts to play, and he continues to inhibit it even as he plays and uses his newfound mechanisms of the left arm. Further, since the stimulation of life itself is continuous, there is a never-ending supply of habitual reactions for you to inhibit anew. For instance, I inhibit my tendency to press too hard with my bow as I start a note on the cello; immediately afterward I inhibit my tendency to draw my bow too quickly; immediately afterward I inhibit my tendency to let the bow skate on the string as I finish my stroke. And so on, ad infinitum. Inhibition never stops. Indeed, all of us are inhibiting to some degree at all times, although most of us don’t inhibit very skillfully. It’s useful to recall Sherrington’s words and consider inhibition as the neurological opposite of excitation. The organism is permanently in a state of mixed inhibition and excitation. For instance, when Robert vibrates at the cello he inhibits certain mechanisms of the neck, shoulders, and arms and excites certain other mechanisms, including those of the back and legs. Good coordination is the ability to adapt your mix of inhibition and excitation according to the situation. When first studying inhibition, you may well need to exaggerate its waiting component (the temporary suspension of activity) as well as its intellectual component (the conscious and controlled suspension of activity). But with experience you’ll become able to inhibit in motion and in action, including in the middle of a fortissimo, agitato passage during a tumultuous concert.

INHIBITION ON ALL LEVELS Inhibition pertains to all situations in your life: those that seem to be physical, such as playing the fortissimo passage I just mentioned, and also those that seem to be mental, such as studying a score. These distinctions are illusory. Playing fortissimo is a psychological, as well as physical, event; studying a score is a physical, as well as a psychological, event; both of them are metaphysical events full of symbolic implications. We’ll illustrate inhibition with several situations that seem to be primarily intellectual, psychological, and emotional but are all “embodied,” like everything in our lives. Looking at a new score full of complex passages and obscure annotations, you risk freaking out and deciding that the piece is too difficult and you’re incapable of Inhibition and Non-doing

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playing it. This will predetermine your approach to the score and the likelihood of success or failure. Inhibiting your first reaction, which more or less dooms you to failure, means to look at the score with a completely open mind, making no assumptions and suppositions either about the score or about your own capabilities, and readying yourself to explore it bit by bit, constructively and playfully all along the way. If the piece turns out to be outside your competence, your taste, or your career aims, it’s OK for you to decide to put it aside or even reject it with disdain once you’ve explored it. But if the piece turns out to be a lot of fun, it’d be a pity for you to freak out when looking at it (Example 4.1). A singing teacher tells you that you’re a soprano rather than a mezzo-soprano. How do you react to this information? You can embrace it at once simply because “the teacher must be right,” or you can reject it at once simply because you’re completely and absolutely sure that you’re a mezzo, have always been, and always will be. Or you can listen to the information and, at first, not react to it: not throw yourself into emotional and intellectual turmoil, not make harsh career decisions, not love or hate your teacher, not love or hate yourself. At first, do nothing! Then ponder the information and try to suss out what it really means. Could the teacher be right? Or wrong? Could the teacher be right for the wrong reasons, or wrong for the right reasons? Might it be worth your while to explore the soprano universe for a while, even though your comfort zone lies in the mezzo universe? Many things in life are hard to determine in absolute terms. Plácido Domingo started his career as a baritone and then became a great tenor, only to perform baritone roles again late in his life. Information is relatively unimportant; it’s your interpretation of the information that determines your thoughts, feelings, and actions. If you interpret any bit of information too quickly or too absolutely you’ll risk arriving at the wrong conclusion—be it about your natural vocal range or anything else. You’ve played the harpsichord all your life, specializing in Baroque music. It’s your thing—what you’ve always done, what you like to do, what you do well. Suppose I say, “I’d love to hear you play some Chopin at the piano.” You might be tempted to reply, “What? I can’t play the piano, and Chopin is foreign to me. No way.” Your reaction is predetermined by assumptions that may be false. Your capabilities—and your perception of your capabilities—can change over time. So can your taste. In my adolescence I hated Chopin, but I wasn’t paying attention to his compositions; rather, I confused his music with the flashy and sentimental performances of incompetent pianists. Playing the piano could lead you to new discoveries and pleasures, and it could even improve your harpsichord playing through a form of crosstraining. Even if you really got nothing out of playing Chopin at the piano, however, you’d be better off not responding to my asking you to play for me with an immediate, absolute, and negative reaction. I ask you a seemingly absurd question . . . you do nothing . . . you open up to all the possible answers to the question . . . and then you answer it. It’s OK to say “no,” but it’s potentially harmful to say “no” out of habit rather than out of reflection. You play a concert in which you’re unhappy about your performance. Backstage a concertgoer says, “I loved your playing!” “No, I sounded horrible,” you reply. Apart from the fact that it’s bad manners to refuse a heartfelt compliment, you’re reacting 50

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EXAMPLE 4.1: Lelo Nazário: Excerpt from “Aurora,” for symphonic band, electronic keyboards, pre-recorded sounds, and percussion

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as if to the wrong stimulus: not to the person in front of you, but to the voice inside your head; not to the actual situation, but to an imagined one. In a different setting, you might have this conversation instead: “Did you play well last night?” “No, I played horribly—or so it felt to me.” If someone gives you a compliment, or asks a question, or gives you information or advice, or glances at you, it may be constructive for you to do nothing . . . ponder the situation from various perspectives . . . and then choose how to react, or perhaps not to react. You attend a festival of new music, and you hear a piece that you find ugly from beginning to end, a real annoyance, disgusting. How did such a piece ever get scheduled to begin with? People are such morons. You may not realize it, but when you react in this way you’re inching closer and closer to the Nazis who burned art they considered degenerate and then went on to disenfranchise, imprison, or kill the artists themselves. The history of music is full of violent responses to works of art that, in time, came to be regarded as masterpieces. Well-educated professional critics viciously attacked Beethoven, Berlioz, and Stravinsky, among many others. Audiences started riots when listening to the premieres of works that you and I now love to play and listen to. Reacting strongly to things and people, and wishing harm upon things and people, is potentially disastrous—not only to the things and people in question but to yourself as well. The psychic energy that you’re releasing in such a case is toxic. Inhibition doesn’t mean not having any reactions or not passing any judgments. It only means creating a little space between the stimulus and your reaction, so that you don’t confuse the two. It’s better, then, for you to hear that ugly new piece . . . do nothing . . . open yourself up to all the possible reactions . . . and then shut your ears down for safety, or embrace the experience, or—if you really so wish—hate the piece with all your might.

EXERCISING THE SKILLS OF INHIBITION In any given day you face thousands of stimuli, some big and some small. Each stimulus, however small, triggers a reaction. Your cello teacher asks you to play a given passage a little faster, and you tighten your shoulders as you respond to her request. It’s tempting to think that you have a “physical” problem, but mechanisms of physical tension are completely tied in with thought processes. A stiff shoulder is the result of your suppositions, assumptions, fears, memories, wishes, and desires. To loosen your shoulder, you have to “loosen your assumptions” about who you are, about the instrument or the voice, about music itself. You won’t relax your shoulder until you find a way of stopping the thoughts and emotions that cause you to tighten the shoulder in the first place. Inhibition is key, but it takes a lot of practice to get the hang of it. If it’s hard for you to tame the habit of tightening up at the cello, then start easy and work on a simple activity in daily life, such as speaking. Every word you say carries a tiny risk that you might misuse yourself speaking it: gasping for air before you speak, nodding with your head and neck as you speak, 52

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constricting your throat, doubting the convictions that the word ought to carry. Before you gasp for air, take a microsecond to remind yourself that you already have enough air inside you to speak. Divide your attention between the words you’re saying and your feeling for your head and neck. Then be on the lookout for your desire to nod and lose the vital connection between the neck and the spine. This could drive you crazy, of course, so you’re better off doing it intermittently during the day, or doing it playfully and laughing at yourself when you detect that you’re becoming completely blocked by self-consciousness. Now stop worrying about your speech patterns, and go wash the dishes instead. Give yourself the task of being aware of your posture in space as you bend over the kitchen sink. Now, take hold of a dirty glass. Wait! You forgot your head and neck! Start again. Spend a few seconds just assessing where your neck is in relation to your spine; then reach for a dirty glass. Wait! You curved your spine! Inhibition means to catch yourself in that microsecond where you pass from being attentive to yourself to being exclusively preoccupied with the external goal you have given yourself. It sounds simple on paper, but in reality it’s extremely difficult for most people, most of the time. The thing is, once you master that microsecond, you have mastered yourself. The efforts are really worth your while. I once taught a pianist who was highly reactive. Being able to react is a vital capability, but reacting too easily, too quickly, too often, and too intensely isn’t a constructive use of this capability. I asked my student to remain silent for just a few seconds. “I’m going to list the Italian operas by Mozart,” I said. “Don Giovanni, Così Fan Tutte, and Tosca.” The poor woman had a fit. She really, really, really wanted to tell me that Tosca wasn’t by Mozart, and she was terribly bothered that I had requested her to remain silent. I could see it in her face, in her posture, in the energy bursting out of her. Given the endless stimulation of daily life, it doesn’t seem right to spend that much psychophysical energy overreacting to something so insignificant as a guy misnaming an opera’s composer on purpose. You might think the pianist of my example is so reactive that her habits are abnormal. Try an experiment with some friends. Tell them that you’re going to ask them a question, but say that you don’t want them to answer it. It almost doesn’t matter what the question is: “What’s the capital of France?” The majority of people will find it difficult not to answer. Such a strong need to react is inappropriate in the situation, since the stated requirement is for the listener simply not to answer the question. What happens when you respond inappropriately to this situation, and to the next situation, and to the one after it? The cumulative effects are huge. Inhibit a thousand small but harmful reactions every day, and the cumulative effects of your non-doing will be huge too.

WORDS, IDEAS, CONCEPTS A symbolic story is told about Adam, going around Eden and naming the things he saw: trees, flowers, animals, rocks. The reason the story has metaphysical power is that to name something is to own it. Think of the word elbow and all that it means Inhibition and Non-doing

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to you. The word encapsulates dozens, hundreds, even thousands of experiences in your life: pleasure and pain, ability and handicap, all that you’ve ever done with your elbow. You’ve held your ailing mother by the elbow and helped her walk from her bedroom to the restroom. You’ve hit your elbow on some pretty hard surfaces; strangely, when that happened you referred to your elbow as “the funny bone.” On certain situations you’ve felt the need for “elbow room,” sometimes literally (riding a crowded airplane), sometimes metaphorically (in a social situation where you felt unable to do or say something you wanted to do or say). In your music making, your elbow has played a significant role from the first piano or violin lesson onward. Directly or indirectly, every note you play engages your elbow in some way. The word allows you to talk about relationships: between the elbow and the shoulder, the elbow and the arm, the elbow and the wrist, the elbow and knee—in sum, the whole world of joints and articulations. Imagine how inconvenient it’d be if you didn’t have the words shoulder, elbow, wrist at your disposal. You’d have to refer to each body part circuitously, using many words and sounding rather vague. “You know that body part kind of between this other body part here and that one over there?” “You mean, the elbow?”

Elbow, in short, is much more than a simple label you give to a body part. It encapsulates a world of experience, sensation, thought, emotion, and memory. It’s only too easy to misname an object without realizing that you’re doing it. One day you say “upbeat” when you mean “offbeat.” Or perhaps you haven’t completely understood the difference between tonality and modality, between polytonality and atonality. You might speak with certainty, using wrong words without knowing you’re doing so. Or you might assume that your listener defines the words you use in the same way that you do, when in fact what you call a modulation your listener normally calls a secondary progression. Words are very flexible, allowing many definitions and connotations. Some words are richer and more flexible than others, but all words are less fixed than we tend to believe. There are words that mean opposite things: “The government will not sanction the secretary of state.” This can mean either “The government will not punish the secretary of state” or “The government will not support the secretary of state.” To be able to call things by their names is not only practical; it’s a sign of your understanding the concept being named, and by “understanding” I mean a living process with intellectual, sensorial, experiential, and emotional dimensions. Your work building up your vocabulary is never finished. There always remain new concepts for you to study and name, words for you to clarify for yourself, words for you to embrace or shed, words for you to redefine, new connections and connotations for you to appreciate and employ. As your experience grows, you might enter whole new fields of knowledge—medieval music, bebop, flamenco, mambo—having specific languages. The expansion and deepening of your vocabulary continues during your entire life. 54

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Make it a daily job to catch yourself doing any of these things: • • • • •

Using words vaguely or incorrectly Assuming that your listener agrees with you on basic definitions Not knowing the name of a concept you “feel” sensorially Knowing a word intellectually without an experiential underpinning Being afraid of words, afraid of being left out in conversation, afraid of not being able to express yourself.

Then exercise the skill of inhibition when faced with any one of these situations. Here’s a little psychophysical test, in the form of a short list of musical terms, chosen more or less at random. If you can read this list and understand all the words in it, then you’re a step ahead of the game. If you don’t understand any one word from the list but you’re not afraid of it, you’re still ahead of the game. If, however, a word you don’t know triggers shame and guilt in you, then the time has come for you to “do nothing” until you’re calm enough to study the word. Hemiola, cross-relation, upbeat, offbeat, basso continuo, figured bass, triad, an augmented triad in second inversion, passacaglia, an elided cadence, the submediant, the relative minor, the parallel minor, foreground and background, the upper partials.

Someone asks you to sit at the piano and improvise a short tune based on the pentatonic scale. You vaguely remember that years ago you learned what the pentatonic scale was; or rather, you remember that you were supposed to have learned it—like one of those bad dreams about being back in high school, with an exam approaching and suddenly realizing you’ve been missing classes for weeks. You’re overwhelmed by shame and guilt. You can’t even bring yourself to say, “I’m sorry, but I don’t really know the pentatonic scale. Could you please show it to me again?” Instead, you want to explain, justify, and excuse yourself. Or you want to sink into the earth and disappear. Some concepts are simple, others complex; some can be learned at the snap of a finger, others take years of careful study. But you can learn no concepts, however simple, when you’re totally overtaken by negative emotions. It’s quite all right to be ignorant of what the pentatonic scale means, as long as you remain open to learning it. To acquire and broaden your vocabulary is to broaden your whole self. To go from “fearing” the pentatonic scale to “playing with it” is revolutionary, and non-doing opens the passage from one to the other.

DEFINING THE UNGRASPABLE Inhibition unlocks the entire process of self-discovery. For many reasons, it’s difficult to learn. Often enough, to inhibit is to delay instant gratification of a desire. Most people find this a struggle, despite the immense rewards inhibition offers. Further, Inhibition and Non-doing

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non-doing goes against our long-established wish to get results by doing something, and by being seen to be doing something. Many people actually expect you to “do” and require it outright: your orchestra’s conductor, for instance, or audience members who enjoy a musician’s display of effort more than they enjoy music itself. The real difficulty lies in the fact that to inhibit is to change your identity. As we saw in our illustration earlier, sitting down and bending your knees are distinct gestures—so much so that you change as a person when you stop sitting down and start bending your knees instead. To pass from one to the other, you need to give up your individuality as you see it today. But your individuality is likely to put up a good fight! The processes of inhibition are fraught with risks and dangers. The word itself is  unfortunate, given how in most people’s mind it means something opposed to what Alexander meant. You might want to choose another word to refer to inhibition. Call it non-doing if you like, or neutrality, or emptying before filling, or creating an inner space, or readying the void, or letting go and letting be. Broadly speaking, you can react to any situation from habit or from choice. You might then call inhibition a permanent state of latent choosing. Words are imperfect when it comes to naming something so difficult to grasp. Inhibition isn’t a good word, but all other words are imperfect too. To inhibit is to say no. More precisely, it’s the ability to say yes or no according to your needs and wants, and also according to the needs of a situation. This starts with your saying “no” to whatever blocks your ability to choose among many possibilities. To inhibit is to put a little space between a stimulus and your reaction to it. It frees you from being a victim, a receptacle, or a garbage bag—someone impotent to which the world “does” things. Paradoxically, if your destiny of choice is to be a victim, inhibition allows you to choose that, too. To inhibit is to open your mind and clear the energy channels. By “not doing” you can then direct and shape your energies as you see fit. To inhibit is to become an autonomous individual with a mind of your own. It invites responsibility and accountability, since it points out to you that you have choices at your disposal in every situation. It can be terrifying to realize that you’re responsible for your own actions and reactions, but it’s also the most liberating and life-affirming thing in the world. Robert’s vibrato becomes gorgeous once he frees himself from the tyranny of habit. Anne’s sound blossoms after she stops trying so hard to play loudly. Kathryn’s stage presence becomes magnetic when she doesn’t worry so much about what people will think of her. Embrace non-doing, and you’ll join their happy company.

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CHAPTER 5

DIRECTION

I sight-read a string quartet with friends. Looking at the score, I grasp the essentials of the piece’s formal structure, which help me make decisions regarding smaller sections and phrases. In my mind’s ear I conceive certain sounds, articulations, and dynamics. I command my arms, hands, and fingers to move as needed to transform my imagined sounds into real ones. As I play, I listen to the violins and the viola, and I look up from the music to communicate visually with the other players. I think of what I’ll offer my friends to drink in a few minutes. I also remember a funny joke that I want to tell the second violinist, but I check both my desire to tell the joke and my urge to laugh. My bladder is full, but I check my impulse to empty it. This scenario exemplifies what happens in practice, rehearsal, or performance. For our purposes, this illustration is useful because it shows multiple aspects of thinking in action. In my imagined situation, every thought of mine manifests itself as a bodily reality. This is true of my understanding of the piece’s structure, of my decisions regarding bowing and fingering, and of my desire to laugh. Similarly, everything I do with my body is the result of a command from my mind: drawing the bow, turning my head to look at the second violinist, or not emptying my bladder. It’s impossible to say of any one act that it’s purely mental or purely physical. To sight-read a score in my mind’s ears might be a less intensely physical action than carrying my cello up four flights of stairs, but each is an act of my whole self. In my imagined situation, I do many things at the same time, each thing carrying a thought from my mind. This is true of every situation in daily life. Sometimes I do but two or three things, at other times many more. It never happens, however, that I do one thing, and one thing only. In my imagined situation, some of the commands I give myself are for me to do something: draw a bow, turn a page, look at the violist. Other commands are for me not to do something: not to tighten my left arm when I change positions, not to hunch my shoulders for string crossings, not to laugh at a remembered joke. Other commands still are for me to stop doing something: to stop pressing my finger down

into the string at the end of a note, to stop drawing my bow at the end of a phrase. In other words, some commands excite action, and others inhibit it. In my imagined situation, my understanding of musical structure and my ability to choose and execute bowings and fingerings are more important than my thinking of a joke, or of what to offer my friends to drink at the break. There’s an obvious hierarchy of thoughts and actions. If to live is to think in action, living healthily means having a healthy way of connecting thought to action. I can sight-read a score with a muddied head or a clear one. I can strain to listen to the violist, or I can let information come my way with no effort. I can be overwhelmed by every psychomotor decision, or I can “do” or “not do” with ease. Alexander found a way to make thinking in action joyful and effective. He called it directing or giving directions.

DIRECTION Directing is one of the most important things in your life, and for that very reason it’s hard to grasp and define it. As a starting point, let’s take something Alexander wrote: When I employ the words “direction” and “directed” with “use” in such phrases as “direction of my use” and “I directed the use,” etc., I wish to indicate the process involved in projecting messages from the brain to the mechanisms and in conducting the energy necessary to the use of these mechanisms.1

Directions, then, appear to have two dimensions: they’re messages from the brain to the muscles, and they entail transmission of energy. You might conceive of them as commands that you give yourself. To lift your arm, you send a command from the brain to the arm (and, directly or indirectly, to the rest of the body as well). Energy flows throughout the body, and interlinked muscular contractions cause the arm to go up in space. It sounds like a simple physical act, but it contains complex psychological and metaphysical dimensions as well. Lifting the arm is an affirmative act of your identity: you move, therefore you exist. The lifted arm reveals something about you. A teacher in first grade asks a question of the class. Ten kids lift their arms, eager to display their knowledge. Each kid will lift his or her arm in a completely individual manner. Lift your arm just so, and the teacher will favor you and let you answer the question. What makes your gesture individual and expressive isn’t your anatomical setup but the thought that animates the gesture. Your intention determines whether your arm feels light or heavy, flowing or sluggish, curvy or angular, and whether the gesture is hesitant, authoritative, elegant, or indecent. Behind movement and beyond it, then, there exist qualities that we might call energies. Shake someone’s hand and 58

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you’ll immediately receive a charge of energy with multiple qualities. The charge is so complex that you make an instantaneous assessment of the person’s character and personality from the information in the handshake. The energy you feel in someone’s handshake exists and flows throughout the whole body, in variations of infinite complexity. Thinking in action entails commands from your brain and charges of energy to carry out the commands. Movement is born of these commands and energies, and so is speech. Activity and passivity, doing and not doing are all born of them. Indeed, everything you do is a manifestation of how you issue commands and dispense energies—in other words, how you direct yourself. If you want to integrate yourself and achieve freedom and good health, the place to start is not your movement, nor your speech, nor your behavior, nor your habits, but your directions. Alexander’s genius lay in understanding that directions give birth to everything you do, and also in understanding that directions themselves aren’t something that you actually do. This isn’t easy to explain, but once you grasp it you’ll be on the road to integration. You come for an Alexander lesson and I ask you to sit down. I notice that you scrunch your neck and raise your shoulders as you sit. Then I ask you to “think up along the spine” as a remedy for your tensions. Your first reaction is to look up at the ceiling, stiffen your neck, pull your head back and down, and stop breathing— thereby achieving the contrary of what I’m suggesting. To think up doesn’t mean actively to lengthen the spine. Rather, it means to stop contracting it, and for you to do that you have to stop doing anything to the spine whatsoever, since it was “doing” that caused the spine to contract in the first place. Thinking up is a not a command to do the right thing, but to stop doing the wrong thing. Thinking up might entail imagining a flow of energy along the spine and wishing the flow into existence without moving the spine or contracting it. Or thinking up might mean sensing your spine, and then making some little decision to point it toward a destination in space, perhaps toward the ceiling above your head. Or maybe thinking up is akin to magnetizing the spine with your intentionality, which makes you available for movement, for resistance, or for anything that the situation demands. It may be useful to think of directions as tendencies. Patrick Macdonald presents a pertinent analogy: Consider a piece of steel in proximity to a magnet. We are told that even though the piece of steel does not move in space toward the magnet, every particle of the steel will be orientated toward it. Also, while keeping the orientation of the particles toward the magnet it is possible to move both magnet and steel in any direction, including the opposite direction in which the particles are orientated; the particles can be said to be pointing two ways at once.2

Look at the picture of George Balanchine and Arthur Mitchell in Figure 5.1. Their positions in space are similar, but their directions quite different. It’s as if the curves Direction

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FIGURE 5.1: George Balanchine and Arthur Mitchell

of energy in their postures shaped the space around them differently. Balanchine is tilting his head without shortening his neck, and tilting his torso without hollowing his lower back. Mitchell, on the other hand, appears to be hollowing both his neck and his lower back. We might call Balanchine’s energy field convex and Mitchell’s concave. Mitchell’s attitude comes across as the interplay of muscular forces; his posture “is” muscle. In Balanchine’s attitude, muscles seem to be unimportant; his posture “is” energy. (Needless to say, we can’t separate muscle from energy; the quote marks indicate that this way of speaking is more metaphorical than literal.) For the sake of brevity, we’ll call a total pattern of misuse pulling down, and a total pattern of good use thinking up. Balanchine thinks up; Mitchell (magnificent dancer that he is) pulls down to some degree. Is thinking up something that you “do”? I’m tempted to give you five answers: Yes, no, yes and no, maybe, I don’t know. Does thinking up result in a measurable 60

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physical activity? The same five answers come to mind. It’s impossible to speak plainly about complex and paradoxical processes that affect you to the core. You need to explore the processes for yourself over the long run, the better to understand their meaning.

DIRECTING AND WORDS Directing is an art with techniques that you can practice and master over time. As with all arts, people differ in their approach to it. Many Alexander teachers, for instance, are very keen on verbal commands, others less so. Some teachers believe that unless you issue verbal commands you’re not actually directing. Others believe that verbal commands are useful but not obligatory. Still others teach and direct in silence. To illustrate the use of words in directing, let’s consider a famous formulation within the Alexander community: the commands you might give yourself to energize your primary control (which, as we saw in Chapter 2, is the dynamic relationship between the head and the neck, and between the neck and the spine). One basic way of stating it goes like this: Let the neck be free, to let the head go forward and up, to let the back lengthen and widen, all together, one after the other. It’s often difficult to translate words into sensations and realities. What can you “do” to free your neck? Your neck is tight because of what you’re doing already, so it’s counterproductive to do more of anything. Instead, you have to catch yourself in the act of tightening the neck, and let go of it; or, better still, catch yourself about to tighten your neck and prevent yourself from doing it. And what is a free neck anyway? Not tight and not scrunched, but also not floppy, not slack, not inert, not passive. . . . “Forward and up” is another potentially confusing direction. If you misinterpret it, you’ll end up holding your head in a strange and harmful position. Alexander threw his hands up in the air when he tried to explain it, claiming that you needed to be given the experience to understand it. Patrick Macdonald made a valiant attempt to clarify it: It is useful to consider the “forward” as an unlocking of the head at the atlanto-occipital joint [between the skull and the spine] by refraining from tightening and pulling it backward in the accustomed way, and the “up” as a tiny extension of the spine, which is achieved following this unlocking. The movement, if any, is . . . so small as to be hardly a movement at all. It is a directed flow of force or a kind of pulsation, no more than a heartbeat.3 Direction

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It’s a bit easier to visualize the back lengthening and widening than it is to visualize the free neck. If you try to physically lengthen and widen your back, however, you risk shortening and narrowing it. Think of your back as a space. Your task is to keep it big and open in every dimension. Anything you do muscularly tends to distort the space and make it smaller. You can “let your back lengthen and widen,” but you can’t “lengthen and widen your back.” About the all-important idea of sending various directions all together, one after the other, Alexander wrote that to maintain the unity that is involved in this connected series of acts, [you] will have to continue to project the directions necessary to the performance of the first act of the series concurrently with projecting the directions necessary to the performance of the second, and so on throughout the series until all the preliminary acts have been performed in their connected sequence. . . . This process is analogous to the firing of a machine-gun from an aeroplane, where the machinery is so coordinated that each individual shot of the series is timed to pass between the blades of a propeller making 1,500 or more revolutions to the minute.4

Instead of giving your directions linearly (one, two, three . . .), you do so additively (one, one plus two, one plus two plus three . . .). The difficulty lies in giving these directions not only concomitantly but also extremely fast! Verbal commands may be of limited help in such a situation. The act of directing is creative, imaginative, and playful. Directing will succeed or fail according to the words you choose, your rhythm, and your tone of voice— whether you say the words out loud or just think them in your mind. You can use words in several ways. Ask yourself questions: “Am I thinking up? Is my neck free? Am I taking my head forward and up?” Declare, in the first, second, or third person: “I am thinking up and pointing my shoulders sideways and apart.” Exhort: “Forward and up! Forward and up!” Caution: “Don’t pull down, don’t contract, don’t rush.” Run a list: “Head, neck, back, spine, legs, knees, heels.” Directing has many facets. Suppose you tell yourself to think up along the spine, to point your head forward and up, to let the back lengthen and widen. These are “directions to the parts,” as it were. But you might also tell yourself to get out of the way, to trust the moment, to let go and let be. These are “directions to the whole,” setting up a mood or state and serving as reminders that body and mind are never separate. If your discourse is playful and rhythmic, so will your directions be. If your discourse is staid and calculated, so will your directions be. It would be preferable to direct in silence rather than with a perfunctory discourse that puts you in a stupor. Imagery, wit, rhyme, metaphors, analogies, aphorisms, epigrams, Zen-like koans are all welcome if they heighten your connections. The possibilities are limitless. Here are a few examples. Wait, wait, wait, wait, JUMP! Leave your muscles out of this. 62

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Head to neck, neck to shoulders, shoulders to arms, arms to fingers. Now play. Gather your energies around a central point. Waste nothing, collect everything. Now project yourself outward in every direction.

DIRECTIONS AND ANATOMY Alexander teachers vary in their approach to anatomy and physiology. To some, anatomical information is paramount; to others, helpful but not obligatory. Some teachers consider a surfeit of anatomical information a danger, since it’s possible to use it to separate body, mind, and soul—and, ultimately, to shield yourself from change and responsibility: “I’m built this way, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” Suppose you suffer from focal dystonia and your right index finger has stopped obeying your will. It’s tempting to consider focal dystonia a physical problem for which there exists a mechanical solution informed by anatomy and physiology. And yet, by the time you factor in the psychological and metaphysical dimensions of focal dystonia, anatomical constructs become relatively unimportant. So it is with your directing: anatomy may or may not be of relevance. Early on in his acting career, Alexander started suffering from vocal problems. It was in examining and solving these problems that he came to develop the technique that now bears his name. He told his story in full in the first chapter of The Use of the Self, his third book. For the moment we’re going to examine a single aspect of his fruitful journey. Alexander found that he was contracting his head into his neck every time he spoke or recited, so he trained himself to think up along the spine instead. Despite all his efforts, he found that he could either think up or speak, but not do both at the same time. After many struggles, he understood that the problem lay not in the action itself but in the link between the decision to act and the resulting action, and he finally developed an effective strategy to solve his vocal troubles. Alexander would think up along the spine, and then decide to speak. Rather than going ahead and speaking, however, he’d then do one of three things: carry on thinking up and do nothing, carry on thinking up and do something other than speak (raise his hand, for instance), or carry on thinking up and speak. By alternating freely among these responses, he found that thinking up became gradually more important than each individual response, and he was finally able to think up and speak at the same time. Alexander wrote that you ought to “separate the order [you] are asked to give from the act or acts of which it [the order] is the forerunner5. . . . The whole principle of volition and inhibition are [sic] implicit in the recognition of this differentiation.”6 Become able, for instance, to give yourself the command to lift your arm and not lift it if you so decide; or to listen to the command to think up along the spine and do nothing at all. As a method, this is the contrary of classical conditioning. If you were an “Alexander dog” instead of a “Pavlov dog,” the bell would ring and you wouldn’t Direction

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necessarily salivate. You might indeed salivate, but it’d be one choice among many at your disposal. Alexander’s story is instructive on several counts. An apparently physical problem is the manifestation of a wish or desire, and you can’t control one without addressing the other. And when a solution finally comes, it requires that you stop doing the thing that causes the problem to begin with. Non-doing is the best skill you could ever learn. Needless to say, it’s also the hardest thing in the world to comprehend! If anatomical information takes you closer to comprehending it, pursuing it is a great idea. But if anatomical information takes you away from looking at the wishes and desires that drive your end-gaining, it may be better not to let your mind become distracted by it.

CONCENTRATION AND AWARENESS Learning how to direct is akin to learning a foreign language. To learn French, for instance, at first you have to make a tremendous intellectual effort. At some point, you acquire the reflex of thinking in French whenever you speak in French. Then, as you speak, you make very quick and cost-free decisions and pick words from a huge, internalized database and string them together. From time to time, certain words and expressions will require that you slow down a bit, consult your memory, and speak with more calculation. This gives you three layers of linguistic reflex: the ability to think in French effortlessly; the ability to make hundreds of quick, cost-free decisions as you speak; and the ability to think more consciously whenever the moment requires it. At any rate, it’s possible for you to become able to speak French while doing something else at the same time—driving, for instance, or cooking, or what you will. It’s the same with directing: given enough training, you can “think in directions” and multitask. You’ll still need to make hundreds of quick, cost-free psychomotor decisions minute by minute; and your days will be punctuated by moments in which you’ll need to stop and think through a given task. It may be impossible for you to make directing completely automatic, but in itself this isn’t a bad thing, since conscious awareness is the very source of your integration as a human being. Most people think that concentration is the art of focusing on one thing and eliminating everything else, and they would therefore consider that it’s necessary to concentrate either on piano playing or on giving directions. But there exists a different art that we might also call concentration: the art of organizing many elements around a central point, which allows you to think of your use and your piano playing at the same time. Perhaps we can call the former concentration and the latter awareness. Bruce Lee, the great martial artist and teacher, wrote that “a concentrated mind is not an attentive mind but a mind that is in the state of awareness can concentrate.”7 The difference between concentration and awareness as defined by Lee is perfectly, though unwittingly, illustrated by this excerpt on the fabled abilities of two great conductors, Erich Kleiber and his son Carlos: 64

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Erich Kleiber would go for long walks with a score in his hand and his children walking in front, immerse himself completely in whatever work he was preparing, but at the same time remain aware of everything going on around him. Once, he stopped his perusal long enough to save Carlos from an accident, and then calmly returned to his score. (Carlos’s own concentration is no less amazing: when he made his début at La Scala . . . with Der Rosenkavalier, he continued to conduct throughout the [1976] Friuli earthquake, which shook the place, racked the chandeliers, and emptied the gallery. “I didn’t notice!” he said later, when he was told what had happened after complaining that the orchestra had seemed restless!)8

The elder Kleiber was aware of everything; his awareness being all-inclusive, he could concentrate on his score while keeping track of all around him. The younger Kleiber of our anecdote, however, concentrated on his music making and became unaware of the world around him. I hasten to add that Carlos Kleiber was one of the finest of all conductors, a very great musician who gave exquisite performances. He was capable of perfect awareness, but perhaps he slipped out of awareness and into concentration from time to time!

DIRECTION AS ENERGY We started our discussion of direction by stating that it seemed to have two components: commands from the brain to the muscles, and the transmission of energy to carry out the commands. Then we looked at some ways in which you can issue commands. The time has come for us to look at the transmission of energy. Energy is palpable yet indefinable. Locked in a conference room for a week, a year, or an eternity, a gaggle of quantum physicists, mystics, and Alexander teachers wouldn’t be able to agree on what energy is, how it works, and how it affects one’s life. We’ll skip the attempt to define energy, and instead we’ll practice a series of exercises that enhance your awareness of energy as an all-pervasive psychomotor phenomenon. You can perform most of these exercises alone, although a few require a partner. Some of these exercises and the concepts supporting them will be familiar to readers who have practiced aikido, t’ai chi ch’uan, qikong, and other disciplines. 1. HANDS

The exercise probably works best at first if you perform it standing, but ultimately all positions and all movements allow you to reproduce the exercise’s basic effect. With your palms gently cupped and fingers slightly bent and separated, caress the space between your hands by turning your hands in circles or semicircles. At first, keep the hands fairly close together. Later on you can bring them further and further apart. You can keep your hands close to your body or a little further out; you can Direction

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FIGURE 5.2: Flowing direction

keep the hands as high as your face or higher still, or as low as your crotch or lower still. Vary the speed of your movements, starting andante moderato before practicing in all tempi from molto adagio to prestissimo (Figure 5.2). Through this simple gesture you’ll perceive energies that have always been there, in between your hands. The perception of energy varies from person to person. People report feeling heat, a rubbery presence, a magnetic force, the tendency for the hands to push one away from the other, pins and needles, tingling, and other sensations. Suppose you feel something else; so be it. Suppose you feel nothing; so 66

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be it. Your field of perception changes from moment to moment and from day to day. It’s possible for you to feel nothing today and something tomorrow; or something today and something else tomorrow. It’s also possible for you to feel something but not believe or trust it. Perform the exercise with good will and perseverance, and let the sensations come and go. Suppose you do feel these energies “in your hands,” “from your hands,” or “between your hands.” Play with them as you would with dough, pulling them here and there, shaping and reshaping them. Take your hands further and further apart, and see if you can maintain an energetic connection between them. These energies bridge the passage between the material and the immaterial. The words you use to talk about the material and physical world may be insufficient or inappropriate to describe the immaterial and metaphysical world. In the physical world, you feel completely delineated and separated from other physical entities (such as people, objects, furniture, and so on). In the metaphysical world, these separations aren’t so well delineated. Ultimately it may be useful for you to perform these exercises without thinking too much about the familiar physical world and its rules. The more you perform the exercises, the more you’ll sense how your energy is affected by many factors, all of which are in themselves energies. It may be enough for you to change your posture slightly, or take your shoes off, or wear tight clothes, or drink a cup of coffee, for your energies to be affected in some way, big or small. The energy between your hands may be affected by your manner of breathing. While performing the exercise, breathe out through your mouth—silently, or making a whispery sound, or saying something ordinary, or singing a sustained note. How do these activities affect the energy between your hands? 2. ARMS

Extend your left arm out, as if to hail a taxicab, but without overreaching with the arm. For the sake of brevity we’ll call this posture, where you hold your arm in front of you with joints neither stiff nor limp, the relaxed extended arm (Figure 5.3). Move your right hand back and forth along the left arm, but without touching it. Travel along the upper side of the arm, and then its underside. Keep your right hand in the energetic state you discovered in the first exercise: sensitized and alert, relaxed but not inert. You might imagine that your right hand is an energetic brush, with which you paint the left arm with energy. Or imagine that your left arm is wearing a sleeve of energy and you can roll and unroll it with the right hand. Then switch hands, and use the left hand to explore the right arm. It’s a great exercise to do with a partner. Stand near the partner and, with your hands, explore the space around the partner’s relaxed extended arm, much as you did it to yourself and by yourself. Without physically touching the partner, run your hands along his or her arm, varying the speed of your hands, their distance from your partner’s arm, and their placement (above the arm, underneath it, along the inside of the arm, along its outside, and so on). Then ask your partner to do the same to you. Now your arms have developed the same sensitivity as your hands, and you begin to feel that the arms too “have” energy or “are” energy, or “are” the space they occupy. Direction

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FIGURE 5.3: Intention and direction

3. THE UNBENDABLE ARM

This exercise requires a partner. Stand with a relaxed extended arm. Have your partner stand next to you, placing one hand underneath your forearm and the other above your upper arm, and attempting to bend your arm at the elbow. Your job is to resist your partner, and try as hard as you can to keep your arm straight. If you and your partner perform the exercise with a little competitiveness, you’ll get into a muscular struggle, like two guys arm wrestling at a pub. Your partner tries hard to bend your arm (possibly hurting you a bit), and you try hard to resist him (possibly hurting yourself even more!). You need to perform the exercise for only a few seconds. Once you sense how much of a struggle it is to resist your partner, you might as well stop the exercise altogether and take a little break. Stand with a relaxed extended arm again. Now imagine that your arm is like a hose, spewing hot water at high speed. Pick a point far in space—out of the window and across the street, for instance—and imagine that you’re watering that point with the hose that is your arm. The water comes from the ground, up along your legs, through your pelvis, back, and shoulder, along your arm, through to the fingertips and beyond. After you take a few seconds to develop the feeling of the hose and its connection to the ground, ask your partner to attempt to bend your arm at the elbow again.

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Most likely the result will be very different from your previous “arm-wrestling match.” Your arm becomes so strong as to be unbendable. You may feel that your partner isn’t trying as hard as before, regardless of what he or she says about it. Your partner, too, will be surprised at how differently your arm now behaves. Not only is your arm more powerful and harder to bend, its power seems to be of another nature altogether. The exercise reveals how intention animates gesture. Intending to resist someone who tries to bend your arm and intending to project your energies toward a building across the street will create two completely different gestures. Another way of analyzing the difference is to say that the first time around you try to rely on muscle; the second time you rely on energy. Strictly speaking, the arm-wrestling nature of the first gesture is also energy, except that it’s misdirected, negative, and destructive. Regardless of how you verbalize and analyze the experience, you’re faced with an important, even disturbing phenomenon that points toward a new way of doing things in your life. What would happen if you used intention, perception, and energy rather than raw muscle power in everything you did? What would happen to your identity, your personality, and your way of dealing with the world if this principle became reflex? How would other people see you and react to you, if you presented yourself to the world as an expansive energy field? 4. RESISTANCE AND OPPOSITION

This exercise also works best with a partner. Stand with a relaxed extended arm. Your partner stands next to you, slightly behind you. Ask your partner to place an open hand against the shoulder blade of the lifted arm, and another hand on the underside of your arm, toward the wrist. Then ask him or her to exert a little pressure with both hands, one toward the other. In other words, the partner essentially tries to push your arm into your back and contract your energy field. Your job is to resist his or her attempt by expanding your energy field instead. As in the previous exercise, you can react “with your muscles” or “with your energies.” One reaction quickly becomes a struggle; the other has the potential to become an affirmation and celebration—of your presence, your power, the clarity of your thinking, and the multidimensionality of your existence. Once you get the hang of it, see if you can multitask. While directing your energies under your partner’s friendly pressures, speak or sing. Does speaking cause you to “forget your directions” and shrink your energy field? If so, you have some homework to do. 5. SUPPORT AND SUSPENSION

Stand with a relaxed extended arm. Imagine that an elastic force like a large rubber balloon supports your arm from underneath. The imagined force is friendly, bouncy, and strong, and by supporting your arm up in space the force exempts you from

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muscular effort. Now imagine that another friendly force, made of multiple mobile elastic hooks hanging down from the ceiling, suspends your arm from above. The imagination is the most powerful thing in the world. You only need to imagine someone beating up a little kid for you to get torn up inside. The bad guy and the defenseless kid “don’t exist officially,” but you have a visceral reaction to them anyway. Sometimes the things you imagine cause an immediate, strong reaction; sometimes they cause barely a ripple. But every last thing you imagine triggers some effect in you, however small. You don’t have to do anything to create the feeling of support or the feeling of suspension. Imagining the suspension or the support creates a certain reality— subtle or powerful, agreeable or disagreeable. The act of your imagination charges the arm with a specific energy and changes its behavior and feeling. Most musicians need to hold their arms up in front of their bodies while making music. Let’s take a violinist as an example. She can imagine a friendly force supporting her arms from underneath, or a different force suspending them from above, or both at the same time, or a combination (more of one, less of the other), or one force for the left arm and another for the right arm. There exist many permutations, each giving birth to its own reality. Each permutation has its merits. Equally, each permutation has risks and dangers. If you direct your arm as if suspended from above, you risk lifting your shoulder unnecessarily. If you direct your arm as if supported from below, you risk leaning down on the imaginary support and making your arm heavy. In time you can become aware of all these merits and demerits, and find ways of navigating the risks and dangers of every situation, every direction, every energy, and every thought. 6. LIGHTNESS AND HEAVINESS

Stand with a relaxed extended arm. Imagine that your arm is heavy, dark, sluggish, and dense like mud in winter. Without changing the arm’s position, now imagine that your arm is a translucent tube filled with an invisible white light, expanding like heated gas. It’s enough to imagine your arm becoming lighter for the arm to become, indeed, lighter! Imagination works in all media, and you can mix and match the media according to your needs and wants, your whims and your personality. Use words, sound effects, images, memories, commands, muscular feelings, metaphors, analogies, or little stories that you tell yourself silently. Start pondering the multiple combinations of quality. Your arm can be heavy and resistant, heavy and yielding, heavy and extended, heavy and contracted . . . or it can be light and resistant, light and yielding, light and extended, and so on. Suppose you use a particular direction at the piano and you get a nice sound and feeling from it. It’d be a pity for you to settle on it. There are so many rich possibilities at your disposal that only years and years of experimentation, study, practice, and discovery will give you a proper control of your energies. Use the principle of “I may be wrong.” “This feels pretty wonderful right now, but possibly it isn’t the best energy for my purpose, the most appropriate, the ultimate one. Getting overly attached to this feel70

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ing might prevent me from making further discoveries. I’ll ‘be’ in this feeling for now, but I won’t ‘hold on’ to it.” 7. VOLCANO AND GLACIER

You can literally “blow hot and cold”: air coming from your mouth can be hot or cold depending on how you do it. Cold air seems to come from your mouth, and hot air seems to come from the throat. Start with the decision to blow cold air out of your mouth. Experiment with the shape of your lips, the behavior of your cheeks and tongue, and the shape and direction of the airflow. Blow into your palm, then into the back of the hand, and then along the arm. It may help you to imagine that you’re in a glacier, or that you “are” a glacier. Blowing cold air will connect you with “cold energy.” This is available to you through the imagination alone. After blowing cold air for a while and imagining coldmaking images, put your arms out as in the previous exercises, and imagine your cold energy flowing along your arms and rendering them fresh, chilly, or frosty. Do a similar sequence for hot air and hot energy. Blow hot air out of your mouth, blow into your hands and then into your arms, imagining that you’re a volcano, a bonfire, or a heater, and then put your arms out in front of you and use your imagination exclusively. Both cold and heat have healing properties—as you know from applying ice packs on a sore knee, for instance, or taking a hot shower to loosen your shoulders. In some contexts, directing hot energy is beneficial; in other contexts, directing cold energy is preferable. If you don’t like cold weather, you might dislike imagining cold energy, but it’s better for you to have all energies at your disposal, even seemingly disagreeable ones. 8. FOUNTAIN AND MAGNET

You can become a fountain, projecting your directions outward from the center of your body; or a magnet, gathering energies from outside inward. While standing, bring your hands to the center of your body (more or less under your belly and above your crotch) and then throw your hands out and up, palms facing upward, imitating the gush of water coming off a fountain. Now reverse the motion of your arms and hands. Start with hands high in front of you and broadly apart; then bring them quickly or slowly to the center of your body, indicating with your hands what would happen to energy if you sucked it in from the environment into the center of your body—as if you were a magnet. Moving your arms and hands helps you trigger the fountain and magnet, but as with the other exercises you can activate these flows of energy through the power of the imagination alone. You could call the energy flowing from the center of your body centrifugal, and the energy gathering toward the center of your body centripetal. You could also just call them out and in, or giving and receiving. Each of these pairings has its own connotation. Not only their actual meanings are different, so is their “music,” their emotional Direction

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tone. Which words give you the strongest and most agreeable energies? Over the weeks and months, observe how your vocabulary affects your moods, behaviors, and gestures, and then start making word choices to improve your life. 9. THE FLYING ARMS AND THE BACK

Put both arms up in front of you, as if readying to conduct a large choir: arms fairly high and wide apart, elbows and shoulders loose rather than stiff (Figure 5.4). From the previous exercises, you know that your arms are conduits of energy; you know your arms can be supported, suspended, or both; you know that you can become like a fountain of energy, gushing life-giving energy endlessly, the gush as strong or moderate or steady as you wish. Visualize a combination of these energies while holding your arms up. Then start lowering the arms little by little. Whether you take five seconds or a minute to lower your arms, keep imagining and projecting energies along and around the arms. By the time your arms are completely lowered and relaxed next to your body, you’ll feel that the space between your arms is also filled with energy. Your back ceases being an anatomical construct and becomes instead the energy space between your arms: open, wide, free, and powerful. The sounds that emanate from you as you play, sing, or conduct differ according to the state of your back. The phenomenon is difficult to describe, but essentially your sounds can arise from the interplay of muscular pushes and pulls (a form of

FIGURE 5.4: Flying arms, open back

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“doing”), or from the interplay of intentions and energies (a form of “allowing”). Each approach contains elements from the other: anything you do muscularly is also a form of energy, and anything you do energetically involves muscle in some way. Nevertheless, you may find over time that your sounds do indeed differ when you pass from a primarily muscular approach to a primarily energetic one. 10. FRONT AND BACK

Your energies circulate and propagate in front of you and behind you. It’s generally easier to feel or envision the energies in front of you, since you can see the space in front of you or gesticulate in order to occupy that space. The energies emanating backward from you can be harder to feel. Nevertheless, every time you stand in line you sense how the person standing in front of you, with his or her back to you, gives off a certain energy—which sometimes can feel invasive, even though the person in question “isn’t doing anything.” In short, whether or not you’re aware of it, you inhabit the space behind you as much as you do the space in front of you. Energies can travel along different paths, either by innate reflex or because you direct them consciously. Use one or more fingers of one hand to draw a circle of energy around your belly button. The circle can be as small as a coin or as big as a plate. Go round and round the circle. You can touch your belly or let the finger hover above it. Draw the circle of energy clockwise for a few turns; then draw it counterclockwise. Is there a difference in feeling according to the direction of the circle? People often find that one direction of the circle feels reassuring, the other threatening. The motion of your fingers drawing the circle only exaggerates and externalizes something that’s happening already: the flow of energy along a path that encompasses both the inside of the body and the space right outside it. In the total absence of a hand gesture, your energies are always circulating, taking paths that are innate or acquired. 11. THE HAT OF ENERGY

Clothes, hats, instruments, and any object that you wear or carry expand your energy field. Depending on the hat and on the person wearing it, a hat enlarges or contracts the energetic space around the head. Carnival outfits with extravagant headdresses, for instance, contribute to the wearer’s change of behavior. The extravagant hat triggers an extravagant expansion of the energy field. Sometimes you see someone wearing a certain headdress and you get the creeps. It looks too big, strange, maybe even inappropriate. You may be feeling that the hat impinges on your own space, or that the person wearing the hat has some sort of power over you. Perhaps you can’t quite verbalize the reason why you hate the hat, but you hate it indeed. Other emotions regarding the hat are just as unexplainable: love, scorn, jealousy. You can expand your energy field just by wearing an imaginary hat of energy on the sides of your head, behind and in front of your head, and above your crown. You Direction

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can “wear your hat forward and up” (imagining that energy flows up along your back, spilling over the head and flowing up away from your head and in front of you) or “wear your hat back and down” (imagining that energy in front of you flows toward your face, and above your face and down your spine). 12. LEGS AND FEET

The legs and feet are much like the arms and hands: they are conduits for energy, or perhaps they “are” energy. And, much like with the arms and hands, you can direct energy along the legs, to and from the feet. By directing your energies down your legs and toward your feet and beyond them, you can feel wonderfully grounded; by directing your energies along the legs upward from the ground, you can feel wonderfully charged. There are merits to both directions; don’t choose before you have explored the possibilities. One day you’ll need to be strict about not allowing bad energies in you, coming into you, or projecting outward from you. But premature discernment can block your journey toward your true self. 13. MOVEMENT

Walk, sit, stand, raise your arms, or perform any other action. You might feel not that you’re moving your body in space, but rather that your energies are reshaping themselves in space. To stand up is to shape your energy in space in a certain way; to sit down is to shape it differently; to pass from sitting to standing and vice versa is to reshape your energy continuously in space. Your body seems to have clearly defined outlines and boundaries, but the space you inhabit with your energies may be boundless. There are merits and demerits to boundaries as well as to boundlessness. Finding a balance between the two isn’t easy, but without such a balance you can’t be fully integrated. Movement is one of the arenas in which you can explore the collaboration between the material and the immaterial. 14. VOICE AND BREATH

Everything you say is energy, and your silence is also energy. A word is energy in text, but also energy in vibration. You can direct and project your voice’s energies. This may be different from “projecting your voice.” Bring a hand close to your mouth. Now speak, at the same time moving your hand away from your mouth and pretending that your hand is pulling your voice and breath out of your body. The exercise works best when the speed of your hand gesture is in harmony with the speed of your speech, and when the hand gesture is directed toward a clear destination: a partner watching and listening to you, an imaginary listener, a painting on your wall, or the building across the street, visible from your window. 74

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If you can’t quite think what to say while performing the “hand-pulling-thebreath” gesture, count out loud, alternating right and left hands to pull the breath out: “One, two, three . . . four, five, six. . . .” This has the merit of helping you coordinate the timing of the hand gesture with the rhythms of your voice and breath. The hand gesture helps you become better able to sense and project your voice and breath, but once you feel how your voice and breath are forms of energy that you can project outward and in every direction, you can let go of the gesture and trigger the phenomenon with your voice alone. Apply the concept to actual singing or playing. If you’re a wind or brass player, you can train yourself to associate the breath going through your instrument with the projected energies and directions you’ve been practicing. Blowing through the instrument then becomes synonymous with projecting energy. If you’re a string player, bow an open string and speak, sing, or hum at the same time, while using your left hand to “pull the breath out your body.” Thanks to the phenomenon of bilateral transfer (which we’ll study in Chapter 9), you’ll be able to transfer the directed energy of your left hand and your singing to the bowing arm. Your bowing then becomes breathlike, and you can direct its energies in the same manner you’ve been practicing. 15. TOUCH

“The energy that is you” is connected to “the energy that is all around you.” To put it differently, your energies aren’t completely separate from the energies of the world around you and of the people whom you touch. To touch is to give and receive energy. To touch an instrument is also to give and receive energy. Apply everything you’ve learned from the previous exercises to inform your touch, at the instrument and away from it. The ideas in the next section might also help you improve your touch.

DIRECTION IN TIME AND SPACE Direction has rhythmic and spatial elements. We’ll look at the spatial elements first, using directed listening as an illustration. Suppose you sit in a public environment—the mezzanine cafe of a museum, for instance. Your field of perception expands and contracts as you listen to various layers of sound. Right near you, a couple speaks. You might sense the timbres of their voices without listening to their words. If you decide to pay attention to the words, you direct your hearing to go out toward the words; or perhaps you open your hearing up to welcome the words in. Either way you’ll reshape your field of perception. Now you stop paying attention to the couple, and instead you capture the sounds of coffee beans being ground, a hissing espresso machine, spoons hitting cups. You have again reshaped your field of perception. Then you listen to the collective murmuring of passersby in the distance. The further out you listen, the further your enDirection

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ergy field reaches out. If you start writing a postcard to a friend, you might forget the sounds of dozens of people chatting in the background. Then your energy field is essentially shrinking, perhaps closing in on you. The skill lies in your becoming able to expand and contract according to the situation and to your wishes and desires. You can listen actively or passively. You catch someone’s voice and you become curious. You decide to pay attention, so you send your energy out to the person in question and capture his or her vibrations and translate them into meaning. Trying too hard doesn’t help. You may be able to hear better and understand more if you are receptive, rather than acquisitive. This is a fine skill to exercise when you play with a partner, in a chamber group, or in an orchestra. Much as you can open up to several layers of spatial information, in directing you can avail yourself of several layers of rhythmic information: duration, intensity, and dynamics, among others. Let’s suppose you’re practicing a series of arpeggios at the piano (although almost any other musical activity would be similar in this respect). You sit at the piano for a while, doing nothing but sensing the room, the instrument in front of you, the piano bench underneath your buttocks, your feet on the floor. Your awareness can zoom out into the room, or in toward a specific object—your left toes, for instance. Your awareness of the space, the piano, and your body feeds your thinking in action and your directing. To some degree, the awareness may even be synonymous with directing. You can expand and contract your awareness at will: room, piano, body, toes; toes, body, piano, room. You can decide to zoom in on your toes and be oblivious to the world. Or you can choose to be aware of several things at the same time: room, room plus piano, room plus piano plus body, room plus piano plus body plus toes. Now bring your hands to the keyboard, adding new elements into your awareness: the back, shoulders, arms, hands, fingers, and the feeling of the piano keys under your fingertips. Using verbal commands or not, direct your head and neck, supervising their behavior and choosing not to stiffen your neck. Now start playing your arpeggios. We’ll suppose you play ascending and descending three-octave arpeggios in C major, using both hands together an octave apart, in andante moderato, forte dynamics. And we’ll suppose you’ll keep playing the arpeggios uninterruptedly for quite a while, perhaps five minutes or longer. The arpeggios have multiple rhythmic elements. Each note lasts less than a second; each octave lasts a second or so; each complete ascending arpeggio lasts three seconds; each cycle of ascending and descending arpeggio lasts six seconds. Your awareness can encompass all these layers, or focus on one or two of them at a time. This means that your awareness will have rhythmic dimensions as well. Silently think the words “head, neck, back” to coincide with each C in your threeoctave arpeggio, thereby reminding yourself of your primary directions. With practice, the arpeggio becomes the trigger of direction, helping you free your neck and keeping it free. The desire to judge, to praise, or to condemn is permanent. Awareness and direction, however, are nonjudgmental. It’s difficult to pass harsh judgment on yourself and keep the neck free at the same time. Note by note, octave by octave, and arpeg76

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gio by arpeggio, choose a free neck over self-judgment. You may be surprised at how good you sound when you stop worrying about how good you sound. There’s a difference between playing the piano and working on yourself while playing the piano. When you work on yourself, practicing and exercising meld into a form of meditation. You stay in the moment and let time flow, the future becoming the present becoming the past. When directing is primary and playing is secondary, you may feel that you’re not “doing” something but that something is happening “through” you. You become one with the piano, with music itself, with time and space. Musicians who, in my view, work on themselves as they perform include the pianist Radu Lupu, the conductor Carlos Kleiber, the drummer “Papa” Joe Jones, and the violinist and conductor Sándor Végh. Study them on YouTube. Directing while playing a few arpeggios is one thing. Directing while performing a concerto in public is another thing. It may take years to get the hang of it, but if in the end you could become one with time and space, wouldn’t it be worth your while to pursue it?

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CHAPTER 6

ACTION

In discussing non-doing in Chapter 4, we saw that a habitual gesture—scrunching your neck and contracting your shoulders to plop down into a chair—is activated by a certain thought and is accompanied by certain feelings. Let’s call these thought X, gesture X, and feeling X. A contrasting, nonhabitual gesture—energizing your body upward, bending your knees, and lowering yourself in space—is activated by a completely different thought and is associated with other sensations entirely: thought Y, gesture Y, and feeling Y. In X, all that matters is to sit down. It’s the “doing” version of things. In Y, selfawareness and direction take precedence over the act of sitting down, although you’ll most likely end up sitting anyway. It’s the “non-doing” version of things. X is the sort of disorganized and tense gesture that has been causing you pain for years. Y is most likely the best solution to your woes. Nevertheless, it’s strangely difficult to stop doing things in the X style and start non-doing them in the Y style. Paradoxically, the real test of non-doing comes at the moment of doing. It’s when you act that you show who you are and where you are in your path toward integration. What’s the root cause of the difficulty? To put it succinctly, act X is wrong but feels right, and act Y is right but feels wrong. At the decisive moment of action, all of us will invariably choose to do what feels right, not what is right. In the first chapter of The Use of the Self, where he describes the evolution of his work, Alexander writes about how he struggled with this issue. Searching for a solution to his vocal problems, Alexander found a stumbling block in that critical moment when the giving of directions merged into “doing.” However well he directed his preparations for an act, he lost his directions when he went ahead with the act itself. He, too, kept reverting to X despite his best intentions to do Y, showing that the difficulty is universal. The solution, logically, requires that we abandon our ideas of what is right and embrace what feels wrong. This is not to say there is no right and no wrong, or that

you’re free to do any old thing; simply, your feelings of right and wrong are inaccurate and the judgments you make based on those feelings aren’t constructive. We’ll look into judgment first. Then we’ll look into the three roles you play in your life—as actor, receptor, and witness—and how integrating these roles can help you into action. Finally, we’ll look into timing, which is the key to overcoming most impediments to free action.

GIVING UP JUDGMENT Suppose you’re a pianist. In the middle of a fast passage you have to pass from one chord at one extreme of the keyboard to another at the opposite extreme. If you misuse your playing arm and the rest of your body, you’ll almost surely miss the chord. The very wish to attain your end and strike the chord, however, causes you to stiffen your arm. Therefore, you have to be willing to miss the chord, so to free your arm, so to find the chord! (We study this example, and related ones, in Chapter 17.) And yet, because it feels wrong to miss the chord willingly and to develop a free arm, you’ll stiffen your arm every time—and miss the chord all the same. Suppose you really feel that a certain sound is ugly, therefore wrong. You’ll be very reluctant to make it. What if the sound in question is a necessary step in your musical and artistic evolution? As long as you keep issuing a judgment about it, you’ll be blocking your path toward freedom. One of my favorite Alexander sayings is also one of his most Zen-like: “You all want to know if you’re right. When you get further on you will be right, but you won’t know it and won’t want to know if you’re right. . . . Directly you don’t care if you’re right or not, the impending obstacle is gone.”1 To make sense of this isn’t easy, but we might say that if you become a clear-headed person who lives in the here, now, you’ll be unconcerned with right and wrong . . . which removes the obstacles to right action . . . which means that you’ll be right . . . but since you’re now unconcerned with right and wrong, you won’t even know that you’re right! Bruce Lee speaks of combat, but his words apply to all endeavors, including making music: The perfect way is only difficult for those who pick and choose. Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear.2 . . . The great mistake is to anticipate the outcome of the engagement; you ought not to be thinking of whether it ends in victory or in defeat. Let nature take its course, and your tools will strike at the right moment.3

Lee says that the way is difficult for those who pick and choose, which makes it sound as if he’s against choosing. In fact, choosing is an inevitable constant in your life: every day, all day long, you make hundreds of choices, some very small (brown socks or gray socks?), others more consequential (do I accept the job, or do I turn it down?). It’s judging that is problematic, not choosing.

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A choice is more or less technical (brown, gray); a judgment is more or less moral (brown is wrong, I don’t like gray). It’s very counterintuitive, but you’ll make better choices if you don’t judge—or, failing that, if you suspend judgment, or delay judgment, or make judgments that aren’t absolute. Execute your every gesture with élan and authority, whether it is wrong or it feels wrong, and stand back from the gesture and consider it with detachment. A technical assessment of what you do is helpful: “I was in sync with the metronome,” “I wasn’t in sync with the metronome.” Whether it’s right or wrong to be in sync with the metronome is another thought altogether: “I should be more strict.” “I should be more free.” “I hate the metronome.” Practicing, rehearsing, and performing can all be based on the choices you make or the judgments you pass. Oftentimes judgment implies compulsion, guilt, and shame, while choice implies responsibility, freedom, and love.

ACTOR, RECEPTOR, WITNESS We all play three roles in every moment of our lives. We do things: we act, say, move, choose, push, pull, resist, oppose, provoke, and engage in any number of activities animated by our desires and decisions. We receive information: we see things, hear other people, smell, touch, get pushed and pulled. And we all observe and analyze everything that is going on. Three people are standing together. One decides to give another a push. The pusher acts, and as such he’s an actor, carrying out a decision in practice. The one being pushed is the recipient of the actor’s gesture, and as such he’s a receptor, liking or disliking the push. The third person, watching the other two, describes the event later on: “One man was tall and stooped, the other skinny and old. The tall man pushed the skinny one, who almost fell.” The third person is a witness, observing the world dispassionately, noticing, analyzing and synthesizing information, yet not passing judgment. Suppose the third person says, “A tall guy pushed a skinny one. I felt really bad for him.” Then he’s not exclusively a witness anymore; he’s become a receptor, reacting to the situation with his subjective feelings. The three roles of actor, receptor, and witness don’t happen separately. It’s nearly impossible to stop being an actor, for instance; even when you’re asleep, your body leaning against your lover’s, your breathing audible, you’re still an actor. It’s also impossible to stop being a receptor. Biology makes sure that our senses keep receiving information. When you shut your eyes tight and close your ears in an effort not to see and hear something, you’re still receiving information—at the very least from your own body, hands, and face. And witnessing happens by virtue of your presence wherever you are, for however long or short a time you’re there. Every action has consequences. Lightly touch a piano key, and a little sound comes out: that’s one of the consequences of your simple, gentle action. As a musician playing or singing onstage, you’re acting nonstop. But how well are you receiving the consequences of your own actions? If you’re really attentive when you strike 80

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a chord at the piano, you might feel the piano keys vibrate under your fingertips, the piano bench vibrate under your butt, and the floor vibrate under your feet. It’s not possible to receive every last bit of information from every last action. Sensory overload is hard to handle, so we all have means of diminishing the sensitivity of our receptor function. Not to sense pertinent information, however, is a problem. Perhaps the feeling of the piano keys vibrating under your fingertips might awaken your hands’ ability to produce wonderful sounds, or to play fast passages accurately. Therefore, not to feel these things sabotages your musical life. The ideal actor is guided by the receptor and witness. You do any one thing. Your action has effects that reverberate all around you. After receiving the information from your own actions and those of people around you, you act again. You say something; your friend replies; according to her reply, you say your next thing. The cycle never stops. What kind of person would you be if you didn’t listen to what your friend said to you? Your receptor function is essential, in friendship and in life. The witness is amoral. It doesn’t express a preference or pass judgment, and it has no feelings. “I’m using a MacBook Pro laptop computer as I type.” That’s the witness speaking. “I love my computer.” That’s the receptor speaking, after reacting to the machine’s perceived beauty and user-friendliness. Amorality gets a bad name, because it gets confused with immorality. One means no emotions, no moral judgments. The other means ugly emotions, harmful judgments. Ultimately, it’s necessary and urgent for you to make choices, and preferably healthy moral ones. But you won’t be able to arrive at an informed choice if your witness doesn’t observe, analyze, and synthesize every situation neutrally. Say you make an ardent moral judgment against someone you perceive as a disgusting criminal, a pedophile and rapist. If your witness function didn’t inform you correctly and didn’t help you pick the right guy out of the lineup, then you may be condemning an innocent man. Amorality is the non-doing of morality, the clearing of a path so that the journey toward morality is constructive. You can train your actor, receptor, and witness functions to collaborate. Any activity lends itself to it, but let’s take playing with a yo-yo as an example. I did this with an adult student recently. She had last played with yo-yos in her childhood, thirty years before. Her first approach was to take the yo-yo in her hand, throw it abruptly, and catch it again right away. Her actor function was a quick doer, intense and unhesitant. As with all human qualities, this is positive and negative at the same time. I asked her to hold her arm out, let the yo-yo drop down, and do nothing else. She “misunderstood” me and instead played with the yo-yo in the very same way as before. In fact her actor was so intense that it overwhelmed her receptor. She simply didn’t hear what I said. She looked at me while I spoke, nodded, but didn’t receive the words and their meaning. Her actor was very keen to grab that yo-yo! I pointed it out to her. She laughed a bit, and then she tried what I had asked her to do. The yo-yo went down, then up again, then down again—and my student suddenly grabbed the yo-yo. “It’s swinging in the wrong direction,” she said, obviously displeased. In a way she felt the yo-yo was badly behaved, a little nasty even. First, her actor again took over; she couldn’t just wait, watch, receive the pull of the yo-yo on her fingers, feel and enjoy the pull. Second, she didn’t realize that if the yo-yo was Action

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swinging “incorrectly,” this could only be due to something she did herself with her arm and hand. Her witness function was insufficiently present. The witness would say, “She let go of the yo-yo and held her arm up in front of her. Gravity took the yo-yo down, recoil took it up again, though not as far as its starting point. It went down again, wobbling a bit. Then she grabbed the yo-yo with a quick, sudden gesture.” All of this escaped my student. My student’s actor was overactive, her receptor overwhelmed, her witness lacking in “distance” and too involved with the emotions of the situation. We worked on this for a while, and little by little she started sensing how her actor rushed things and put too much effort into its gestures. The receptor and the witness together started informing the actor. Although it’s the most logical thing in the world, it’s difficult to wrap your brain around the idea that the behavior of the yo-yo is a function of your behavior. The yo-yo has absolutely no will of its own! Because of something you do yourself, the yo-yo travels at a certain speed, with a certain trajectory. If you want to change the yo-yo’s trajectory, you don’t change the yo-yo; you change yourself. I showed my student how she could alter the use her arm. She could hold it stiffly, softly, or anything in between. She could hold it far in front of herself or close to herself; she could rotate the arm in pronation or supination; she could move it a lot or a little, quickly or slowly. Instead of testing some of these permutations, her overactive actor had been doing the same thing again and again. In a sense, her actor was out of touch with reason—that is, temporarily insane. You may find this hard to believe or even laughable, but most likely you do a similar thing in some situations in which you find yourself: if not playing with a yo-yo, then dealing with an in-law, or a bureaucrat, or a conductor in an orchestra, or a bow stroke at the violin. Let’s take a simple example. You’re at your computer. The browser seems to be “misbehaving,” pages not showing up, links appearing and disappearing. And yet you keep pressing the same keys again and again, hoping that somehow the program will change its behavior. It’s crazy, huh? Your three functions are equally important. The overactive receptor might proudly say, “I’m sensitive to others; I pay attention.” True enough, but excessive sensitivity to the well-being of others, for instance, can lead you to interfere in their lives and do them harm. Or you might be so sensitive as to die young of a broken heart. The overactive witness might say, “The capacity to observe the world dispassionately is the mark of a civilized human being.” True enough, but the capacity to feel and to act are also essential, and essentially human. To learn more about your actor, receptor, and witness roles, start by watching other people. In their behavior you might see the overeager actor, doing things nonstop; or the indecisive actor, unwilling to take even the smallest risk. You probably know a man or a woman with an overactive receptor, someone a little paranoid who keeps questioning everything you say and do (“What do you mean by that? Why did you do that?”). Or the guy without a witness, unable to articulate a simple thought, put two and two together. The witness doesn’t have to be verbal. You can observe an event in complete silence and summarize important information about it with a few 82

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gestures or a few drawings on a scrap of paper. There are people whose witness function is too overbearing. Such people are able to analyze events and actions in detail and without making moral judgments, but they tend to prefer analyzing to doing and receiving. They describe a swimmer accurately but won’t dip their toes in the swimming pool. Suppose you diagnose an imbalance in your actor, receptor, and witness roles. The timing of your actions is likely to be part of the solution.

HESITATION AND EAGERNESS “He who hesitates is lost.” “Look before you leap.” How to reconcile these contradictory statements? In hesitation there is timidity, insecurity, feeble gestures that fall short of the goal, a false kind of relaxation. In eagerness there is hurry, brusqueness, excess effort and tension, angular motions that overreach their goal. Hirohide Ogawa, Zen teacher and basketball coach, encapsulates these two opposites nicely: “A violent shot can break the post or tear the net, but it will not score. Neither will you impress me with a timid throw that falls short. Rage and fear, two more stepping-stones into the whirlpool.”4 Choose a gesture and take a few moments before executing it: sitting down, striking a chord, singing a scale. Conceive the gesture in your mind, check your desire to rush into action, and direct your energies without doing anything physical. Then decide to act. Immediately you take this decision, act! In other words, give yourself time between conceiving of a gesture and executing it (“Look before you leap”), but not between deciding to act and acting (“He who hesitates is lost”). Husler and Rodd-Marling address this issue in connection with singing: All muscle movements (tensing exercises) should be practiced as rapidly as possible to begin with, never slowly and hesitatingly. . . . [Rapidly executed contractions] remind the muscles, as it were, of their own existence, bypass “bad habits” (habitual kinds of fixity, for instance) and other deficiencies in the vocal organ. . . . [These movements] must be produced, at first, not only rapidly, but suddenly, without forethought or deliberation, in order to avoid certain complications that invariably set in when training begins.5

We find Cornelius L. Reid in complete agreement. It is necessary . . . that the transformation of the breathing mechanism into a sound-producing instrument be initiated instantaneously. To do so other than quickly only serves to introduce interfering tension. . . . Involuntary responses have to be encouraged, and the only way to accomplish this is thorough precision of attack. By responding quickly to the pitch, intensity and vowel pattern, without regard to quality per se, a real breakdown of a wrong coordinative process becomes a distinct possibility.6 Action

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FIGURE 6.1: Lionel Messi

Imagine Mr. Reid sitting at the piano. He asks you to sing the vowel “ah” in forte dynamics, on a note low in pitch. He plays the relevant chord at the piano, and he wants you to respond to the stimulus without further ado. Is the exercise “difficult”? Don’t think about it. Are you comfortable doing it? Don’t think about it. Will you make a pretty sound? Don’t think about it. Act at once and without regard to the end result of your action; otherwise judgment will interfere with action or even prevent it altogether. The fight against hesitation and eagerness, then, takes place at the moment where you pass from deciding to do something to actually doing it. Figure 6.1 shows Lionel Messi, a great soccer player, taking care of himself and “thinking up along the spine” as he makes his decision to act (Figure 6.1). Timing is everything—in sports, in music, and in life. In his book Building a Character, Constantin Stanislavski, the theater director, explores what he calls temporhythm, the pushes and pulls of time in speech, movement, thought, and action. “Good day and good tempo-rhythm to you,” was Tortsov’s greeting to us as he came into class to-day. [Tortsov is Stanislavski himself, thinly fictionalized as an acting teacher.] Then noting our puzzled faces he added: “Are you surprised by my wishing you good tempo or good rhythm instead of, shall we say, good health? Your health can be good or bad but if your tempo-rhythm is 84

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good it is the best evidence of your well-being. That is why to-day I wish you good tempo-rhythm as the equivalent of good health.”7

Knowing how to be slow is as important as knowing how to be fast. Equally important is knowing how to pass from slow to fast and back to slow again. Your temporhythm isn’t unlike the tempo-rhythm of music itself: some of the time you act metronomically (when you walk, for instance), some of the time you use rubato (when you drive in stop-and-go traffic). Good tempo-rhythm entails knowing when to act opportunistically, with little thought. In Chapter 16 we study the principle of opportunism in detail, as well as other rhythmic dimensions of coordination and good use. In conclusion, acting freely is to act from choice rather than from judgment. It entails not anticipating the outcome of your actions and, on acting, analyzing the consequences of your actions without passing judgment. Life is played at the microsecond between deciding to act and acting. Time your actions astutely and you’ll enjoy the game, whether you win it or lose it!

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PART I I

THE PROCEDURES

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CHAPTER 7

THE LEARNING EXPERIENCE

To optimize your study of the Alexander Technique, it can be helpful to distinguish three aspects of it. There is Alexander, the man of flesh and blood who wrote several books and taught thousands of students. Alexander had a health problem in his youth. Looking for solutions to his problem, he had a series of experiences and insights. He understood that the body and the mind always work together, to the point where neither exists independent of the other. The notion of nonduality has existed for thousands of years and is articulated in many philosophies and religions. It’s therefore a universal and timeless principle. Alexander didn’t invent it; he understood it for himself, and the understanding had a deep impact on his life, as it will on yours. Alexander also understood that stimulus and reaction are two separate things. Someone speaks to you. This is the stimulus. You become annoyed. This is the reaction. You say, with complete conviction, “This guy is annoying. He really, really is annoying.” Without being aware of it, you’re amalgamating the stimulus and your reaction to it. It make take years of work for you to realize that, indeed, there is a separation between the stimulus and the reaction, and in this space between the two you can choose how you react to the guy—with annoyance, amusement, indifference, delight, hatred, and so on. This, too, is a universal and timeless principle, and many philosophies and religions have tried to articulate the principle over the millennia. To help others understand universal and timeless principles, Alexander used a chair, a table, some vocal exercises, certain postures and procedures, and also a specific vocabulary: “end-gaining,” “inhibition,” “direction,” “the use of the self.” Put together, all these things form a technical framework. The flesh-and-bones man, the universal and timeless principles, and the technical framework are separate entities. We can be grateful for the man for showing us the way, but to attach too much importance to his existence—what he thought, what he said, and what he did—would mean focusing on the teacher rather than on the lessons we can learn from him. A technical framework helps you study the principles, but it’d be a pity to confuse the framework with the principles, or to favor the

framework over the principles. The framework only exists to help you learn how to work on yourself. If you give too much importance to the framework, you won’t be paying attention to yourself, defeating the purposes for which the framework was created to begin with. Suppose, however, that as part of your learning experience you’d like to know a bit more about Alexander’s way of doing things and the framework that he might have used to connect with timeless and universal principles. Let’s imagine what it was like to take a lesson from him.

ALEXANDER AT WORK It’s impossible to know how Alexander actually taught, since he’s been dead since 1955. Nevertheless, from his writings I culled a few quotes that might give us some idea of how he went about it. He wrote, “I begin with procedures that involve only simple activities on the pupil’s part, such as sitting and rising from a chair.”1 You can learn a lot about yourself from doing something ordinary and attempting to do it in a smooth, self-aware, and unselfconscious way. “Please sit down. Now stand.” It’s much harder than it sounds. Things go wrong: you stiffen your neck, stick your bottom out, and plop down heavily. Then you try to fix those things, and they only become worse. Before long you become embarrassed at how awkward you are, and for the next few weeks you obsess about it. The more frustrated you become, the more awkward your movements. Why go through such a tortuous process? In fact, you’re not actually learning how to sit and stand. Rather, you’re facing a situation and deciding how you want to react to it. In Alexander’s words: It all comes to inhibiting a particular reaction to a given stimulus. But no one will see it that way. They will all see it as getting in and out of a chair the right way. It is nothing of the kind. It is that a pupil decides what he will or will not consent to do.2

Elsewhere, he says that “it is not getting in and out of chairs even under the best of conditions that is of any value, that is simply physical culture—it is what you have been doing in preparation that counts when it comes to making movements.”3 In preparation, you inhibit and direct. You notice things in yourself and around the room, you sense how you distribute your weight along your body, you catch yourself having parasitic thoughts about the chair behind you, and you decide, to the best of your ability, to let go of these thoughts, free your neck, suspend judgment— and, perhaps, bend your knees and sit down. By an apparent miracle, you find yourself floating through the air and sitting down in a completely effortless manner. Sitting and standing, in fact, are only a ruse to get you to work on yourself. Alexander said that “you are not here to do exercises, or to learn to do something right, 90

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but to get able to meet a stimulus that always puts you wrong and to learn to deal with it.”4 The name of the game is Stimulus & Reaction, and to play it well means to deal with being put wrong. The chair is only a prop. You can use any other gesture, situation, exercise, or task to work on yourself and look for the marvelous, healthgiving, happy-making effortlessness that comes from letting go of habit. At some point during your lesson, Alexander might put you in a strange position. To diminish the effort needed to accomplish a physical task—moving a heavy load, for instance—you might use, among others, a lever, an inclined plane, or a system of pulleys. In physics and engineering, a tool’s force-amplifying effectiveness is called mechanical advantage. Alexander borrowed the term from engineering and used it to speak not of tools but of positions. A position of mechanical advantage allows you to achieve greater results with lesser efforts. Suppose you need to pick up a heavy object from the floor and place it on a higher surface. The traditional advice is to say, “Use your knees, not your back.” It’s more accurate and helpful to say, “Keep the back relatively straight and bend down using the knees instead.” Lengthen your spine, bend the knees to squat, take the object in your hands, and straighten the knees to stand up and lift the object in the process. As long as you keep lengthening your spine, “using your knees” gives you a lot of strength and lessens the likelihood of misuse and injury. A well-directed squat, then, is a position of mechanical advantage. Several such positions were part of Alexander’s repertory of teaching tools. Here’s something he wrote about it. The position of mechanical advantage, which may or may not be a normal position, is the position which gives the teacher the opportunity to bring about quickly with his own hands a coordinated condition in the subject. . . . The placing of the pupil in what would ordinarily be considered an abnormal position (of mechanical advantage) affords the teacher an opportunity to establish the mental and physical guiding principles which enable the pupil after a short time to repeat the coordination with the same perfection in a normal position.5

Complicated, huh? Allow me to interpret the paragraph, at the risk of misunderstanding or misrepresenting Alexander. There are many positions of mechanical advantage, some familiar from daily living and others unfamiliar. You seek these positions not only as ends in themselves but also as means to learn “mental and physical guiding principles.” Some positions are challenging, and you can become comfortable in them only if you inhibit and direct. This is their true usefulness to you. Among positions that Alexander used, there are the monkey and the lunge, which we’ll study in depth in the next chapter. Figure 7.1 shows Alexander himself in a lunge, and a young student in a monkey. It’s tempting to think of these positions as exercises to improve your coordination, but behind their convenient mechanical advantage there lies a greater purpose. Alexander said that “all exercises are fundamentally the same in the sense that the activity which goes to their performance is inseparable from the habitual manner of general use of the performer.”6 In other The Learning Experience

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FIGURE 7.1: Positions of mechanical advantage

words, it’s not about “the exercise,” it’s about “you.” You don’t work on the exercise; you work on yourself while performing the exercise—by dealing with your attitudes, your perceptions, your judgments, your choices and decisions. It takes a while to get good at it, but the payoff is huge. If you select one well-designed, fundamental exercise and make a thorough study of it, you might achieve good health thanks to that exercise alone. Mastering the principle behind the exercise is synonymous with mastering yourself. This is why a martial artist performs the same kick every day, dozens of times a day; or why a singer performs a crescendo and diminuendo on a long note every day, dozens of times a day. Your lesson with Alexander, then, might entail your sitting and standing, going into a monkey a few times, and perhaps talking a bit. We can speculate that the “real” lesson was not what he did to you or with you, but what you made of it; not the stimulus he provided, but your reaction to it.

TEACHERS, LESSONS, CLASSES F. M. Alexander started training teachers in 1930. Until his death in 1955 he trained a few dozen teachers, some of whom eventually opened their own training schools. Today there exist thousands of certified Alexander teachers all over the world. As with all professions, teachers run the whole gamut of human talents and foibles, differing in how they interpret the Technique’s principles and in the framework they use in their teaching. Most teachers use touch in their lessons, employing their hands to “read” their students and guide movement. Some teachers think that without touch it’s impossible to impart kinesthetic information to students reliably. Others think that Alexander himself worked through his issues without anybody else’s touching him, proving that touch isn’t actually obligatory as part of the learning experience. Some teachers teach one-on-one lessons; others favor group work. Alexander himself was keen on individual lessons: Reliable sensory appreciation . . . can only be done by individual teaching and individual work. Moreover, people who are massed together are apt to be governed by the “herd instinct,” and we need to help man to evolve beyond that influence as soon as possible, and to this end we must have conscious and individual development.7

Group work, however, has its own merits. You can learn a lot from interacting with other people and from observing your peers as they, too, act and react. According to some teachers, group work is actually preferable to individual lessons, since human beings interact with one another all the time and it’s within group dynamics that you need to sort out who you are.

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Some teachers consider that the most important aspect of the work is movement; others think that stillness is the key. Some teachers work in silence, believing that kinesthetic information is best imparted through touch. Others believe that it’s obligatory to use words in order to direct one’s energies. Some teachers use props and objects, such as a saddle on a wooden horse or a slanting board to help you learn how to squat. Others consider such objects gimmicky. Some teachers use postures from other disciplines, such as yoga and t’ai chi ch’uan, figuring that those postures are also positions of mechanical advantage that help you learn how to inhibit and direct. Other teachers think that it’s best to learn the Alexander Technique with as few references to other disciplines as possible. Indeed, some teachers consider that the Technique is synonymous with the framework that Alexander used in his lifetime, and unless you keep to “his” framework you aren’t learning “his” Technique. There are merits and demerits to each of these approaches. My old teacher, Patrick Macdonald, wrote an interesting little book entitled The Alexander Technique as I See It. The truth is that everyone sees the Alexander Technique in a different light. It’s your job to “go see it with your own eyes” and make of it what you will.

INDIRECT PROCEDURES Although Part I of this book is ostensibly about the principles of the Alexander Technique, it contains several practical exercises, showing that theory and practice are like the body and the mind: if they’re alive, they live together; and if they don’t live together, they’re dead. In the next few chapters, I cover some of the procedures Alexander himself employed in his practical framework. Needless to say, I can only offer you my own understanding or misunderstanding of Alexander’s framework; to some degree I’m not really writing about the Alexander Technique but the “Alcantara Technique.” By bringing your subjectivity and personality to what you read here and elsewhere, you’ll inevitably create your own technique, much as Alexander created his and I created mine. Chapter 8 covers the monkey and the lunge, two useful positions of mechanical advantage. They’ll help you coordinate yourself from head to toe, with an emphasis on the back, pelvis, legs, and feet. Chapter 9 covers a procedure called hands on the back of the chair. It’ll help you coordinate yourself from head to toe, with an emphasis on the back, shoulders, arms, hands, and fingers. Chapter 10 covers a procedure called the whispered “ah.” It’ll help you coordinate yourself from head to toe, with an emphasis on the lips, tongue, jaw, breathing, and speech. Chapter 11 covers constructive rest, which some teachers also call table work or semi-supine. It’ll help you coordinate yourself from head to toe, with an emphasis on release and renewal. 94

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Chapter 12 shifts from procedures to suggestions on methodology and attitude. It’ll help you coordinate yourself from head to toe, with an emphasis on yourself. Suppose you have a specific goal you want to achieve: to free yourself from shoulder pain, for instance, or improve the dexterity of one of your hands. Working on yourself is an indirect procedure, while working on the goal is a direct one. Monkeys, lunges, and all the other exercises may appear unrelated to specific goals, but if you use them as procedures to work on yourself, then you’ll indirectly achieve your goals. Working on yourself is something that you may need to do more or less all the time, your whole life. Ferruccio Busoni, the great pianist and composer, said of practicing the piano that it is “like an animal whose heads are continually growing again, however many one cuts off.”8 Elsewhere he said that, in his life, he completely reworked and relearned his piano technique five times. We can be fairly certain that his first technique was stupendous to begin with, yet he saw fit to redo it, and then again and again. One of the reasons you remake yourself throughout your life is the possibility of reaching ever higher and deeper. Maurice Ravel attended Gabriel Fauré’s composition class at the Paris Conservatoire even after he had written his magnificent string quartet. Lotte Lehmann, at the end of her distinguished singing career, would still take forty-five minutes every day to execute a single, perfect slow scale. Ravel, Lehmann, and Busoni never stopped practicing, learning, and changing. In other words, they worked on themselves ceaselessly. Alexander the rogue liked saying, “We can throw away the habit of a lifetime in a few minutes if we use our brains.”9 It’s entirely true. The catch is that it takes us a lifetime to learn how to use our brains.

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CHAPTER 8

THE MONKEY AND THE LUNGE Back, Pelvis, Legs, Feet

How many joints are there in your body? To get you started, I remind you that your elbow is a joint, as is your knee. You have two elbows and two knees, so that makes four joints already. Your wrist is a joint. The fingers connect to the hand at the knuckle joints. The fingers’ phalanges are connected to one another at joints. Two wrists, ten fingers, many joints. Keep scanning your body mentally and counting your joints. Don’t forget the joint between the jaw and the skull. Do you count it as one joint, or two (one on each side)? When you’re done counting, state out loud how many joints you have. Alternatively, look up the human skeleton on the Internet and see what Google says. Surprising as it may be, it’s not possible to answer the question precisely. Experts don’t agree on the very definition of joint. Some say that your skull is made of many separate parts, and that every two parts meet at a joint that you ought to include in the total count. Others say that those joints aren’t of the same type as your elbows and knees and shouldn’t be counted. A fetus has more joints than an adult; as the fetus develops and grows, some of its bones get fused, eliminating the joints between them. This, too, creates counting difficulties. For our purposes, it isn’t important for you to know the exact number, or the joints’ names or their placement throughout the body. What is important is to realize that you have quite a lot of joints. Some sources say that the adult body has from 250 to 350 joints; other sources give a higher number still. Each joint has an innate capacity for movement. Your elbow joints can bend in certain ways and to certain degrees. The joint between your jaw and your skull has a different range of motion, allowing you to open and close your mouth. Imagine what your life would be like if a joint of yours lost its capacity for movement, forever: you wouldn’t be able to bend or unbend your elbows, for instance. Or your mouth would be either permanently closed or permanently open. It’d make your life awkward, to say the least.

Your joints’ capacity to move, then, is of paramount importance. Now imagine what would happen if every joint in your body moved in sympathy whenever you chose to move a single joint. You bend your elbow a little . . . and your knuckles, your vertebrae, your knees, your ankles, and everything else also moves. This, too, would make your life awkward. Your joints’ capacity not to move, then, is also of paramount importance. Good coordination requires your capacity to move any and all joints, according to the need of a task; and also not to move any and all joints, according to the need of the task. When you play the violin, for instance, you need to bend and unbend at least one of your elbows virtually nonstop. Strictly speaking, however, you don’t need to flex your spine at the same time. Depending how you do it, flexing the spine risks throwing your whole coordination out of balance. It’d be useful for you to know how to bend your elbow and keep your spine relatively still. In this chapter we’ll study two positions of mechanical advantage: the “monkey” and the “lunge.” They’re extremely useful in daily life, and also in making music. And they’re great laboratories for you to explore the art of moving and not moving the joints in your body, with an emphasis on the art of using the hip joints without letting the pelvis disconnect from the back.

THE MONKEY If you’re a typical human being, you probably bend your back and stoop when you lower yourself in space—for instance, to pick up an object on the floor or to wash your face. Your back is innately flexible, and with training it can become very pliable. But just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should do it! Over time, stooping becomes costly, since it’s an inefficient way of directing your energies. In most situations, you’re better off lowering yourself by “going into a monkey.” Stand up and place your feet at shoulder width or slightly wider. Now bend your knees and lean forward from the hip joints, without bending the back. In other words, mobilize the hip, knee, and ankle joints, but not the vertebrae along your spine. The monkey is difficult to perform to perfection, for many reasons. One is the antagonism between direction and movement. Most people pay more attention to the movement that sets up the position than to the directions that initiate the movement. Ideally, you’d think up along the spine before you do anything, think up along the spine as you bend your knees, and think up along the spine as you lean forward. But bending, leaning, moving, and otherwise reacting to the situation will so absorb your attention that you’ll forget to think up. While moving into a monkey, you have to make many quick decisions: do this, don’t do this, do this some more, stop this from happening, do this, don’t do this. The decision-making process needs to be not only efficient but also a lot of fun, or you won’t agree to it. The Monkey and the Lunge

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The monkey is partly a matter of body dynamics, but also a matter of your connecting with the moment and finding your place in it. Can you stay “right here, right now” as you do a monkey, with a mind free of parasitic thoughts? Or do you bring in worry, hesitation, hurry, assumptions, and suppositions? The ultimate difficulty in doing monkeys—and in everything else in your life—is judgment. Monkeys feel wrong when you first do them. You might be so used to bending your back that not doing so feels unnatural. You’ll have a wealth of emotional responses to the very idea of doing the monkey: “It looks wrong. My knees will hurt. I wouldn’t want to do it in public. I don’t like it. Why are you making me do this?” In itself the monkey (using the hip, ankle, and knee joints without bending the spine) is natural and healthy. Accomplished athletes, martial artists, dancers, and musicians do monkeys without a second thought. So do children whose perfect coordination is unimpeded by self-consciousness (Figure 8.1). The nonmonkey (stiffening the hip, ankle, and knee joints and bending the spine instead) is inefficient and

FIGURE 8.1: The monkey

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costly to your well-being. Your judgments of right and wrong, then, prevent you from doing something that happens to be natural, healthy, and necessary. Judgment deserves further study, and we’ll return to it in Chapter 14. For now we’ll practice the monkey to the best of our ability.

WORKING TO PRINCIPLE In the previous chapter we encountered an idea from Alexander: “working to a principle in learning an exercise.” The most important aspect of the principle is to realize that you don’t perform an exercise; instead, you work on yourself through the exercise (or thanks to the exercise). I propose a way to bring this principle into practice. Make a list of everything that can go wrong while you perform an exercise, and then set out to prevent these things from happening. Now, let me rephrase it: make a list of everything that you risk doing wrongly while you perform the exercise, and then set out to stop yourself from doing them. This may sound negative, but to stop the wrong thing is, in fact, an affirmation of life. In this example, we’ll concentrate our “stop the wrong thing” thoughts on the art of using certain joints while not using others. 1. In ideal coordination, the neck and the spine belong together in a unit, and the head is to some degree autonomous from the neck. If your neck is floppy, your head will go back and down (contracting into your spine) or forward and down (hanging toward your chest) whenever you move. In either case, the head will drag the neck with it, and your neck will lose its connection with the spine and instead form an awkward unit with the head. In ideal coordination, your head plays a double role: it “wakes up the spine” and it “wakes up movement.” Direct your head up in space, and your spine (including the neck) will organize itself underneath the head; then get your head to initiate the actual movements of your body through space. Prevent your neck from stiffening or going floppy, and prevent your head from falling forward or backward.

2. In ideal coordination, the back and shoulders belong together in a unit, and the arms are to some degree autonomous from the shoulders. When you lean forward in space, you risk stiffening your arms by the sides of your body. Suppose you decide to relax them. Then they risk becoming heavy and dragging your shoulders forward and down, away from the back where they properly belong. As a result, you end up curving the back, even if by a slight degree. Counterintuitive as it may sound, relaxing your shoulders may be a problem, not a solution! Prevent your arms from stiffening or getting heavy. Prevent your shoulders from tending downward and inward. Prevent your back from losing its length and width. The Monkey and the Lunge

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3. In ideal coordination, the pelvis belongs in a unit with the back, and the legs are to some degree autonomous from the pelvis. If the pelvis starts shifting forward in space as you bend your knees, it may be losing its connection to the back and becoming united, as it were, with the legs. To counter this, you risk stiffening your hip joints, or your ankle joints, or all of them. The connection between the back and pelvis needs firmness, and the separation between the pelvis and the legs needs looseness. It sounds simple, but to achieve it in practice may take years of work. Prevent the pelvis from moving away from the back, and prevent your hip joints from going stiff.

4. The main task is for you to create a circuit of connections throughout the body. At first, specific angles and arrangements can help you connect. Once you are connected, however, the angles and arrangements lose their importance. Knees in or knees apart, feet in or feet out might work equally well if your feet are talking to the knees, the knees are talking to the pelvis, and the pelvis is talking to the back. Before you get the hang of it, though, certain arrangements are more connective than others. As you bend the knees, they go forward in space. They may also start moving inward in space, toward each other; or outward, away from each other. Generally speaking, it’s better for the knees to tend somewhat away from each other rather than toward each other. “Knees in” risks making your legs wobbly. If you don’t overdo it, “knees apart” can have a beneficial effect on the relationship between the pelvis and the back, and on the overall strength of back and legs together. Prevent your knees from tending inward as you bend them.

5. When you bend your knees, the feeling of losing your balance might lead you to tighten your toes and other parts of your feet, such as the ankles. You’re gaining a new balance as you do the monkey, and part of the challenge is for you to agree to let go of the old. It’s indeed a loss of sorts, but necessary and inevitable. Keep your feet flat on the floor and distribute your weight evenly along the feet, and you’ll be comfortable. Prevent your ankles and toes from tightening.

6. In ideal coordination, your ribs will move freely if only you let them. Their movement “is” your breathing. (We’ll look into this in Chapter 10.) The psychophysical effort of performing a monkey can lead you to stop your breathing—that is, to stop moving your ribs. Suppose you notice it, and you decide to do something about it. You risk forcing your breath; and you also risk moving many joints that don’t need to move when you breathe, for instance those along the spine. Prevent your breathing from becoming constricted or forced, and prevent unneeded joints from moving when you decide to let the ribs move.

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How can you do all this and maintain your sanity? It isn’t easy. You need to become a creative artist of monkeys, a monkey dancer, a monkey poet, a monkey clown. As in all learning, use observation, humor, storytelling, rhythm, timing, and anything else that helps you. Another way of studying and mastering any exercise is by varying its technical specifications. Here are some of the specifications you can play with when doing monkeys: • • • •

The distance between feet and their angle to each other The degree to which you bend your knees The degree to which you lean forward The speed of each phase of the movement

These specifications are independent of one another. With feet wide apart, for instance, you may bend the knees and lean forward a lot; with the feet close together, you may bend your knees a lot and not lean forward at all. These are only two examples. Your personal zoo can have a thousand different monkeys. Since the monkey entails bending the knees and leaning forward, there are three basic ways of doing it from a standing position: (1) bend the knees, and then lean forward; (2) lean forward, and then bend the knees; (3) bend the knees and lean forward at the same time. Each is a challenge to your capacity to direct your thoughts and energies. Most people sit down by passing through a quasi monkey. Experiment with going from a monkey to sitting down, and vice versa. Your legs need to be very present for you to do this without scrunching your neck. Note that a very low monkey is the same as a squat.

MONKEY AGAINST THE WALL I’d like to present, in detail, a variation on the theme of the monkey. It consists in going into a monkey with your back against a wall or door, which is very enjoyable when you get the hang of it. The interest of the procedure, however, lies less in its pleasures and more in the wealth of possibilities it offers you to work on yourself. 1. Stand with your back turned to a wall, your body an inch or two away from the wall. Lean back in space until your back touches the wall. Your head doesn’t need to touch the wall; in fact, for most people the head will naturally be a little forward of the wall. Stand for a moment, just sensing your back and the wall behind it. Most likely the contact between your back and the wall will be uneven, one shoulder blade seemingly leaning harder into the wall than the other, or maybe one hip further back than the other. This is one of the exercise’s benefits, as it allows you to study the asymmetries in your body: the habits of shoulders, the habits of hips, the habits of middle

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and lower back. One day you might want to address them, but at first observe yourself dispassionately without judgment or criticism. If you act too soon or too harshly, feeling that “things are all wrong and you should do something about it,” you risk doing the wrong thing anyway, or doing it in the wrong spirit—taking a shoulder blade too far, pushing, twisting, or forcing. 2. There you are, leaning calmly against the wall and feeling the wall and your back against it. Put your hands on your hips, with the thumbs facing forward and the little fingers backward, and point your elbows against the wall. In itself, this gesture is a psychophysical challenge, as you risk lifting and contracting your shoulders in the process, or curving your back, or letting your neck move forward. Isolate this gesture and perform it a few times: put your hands on your hips, point your elbows against the wall, then relax the arms; and again, hands on hips, elbows against the wall, then relax the arms. It becomes a meditation on how to find the mobility of the joints involved (shoulders, elbows, wrists, and fingers) without tensing elsewhere along the circuit. Decide to put your hands on your hips, then refuse to carry out your own decision. This allows you to break the habit of doing, doing, doing! Imagine that you can put air or light in all of your joints, which then “move as forms of energy” rather than “forms of skin, flesh, and bones.” Move your arms and hands as if you were a royal dancer from Cambodia, your limbs moving to a sacred song, never contracting, never losing their connection with your back, never losing their connection with your mind, heart, and soul. 3. Put your hands on your hips and point your elbows against the wall. Keep them there for a moment. Decide that your elbows will anchor your upper body against the wall and will not move or slide up or down the wall. Use your hands to gently tuck your pelvis, unhollowing your lower back; while doing it, bend your knees a bit. This will cause you to somewhat flatten the lower back against the wall while stretching it a few millimeters lower in space. 4. Let go of your arms, which will hang by the side of your body. Enjoy the feeling of the flattened back against the wall. The wall supports and welcomes you. One day you might imagine that your back is permanently supported by an invisible, friendly wall. And your back might become “like the wall”: solid, stable, wide, long, and strong. 5. Keep your butt against the wall and lean forward slightly in space. The difficulty lies in directing your spine and hinging from the hip joints. You’re likely to hinge from somewhere in your middle or upper back, and to let your head and neck droop forward and down. The entire procedure depends on your using some joints while refraining from using others. In this case, your trunk moves as a whole from the hip joints, and every joint along the spinal column stays firm, from the coccyx up to the atlanto-occipital joint between the spine and the skull. Until you’ve done it hundreds of times, this will feel wrong to you: too stiff, too blocky, unnatural. Well-coordinated children and adults, however, keep their trunk whole and relatively rigid in diverse settings and situations. In sports, for instance, you’ll get a lot more strength in your gestures if you keep the trunk whole. Watch a good juggler and you might notice that the 102

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extravagant movements of the arms and hands barely affect the trunk. Even when the juggler starts walking or running at the same time she juggles, she’ll keep her trunk relatively rigid. The firm trunk, then, is natural; it’s the disorganized trunk of your adult habit that is unnatural and ultimately unhealthy. Isolate this aspect of the exercise. Lean forward a little, and then lean back again. What happens to your legs and feet, to your shoulders and arms, to your head and neck, to your trunk, to your breathing? It takes a while to direct yourself into movement and remain aware of how your movements affect your coordination. 6. Suppose that you can now lean forward without losing the oneness of your trunk. Stay there a moment, leaning forward in space with your butt against the wall and your knees slightly bent. This is a monkey supported by the wall. Now shift your weight forward a little, until your butt isn’t touching the wall anymore. How do you start the movement? Who does what, where, when, how much, and what for? Answering this question is tricky, and it helps if you ask the question in the right spirit: playfully, imaginatively, addressing the laughing child within. 7. The entire procedure can happen like “a dance with a text,” in which you move rhythmically in response to a linguistic stimulus. Choose a steady rhythm with a pulse, like a heartbeat. Keeping to the pulse, scat a text out loud (“ba-DAM, ba-DAM, ba-DA-da ba-DAM!”). Then make the various gestures coincide with beats in your song: walking toward the wall, leaning against it, raising your hands to place them on your hips, tucking your pelvis and bending your knees, and so on. You don’t need to compose a specific song for your monkey against the wall; the important thing is for you to think and move according to a rhythmic energy. Rhythm is an energetic impulse that carries you forward and makes it easier for you to pass from gesture to gesture smoothly. A basketball player moving down the court, dribbling, passing, receiving, jumping, and scoring will succeed or fail according to the rhythms of the play. (We develop the subject of rhythm in Chapter 16.) 8. You can do monkeys against the wall at home, in your practice room, backstage during the intermission of a concert, anytime, anywhere. Stay in a monkey against the wall and sing or play your instrument. Use the wall to stabilize your posture, and sense how it affects your breath at the oboe or your bowing at the violin.

THE LUNGE The lunge is a cousin of the monkey. Again you lower yourself in space, but now placing your feet asymmetrically and perhaps keeping one knee bent, the other straight. Otherwise, its basic principle is the same as the monkey’s: bending the joints (of hips, knees, and ankles) while keeping the spine undisturbed. There are numerous ways of lunging. I propose a version with several intermediate steps, each a useful challenge in itself. I describe a left lunge—that is, one in which the left foot ends up ahead of the right in space. A right lunge requires mirror steps on the other side of the body. The Monkey and the Lunge

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1. Stand up and bring your feet side by side, close together. 2. Put the heel of the left foot on the hollow of the right foot, advancing the left foot forward slightly and placing it at an angle of about forty-five to sixty degrees to the right foot. 3. Turn your head and trunk so that you face the same direction as your left toes. 4. Lift your left knee up in the air, so that your foot is clear of the floor. 5. Lean forward and let the left foot drop and land lightly on the floor, away from the right foot. 6. Bend your left knee slightly. 7. Lean your trunk forward, from your hips. Figure 8.2 illustrates a few of the steps in the sequence. Several of the misuses that afflict a badly coordinated monkey are also evident in a lunge. We won’t list them all again; instead, we’ll consider each intermediate step and the new challenges it brings. 1. When you put your feet wide apart or bring them close together again, you risk putting all your attention on your legs and feet. But if you neglect to direct the head and neck, they’ll flop around as you move, causing the whole body to become disorganized and affecting the movements of the legs and feet. As you shift your balance from leg to leg, it’s better to keep the torso unified, with the head, neck, back, shoulders, and pelvis moving as a single block. Contracting the torso or swinging the hips is a compensating mechanism for an apparent loss of balance. Aim not to keep your balance at every moment, but rather to lose your balance without losing the lengthening of the spine. If you find yourself dragging your feet as you open and close your legs, you’re probably making your body heavy. Think up-and-away from your feet and bend your knee a little when you decide to move a leg. Prevent yourself from “losing your head” and from contracting or twisting the torso. Prevent yourself from dragging your feet.

2. To put the heel of one foot next to the hollow of the other, you need to shift your body weight slightly, so that one leg supports most of the body weight and the other moves freely from the hip joint. Whenever you shift your body weight, you risk disconnecting the pelvis from the back. In order to turn your foot, you could conceivably hinge at the ankle joint. It may be better to turn the entire leg as a unit, hinging from the hip joint. When you do so, you risk turning the pelvis together with the leg. The pelvis, however, is more comfortable when it remains unified with the back. The perennial difficulty in coordination is to keep the back and pelvis relatively firm, and the hip joints quite free. Prevent yourself from losing the connection between the back and the pelvis, and prevent yourself from stiffening the hip joint of the moving leg. 104

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FIGURE 8.2: The lunge

3. Turn your torso and realign it with the left foot (which is now at a forty-five to sixty degree angle to the right foot). The challenge lies in keeping the torso unified. As usual, you risk “losing your head.” Now you also risk losing your shoulders (which you might turn too far relative to the pelvis) or your pelvis (which you might turn too far independently of the back). Prevent yourself from losing the unity of the trunk and the length of the spine.

4. Lift your knee up in the air. To lift the knee freely, you need to keep the hip joint free . . . and to free the hip joint, you need to firm up the connection between the back and pelvis . . . and to firm up the back and pelvis, you need to connect the neck and the spine . . . and to connect the neck and spine you need to direct your head forward and up. To relax your body would cause the whole chain of connections to crumble! Prevent yourself from tightening or collapsing.

5. You’ve been standing momentarily (for a second or three or ten) on your leg with the other knee a bit up in the air and the foot off the floor. Now you’re going to lean forward in space and put your front foot down. Most likely you’ll reach forward with the foot, and the leg will follow the foot, and the pelvis will follow the leg, disturbing the all-important connection between the back and pelvis. Instead, think up along the spine, let your head orient you in space and in movement, let your back move forward in tandem with the head and neck, and use your front foot not to initiate movement but to catch yourself from falling. Prevent yourself from using the foot as the initiator of forward movement.

6. When you land on your front foot, the leg will naturally be bent at the hip, knee, and ankle. Once you find yourself in this position, you may bend and unbend your front knee at will. But if you neglect to energize your head and neck, you’ll tend to initiate your movements in space with the pelvis, which then disconnects from the back. Prevent yourself from using the pelvis as the initiator of forward movement.

You don’t need to do the step-by-step procedure every time you lunge. Combine one or more of the steps in the sequence. For instance, in a single gesture bring your feet together, place your left heel in your right hollow, and turn your head and trunk. In time all you have to do is think up and take a step, big or small, and—that’s it. You’ll be lunging. Alexander wrote at length about the lunge in his first book, Man’s Supreme Inheritance. He makes the point that right walking starts with right standing, and he explains the connection between the two: 106

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[The close-footed lunge] is physiologically correct as a primary factor in the act of walking. The weight is thrown largely upon the rear foot, and this enables the other knee to be bent and the forward foot to be lifted; at the same time the ankle of the rear foot should be bent so that the whole body is inclined slightly forward, this allowing the propelling force of gravitation to be brought into play.1

Most people walk by moving forward with their feet first, then dragging their pelvis behind the feet, and then dragging the back behind the pelvis. Instead, Alexander suggests that you use the movement of the body itself—not the feet—as the primary source of forward motion in walking. In effect you’ll be walking up off every step, rather than down into every step. It goes somewhat like this: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Think up along the spine. Put your weight mostly on the back leg. Lift the front knee a bit. Lean forward very slightly. Let your front foot catch you, but don’t put too much weight down.

Get into the swing of things, and you’ll set in motion a relatively automatic sequence of events that “does the walking” for you: think up, lift the knee, lean forward, let the foot catch you; up, lift, lean, catch; up, up, up, up! It’s no big deal to go from lunging to sitting and vice versa: 1. Calm down, open your mind, and think up along the spine. 2. Think up along the spine and stand in a close-footed lunge with the back of the legs almost touching the seat of the chair. One foot will be slightly forward of the other. 3. Think up along the spine, choose whether you want to remain perfectly upright or lean forward slightly, and bend your knees until seated. The heel of the back foot might come up off the ground a bit. 4. Standing up is more or less the reverse of that: think up along the spine, point your heel down, choose whether you want to remain upright or lean forward, and unbend your knees until you stand. Get the hang of monkeys and lunges, and your sitting, standing, walking, climbing, leaning, bending, and squatting will all flow, one from the other.

MOVEMENT, AESTHETICS, AND IDENTITY If you perform standing—as a woodwind or upper-string soloist, as a Lied singer, as a conductor—you’d benefit a lot from using a discreet lunge. Figure 8.3 shows the trombonist Eugen Reiche demonstrating it. The Monkey and the Lunge

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FIGURE 8.3: Eugen Reiche

Hotteterre-le-Romain, writing in 1699, advised flutists, oboists, and recorder players alike to stand on a lunge (although he doesn’t call the recommended posture a lunge): If standing, the player should be well balanced on the legs, with the left foot advanced, and the weight of the body resting chiefly on the right hip. This position must be maintained without the least constraint. . . . These directions, carefully followed, will promote a very graceful attitude, which will be not less pleasing to the eye than the tone of the instrument will be agreeably soothing to the ear.2

Here’s one way to go about it: 1. Think up along the spine. 2. Carry on thinking up along the spine and place yourself in a close-footed lunge. 3. Carry on thinking up along the spine, stay in a close-footed lunge, and bring your instrument up to playing position. 4. Carry on thinking up along the spine, stay in a close-footed lunge, and play a few notes. 108

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5. Carry on thinking up along the spine, stay in a close-footed lunge, and play a whole concerto in public. The biggest difficulty in the procedure is to think up along the spine at all times. Despite your best intentions, you’re likely to neglect it again and again. And when you remember to do it, “it feels wrong.” This is the crux of the whole matter: what is right feels wrong, and what is wrong feels right. To understand how these simple procedures aren’t a matter of body mechanics alone but psychology and aesthetics as well, perform a thought experiment. William Primrose, the foremost violist of his time, spoke emphatically against excessive movement on stage: I sometimes see a lot of bobbing and weaving on the part of the soloist. . . . With a few [musicians], [this weaving] becomes almost a vulgarity. The facial expressions and the sinuous movements and gyrations simulate those of a belly dancer. . . . Sometimes I can draw a student up sharp by saying, “Look, with your moving about in that way, you have to remember that the F-holes are on different planes all the time. The tone is always coming out at a different angle, which is undesirable. Also, from my standpoint, your gyrating is unsightly.”3

Richard S. Rockstro wrote a comprehensive treatise on the flute, drawing from many historical sources. Of a flutist’s moving on stage, Rockstro writes: The player should stand or sit as still as possible; there must be no swaying of the head or the body in cadence with the music, nor must there be any of the ungainly and ridiculous rolling and contortions too often substituted for musical expression. A true musician will endeavor to produce an effect by his artistic rendering of the music of which he is the exponent, not by any acting or attitudinizing.4

The thought experiment consists in your “being” the player that Primrose describes, then “becoming” the player that Rockstro describes. How willingly and how easily would you give up all your unnecessary movements and “stand or sit as still as possible”? The monkey and the lunge invite you to render your trunk relatively immobile. This might give you uncomfortable sensations of constraint and rigidity at first. But you can actually move in a lot of ways without losing the connections between the neck and the spine, the back and the shoulders, and the back and the pelvis: you can bend at the hips, knees, and ankles, you can shift your body weight in multiple directions, you can pivot, you can jump up and down . . . the list goes on. It’s useful to draw a distinction between movement and mobility. Mobility is latent movement: the body or a body part is ready to move, whether or not it moves. Movement is utilized latency. As long as you keep your connections and directions, movement is all good. If, however, you lose your connections and directions when you move, you might prefer to stay mobile without actually moving. The Monkey and the Lunge

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Investigate all these possibilities for yourself, and then decide how you want to live and make music. Movement or stillness? Latency or action? Gyrations or connections? You’re the boss of your life. The companion volume Integrated Practice furthers the discussion of the lunge, with an emphasis on its stability and application to music making. The relevant section is titled “The Lunge: Resistance and Mobility Revisited,” in Chapter 13 of that book. Please refer to video clip no. 44, “The Lunge.”

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CHAPTER 9

REACHING OUT Shoulders, Arms, Hands, Fingers

Ask a friend to stand up and lift both his arms in front of him, as if readying himself to conduct a big symphony orchestra. You can bet that your friend will sway his upper body backward, pull his head back and down, lift his shoulders, and stick his pelvis forward. Then lift your arms and ask your friend to describe how you do it. I bet that you’ll behave in a similar way, as do most people. Although your upper limbs are essential to your music making, you can’t coordinate them well unless you pay attention to your whole body at the same time. Alexander developed a procedure that addresses this issue. He called it hands on the back of a chair and described it in detail in his second book, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual. You can do it seating, standing, in a monkey or lunge, and in many other ways. For the sake of brevity we’ll focus on a version where you remain seated. You need two chairs: one to sit on, the other for you to handle. The type of chair matters little, but you might want to use normal dining-room chairs, with a firm seat that doesn’t slope forward or backward, and without a rim that could cut into your thighs. The exercise is very simple. Sit on one chair and place the other in front of you, with its back facing you. Now bring your hands up and hold the railing of the second chair. The actuality of performing it, however, is complex. To be seated in a dynamic manner, to reach out for an object without misusing yourself, and to hold and manipulate the object freely is quite a task. Before we look at the exercise itself, we’ll consider several aspects of coordination that play a role in the exercise, and by extension in your life. We’ll look at pronation and supination, which are arm rotations; the relationship between the elbows and the wrists; and the sitting position. Then we’ll study the exercise itself, which will lead us to ponder the issue of power and strength in your arms and fingers. We’ll look at bilateral transfer and quadrilateral transfer, which are forms of dialogue between your limbs. Finally, we’ll look at injuries to the hands and the healing process.

FIGURE 9.1: Leopold Stokowski

The companion volume, Integrated Practice, contains an exercise to help you lift your arms without misusing your back. The exercise is called “The Plunge,” and it’s described in Chapter 13. The relevant video clips are number 45, “The Plunge I: From Above, the Basics”; number 46, “The Plunge II: From Above, Variations”; and number 47, “The Plunge III: From the Side.” Figure 9.1 shows the conductor Leopold Stokowski lifting his arms without misusing his back. Figure 9.2 shows William Primrose lifting his arm and holding a viola without misusing his back.

PRONATION AND SUPINATION Stand with your arms hanging by the side of your body. In this position, pronating your arms means rotating them so that your palms face backward, and supinating your arms means rotating them so that your palms face forward. 112

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FIGURE 9.2: William Primrose

Now stand with your arms held straight in front of you. In this position, pronating your arms means rotating them so that your palms face downward, and supinating your arms means rotating them so that your palms face upward. The terms may be used for other body parts, such as the legs and feet. If you tend to lean on the outside of your heels when walking, you’re supinating your feet; if you tend to lean on the inside of your heels, you’re pronating your feet. Look at a pair of well-worn shoes and you’ll know whether you’re a pronator or a supinator. Pronation and supination also apply to the position of the whole body: you’re prone if you lie on your stomach, supine if you lie on your back. Regardless of what you do, you’re permanently pronating your arm or part of it, or supinating your arm or part of it, or combining degrees of pronation and supination at once, or changing these combinations in movement and in space. A sevenpart video study associated with Integrated Practice covers the basics of pronation and supination. The next sections discuss the contents of each video clip. Reaching Out

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1. SHOULDERS AND BACK

Put your right hand on your chest, like a kid learning to sing the national anthem. Place the hand high enough on the chest for the right fingertips to touch the left side of the collarbone. Now pronate and supinate your left arm. What happens to the collarbone and shoulder? Most likely you’ll turn the shoulder forward when you pronate the arm and backward when you supinate it. Ideally, however, your shoulder would offer a gentle degree of opposition and resistance to the moving arm: within a certain range of motion you’d pronate your arm and the shoulder would refuse to move forward, and you’d supinate your arm and the shoulder would refuse to move backward. Keep your hand on your chest and use the fingertips of your right hand to invite the collarbone (and by extension, the shoulder) not to move; then pronate and supinate your arm again. As long as you keep your shoulder in a unit with the back, you’ll be better able to rotate your arms without overly engaging the shoulder. This exercise is illustrated in video clip number 27, “Pronation & Supination I: Shoulders & Arms.” 2. HANDS AND WRISTS

Hold your arms gently stretched in front of you, with your hands at about chest height. Keep your wrists floppy and let your hands hang loose. Then rotate your arms at high speed from pronation to supination and vice versa. What happens to your arms and to the rest of your body? Everything wobbles. Now make relaxed fists of your hands, thereby firming up your wrists. In the same position as before, rotate your arms at high speed. Everything stops wobbling. The behavior of your wrists and hands, then, plays a role in the behavior of your arms. When you ponder pronation and supination, keep in mind that floppy wrists tend to cause wobbliness. This exercise is illustrated in video clip number 28, “Pronation & Supination II: Arms & Hands.” 3. CONVEXITY AND CONCAVITY

In Chapter 2 we studied convexity and concavity, two opposing ways of directing your energies and occupying the various spaces in and around your body. Depending on how you direct your arms, they too can create convex or concave spaces. Turn your arms in supination and glue your elbows to the sides of your body, and you’ll create concave supination, which you can exaggerate (for the pleasure of learning something useful) by scrunching your neck, lifting your shoulders, and keeping your wrists floppy. Now keep your back erect and open, lift your arms in supination with elbows lightly raised as if greeting a group of beloved friends, and you’ll create convex supination. Sit slumped in a chair and place your pronated arms limp and lifeless against your body, and you’ll create concave pronation. Sit erect at a table, put

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your palms flat down on the tabletop with your elbows lightly energized away from your sides, and you’ll create convex pronation. All these patterns of use and misuse can happen along a continuum from exaggeration to subtlety. Wherever you are on the continuum, convexity is more constructive than concavity. This exercise is illustrated in video clip number 29, “Pronation & Supination III: Convex/Concave.” 4. RESISTANCE AND OPPOSITION

The arms communicate with each other through the back. If you lose the awareness of your back, the communication between arms will suffer. Do this exercise with a partner: hold your arms up in front of you, in any one combination of pronation and supination. Ask your partner to gently take hold of your arms and apply a little pressure to them. Meet the pressure from your partner by engaging your back, as if you were pushing your partner back in space. This will create a feeling that your arms “belong” to the back. You might feel a long circuit of connections from the fingertips of one arm to the fingertips of the other arm through the back. While meeting your partner’s pressure, start moving your arms in various degrees of pronation and supination: turn them, raise and lower them, move them across your chest, and so on. Keep meeting the pressure from your partner at all times. You’ll feel that resistance and mobility are complementary, rather than mutually exclusive. This exercise is illustrated in video clip number 30, “Pronation & Supination IV: Resistance.” 5. DIRECTION

In Chapter 5, we studied the flow of energy running through your body. Lift an arm in front of your body, as if to hail a taxicab. Using your imagination alone, you can change the arm’s energy by making it feel as if supported from underneath or suspended from above, heavy or light, outward-oriented or inward-oriented, and so on. The energies in your arms affect pronation and supination. Suppose you play the violin and you can’t quite figure out how best to rotate your left arm in order to hold the instrument and play with accurate intonation and a free vibrato. You risk thinking that the problem is mechanical, having to do with degrees of pronation and supination. But it’s possible that the problem is directional, having to do with degrees of heaviness and lightness (or other qualities of energy). When practicing, alternate moments when you concern yourself with the position of your arms in space with moments when you concern yourself with the energies you send along your arms. In time the two approaches—mechanical and directional—will become one and the same. This exercise is illustrated in video clip number 31, “Pronation & Supination V: Direction.”

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6. MOVEMENT

It’s relatively easy to create good directions and oppositions as you hold an arm in either pronation or supination. It’s somewhat harder to keep these directions and oppositions as you move freely, passing from pronation to supination and back again. It’s harder still as you move both arms, sometimes symmetrically and sometimes asymmetrically, as required by the tasks of daily life and music making. Look at your right palm, and then rotate the forearm and hand so that you look at the back of the hand. This is a simple rotation, passing from supination to pronation. Do the same thing for the left hand and forearm. Now rotate both arms, symmetrically and at the same time. Then turn the arms asymmetrically: when you rotate the right arm from pronation to supination, you rotate the left one from supination to pronation. Now turn them asymmetrically and at different speeds, perhaps by rotating the right arm quickly and the left one slowly. It’s a little harder, isn’t it? When we become overly absorbed by the rotations, we neglect those elements that actually facilitate the rotations: the connection between the shoulders and the back, the floppiness or firmness of the wrists, and the qualities of direction and energy along the arms. This exercise is illustrated in video clip number 32, “Pronation & Supination VI: Movement.” The series of clips ends with a brief demonstration of arm rotations in music making in video clip number 33, “Pronation & Supination VII: At the Viola.”

ELBOWS OUT, WRISTS IN Sit at a table and place your hands flat on the tabletop, palms facing down. You can rotate your hands by turning your little fingers out, away from each other; or inward, toward each other. If you turn your little fingers out, the wrists will move in toward each other; if you turn your little fingers in, the wrists move out, away from each other. For our purposes, turn the little fingers out, thereby letting the wrists come in. With your hands so placed, you can keep your elbows close to your body (as if stuck to your sides) or you can point the elbows away from your body. For our purposes, point your elbows out. You can do these movements gently or exaggeratedly. Do them gently for now. You’ve arranged your arms in such a way that the elbows are tending out and the wrists are tending in. The opposition of forces (or tendencies, if you prefer) between the elbows and the wrists organizes the arms quite constructively. In this position, tap the tabletop with your little fingers, and you’ll see that your fingers are indeed rather strong. If you reverse the arrangement and bring the elbows in and turn the wrists out, your fingers will feel rather handicapped. “Elbows out, wrists in” isn’t just a way to free your little fingers. It’s a foundational gesture for all instrumentalists as well as conductors, contributing to dexterity but also sound production, legato, and many other aspects of technique and musicianship. 116

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Refer back to Chapter 2 and the photos of Pablo Casals and Janos Starker at the cello. Although the two men have very different aesthetic outlooks, they both direct their elbows in opposition to their wrists. In cello playing the left hand has several separate functions, in particular articulation of notes on the fingerboard, vibrato, extensions between fingers in the same position, shifting positions, and left-hand pizzicato. With the elbow out and the wrist in, the hand finds itself in the best position to articulate notes; the fingers can extended farther and more easily within each position; the left arm shifts more smoothly, and the hand prepares each new position more readily; the vibrato becomes easier to control and alter; the left fingers are in a better position to pluck the strings in left-hand pizzicati; and the arm has greater mobility and readiness to move from string to string. (Note that “elbow out” doesn’t mean “elbow up”! It’s possible to keep your elbows quite low—which is often advantageous—and direct them either in or out.) Elbows out, wrists in is similarly beneficial for the right arm at the cello, even though it has completely different functions from the left arm. When the right elbow tends outward, it’s easier to transfer the power that comes from the back and legs, through the arm and fingertips, to the point of contact between the bow and the string itself. The arm is also better able to make the adjustments in height necessary to cross from string to string. Before you think that elbows out, wrists in is a cello trick, go on YouTube and use the search words “Arthur Rubinstein Recital Pasadena 1975.” (At the time of writing, the URL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLH6_xaje8Y was valid for the clip in question.) Cameras show him at the piano in profile, from the front, from the back, and from above. Besides enjoying his brilliant playing, watch closely how Rubinstein keeps his elbows out and his wrists in throughout the entire performance, regardless of what the music score demands of his hands. Now look at the photo of Leopold Stokowski at the beginning of this chapter. He too directs his elbows out and his wrists in. Indeed, the relationship is universally useful, whether you’re a string player, a pianist, a wind player, a conductor, or anyone else. Practice elbows out, wrists in in daily life, for instance when you type at the computer. Practice it at rest, for instance by placing your hands on a tabletop and doing nothing other than directing your energies. Practice it when you do “hands on the back of the chair,” for instance by touching the railing of the chair in front of you and experimenting with the angles of the wrists and elbows. Then practice it in your instrumental or conducting technique. The companion volume Integrated Practice examines the relationship of elbows out, wrists in. The relevant video clips are number 56, “The Song of Pronation I: An Introduction”; and number 57, “The Song of Pronation II: An Application.”

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DYNAMIC SITTING In some ways, it’s easier for most people to discover how best to stand and walk than how best to sit. Standing and walking are dynamic, while sitting is comparatively static. In standing and walking you can adjust your coordination easily and in multiple directions. Sitting is more constrained by definition, and it tends to make most people lumpy or stiff. The challenge, then, is to find dynamism in the sitting position. Leaning back against the back of the chair makes it a bit hard to move forward, backward, sideways, or up out of the chair. Sitting upright and relatively forward on the chair, without leaning back, makes it easier for you to direct your energies and prepare movement. There are merits and demerits to both positions. Your body type, your habits, the type of chair you’re using, and your objectives all affect how you sit now and how you might decide to sit in the future. For our purposes, we’ll assume you’re sitting relatively far forward in the chair, on your sit bones rather than on your thighs, with your back erect, the spine long, the head mobile, and the feet flat on the floor. Your task is to sit “in the moment,” ready to move and also ready to wait for a long while—for instance, for the ninety minutes that an orchestral rehearsal lasts until the break. Sit and do nothing. Sit and stay awake and alert as you do nothing. Sit and feel your body, sit and observe the world, sit and share your awareness between everything happening inside yourself and everything happening outside yourself. While sitting you can move your head, lean backward or forward, stand up and sit down again. This is latent mobility, at your disposal whether or not you use it. While seated, ask a friend to stand behind you, put his hands on your shoulders, and push you down a bit. If you’re sitting upright on your sit bones, you can meet your friend’s pressure effortlessly, just employing the innate power of the back and legs. This is latent resistance, at your disposal whether or not you use it. Sitting, like many positions, is most comfortable when it contains both latent resistance and latent mobility. Integrated Practice covers sitting in detail. The section in question is titled “Sitting and Rocking” in chapter 12, and its materials are illustrated in four video clips: number 23, “Sitting & Rocking I: The Basics”; number 24, “Sitting & Rocking II: At the Cello”; and, at the piano, number 25, “Sitting & Rocking III: From the Side,” and number 26, “Sitting & Rocking IV: From the Back.”

REACHING OUT Now that you’re sitting dynamically, we’ll cover the next aspect of the procedure: using your arms and hands to reach out and handle something. As you know, there’s a second chair in front of you, awaiting your touch. We might say that the second chair represents everything that isn’t “you.” It’s the piano or the cello that you’ll play at some point; it’s the physical world and its objects, the 118

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computer, the car, the kitchen utensils you make lunch with; it’s also everyone you’ll physically touch. The second chair is the “other,” and as such it also symbolically represents things and people you won’t ever touch—like your orchestra’s conductor, for instance. The main difficulty in this exercise or meditation is for you to reach out toward something that is not you and not lose your directions, your connections, and your awareness of yourself. Ideally, reaching out doesn’t disconnect you; rather, it increases your connections. You can handle that second chair in front of you by “going for it,” concentrating on it and concerning yourself with it; or you can handle it by remaining seated, so to speak, and in touch with your inner moment. It’s a matter of finding a balance between inner and outer domains, private and public, self and other. There are many ways of going about it, but here’s a possible approach. Organize the situation according to a certain hierarchy. You’re more important than the chair in front of you. Within yourself, your head, neck, and back are most important. The pelvis is connected with the back and leads to your legs and feet. The shoulders are connected with the back and lead to your arms and hands. Along your upper limbs, the arms are more important than the hands and the hands are more important than the fingers. It goes something like this: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Ignore the chair in front of you and direct your head, neck, and back. Keep direction 1 going, and direct your back, pelvis, legs, and feet. Keep directions 1 and 2 going, and direct your back and shoulders. Keep directions 1, 2, and 3 going, and direct your arms, hands, and fingers. Keep directions 1, 2, 3, and 4 going, lift your arms, and hold the railing of the chair in front of you.

You’ll hold the chair, manipulate it, and control it much more efficiently if you create an organized circuit of connections throughout your body (Figure 9.3). You might feel a paradox in action: the movement seems to originate from your back . . . no, no, it seems to originate from the fingertips . . . no, no . . . it’s both at the same time!

HOLDING AND HANDLING AN OBJECT Your hands can do many things with the chair in front of you. Suppose your priority is just to direct the flow of energy along your arms. Then you can touch the chair with barely registered force; the chair is there only to give you a frame of reference for the positioning of your arms in space. But suppose you want to prevent someone else from taking the chair from your hands. Then you’ll need to hold the chair more firmly. The first difficulty lies in using the appropriate touch. It’s only too easy to hold the chair more firmly than necessary, without realizing you’re doing it. It’s just as Reaching Out

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FIGURE 9.3: Reaching out without losing yourself

easy to hold it floppily when you mean to hold it firmly. Exercise yourself along the force continuum, touching the chair triple pianissimo first, then increasing your hold until you’re gripping it with fortissimo strength. How many gradations do you have at your disposal? How smoothly can you pass from gradation to gradation? The second difficulty lies in using yourself well in every gradation. A firm touch might cause you to contract your neck. A soft touch is also challenging. Test this by touching the chair very lightly and seeing how long you can do it without fatiguing yourself. Directing your head, neck, and back as you hold the object will help you achieve mastery of gradation. The third difficulty lies in controlling your timing. You can touch the chair in front of you for a microsecond or for an eternity. If you mean to do it for a microsecond, then doing it for a second is way too long! Your gauge for timing can be like your gauge for dynamics: extremely fine or not so fine. It takes training to “master the microsecond.” The fourth difficulty lies in combining dynamics and timing. Up to the precise moment when you take hold of the chair, you keep your arms in a state of freeflowing, tensionless energy. When you take hold of the chair and keep your arms up in space, you’ll need slightly more power. The difference in tension between not holding the chair and holding the chair can become ever smaller, until you pass from one to the other imperceptibly. Now you begin to see the merit of this procedure: it’s a form of silent music, allowing you to practice vitally important aspects of your musicianly life without having to worry about intonation, the right notes, and suchlike. Your hands interact with objects in a remarkable number of ways. Just to list a few possibilities, you can take a tennis ball in your hands and poke, caress, squeeze, turn, or throw it. Train your hands’ intelligence and creativity by doing varied things to the chair in front of you. Place the chair asymmetrically, or close to your body, or far from it. Then reach for the chair, hold it, move it, and see how adaptable your hands and arms are—and your mind, too. For some people, asymmetry “feels wrong,” and just to face a chair placed at a funny angle is enough to cause them to lose their composure. Integrated Practice covers the issue of handling objects. The section in question is titled “Object Wisdom” in chapter 13. Please refer to video clips number 49, “Object Wisdom I: The Broom”; number 50, “Object Wisdom II: The Basketball”; and number 51, “Object Wisdom III: The Piano.” After practicing these variations and combinations with the chair, do a version of the exercise with your instrument. Suppose you’re a pianist. Sit at the piano and work on yourself first and foremost. Then bring your hands to the piano without losing your head. Then play notes and chords of varying length and dynamics, still without losing your head. Then play one of the pieces in your repertory . . . without losing your head.

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POWER AND STRENGTH IN THE ARMS To make music, you need to exert power in some way. Is power the same thing as tension? It depends on how you define your terms. Suppose you’re a pianist of average coordination. To play loudly you’re likely to lift your shoulders, pull your back down, and bear down on the piano keys with contracted arms, wrists, hands, and fingers. First you create tensions within yourself, and then you fight against these very tensions, believing all the while that you’re merely using the force needed to play loudly! Loud playing actually requires greater relaxation, and less effort, than quiet playing. Gerhard Mantel makes this point on cello playing: The louder the sound the more relaxed the musculature will be. This rule is easily demonstrated: If the frog of the bow is placed on the string and the arm is completely relaxed, an unnecessary amount of pressure is resting on the string. To diminish this pressure we must use the musculature that holds up the arm. This fact alone shows us how cautious we must be with words like relaxation. If one is forced to practice pianissimo for an extended length of time (perhaps because the neighbors are asleep), the arm tires much faster than in loud playing because the muscles must actively hold up the entire arm, including the bow.1

Soft playing demands greater technical virtuosity from all musicians. For this reason, even if a score shows a passage in piano, pianissimo, or dolce you’ll learn the passage more easily if at first you practice it in mezzo forte, forte, or fortissimo. There’s a saying attributed to various famous pianists: “A pianist should play with arms of spaghetti and fingers of steel.” This puzzling idea has merit. Musicians often play with “shoulders, elbows, and wrists of steel,” which contributes to injuries such as bursitis, tendonitis, and carpal tunnel syndrome. Janos Starker wrote that “‘relaxed’ playing is in reality the even distribution of muscle tension. . . . The [physical] power is aimed at the contact points on the strings, via the bow and the left fingers. The power of the arm originates in the back muscles.”2 Power, then, is well-distributed tension, which has the misleading feeling of relaxation. If you’re in the habit of playing with “arms of steel,” you’ll need to redistribute your strength so that your back does more of the work and the arms rather less. At first you might find this disturbing, since the absence of strength in your arms may give you the feeling that you’re altogether powerless. Let’s summarize it this way: “The back works, the hands play.”

BILATERAL AND QUADRILATERAL TRANSFER Your limbs can fight or collaborate, but in either case they’re in constant communication. A simple illustration of this phenomenon is familiar to all kids since time immemorial. Rub your tummy with one hand and tap your head with the other, and 122

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you’ll feel how one hand tries to imitate the other, or how one hand tries to tyrannize the other. We’ll call the communication between your two arms or between your two legs bilateral transfer. And when legs and arms are all talking to one another, we’ll call it quadrilateral transfer (Figure 9.4). If you become drawn in by the challenges of using your arms and hands, you risk neglecting the use of your legs and feet. On account of quadrilateral transfer, however, anything that you do with legs and feet affects your arms and hands directly or indirectly.

FIGURE 9.4: Quadrilateral child

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Some musicians contract their legs and feet when playing, sometimes because of the habit of keeping time by tapping with the feet. It’s possible to tap your feet constructively, with good rhythm and good coordination. But if you tense up your foot when you tap, you’re likely to activate compensating mechanisms in the legs, then the hips, then the torso, and onto the upper limbs. Spend time with your feet, so to speak, sensing how you put weight on them when you walk, tap, or use the pedals at the piano. Tap your foot willingly, and notice how regular or irregular your rhythms are and what happens to the rest of your body when you tap. It might be good to become a skillful foot tapper, and then internalize the skill and play or sing without tapping your feet at all. Go for a walk carrying small hand weights (bottles of mineral water, for instance). The weights require that your arms become more active than they normally are in walking. If you direct your back while walking and pumping your arms, you’ll cultivate a circuit of connections between the back and all four limbs. Practice the cello for half an hour, then go for a quadrilateral walk around the neighborhood, and then go back home and practice the cello again, retaining your enhanced quadrilateral transfer. Do a monkey or a lunge, and then place your hands on the back of a chair in front of you. This allows you to “complete the circuit,” so to speak, and integrate your four limbs in a single procedure. While standing or in a monkey, straddle a chair with your legs and squeeze the chair gently with your knees. Place your hands on the chair’s railing. Then use your hands to tilt the chair away from you, and your legs to prevent the chair from tilting. You’ll feel an opposition of forces between your arms and your legs, with your back as the mediator, balancing out the forces that each limb exerts (Figure 9.5). Quadrilateral transfer applies to all your activities. Playing a keyboard instrument is an obvious application of its usefulness. You can employ quadrilateral transfer in a sober manner, as illustrated by the organist Marie-Madeleine Duruflé (Figure 9.6), or in an intensely involved manner, as illustrated by Ray Charles at the piano (Figure 9.7). Integrated Practice develops the subject of bilateral and quadrilateral transfer in depth, in chapter 15. The relevant video clips are number 54, “Quadrilateral Transfer I: An Introduction,” which presents a simple but complete quadrilateral transfer exercise for you to practice with a partner; and number 55, “Quadrilateral Transfer II: An Application,” which shows you how to apply quadrilateral transfer in music making.

HAND INJURIES AND THE HEALING PROCESS Most musicians are naturally concerned with the health of their arms and hands, as an accident could lead to loss of work or permanent disability. Some musicians prefer to avoid certain risky actions, such as lifting suitcases, or stripping wallpaper.

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FIGURE 9.5: Establishing quadrilateral transfer

Being careful, however, sometimes increases the likelihood of accidents. The pianist Claudio Arrau said: “I do a lot of things that actually are dangerous for my hands— weeding with a sickle, for instance. I’m not fussy at all. It’s important—otherwise you become self-conscious about the action of the hands.”3 You always have a choice of reaction to a given stimulus. Frank Pierce Jones recounts an instructive anecdote:

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FIGURE 9.6: Marie-Madeleine Duruflé

[One night after an Alexander lesson] I was awakened by a thunderstorm and got up to close my window. Forgetting that I was in a country hotel and that the window was not balanced by a counterweight, I loosened the catch, letting the window crash down onto my finger. I had never known how to cope with this kind of pain, but had always been engulfed by the throbbing agony of the sensation. This time, undoubtedly as a consequence of the lesson that morning, I perceived the sensation as a pattern with time-space value and found that I could inhibit the surges of tension that were passing in waves from my neck down my shoulder and arm to my finger. As I sustained the inhibition by keeping the awareness of my head and neck central and my finger peripheral, the sensation changed from ischemic pain to a glowing warmth as blood began to flow back into my finger. In the morning there was nothing to remind me of the episode except a thin red line across the nail.4

Musicians sometimes cause themselves harm on account of misconceptions about finger strength (“My hands are too small, my ring finger too weak, my joints too soft . . .”). Feelings of weakness in specific fingers are often based on a perception of relative strength. Your index fingers are much stronger than your little fingers; therefore, you think that your little fingers are weak. And yet your little fingers actually have enough strength to do their job. You can choose to worry about them or to trust them. 126

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FIGURE 9.7: Ray Charles

Perhaps you must examine your fingers’ workings in detail, exercise your fingers, and strengthen them. It’d be a good thing to do after you’ve sussed out the head, neck, and back; pronation and supination; bilateral and quadrilateral transfer; and the thousand other things that determine your overall coordination. It’s possible, however, that by then you’ll have figured out that your fingers are ever so happy to be left alone!

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C H A P T E R 10

THE WHISPERED “AH” Lips, Tongue, Jaw, Breath, Voice

In this chapter we’ll study the whispered “ah,” a seemingly simple exercise that hides layers of complexity. The exercise merits and requires preparation. Before we perform it, we need to look at breathing first, and then the behavior of your jaw. In a two-volume, 1,600-page work on the physiology of breathing we read this statement: Surely no organ or system of the human body is at present completely understood anatomically or physiologically. It would be difficult, however, to single out one vital organ concerning which more has been written, on which more lively differences of opinion are still expressed in print, and of which more remains to be learned, than the mammalian lung.1 . . . With the evidence produced from many sources, the external and internal intercostals have been considered either expiratory or inspiratory, both inspiratory and expiratory acting simultaneously and alternately, and, finally, only regulating the tension of the intercostal space.2

To put it differently, breathing is so multifaceted that people can’t agree on many of its characteristics. “Lively differences of opinion” are apparent when two or more singers, for instance, discuss breathing. The differences of opinion are greater still if a singer, a yogi, a physical therapist, and a drill sergeant share their views on breathing. Their views might be as divergent as to be mutually exclusive. There are many reasons for this. First, what we feel we’re doing is often different from what we’re actually doing. It’s likely that the drill sergeant has no idea he’s stiffening his neck every time he sucks in air through his nose. Second, what is called normal breathing (according to a statistical average) is not necessarily natural breathing (according to the laws of nature, ideal), and yet in dis-

cussion we tend to take one for the other. If a large group of people breathe in a certain way, we tend to call their way of breathing normal even if everyone in the group happens to gasp for air. In this context, normality is easily misunderstood. Third, it’s difficult to observe natural breathing. The act of observing an environment causes the environment to change. Regardless of how skillfully you observe your breathing patterns, you’ll inevitably change them by the simple act of observation: Individuals unaware of breathing commonly breathe at rest between 15 and 20 bpm [breaths per minute]. As respiratory test subjects they usually breathe more slowly, between 10 and 15 bpm. Experienced test subjects tend to breathe more regularly than untrained subjects. . . . But regularity does not necessarily imply spontaneity.3

Fourth, even if you have accurately felt or observed ideal breathing, it’s possible for you to describe the experience in a confused way. Some singers, for instance, speak of the diaphragm when they mean the abdominal muscles. Cornelius L. Reid explains this particular problem: “Pedagogic procedures initiated with the express intent of pushing the diaphragm ‘up’ or ‘in’ mistake diaphragmatic action for abdominal muscular tension. What creates the illusion of diaphragmatic activity is that the abdominal wall is pulled inward during expiration, and consequently moves the abdominal contents upward.”4 Fifth, breathing straddles the line between voluntary and involuntary bodily functions. Reid posits that “in common with all such systems, the following rule applies: if but one member of a complex muscular system is involuntary, all members of the system must be treated as though they, too, were involuntary.”5 In other words, breathing escapes total conscious control. Attempting to impose control upon it can undermine its proper functioning, aspects of which are necessarily unconscious. Sixth and most important, breathing highlights the complete inseparability of the physical, the psychological, and the metaphysical. Mystics in every culture talk reverently about the breath, calling it prana in India, qi in China, and ki in Japan. These words, however, are by no means the same as what a physiologist might call “breath” or “breathing.” In English they would be translated as “spirit,” “air,” “circulating life force,” “the universe.” Breath means one thing to a yogi and something else to a physiologist—and, for that matter, to a yogi in India who devotes a lifetime to the study of prana and an informal student of yoga in the Western world. In sum, breathing is ungraspable. It’s too big a subject for us to seize unambiguously and encapsulate in a way that everyone can agree on. Breathing, the most important thing in our lives, may actually escape understanding or control. Early on in Alexander’s teaching career, many people referred to him as “the breathing man,” and it’s true that his teachings mitigated or eliminated many socalled breathing problems. Counterintuitive as it may seem, however, Alexander himself recommended that you not think about breathing and not work on it directly. He wrote that “the act of breathing is not a primary, or even a secondary, part of the process. . . . As a matter of fact, given the perfect coordination of parts as

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required by my system, breathing is a subordinate operation which will perform itself.”6 Instead of working on your breathing, Alexander invites you to work on how you use yourself—that is, how you perceive the world, how you react to a situation, and how you choose to do or not do any one thing. A positive change to your use will cause a positive, indirect change to your breathing. Given a deep enough change to your use, all your breathing difficulties would disappear without your addressing them in the first place. It’s OK for you to disagree with Alexander, since the subject of breathing is ungraspable anyway. But understanding him could be useful in practice.

DOING AND ALLOWING IN BREATHING What happens when somebody makes breathing primary and voluntary, rather than subordinate and involuntary? Ask an unwary friend to take a deep breath. Most likely you’ll see your friend tense the neck and depress the larynx; raise the upper chest and the shoulders to inhale, and collapse the chest and spine to exhale; and suck air into the lungs by gasping or sniffing. These misuses are exaggerated by the self-consciousness inherent in the performance of the exercise, but they are equally present in most people most of the time: in movement or at rest, while speaking or while silent, in rehearsal or in performance, in a yoga class or in a physiotherapist’s office. Pulling the head back and down and crowding the larynx affects your throat and tongue directly, and your whole coordination indirectly. In truth, “back and down” is an entire psychophysical state, as you know from studying the primary control in Chapter 2. There’s no way around it: if your head goes back and down, so goes your life. Gasping and sniffing are nearly universal. Listen to radio and television announcers, singers, people who speak to you, even the outgoing message in your own answering machine, and you’ll notice how often people gasp or sniff audibly when they speak. When you gasp or sniff, you’re aspirating air much as a vacuum cleaner does. The intake of breath can (and perhaps must) happen differently. Alexander wrote: Inspiration is not a sucking of air into the lungs but an inevitable instantaneous rush of air into the partial vacuum caused by the automatic expansion of the thorax.7 . . . If the thorax is expanded correctly the lungs will at once be filled with air by atmospheric pressure, exactly as a pair of bellows is filled when the handles are pulled apart.8 . . . It is not necessary . . . even to think of taking a breath; as a matter of fact, it is more or less harmful to do so.9

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Your ribs move, thereby creating an expansion of the lungs. Air then rushes in automatically. Once you learn how to let your ribs move, you won’t have to suck in air through the mouth or the nose. Depending on how you think about it, breathing out is actually more important than breathing in, since the ideal out-breath instigates or permits the ideal in-breath to occur reflexively. But breathing out isn’t something that you need to do, any more than breathing in. You can drive air out or you can allow it to escape—and the choice is yours to make. People sometimes try to expand the chest and increase the intake of breath in order to alleviate the multiple symptoms of a perceived lack of breath. Yet the effects of hyperventilation, or overbreathing, are if anything worse than those of underbreathing. These effects include “abnormal sensations such as numbness, deadness or ‘pins and needles’ . . . hyperactivity, tension, emotional sweating and instability, . . . visceral disturbances of heart, gut and bladder . . . dizziness, faintness, visual disturbances and altered states of consciousness.”10 When you breathe out, you allow air to escape; when you breathe in, you allow air to enter. The passage from one to the other can occur without thought. Husler and Rodd-Marling wrote that “once the air has been expelled the diaphragm automatically switches over to breathing in, a process that needs no attention or conscious effort; either, indeed, would be more likely to disturb this perfectly natural control.”11 Traditionally one accords a lot of importance to the diaphragm in breathing. In  reality, the diaphragm doesn’t have proprioceptive nerve endings, and for this reason it’s impossible for you to control it directly. Alexander wrote that in all the contractions and expansions of the thorax during breathing, “the floor of the cavity (diaphragm) plays its part, moving upward or downward in sympathy with the particular adjustment of the bony thorax.”12 You don’t breathe because you move the diaphragm; rather, your diaphragm moves because you breathe. The diaphragm, then, is another element in breathing that you’re better off leaving more or less alone. The most important thing about breathing, then, is for you not to do it, but to allow it to happen of its own: allow your ribs to move, allow your lungs to inflate and deflate, allow the diaphragm to do what it will, allow air to come in, allow air to come out. This is called “letting be and letting go,” and from a metaphysical perspective it’s the hardest thing in the world.

SUPPORT AND THE VOICE Two issues in breathing deserve closer attention: the notion of breath support, and the relationship between the breath and the voice. Cornelius L. Reid points out that vocal tone “is nothing more than pressure variations created by an oscillation movement of the vocal folds whose frequency determines pitch. It is a physical impossibility to ‘support’ these vibratory patterns.”13 In other words, support is an image or metaphor, rather than an actual physical process. 132

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You may of course put images and metaphors to practical use, but if you become convinced that support is a physical process that you can manipulate and control directly, you’re likely to tie yourself into a knot. Michael McCallion manages a useful definition of support in The Voice Book: “To put it simply, it is the refusal to collapse.”14 Seen in this light, support isn’t something that you do, but something the contrary of which you avoid doing. Enter a state of balanced tension; open your mind and your ears; breathe, sing, breathe, sing; and, moment by moment, refuse to lose your state of balanced tension. You may feel as if you’re supporting your breath or your voice, but in fact you’re “supporting yourself.” When it comes to the relationship between the voice and the breath, most singers are convinced that they need to control their breathing in order to control their voice. The singing voice, however, is made of certain muscular actions that, in themselves, regulate the flow of breath. Husler and Rodd-Marling wrote that “a properly functioning larynx regulates and trains to a high degree (by means of the ear) the respiratory muscles needed in singing.”15 The real question in singing, Reid writes, is “improving the coordinate relationship of a highly complex system of laryngeal muscles, which lies beyond volitional control.”16 To put it differently, it’s not the breath that controls the voice, it’s the voice that controls the breath—with the added complication that you can’t quite control the “highly complex system of laryngeal muscles” directly. Instead, you have to figure out, through your ears and your psyche, what kinds of sounds you need to make in order to trigger the laryngeal muscles to work properly, in order to get your breathing automatically sorted out. Every step along the way you’ll have to work indirectly, using creativity and cunning to subdue habit. In principle, it’s unnecessary for you to do any breathing exercises whatsoever. You don’t need to change the mechanics or the speed of your breathing, to count while you breathe in or out, to hold your breath or force it out. All good breathing instruction might be summarized in two complementary bits of advice: 1. Stop constricting your breath. 2. Stop forcing your breath. You can, of course, bring breathing into the arena of self-awareness, and use breathing exercises to sharpen your coordinative skills. A badly constructed breathing exercise seemingly invites you to misuse yourself and do something unnatural. How do you react to the invitation? Perhaps by doing nothing to begin with, and then approaching the exercise with a playful attitude: “This exercise is kind of crazy, but let me see if I can navigate it and get something out of it.” The companion volume Integrated Practice makes a further study of breathing and its relationship with music making. Chapter 14 of that book proposes several “non-breathing exercises,” thanks to which you can work on your breathing seemingly without working on it. Integrated Practice also contains a detailed study of the messa di voce, or the art of making sounds louder and softer. You can use the messa di voce to conquer breathing through indirect means. The pertinent chapters are 18, “The Messa di Voce: Virtuosity of Contact,” and 19, “Practicing the Messa di Voce.” The Whispered “Ah”

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The messa di voce is illustrated in three video clips: number 66, “Messa di Voce I: The Basics”; number 67, “Messa di Voce II: An Application”; and number 68, “Messa di Voce III: At the Flute.”

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE JAW Talking, singing, chewing, playing woodwind or brass instruments, brushing your teeth, and many other activities require that you move your jaw. Think of how many syllables you say in the course of a normal conversation, and how many normal conversations you have. Although it’s theoretically possible to keep your jaw still and speak through clenched teeth, habitual speech involves a tremendous number of jaw motions. In short, you move your jaw several thousand times per day. When it comes to the jaw, you have less leeway to misuse it than you might think. Since your jaw is connected to your skull, misusing your jaw will affect the skull directly, and the rest of the body indirectly. Very small misuses of the jaw, multiplied by thousands every day and sustained for weeks, months, and years, have a strong negative effect on your health. Many people open their mouth by moving the skull away from the jaw, rather than moving the jaw away from the skull. Sit at a table. Put an elbow down on the table with the palm of the hand facing you. Rest your chin on your hand, and lean your head gently into the hand (which of course is supported by the elbow and the table underneath it). Now open your mouth. Since your hand is blocking your jaw, it’s the skull that moves instead, scrunching the neck and spine. This is how most people open their mouth most of the time, even when there are no physical barriers to the movement of the jaw. Poise your skull up on top of your spine. Keep the skull mobile yet magnetized toward the ceiling or the sky. Now open and close your mouth without disturbing the magnetized, poised skull. You don’t need to hold the skull rigidly in place; you can move it at will as long as the skull doesn’t bear down on the neck and spine. Place a soft hand on the back of your neck, with the fingertips touching your skull. Now speak. Your hand will help you monitor the behavior of your skull and neck as you move the jaw without scrunching your neck. Counterintuitive as it may be, a completely relaxed jaw is a hindrance to good coordination. Let your jaw flop, village-idiot style. You might notice that the floppy jaw makes the soft palate collapse, interferes with the free flow of breath in the nasal passages, and crowds the throat. In a bid to free the jaw, singers and other people sometimes do a version of the village idiot, with harmful effects to the breath, the voice, and the rest of the body. Good coordination requires not relaxation but the dynamic opposition of many tensions throughout the body. Ideally, the jaw and the face oppose each other: as your cheekbones move up and out when you smile, the jaw moves forward and down in opposition to the cheekbones. If the pulls are balanced you might feel as if your 134

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FIGURE 10.1: Oppositions between the face and the jaw

face is completely relaxed, which is an illusion of sorts since the face is in fact suffused with needed tensions (Figure 10.1).

TWO OPPOSITIONAL EXERCISES Get a shoelace about 30 inches in length, or a long elastic band like one used to keep together a sheaf of papers. Wrap it around the base of your skull and above your ears, and tie the ends under your chin, more or less like a helmet strap. You can vary the tightness of the knot, the precise place of contact on your chin (closer to the lips or to the tip of the chin), and the path of the shoelace on your skull (closer to its base, or toward the crown). The Whispered “Ah”

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Wear the shoelace and smile, speak a few words, sing a short tune, yawn, or otherwise move your jaw. The shoelace holds the jaw and skull gently together, while speaking or yawning moves them gently apart. Thanks to this opposition of forces, your jaw is likely to become energized and directed, pushing itself outward against the inward pull of the shoelace. The exercise enhances your perceptions of how the jaw, the skull, the lips and tongue, and the rest of the face all relate (Figure 10.2). Your job is to create an imaginary or latent shoelace permanently tying your skull to your jaw, inviting an elastic opposition of forces.

FIGURE 10.2: Muscles are interconnected

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Our second exercise is more elaborate. Stand at ease, perhaps in front of a bodylength mirror. Bring the right hand to your face. With a light touch, place the right thumb on your right cheekbone and the tip of the right middle finger on your left cheekbone. Keep your elbow floating at about shoulder height. Now smile, broadly or discreetly. Your cheekbones will appear to move up and out in space. Let your fingers follow the cheekbones as they move, and the thumb and middle finger will spread outward; let the arm follow the fingers as they move, and the arm will rise slightly. The cheekbones move the fingers, the fingers move the hand, and the hand moves the arm. Keeping your right hand in place—fingers lightly touching the cheekbones— now bring your left hand to your jaw. Wrap your thumb and index around your chin, without pushing or squeezing; or, if you wish, pushing and squeezing in pianissimo dynamics. Let the other fingers of the left hand fall naturally upon the collarbone and throat, where they too will exert pianissimo pressure. Again, smile and take your cheekbones up and out. Let your jaw gently meet the gentle pressure of your left hand, and then open your mouth. As you open your mouth, the tip of your jaw describes a tiny, almost invisible circle. In other words, your jaw moves forward and down when you open your mouth, much as it did when you wore the shoelace. Your left hand will naturally move slightly, and you’ll feel the movement all the way to your elbow, shoulder, and back. To some degree, opening your mouth then becomes an activity involving the whole body. Let go of your hands and speak, sing, and otherwise use your mouth normally. With luck you will retain the feeling that all body parts are connected in movement, and the simple act of moving your jaw will become a coordinative trigger.

THE WHISPERED “AH” Now you’re ready to study the whispered “ah” proper. At first it may look like a breathing exercise, but in truth it’s a psychophysical challenge involving some of your most intimate and primeval dimensions. 1. Stand at ease, upright but not uptight, attentive and playful. We’ll call this posture and attitude thinking up along the spine, or more informally thinking up. 2. While thinking up, smile or grimace. The smile can be so gentle as to be nearly invisible, or so blatant as to make you look like a clown. To put it differently, you can smile pianissimo, fortissimo, or any dynamic in between. 3. While thinking up and smiling, open your mouth and direct your jaw slightly forward as it moves. 4. While thinking up and smiling, and without letting your jaw recede or your mouth close, exhale on a nearly silent, whispered “ah” vowel. 5. While thinking up, close your mouth without contracting or snapping the jaw, relax your face, and breathe in through your nose. The cycle of the whispered “ah” is complete. The Whispered “Ah”

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The whispered “ah” invites you to change two basic habits: that of disconnecting and contracting body parts when you breathe, and the habit of inhaling by sucking in air through the nose or the mouth. Your breath will be perfectly controlled—as long as you think up along the spine and don’t mess with the inhalation. This is both the merit of the whispered “ah” and its great difficulty. One of your tasks is to observe and prevent everything that can go wrong during the exercise. While exhaling on a whispered “ah,” you might end up forcibly squeezing all the breath out of the lungs, shortening your spine, narrowing your back, and contracting your neck and shoulders. There may be some interest in trying to completely empty your lungs, but you’ll do it better if you don’t contract those parts of your body (such as the neck and shoulders) that do not play a direct role in the functioning of your lungs. You can choose to perform your whispered “ah” without forcing or squeezing, regardless of how loudly or quickly you do it; or you can, indeed, choose to squeeze yourself to suffocation and learn something useful from it, if only to contrast it with not squeezing. Suppose you run out of breath after a short whispered “ah.” This probably means that you were breathing shallowly before you started it, or that your whispered “ah” is causing a leaky dispersal of breath. Having realized that you’ve been breathing shallowly, you’ll likely want to breathe deeply instead, but this only creates a new problem: a willful breath is often a forced breath. You can perform the entire cycle in two seconds or in two minutes, depending on your needs, aims, and abilities. As with all exercises, each intermediate step is an end in itself. Practice each step in isolation, as many times as you wish. For instance, smile a few times before you attempt to smile and move the jaw forward at the same time; or open and close your mouth several times before whispering an “ah.” Start the “ah” with a gentle glottal stroke, which makes the outflow of breath easier to control; or without it, which makes the throat freer. The glottis is the part of the larynx consisting of the vocal folds and the slitlike opening between them. A glottal stroke is a brief closing of the slit between the vocal folds. It’s something you do often in ordinary speech. If you say, “Oh, I see what you mean,” most likely you’ll perform a glottal stroke as you begin to say the word “Oh.” Perform the “ah” audibly or silently. In the basic version you avoid making extraneous noises, such as clearing your throat, hissing, snarling, or gurgling. But all noises have their merits and their usefulness, so you might one day adapt the whispered “ah” to hissing and snarling. Vary the quality of the vowel itself. Play-act a little and make an “ah” like an Australian, an Italian, or an American. These variations trigger changes in the coordination of your larynx and affect your breathing as well. Try a whispered “eh,” “ee,” “oh,” and so on. Each vowel requires a slightly different coordinative arrangement. The ability to make many vowel sounds is the mark of a flexible and adaptable larynx. Try this variation. Toward the end of an exhalation, say a few words without an extra intake of breath. Most likely you’ll feel compelled to take a little breath to say the words, even though you still have air in your lungs. The challenge is to “agree to speak with the air that is already there.” If you persevere with this exercise, you might be able to break the habit of gasping before speaking. 138

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Whisper an “ah,” say a few words without taking in air, go back to whispering an “ah” without taking in air, then say a few more words, and so on. On the same breath, whisper, talk, whisper, and talk again. Be ambitious and decide that you’ll alternate languages: whisper, talk in English, whisper, talk in French, whisper, talk in German . . . all on the same breath! If you’re panicking at the thought of performing this exercise, you’re making incorrect assumptions about how difficult it is, or how little French you speak. You probably know hundreds of French words even if you’ve never studied the language: “Paris,” “croissant,” “café,” “Notre Dame,” “Pepe Le Pew.” It’s the same for German, Spanish, and a half dozen mainstream languages: you know more than you think. Truth be told, the whispered “ah” flusters a lot of people. Some even refuse to learn it, giving a variety of reasons for it: “I have ugly teeth.” “My mother used to tell me to smile, and I hated it.” Ostensibly you’re only learning how to open your mouth and let air out, but this can trigger fear, hesitation, doubt, displeasure, and many other emotions, showing that body, mind, and emotions are completely intertwined. The whispered “ah” has the potential to help you get rid of unwarranted fears and vulnerabilities. If you work through it and change your reaction to learning the whispered “ah” from dread to pleasure, you’ll become a different human being. The muscles of the face are completely interwoven one with another. Because of the release of tension in jaw, facial muscles, neck, and shoulders, the whispered “ah” contributes to relief of headaches, migraines, and the discomfort of involuntarily clenched teeth. The whispered “ah” helps to open and clear up the sinuses. If you frown a lot, the whispered “ah” might help you become aware of it and lessen it; if your face lacks muscle tone, the whispered “ah” might help you energize your face, indirectly benefiting the condition of your facial skin and perhaps even affecting your features. The misalignment of jaw and temple causes numerous illnesses, among them dental, skeletal, and other health problems. Dentists refer to this misalignment and its effects as Temporal-Mandibular Syndrome (TMS). Some musicians are at great risk of a misaligned jaw—violinists and violinists, for instance, whose instruments tend to press into the jaw at awkward angles. Realigning the jaw isn’t a simple matter. The whispered “ah” might not completely solve the problem, but it gives every sufferer some pointers toward its solution. Muscular oppositions within the face help the jaw and skull collaborate dynamically, so that the jaw can begin to find its place within the entire circuit of bodily connections. More important, the whispered “ah” requires that you calm down, do nothing for a while, focus your attention, and direct your energies in order to achieve a subtle and complex goal. These processes will help you do whatever you need to do to work through your TMS. Everyone benefits from learning the whispered “ah,” but the freedom of lips, tongue, and jaw that the whispered “ah” entails is particularly useful for singers. When you become able to open your mouth without stiffening the jaw or the neck, your enunciation, sound quality, and legato all improve. Many instrumental techniques depend on the independence, or rather the interdependence, of lips, tongue, and jaw, in particular for wind and brass players. The whispered “ah” gives you indirect means to work on your embouchure, the control of airflow, tonguing, and articulation. The Whispered “Ah”

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Musicians whose music making doesn’t depend directly on their vocal or facial mechanisms—string players and pianists, for instance—might think that the whispered “ah” has no direct bearing on their craft. It’s nearly impossible, however, for your shoulders and arms to be free if your jaw is tight. Therefore, freeing the jaw can have a marked effect on the use of the shoulders, arms, and hands, and on total performance. Now you might be ready to use the skills you’ve accumulated practicing the whispered “ah” to face two challenges of speech and voice: tongue twisters and shouting.

TONGUE TWISTERS Read the tongue twisters below out loud, preferably taking turns with a partner. Peggy Babcock, Peggy Babcock, Peggy Babcock. Willy’s real rear wheel. Flash message! Flash message! Flash message! Scissors sizzle, thistles sizzle Dust is a disk’s worst enemy. A pest exists amidst us. Tongue twisters cause strong emotional responses. Many people become intensely agitated and tie themselves in knots. Test this by asking friends around a dinner table to take turns saying “Peggy Babcock” quickly, three times in a row. Tongue twisters are so involving that they ought to be called “people twisters.” They trigger the misbehavior of body, mind, and soul together. They are provocative, so to speak: they provoke you into losing your head and making a spectacle of yourself. Once you understand their power, however, you can use them as aids to coordination. “Peggy Babcock, Peggy Babcock, Peggy Babcock.”

You try to say it, and the consonants don’t come out as you expect. You try again, shaking your head and neck in a bid to make your lips and tongue move. Without your noticing it, you become so frustrated by the failure that you go temporarily insane. For a few seconds, for half a minute or longer, all that exists in your world is the fight against the bitter enemy. All you think of is Peggy Babcock, the wicked temptress. You don’t realize it just yet, but the bitter enemy is yourself. In your eagerness to “get it right” you become unwilling to pause for a moment and think through the difficulty and its possible solutions. The very first step in trying to solve this problem— as with all problems—is the willingness to do nothing, for however long it takes to clear your mind and focus yourself. For most people the intellectual decision to stop and do nothing is much weaker than the emotional impulse to keep fighting. 140

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Suppose you finally calm down and stop trying to say “Peggy Babcock.” Break down the tongue twister into its words, and each individual word into its component syllables. A single syllable by itself is usually easy to say out loud. Right now this is all you have to say: “Bab.” Wait a while before saying it a second time. Part of you might still be terribly interested in going back to the fight against the tongue twister. Instead, remain calm and say this single syllable a few times, with pauses in between. Divide your attention, giving some of it to the syllable and some to your coordination from head to toe, to the movements of lips, tongue, and jaw needed to pronounce the syllable, to your breath and your voice, to your feeling for linguistic rhythm. Now go to the next syllable and repeat the process: “Cock.” Then say the two syllables in sequence, and see what decisions you need to make in order not to lose your cool as you go from syllable to syllable: “Babcock.” Do you need to slow down one syllable and speed up the other? Do you need to slow both of them down? Do you need to put a tiny break between them, almost inaudible to people listening to your performance? Do you need to lengthen a vowel? Do you need to give a special command to lips, or tongue, or jaw, or a combination of these, to wrap your brain around a consonant, or a sequence of consonants? Now say “BAB-cock,” the “BAB” louder than the “cock.” Lengthen the “a” of Bab: “BAAAB-cock.” Do this a few times, keeping your overall speech relatively slow. Put “Babcock” aside and say “Peggy,” once and once only. Most likely you’ll be terribly tempted to say it more than once, and to go on to say the entire tongue twister and engage in the fight! But suppose you manage to say “Peggy,” once and once only. Wait a few seconds, then say it slowly two or three times in a row, with short pauses in between. Both Peggy and Babcock have stresses on their first syllable: PEG-gy | BAB-cock.

Emphasize the stress on the second word: PEG-gy | BAB-cock.

Now lengthen the “eh” of Peggy and the “ah” of Babcock, waiting a little bit between the two words, and making BAB the strongest of all four syllables: PEEEG-gy . . . | BAAAB-cock.

Say it all a few times in a row, and then start speeding it up gradually, making the vowels not so long, making the separation between syllables not so big, making the syllable “Bab” not so loud. Eventually all these linguistic and psychophysical decisions become partly conscious, partly reflex. In time you become able to make multiple decisions quickly. Then tongue twisters become friends, not enemies; sources of pleasure, not pain; coordinators, not provokers. You don’t control a tongue twister; you control yourself as you say a tongue twister. What you learn from mastering “Peggy Babcock” you can easily apply to The Whispered “Ah”

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instrumental techniques at the oboe and the flute, to singing and speaking, and to many other domains. Here are some more friendly people twisters. Enjoy them! Seventy-seven benevolent elephants. Amidst the slithering thistles, I thwarted. Sheena leads, Sheila needs. Extinct insects’ instincts. All rural girls will wear jewelry. Black background, brown background. Double bubble gum, bubbles double.

SHOUTS We’ve all heard stories of a mother showing superhuman strength and freeing her child from under a car’s wheels by lifting the car with her bare hands. Such stories may be urban legends, but the mother’s mythical strength is in fact a latent capability that lives inside every human being. Martial-arts feats, oftentimes performed by slim little fellows, prove that you can train yourself to act powerfully without muscular strain. This is true for all your activities, musical or otherwise. In this exercise we use shouting as the gateway to effortless power, but the principle applies to everything you do. You’ll learn more by practicing the exercise with a partner. If possible, use a soundproof practice room in a music school. If not, accept that your neighbors might be startled. The exercise consists of a sequence of shouts. By “shout” I don’t mean a forced yell that damages your throat and hurts my ears, but a free sound that caresses both your throat and my ear. Ultimately, nothing you do as a performing musician ought to hurt you or your audience, unless you make a conscious choice to do so. Here’s a list of good words to shout. Alternate among words at will. Repeat a word several times in a row if you wish. Take frequent breaks from shouting. GO! NO! COME! NOW! STOP!

These words consist of a single syllable, starting with a consonant. They are commands we all give, often in a stressful situation. A mother sees her child running down the block toward a busy intersection. Without forethought or the fear of ridicule, she shouts “STOP!” The child hears the message at once and stops running.

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In performing the exercise, you might go through three phases. At first you try too hard, scrunch your neck and throat, and produce a strangled cry that the running child won’t even hear. Then, through careful calculation you free your voice somewhat and produce a healthy sound, though not powerful. Finally, you tap into your instincts and combine them with your conscious control, and your shout doubles, triples, and quadruples in size. Given the right conditions, a free shout gives you energy rather than consuming it. For this reason, divas and rockers can sometimes give three-hour shows in which their energy goes not down but up from aria to aria and from song to song. You and your partner take turns shouting. Watching and listening to each other, you observe any number of things. When a shout goes wrong, the head jerks forward, dragging the neck with it. The connection between the bottom of the skull and the top of the neck shortens, as if the head is suddenly too heavy for the neck. The shoulders go up, arms and hands tense up. The pelvis jerks forward, the heels come off the floor, the body sways. And the shout sounds rather puny. Center yourself before shouting. Imagine that the ceiling attracts your head upward at the same time that the floor attracts your coccyx downward, creating a double stretch of your spine. Without shouting, open your mouth gently and close it again, monitoring your head and neck. Remember our previous exercises and find an opposition of forces within your face. Open your mouth and let air out of your lungs without relaxing the skeleton: head and neck directed, back stable, pelvis in a steady unmoving arrangement with the back, feet planted on the floor, knees slightly bent. Keep yourself in this loose and firm state. Let air out of your lungs silently. Let air come into your lungs just as silently. Now SHOUT! You can control the shape of your mouth cavity to a large degree. Try this: close your mouth, clench your teeth, purse your lips, and push your tongue up toward the roof of the mouth and forward into the teeth. The entire cavity becomes squashed and crowded. Keep the mouth in this shape and make a sound—humming, for instance. What kind of sound does such a tight mouth produce? Relax all these tensions and hum again. How does it feel in comparison? This is a crude experiment, but it proves that by controlling your lips, tongue, jaw, and throat you can enlarge, diminish, and otherwise shape the mouth cavity, partially controlling the sounds you make. Go back to directing yourself from head to toe. Find the opposition of forces within your face that allows you to move your jaw without pulling the skull down into the neck. Open your mouth and shape the mouth cavity as if a small balloon inside it gently pushed all the boundaries (the tongue, the hard palate, the soft palate) outward, away from each other. Exhale once, not letting anything in your skeleton move other than the ribcage. Inhale . . . and SHOUT! Suspend your aesthetic judgment while shouting. If you aren’t willing to make a fool of yourself, you won’t tap into your deepest powers. Pace and time your efforts. Alternate long periods of directing in silence with short bursts of sudden shouts. Keep eagerness at bay by working calmly and steadily, and eliminate hesitation by

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shouting suddenly and without forethought. Prepare, prepare, prepare, SHOUT! Prepare, SHOUT, SHOUT, SHOUT! Shout once, and immediately shift from “doing” to “sensing.” How does the room vibrate when you shout? Shout into a piano. Shout while standing next to a drumming kit, and you may be surprised by the wealth of sympathetic vibrations you trigger. The most useful thing you learn in the exercise isn’t how to shout, but how to become attentive, how to act intensely without losing your head, and how to direct your energies to obtain maximum effect with minimal effort. Once you master the exercise, you don’t need to shout ever again; it’s enough to have a “latent shout” inside you, available at all times.

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C H A P T E R 11

CONSTRUCTIVE REST

Suppose you need to do something to the underside of a piece of furniture, such as tightening the screws holding the kitchen table’s legs. You may find that lying on your back is the most ergonomic position for that particular task. As you lie down you arrange your back, pelvis, shoulders, and legs to be comfortable and efficient, using more of your back and less of your wrists to accomplish the task. Lying on your back, then, is much like the monkey and the lunge: a position of mechanical advantage that allows you to minimize efforts and maximize results (Figure 11.1). You need to lie on your back for a large number of activities. These include exercises from yoga and Pilates, stretching and doing sit-ups, receiving certain medical procedures, and so on. Further, it’s a useful position for resting, relaxing, and going to sleep. Lying on your back allows you to learn some interesting things—for instance, as regards the relationship between the head and the neck, and also between the back and the pelvis. It allows you to acquire and refine psychomotor skills. It allows you to take time off from “doing” and spend some time “sensing” and “thinking” instead. In short, it’s a fine position for working on yourself. If you lie on your stomach, you’re prone; if you lie on your back, you’re supine. If you lie on your back with your legs bent and your feet flat on the floor, then you’re semi-supine, a term many Alexander teachers use to refer both to the position and to the practice of working on yourself while lying on your back. Other teachers call the practice constructive rest. Although you can do many things besides resting when you lie on your back, we’ll adopt this term for the sake of convenience. To help you establish mechanical advantage in the semi-supine position, we need to revisit two aspects of the simplified skeleton, a concept we pondered in Chapter 2.

FIGURE 11.1: Using mechanical advantage

THE SIMPLIFIED SKELETON: HEAD AND NECK The simplified skeleton posits that the connection between the neck and spine helps you direct the head in relation to the neck; the connection between the back and shoulders helps you direct the arms in relation to the shoulders; and the connection between the back and pelvis helps you direct the legs in relation to the pelvis. Lying on your back is a challenge to your simplified skeleton, as all three points of connection within the skeleton will suffer if you arrange yourself awkwardly. For instance, lying on your back without placing some support under your head will cause your neck to move back in space—perhaps farther back than ideal, to the point where the neck might become excessively concave and lose its integration with the rest of the spine. This doesn’t mean you must always use head support when you lie down. You can choose to not use a head support just to feel what it’s like, the better to understand the relationship between the head and the neck, and the better to make constructive choices in the future. Or you might choose to stay in what appears an uncomfortable position in order to study discomfort and your reaction to it. Or you might find that

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FIGURE 11.2: Constructive rest

the overly concave neck has unsuspected merits. It’s also possible that your anatomy is such that you don’t need any head support whatsoever (Figure 11.2). For our purposes we’ll assume that you’re an average human being with a normal neck, and that you need some head support for your constructive rest. Lying directly on a hard surface can be uncomfortable, although it too may have merits. Alexander teachers use padded tables of varying softness for the constructiverest section of their lessons. At home you can use a carpet or rug, or a thin mattress like a yoga mat. Lying on your bed is also possible, although your associations with the bed—sleeping, dreaming, making love—might take you out of work mode. Nevertheless, you can always exercise choice regardless of your circumstances: you might choose to lie in bed and work on yourself diligently, or lie in bed and fall asleep. Lie on your back with your legs bent and your feet on the floor. Place your feet neither too far from your trunk nor too close to it, spread about hip-width. Pronate your arms, move your elbows out away from the ribcage, and let your hands rest on your abdomen. Endless variations are possible, but for now this is your starting point. Many factors affect the position of your head when you lie down: the height of the support, the materials used, the surface on which you’re lying, the curve of your lower back, and the tilt of your head relative to the neck, among others. Gather a pile of paperbacks of varying thickness, so that you can change the support from half an inch (or less) to three inches (or more). In this way you can lift or lower the head support according to your needs and wants, according to the changes in your coordination over the months and years, and according to all the other factors involved.

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Insert a single paperback under your head. How does that feel? Now tilt your head, lifting your chin a little bit. How does that affect the sensation of support under your head? Tuck the chin in. Does it make it easier for you to breathe and swallow, or harder? Insert a second paperback under your head, and repeat the experiments regarding the head’s tilt. Insert a third one, then a fourth. At some point the support might be too high for comfort—which is no better than too low. Your job is to experiment, sense, discern, and adjust. Someone with a long-standing hunch on the top of the back will need more support than someone with a flat back and a long neck. As with anything else, judgments and suppositions may lead you astray. I once had a student who had convinced himself that in perfect coordination one wouldn’t need any head support at all, and he made that a goal for himself. It led him to carry his head and neck in a twisted way that impeded his progress. You can’t know beforehand how much support—if any—is best for you today, then tomorrow, then the day after. Experiment with an open mind over the long run. If it turns out that you need and want head support, so be it; if you don’t need and don’t want head support, so be it. For your head support you can use books, placemats, towels, sweaters, pillows, shoes, backpacks, and many other objects. Some objects are very firm, others much softer. You could say that some supports are too firm (therefore harmful in some way) and others too soft (therefore harmful in a different way). Or you could say that each support has its own effect on your use, which you enjoy discovering for yourself. Working on yourself means making choices and owning the consequences of the choices you make. This principle informs everything you do, including the decisions you make regarding your head and neck when you lie on your back. Some people like being finicky about what they use for head support (paperback books exclusively); others like being flexible (whatever is available). You may choose to be finicky or flexible; what makes the choice valid is your owning it.

THE SIMPLIFIED SKELETON: BACK AND PELVIS Now that you have explored the issue of head support and made a few choices, you’ll explore the relationship between the back and pelvis and make some more choices. Before you lie on your back, do a simple exercise. While standing normally, test your pelvis’s mobility. You can move your pelvis on three planes. Let’s call them swing, tilt, and turn. To swing it from side to side while standing, start by moving your left hip leftward. If it helps, use the wall on your left as a reference or destination: move the left hip a bit toward the wall, or imagine that the wall is pulling your hip toward it. Then move your right hip rightward, again using the wall on your right as a reference or destination. For our purposes you don’t need to make big movements; it’s enough to discover these planes of movements and be willing to move your pelvis a bit here 148

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and there. But if exaggerated movements make it easier to feel your pelvis and understand its behavior, go for it and dance to your heart’s content. To tilt your pelvis back, stick your butt out and hollow your lower back. To tilt your pelvis forward, flatten your lower back. It may help you find the path of movement if you imagine that your genitals are going forward and up in space, as if toward your belly button. To turn your pelvis clockwise, bring your left hip forward and the right hip backward. To turn it counterclockwise, bring your right hip forward and the left backward. Naturally, it’s possible for you to combine degrees of movement along all three planes at the same time, as you do instinctively throughout your day. It’s easy to accept that your pelvis must be mobile in order for you to be well coordinated and healthy. It’s a little less easy to see that excessive mobility is harmful, since it tends to have a disconnecting effect upon the body. To figure out how to direct your pelvis is a challenge, partly because you need to balance out mobility and resistance. The average human being tends to wear the pelvis asymmetrically relative to the back, habitually swinging, tilting, or turning it in some off-center way, and habitually holding the pelvis in the off-center position. If you tend to tilt the pelvis habitually in such a way that you exaggerate your lower back’s natural arch, lying supine or semi-supine on a flat surface might be quite disagreeable. For that reason, it’s good for you to be able to tilt your pelvis willingly in both directions (flattening or hollowing the lower back), because then you can adjust the position of your pelvis until you’re comfortable lying on your back. While lying down, give your lower back a small stretch in the following way: lift your pelvis a little bit off the floor, tilt it slightly in the direction that corresponds to your pointing your genitals toward your belly bottom, stretch the bottom of the spine toward your feet, and lower your pelvis and lay it on the floor again. Perform every phase of the gesture with small movements at moderate speeds, and you’ll achieve a nicer stretch than using large movements at plodding speeds.

WORKING ON YOURSELF There you are, lying semi-supine with head, neck, back, pelvis, legs, and feet nicely arranged. To become semi-supine you did a lot of sensing, thinking, choosing, and deciding. This means that you’ve been working on yourself already. Now you’ll widen the scope of your exploration and put your mechanical advantage to good use. 1. GIVE YOURSELF CHALLENGES OF COORDINATION

1. Place your hands lightly on top of your hips, and then bend or unbend one of your legs. What happens to your pelvis? Most likely it lifts off the floor and twists in some way. This means your pelvis isn’t sufficiently anchored in the back, and instead it’s Constructive Rest

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creating a unit with the leg. You may need to make the leg movement secondary, and the connection between the back and the pelvis primary. Imagination and awareness are your main allies, but “doing” has its place too. You might want to push your pelvis down into the floor a little bit and see if this helps it stay anchored. 2. Give all your limbs differing tasks. For instance, decide that you’ll unbend the right leg at the same time you bend the left one. It sounds simple on paper, but to perform it without disconnecting or scrunching is something else. Then decide to engage your arms as well, moving your hands from the floor to your trunk and back to the floor again. You’ll be doing a strange quadrilateral dance, all limbs moving slowly in diverging paths. What happens to the head, neck, shoulders, back, and pelvis when you dance in this way? 3. Speak, recite, or sing. Keep your hands on your abdomen and sense your breath and your voice’s vibrations. If you don’t know what to say, just count out loud: “One, two, three, four. . . .” Speak slowly or quickly, loudly or softly. Some people gesticulate, nod, lift the shoulders, and otherwise move while speaking to compensate for insufficiently clear patterns of thought and speech. While in semi-supine, speak and give yourself the task of moving only those body parts that must move when you speak: the lips, tongue, and jaw, the ribcage and the diaphragm . . . and maybe nothing else. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t ever gesticulate when you speak, only that having choices at your disposal will make you more comfortable. Saying a single word without moving the hands, twitching the neck, or lifting the shoulders may be difficult at first. In the long run, however, you may be grateful for having developed these highly condensed psychophysical means. 4. Perform a whispered “ah,” or several in a row—short or long, loud or soft. Can you pay attention to your breath without hyperventilating and passing out? Might you catch yourself gasping for air on occasion, or in fact every time you inhale? If so, remember Alexander’s strategy for working on himself: he’d give himself a goal (speak, for instance) and would then refrain from attaining the goal (choosing instead to do nothing, to lift an arm, or in fact to go ahead and speak). Do the same: decide to do a whispered “ah” and then refrain from actually doing it until you’re good and ready. 5. Work on your resistances and oppositions. For instance, keep the right leg bent and cross the left over it, placing your left ankle against the right knee. Now push your left foot gently or not so gently into the right leg, and use the right leg to resist the push. What happens to your back and pelvis? It’s possible that they’ll connect, the better to oppose the actions of your left leg. Keeping your legs thus arranged, now bring your hands into play: place the left hand on your left knee, and the right on the left foot. Apply a little pressure from your arms and hands to your legs and feet. Now all limbs, plus the back and the pelvis, are communicating in a circuit of connections. You can push hard and scrunch your whole body, or you can keep a clear head and direct your energies constructively. This is the real meaning of working on yourself: making choices and becoming responsible for the choices you make. 6. Give yourself the task of lying down without doing anything, but also without drifting into daydreaming, restlessness, boredom, or sleep. How long can you stay 150

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on your back watching, listening, breathing, thinking, and directing? It’s perhaps the hardest of all challenges when it comes to constructive rest. 2. TAKE BREAKS FROM PRACTICING AND WORKING

The rhythms of your daily life contribute to how productive, healthy, and happy you are—or, as the case maybe, unproductive, unhealthy, and unhappy. The challenge of life is to be in the here, now, fully in the present moment. To remain attentive as you practice the piano for three hours without a break is possible, but difficult. At some point you’re likely to play mindlessly, banging at the piano or making repeated mistakes—perhaps without being aware of it. Doing so too often or for too long will interfere with your technique, your muscular and aural memory, your sound, and your life. Mindlessness can lead first to fatigue, and then to injury. Since it’s difficult to remain mindful at all times, you’re better off taking breaks from your musical work (or any other work) and turning your mind to something else for a while. How often should you take breaks, and for how long? It’s impossible to answer. The only near certitude is that taking breaks can be helpful, and not taking breaks can be harmful. Here’s only one of a thousand ways of taking a break: practice for half an hour, lie on your back for three minutes; practice another twenty minutes, lie on your back for three minutes; practice another forty-five minutes, lie on your back for five minutes. If you time your breaks intelligently, you’ll achieve much more at the end of the practicing session than if you practice nonstop for the same length of time. If circumstances allow it, lie on your back for a short while whenever you’re tired or overworked. It has become commonplace for musicians to lie semi-supine, backstage, during a concert intermission. Develop the habit of lying on your back during daily practice, at the end of a long day’s work, to listen to the radio or talk on the phone, in an airport lounge before going on a long-haul flight, and on many other occasions. 3. PRACTICE MENTALLY

You can learn a piece at the instrument or away from it, and in both cases with or without a score. One possibility, then, is for you to lie semi-supine and practice mentally without a score, visualizing the gestures and imagining the sounds you need to perform a specific passage, section, movement, or complete work. On the one hand you’ll be conceiving of music independently from your habits of playing or singing, therefore allowing music to live freely inside you before it becomes embodied. On the other hand you’ll be associating your conception of music with multiple psychophysical connections. When you pass from mental practice to actual music making, you might retain your connections even as the music becomes embodied in sounds and gestures. Walking in the woods, pacing your room, sitting, standing, or being in a monkey or lunge all afford the opportunity for practicing mentally. By virtue of its stillness, Constructive Rest

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FIGURE 11.3: Working on yourself

however, lying on your back is particularly useful in disconnecting faulty habits of use from a musical conception (Figure 11.3). 4. PREPARE YOUR SLEEP

How should you sleep? On a firm mattress or a soft one? On your back, on your side, or on your belly? With a soft pillow, a firm one, or none? Sleeping in comfort is certainly a good idea, but determining the very meaning of comfort is difficult to begin with. You might have a comfortable but harmful habit and an uncomfortable but health-affirming alternative. Certain bits of received wisdom are possibly wrong—for instance, the idea that one should sleep on a firm mattress. Some firm mattresses are certainly wonderful for some people, but no firm mattress is wonderful for all people. About sleep as about everything else, you’ll need to change your mind more than once before you find the best position, the best rhythm, and the best habits. Some people claim they find it impossible to sleep on their back. But if they take an Alexander lesson in which they lie on their back for part of the lesson, they sometimes fall asleep after a short while. This demonstrates that you can change deepseated habits of sleep if the conditions are right. Sleeping on your back may or may 152

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not be the best position; my point is that you can work on all habits, including those you feel sure are set in stone. Lie semi-supine on the floor before you go to sleep, thereby beginning the transformation from “doing” as you do all day to “non-doing” as you’ll do all night. Or lie supine or semi-supine directly on your bed as you seek sleep, directing your energies into calm. Your body’s position isn’t nearly as important as how you direct your energies. After working on yourself in semi-supine, suppose you turn on your side in order to fall asleep. It’s perfectly possible that you’ll have sweet dreams. 5. HEAL YOUR HURTS

Frank Pierce Jones tells an instructive story about Alexander’s brother, Albert Redden (known to all as A. R.) and himself a fine teacher of the Technique. A. R. got thrown off a horse and suffered a severe back injury. The doctors told him he could never walk again, and for eighteen months he lay in a darkened room with nothing to do (he could not read) but practice inhibition and directive orders. In the end he was able to prove the doctors wrong by walking, first with two canes and then with one. When I knew him, he used the cane only to steady himself, never coming down on it heavily, and could walk, with a curious swaying motion, for a considerable distance, his trunk very upright and his legs swinging smoothly from the hips.1

Doctors often prescribe rest following an injury, an operation, or an illness. Yet what made A. R. well was not to lie down and rest for eighteen months, but to work on himself while lying down for eighteen months. If you find yourself confined to your bed, you can make the experience positive by spending part of your time directing your energies, visualizing, imagining, thinking, sensing, remembering, projecting, desiring and letting go of desire, and otherwise looking forward to your certain recovery.

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C H A P T E R 12

WORKING ON YOURSELF

Ideally you’d wake up with good use, get out of bed with good use, take a shower with good use, and go through the entire day with good use. Good use isn’t something you do, but something you live. It’s your “individuality and character,” in Alexander’s words, and as such it’s permanent and embodied. Until you personify good use, however, you need to cultivate it consciously and diligently. You do so by “working on yourself.” Working on yourself means to face a situation and react constructively to it. It means to deal with discomfort if the discomfort is inevitable, as it often is when you pass from the known to the unknown. It also means to discover, explore, and conquer new ideas and techniques, and to connect to your innermost energies, moment by moment. You can work on yourself as you pursue every task in your daily life, from talking on the phone to making lunch. The basic principle is simple. It’s possible for you to become so drawn in by the task at hand that you “forget yourself.” You can also be so drawn to your own thoughts, feelings, and sensations that you “forget the task at hand.” At their extremes, both situations are problematic. If you forget yourself, you also forget your intelligence, your creativity, your analytical capabilities, and so on. If you forget the task at hand, you don’t accomplish what needs to be accomplished. In between the extremes, there’s a fluid region in which you keep your mind both on yourself and on the task at hand. When you slice a loaf of bread you might tend to raise your shoulders, lower your head and tense your neck, and apply excessive force unevenly on the loaf of bread, causing harm both to you and to the loaf. You might instead organize your back and legs, put yourself in a position of mechanical advantage, keep your shoulders in a unit with the back and the neck in a unit with the spine, direct the elbow, wrist, and hand, and slice the loaf with minimum tension and maximum pleasure. To get the hang of the approach, at first you may need to take a little extra time to accomplish the task. Once you become used to it, you won’t have to take extra time at all; you’ll only need to “agree to pay attention.”

Working on yourself sometimes means developing better mechanics for simple gestures, such as slicing a loaf of bread or drawing the bow across the string. At other times, however, subtler forces are at play. Do this experiment. Sit at a table with a large sheet of blank paper and a colored pencil. Decide that you’ll color the entire sheet with the pencil. It may take 15 minutes or more to accomplish the task. Start with an open and erect back, the feeling of your arm as if extending from the bottom of the back, your hand extending from the arm, the pencil extending from your hand. Bring the pencil to the paper. Did you remember to stay with your back, or did you let go of the feeling of the back in order to put the pencil to paper? Make the poise of your back be primary and let the work of the arm and hand be secondary, the touch of the pencil on paper tertiary, and the actual color covering the paper quaternary. Persist, and you’ll be surprised at the results. Not only will you have an exquisite sensorial time, you’ll achieve a beautifully textured colored paper that shines under the sunlight. YouTube has a clip of the aged Claude Monet, filmed painting in his garden. (Search “impressionist painter Claude Monet at work.”) He looks at a bush, turns his attention to the canvas, and dabs it with a brush. You can actually see the power from his back as he turns from left to right, as he lifts his palette and touches it with his brush, and as he applies paint to the canvas. He’s not “painting.” He’s “working on himself while painting.” This is not only a mechanical approach; it’s completely inseparable from Monet’s aesthetics and identity as a painter. Constantin Brancusi, the Romanian sculptor, once said that things aren’t difficult to do; what is difficult is to put yourself in the state of doing them. Playing a tricky passage musically isn’t difficult to do, but to put yourself in a state where you can do it is, in fact, quite difficult. It takes skill, of course; but, most important, it takes the willingness to move along the continuum from “working on the task” to “working on yourself ” and finding the spot on that line where things become easy to do.

WORKING ON YOURSELF WITH ALEXANDER’S PROCEDURES The word method comes from Greek, where it means “pursuit of knowledge.” Metaexpresses “development,” -hodos means “the way.” A method doesn’t have to be a regimen with rules and regulations, time slots, and specific technical procedures. It can be a series of habits: the habit of staying on an even emotional keel, the habit of acknowledging you may be wrong about something, the habit of not rushing to conclusions. Or the habit of keeping track of things, objects, people, facts, and numbers; or the habit of enjoying small things in life; or the habit of using words thoughtfully to express precise ideas and sentiments. All the same, your method can also be organized and disciplined if it suits you. Every morning without fail, you commit to a two-hour practice session, which you start by sitting still for five minutes without becoming stiff. This is just an example; the important thing is for you to work on yourself, whichever method you use. Working on Yourself

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One method would be to practice and master the procedures outlined in this book: the monkey and the lunge, the whispered “ah,” and all the others. Understand their inner logic and the underlying principles that bind the procedures in a cohesive whole. Become able to do them easily, at different speeds, in all sorts of variations, in sequence, in alternation, and in combination. Perform each step of each procedure on its own, and all steps smoothly together. Perform all the procedures as ends in themselves, and applied to problems of daily life and music making. Learn to apply these procedures reflexively—without the apparent help of the conscious mind, and without stopping the flow of movement to consider its mechanics. Each traditional Alexander procedure addresses the coordinated use of the whole self, at the same time highlighting the use of specific parts of the body. As I see it, the monkey and the lunge pay particular attention to the relationship between the back and the legs. The hands-on-the-back-of-the-chair deals with shoulders, arms, wrists, hands, and fingers. The whispered “ah” addresses the use of the mouth, lips, tongue, jaw, and throat directly, and breathing indirectly. After learning each procedure separately, combine them in twos, threes, and fours, thereby engaging every limb and every muscle group in organized activity. This is an excellent way of learning all aspects of directing: the simultaneity and hierarchy of orders, the balance between orders to do and orders not to do, the needed quickness of attitude, and so on. You might do a monkey and then put your hands on the back of the chair; do a lunge and then a whispered “ah,” either one after the other or in intercalated steps; do a monkey first, then put your hands on the back of the chair, and then perform a whispered “ah.” These procedures are indirect aids in acquiring and refining musical skills. A trumpeter who lunges, directs her arms, and whispers an “ah” is activating many of the mechanisms that she employs in trumpet playing. Below is a run-through of the directions you need for combining three procedures: the monkey, the hands-on-the-back-of-the-chair, and the whispered “ah.” It shows you how formidable and satisfying a task it is to direct your whole self in action. Let the neck be free, to let the head go forward and up, to let the back lengthen and widen, to let the knees go forward and away, and to lean the trunk forward from the hip joints. Let the shoulders spread sideways and apart, to let the extension of the arms continue through the elbows, the wrists, and the fingertips, to bring the arms out and around the back of the chair, to let the fingers take hold of the chair. Energize your cheeks, to let the jaw go forward and open the mouth, to exhale on a whispered vowel “ah,” all together, one after the other. “All together, one after the other” is one of those important concepts that are difficult to explain. One way of putting it is that you don’t give your directions in a simple 156

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linear sequence (one, two, three, four . . .) but in an additive, spiral arrangement (one, one plus two, one plus two plus three, one plus two plus three plus four . . .). It’s usually better to work on yourself for a short time often, rather than for a long while once a day. Work on yourself preventively. Don’t wait until you’re tired or in pain before you stop your activities to work on your use. If, however, you do find yourself tired, in pain, or simply in a bad mood, remember that working on your use may mitigate or eliminate all such states. Working on yourself is like brushing your teeth. It needs to be cultivated, albeit grudgingly at first, until it becomes so ingrained that it’d feel wrong not to do it. At the end of his long life, Alexander was asked if he ever stopped working on himself. “I dare not,” he replied. Working on yourself is delightful at times, and arduous, boring, discouraging, and even painful at other times. The rewards, however, make it well worth your while.

ON ADAPTABILITY To work on yourself is to present yourself willingly with a stimulus that “puts you wrong,” in Alexander’s words, and then deal with it. One way to do it is to place yourself in a situation where your normal reaction would be one of discomfort, hesitation, overeagerness, irritation, or anxiety. Then use your knowledge of inhibition and direction to react differently. You can do this specifically by practicing and performing in exceptional (that is, potentially adverse) circumstances; or generally by seeking out challenges to your coordination. In both cases you’ll be working on your adaptability. We’ll consider each case separately. Wherever he went, Vladimir Horowitz used his own piano and stool for his performance, the better to ensure he’d have ideal conditions for the concert. Horowitz insisted that every concert take place on Sunday at 4:00 in the afternoon, and he requested to be fed the same lunch of fish. (If this story isn’t true, it’d still illustrate a way of doing things, a working mode.) Claudio Arrau proposed an alternative. He said of playing on unfamiliar pianos: “One should be able to adjust on stage, instantaneously. From the first chord, you should know immediately what kind of piano you are playing.”1 The instrument is only one of many variables that you have to deal with on stage. If you’re a cellist, for instance, you may have to consider the instrument itself, the setup of bridge and sound post, the strings, the bow, the condition of the bow hair, the rosin, the chair, and the endpin. Further, you’ll deal with the height and angle of a music stand, the acoustics of the hall, temperature and humidity, noise, strange odors, light conditions. Further still, you’ll deal with matters of dress, hunger, thirst, sleep, interpersonal relationships, and general health and well-being. It’s fair to say that you’ll never be able to create absolutely ideal conditions in every respect. Therefore, pursue two avenues at the same time: seek to adapt the physical world to your needs and wants (the “Horowitz approach”), and seek to adapt yourself to the impositions of the physical world (the “Arrau approach”). Working on Yourself

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To develop your adaptability, practice in unfamiliar and problematic conditions. Seize every opportunity to play on different instruments, including some inferior to your own. When practicing, experiment with every possible variable and circumstance: sitting on a wobbly chair, playing and singing in an acoustically dead environment, practicing immediately upon waking up in the early morning, and so on. Suppose the heavens offered you a gift but demanded a choice: you could choose between owning a perfect instrument or achieving perfect adaptability to all circumstances. However tempting it may be to go for the perfect instrument, perfect adaptability is by far the greater gift. I play on somebody else’s cello; I find it difficult to make it sound like my own instrument; I try to make it conform to my musical and technical wishes by using my arms in unfamiliar ways; in the process I neglect the coordination of my head, neck, and back; I begin to use my arms ever more inefficiently; my playing worsens. The solution lies in aiming for the best possible coordination of my whole self in the circumstances. I can play the crappy cello well only by using myself well while playing it! A twisted neck and stiff shoulders won’t make the cello sound better. Instead of letting the crappy cello make me do bad things to myself, I do good things to the crappy cello. I’m at the center, the cello is at the periphery; to work on myself is to connect with the center, the better to navigate the periphery.

ON FEAR Working on yourself might mean working on your fears. Acknowledge what makes you uncomfortable, and then find a little distance from the discomfort through humor and creativity. Discomfort varies a lot from person to person. One person hates dancing, someone else hates speaking in public, a third hates cats. Many classically trained musicians have a phobia of improvisation, while many accomplished improvisers have a phobia of printed scores. You may think it laughable that someone fears something that you find perfectly banal, but most likely you have some fears that, for other people, seem laughably irrational. You don’t need to conquer all fears, which is probably an impossible task; you just need to acknowledge the fear, figure out what effects the fear has on you, and choose whether or not it might be worth your while to do something about the fear in question. Suppose I ask you to improvise something in the style of Mozart. Your reaction might be “No. I can’t. I don’t like improvising. Can we do something else?” You have the right to refuse to do something, of course, but you might instead acknowledge that you’re afraid of improvising; that not only do you lack the technical and musical skills to do it, you have negative emotions toward the very thought of facing the unknown. In short, you feel threatened, and the fear handicaps you physically, intellectually, and emotionally. Start by observing your fear and the effects it has on you. Then take a metaphorical deep breath and see what you can do while attempting to improvise something in the style of Mozart. If you’re blocked, take a second metaphorical deep breath. Or

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choose to play something else first—a scale, a warm-up exercise. Or put on a recording of something by Mozart so that your ears capture the sounds and the style, and then try again. Or clown around a little and play a jokey version of something by Mozart that you know well. Or ask for advice. The main thing is that you have many choices at your disposal. The absolute first choice is either to submit to the handicapping power of fear or to accept facing the fear and eventually overcome it.

LIFE AS A MARTIAL ART A martial artist in combat achieves a state of high awareness wherein he might be able to foresee his opponent’s move and find the appropriate countermove without difficulty. It’s a state of mind and body in which the martial artist stays completely invested in the here and now, and with an array of capabilities at the ready. The martial artist sees, hears, and senses the continuous flow of information from the environment, processes the information with a mixture of intellectual and intuitive capabilities, and makes his choice to act or not to act. This happens more or less continuously. It’s not as if the martial artist concentrates first on sensing the environment, then on processing the information, then on making decisions, and then on acting. Instead he multitasks in the moment. What allows him to do so is his “use.” It contains apparently postural elements that are in fact “relational” rather than “positional,” and psychological elements that are inseparable from bodily attitudes and energies. Depending on your temperament, it may be useful for you to consider daily life as a sort of martial art. A rehearsal, a bus trip with the orchestra, an audition, a practice session, a lesson that you take, and a lesson that you give are all “combat arenas” in which you face the unexpected, the conflicting, the challenging, the unknown—and in which you sense, choose, and react, multitasking moment by moment, much like an actual martial artist. The conductor’s upbeat is a challenge, a provocation, an attack on your senses and your aesthetics. How will you react? You can get confused and worked up about it, or you can ignore the conductor’s gesture and pay attention to the concertmaster instead, or you can decide to be proactive and start the piece on your own initiative, or you can take the whole thing as a joke, or you can seek oblivion by shutting out all the information coming at you. The important thing is to understand that you always react to stimuli coming at you in an unbroken sequence; you always have choices; and you always make choices, even when you’re not intellectually aware of making them. The sequence of stimulus and reaction never stops: upbeat (choose your reaction), downbeat (choose your reaction), another upbeat (choose your reaction), a sforzando (choose your reaction), a crescendo (choose your reaction). To work on yourself is to heighten your awareness of the choosing process: the choices at your disposal, their merits and demerits, and the consequences of every choice you make. If daily life is a martial-art arena in which you’re constantly “attacked” by stimuli, the best self-defense is to “do nothing.” To make actual choices

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when faced with a stimulus, you can’t allow a default choice to block the process. An immediate, habitual reaction of which you may not be fully aware—for instance, hating the conductor every time he gives an upbeat—would prevent you from having any other reaction. Non-doing means that some part of your brain, heart, soul, and body remains permanently open to a new possibility. It’s not as if you ought never to hate the conductor and his upbeats; it’s simply better for you to figure out your choices and then settle on what you prefer. What is your life like if you hate the conductor, and what would it be like if you didn’t hate him? Once you’ve created an open space inside yourself through inhibition and non-doing, you can let go of habitual reactions and make individual, creative decisions with greater ease. If hating the conductor is one such decision, it’ll more constructive for you than to hate him by default. You might become able to hate the conductor and play really well, instead of hating the conductor and playing really badly BECAUSE HE MADE YOU DO IT.

MIRRORS, VIDEO CAMERAS, TAPE RECORDERS When Alexander first decided to find out how he was using himself when speaking, he worked on himself in front of a mirror. Later on he added two other mirrors, so that he could see himself in profile or from the back without having to turn his head. What he saw played an important role in his discoveries. Many musicians use mirrors in their daily practice. In more recent times, some have been using audio recorders and video cameras. Useful as they may be, mirrors, cameras, and recorders carry certain dangers. It’s possible to look without seeing, and to hear without listening. Sometimes I place a student in front of a mirror and ask her to perform an ordinary gesture, like putting her feet wide apart and close together again. The student shortens her torso, twists her hips, freezes her breathing, and so on. Then I ask her, “What did you see as you moved?” Common answers include “Nothing.” “I wasn’t looking.” “I hate my haircut.” To look and to see, you need to be attentive, dispassionate, interested yet disinterested, inquisitive yet accepting. Otherwise you risk looking at a mirror or a video, or listening to an audio recording of yourself, without finding out anything useful. Worse, you may pass judgment—“I like it,” “I don’t like it”—and block the blossoming of objective awareness. Faulty sensory awareness pervades all of our actions, including watching and listening. The use of visual or aural aids doesn’t guarantee accuracy of perception. Only an improvement in how you use yourself will entail progress in sensory awareness. Watching yourself in the mirror becomes useful when you can keep a “free neck” while doing it—and by a free neck I mean, among other things, a state of mind free of assumptions and judgments. It takes many experiences of the same kind before one really understands what lies behind the experience. A couple who have been dancing the tango several times a week for many years have a different sense of the possibilities hidden in tango from 160

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a couple who have taken a single weekend class. If you look at yourself and see “nothing,” or just an odious zit on your nose, you may well decide right away to stop looking. Look at yourself in the mirror, and then walk away without drawing any conclusions. Go back to the mirror and look at yourself again, staying in front of the mirror for a while longer than before—and draw no conclusions. Do this several dozen times over days and weeks. If you really train yourself not to draw conclusions, you might start seeing some interesting things. Video and audio recordings are like the mirror, in that they easily invite you to “not listen to yourself ” or rush to conclusions. But they are also unlike the mirror, in that they allow you to observe yourself after the fact and at a certain distance. This can be an advantage. Unfortunately, video and audio recordings distort the actuality of your playing and singing: the sound you make isn’t the exact sound that comes out of your recording equipment. The recording can make you sound stronger, or weaker, or more resonant, or less resonant. It doesn’t matter in what direction the recording distorts your music making; the simple reality is that it inevitably distorts it in some way. You can use recordings to perceive aspects of your playing and singing, but not the whole of it, and most likely not the essence of it. It’s a complete certainty that listening to a recording of Wilhelm Furtwängler’s conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, for instance, does not and cannot correspond to the experience of listening to a live concert of theirs. All the same, you can learn a tremendous amount by recording yourself, however informally. A cheap video camera will capture something of you. Suppose this “something” is incomplete and even misleading. Watching or listening to a distorted version of yourself can be useful: it teaches you not to draw conclusions or pass judgment. How can you hate or love something that is a mirage, an illusion, an echo of an impression? Listen to the distorted portrayal and back off your own feelings. “It’s kind of interesting,” you might say. Then you analyze it dispassionately: “I may be wrong, but it appears that I’m rushing my sixteenth notes.” The simple fact of recording yourself is a sort of psychophysical challenge. How do you play or sing when you’re aware that you’re being recorded? Just to have a mike in front of you can be quite unsettling—even a “dead” mike, unhooked to any other equipment. It creates possibilities, both negative and positive. You might find the mike a real distraction, partly because it triggers your fear of being judged by listeners and music critics. Or you might take the unhooked mike as an invitation to address an imaginary audience in a concert situation, resulting in your focusing yourself and playing or singing better than you normally do. Recording yourself informally with inexpensive equipment also has the merit of preparing you for bigger projects. Once you’re used to recording yourself regularly, you won’t be unsettled by a bigger project such as a CD or DVD. But if you have little or no experience of recording yourself, then a whole CD can be quite daunting. At all times and in all settings, everything boils down to your intentions, your perceptions, and your reactions—what you think, what you feel, and what you do. To work on yourself is to aim to know yourself, and perhaps to understand yourself and accept yourself as you are. It may well be an impossible aim, but its pursuit will give you purpose and pleasure. Working on Yourself

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PART I I I

THE APPLICATIONS

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C H A P T E R 13

TECHNIQUE

Whether you’re a singer, instrumentalist, or conductor, you have a personal definition of “technique.” Perhaps you’ve never articulated it intellectually or verbally, but it certainly affects the way you practice, rehearse, and perform. It might be an interesting experiment for you to think through your current understanding of technique, and state a brief definition of it before reading on. Write it down on paper, or share it verbally with a friend. Many musicians might say that “technique is the physical means by which one actualizes one’s musical conception,” or a version of it. This seems reasonable, yet it makes a false assumption: it implies a separation of body and mind. By defining technique as the physical means to actualize a conception, you may end up equating the technical work of your daily practice with training the body. Such training tends to be mechanical, repetitive, and devoid of reflection or attentiveness. Take a walk down the corridors of a music school and you’ll appreciate how prevalent this is. If you search for control of a complex, creative process through machinelike means, you’re unlikely to achieve what you’re looking for. Besides, you could injure yourself in the process. A biographer quotes the pianist and composer Ferruccio Busoni: “[Busoni] writes that a great pianist must first and foremost be a great technician. But, he says, technique does not depend solely on fingers and wrists, strength and persistence. It is seated in the brain.”1 If this is so, you won’t think of “training your body” to acquire or refine technique. You’ll necessarily train the brain, or, more precisely, the connections between the brain and the fingers, or more broadly, between your intentions and your gestures. The great violin teacher Ivan Galamian wrote that technique “is the ability to direct mentally and to execute physically all of the necessary playing movements of left and right hands, arms, and fingers.”2 To speak of directing mentally and executing physically is perhaps redundant; it’d be a contradiction to say that someone is adept at executing physically but mediocre at directing mentally. It might be useful to refer to both aspects simply as “directing,” thereby highlighting the integrity of thought

and action. Then your technique becomes synonymous with your directions—the thoughts and energies that give birth to everything you do in practice. After Galamian speaks of the playing movements of left and right hands, arms, and fingers, he points out how body parts affect one another: However important the individual elements in violin technique, more important still is the understanding of their interdependence in a natural, organic relationship. If, to give an example, the bow is held after one fashion, then the functioning of the fingers, hand, wrist, and arm will fall into a certain organic pattern. If the bow grip is changed, one must permit all other parts of the hand and arm to find their corresponding organic adjustment and their balance, one with the other.3

We might go further and state that all body parts are interconnected: the fingers, hand, wrist, and arm, of course, but also the head, neck, back, legs, and feet. An eventual change of bow grip does indeed necessitate the adjustments that Galamian writes about, but these adjustments would also affect—directly or indirectly—the whole body. By the same token, a change in the orientation of your head, neck, and back will end up affecting the arms, hands, and fingers. Tempting as it is to find a good bow grip or a good hand position and, from there, make all necessary adjustments throughout the body, it may be better for you to find a good orientation of your head, neck, and back—and, from there, make all necessary adjustments to your arms, hands, and fingers. If you change your coordination, you change your technique. Technique, in fact, is only a manifestation of how you use yourself—an effect, rather than a cause. The use of the self, applied to playing the violin, constitutes “violin technique”; applied to singing, “vocal technique.” Husler and Rodd-Marling wrote: To define [technique] is a matter of some difficulty, because it is not easy to decide whether technique applies to singing at all; if it does, where does it end, or where should it end? This may be a pointer: organic being has no capacity for living “technically”; to impose technical measure upon it invariably signifies the presence of an alien force. Technique, in short, is not a physiological term. . . . The perfect singer (ideally speaking) is one who has succeeded in overcoming all forms of technical usage, he is past the stage of needing its help, he sings with a fully liberated vocal organ, from its inmost nature, with every impulse, urge and drive belonging to it. To create is to bring forth from an existing reality; technique is fabrication.4

In short, Husler and Rodd-Marling affirm that technique “doesn’t exist,” at least not in the common understanding of the word. To use yourself is to possess technique. You need not acquire it, nor superimpose it on the way you use yourself. You can, however, improve your technique if you work on how you use yourself. Technique has often been equated with coordination, and coordination with the ability to play fast notes. Speed and accuracy may be important aspects of technique, 166

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but so are clarity, evenness, intonation, and many others. A complete technique implies the ability to play legato and sostenuto, in a wide range of dynamics and articulations, in every imaginable color. Wilhelm Furtwängler wrote that technique “must make free regulation of the rhythm possible, and go beyond this to influence the tone.”5 Heinrich Neuhaus concurs: “Work on tone is work on technique and work on technique is work on tone.”6 A healthy technique, then, is completely inseparable from a healthy sound—that is, a sound that is free, vibrant, appealing to the senses, and musically compelling. Neuhaus writes of a pupil who “because of technical difficulties or some other reason . . . plays ‘what comes out’ and not what he wants and thinks, or—most important of all—what the composer wants.”7 On the one hand, technique serves the wishes of the composer and the purposes of music itself. On the other hand, it represents a link between conception and perception. You conceive of something in your mind’s ears; you actualize this conception; you assess the results objectively, to verify if indeed you played what you wanted, how you wanted it. Then you start again. For now, then, let’s redefine technique as perception, intention and gesture, directed into sound and at the service of music; the way you use yourself when you sing, play, or conduct.

THE “WHAT” AND THE “HOW” If you conceive of technique as “the physical means by which one actualizes one’s musical conception,” you create a subtle distinction between what you do (your musical conception) and how you do it (the physical means you employ). This distinction is as unhelpful as the separation between body and mind. Let’s return briefly to an idea we studied in Chapter 4. There we compared two contrasting actions: sitting down in your habitual manner, which is activated by a particular mental command and accompanied by a particular sensorial feedback; and sitting down in a directed manner, which is activated by a mental command wholly different in nature from your usual command to sit down, bringing with it entirely new sensations. We might call the first action “sitting down,” and the second one “thinking up to bend the knees.” These aren’t two ways of doing the same things, or two “hows” for the same “what.” They are two separate “whats,” each inextricably bound to its own “how.” The “how” determines the “what,” and vice versa. The same applies to music making: there isn’t and there can’t be a separation between technique (the presumed “how”) and music (the presumed “what”). Neuhaus quotes or paraphrases what Nietzsche said about writers: “To perfect a style is to perfect ideas. Anyone who does not at once agree with this is past salvation.” This is the true meaning of technique (style). I often tell my pupils that the word “technique” comes from the Greek word “techne” and that it means art.8 . . . The objective is already an indication of the means of attaining it.9 Technique

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Wilhelm Furtwängler too takes up the connection between technique and art: Previously technique [was] something positive, because it only ran parallel to what it had to express. Since [then] it has become learnable, something— mind you—which was not the case before. . . . The real problem of our time is therefore how to reconcile it with content. . . . And now it becomes apparent that there is yet another technique of which today’s world is no longer aware, which is infinitely more difficult. The difference between these two concepts of technique contains everything of any importance that today’s world should and does not know.10

The central difficulty in our existence is to establish a circuit of connections. These include connections between body parts, so that the head, neck, and back collaborate with the arms, hands and fingers; connections between body and mind, between intention and gesture, between technique and content, so that all that we do is expressive and meaningful; and connections between our individual selves and the people with whom we communicate, so that we become part of something bigger than ourselves. Isolating technique from this circuit of connections defeats the very purpose of technique. You hear a young child sing something simple but beautiful. Then you hear a big-name virtuoso play a flashy concerto that leaves you indifferent. Who has the better technique of the two? “How and what” live together, whether in the heart of a child or in the fingers of a virtuoso. If you pursue technique with your fingers, it becomes your aesthetics, too. But if you connect with the Creative Source, your technique will shine regardless of what you do.

WORKING ON TECHNIQUE Friedrich Wieck, Robert Schumann’s unwilling father-in-law, once wrote in a letter  to Schumann’s mother: “For Robert the greatest difficulty lies in the quiet, cold, well-considered, restrained conquest of technique, as the foundation of piano playing.”11 Wieck’s exhortations to Schumann illustrate nicely a well-established belief of how technique can be acquired. It’s a view that, though not incorrect, is often misinterpreted. Practicing in a machinelike, thoughtless manner in the pursuit of technical control for its own sake doesn’t address the real problem of technique, which is to unite craft with content. But working in a well-considered manner and uniting craft with content is, of course, a wonderful way of practicing. Infuse every one of your gestures, however simple or complex, with a spark of musicality, so that your technique becomes pregnant with meaning. Instead of pursuing technical control first and then applying to it a veneer of musicality, integrate the disciplined work on what Wieck calls “a pure, exact, smooth, clear, well-marked, and elegant touch”12 and the expression of your innate musicality. One note sung, 168

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one bow stroke, one chord strummed at the guitar can all be born of a musical intention. Let’s take scales as an example. Neuhaus wrote: [Leopold] Godowsky, my incomparable teacher and one of the great virtuoso pianists of the post-[Anton] Rubinstein era, once told us in class that he never practiced scales (and, of course, that was so). Yet he played them with a brilliance, evenness, speed and beauty of tone which I believe I have never heard excelled.13

A scale, then, isn’t a physical exercise but a form of music. Sit calmly at your instrument or stand calmly as you prepare to sing, and sound a scale as if performing in public, communicating something meaningful to your audience. Working on your technique then becomes not only constructive but also so agreeable that you’ll practice not because you have to, but because you want to. It’s easy to underestimate the emotional dimension of technique and of daily practice. If you practice your scales in boredom and frustration, then your technique will also contain a charge, hidden or blatant, of boredom and frustration. If you hear, in every scale that you play or sing, something joyful and expressive, then your technique will contain a charge of joy and expression. Suppose you hate your right ring finger on account of its refusal to move as fast as you’d like it to move. Your technique will be shaded with a little hatred—to be precise, a little self-hatred. If you want to conquer the apparent physical problems involved in each technique, you need to navigate the boredom, frustration, and selfhatred that might be seeping into your work. In many instances, these emotions don’t simply seep into the work; they actually determine the work itself. Your technique can be “hateful” or “celebratory,” “bored” or “clever.” Neuhaus wrote that “the whole secret of talent and of genius is that in the case of a person so gifted, music lives a full life in his brain before he even touches a keyboard or draws a bow across the string.”14 This means that you can improve your technique without playing or singing a single note—by heightening your awareness of yourself moment by moment, by noticing how you react to a given situation, by sensing your movements and rhythms in daily life, by becoming invested and attentive. The study of technique is akin to a meditation. You sit at the piano not knowing exactly what you’ll do that morning or what will come out of the instrument. You appreciate the environment, regardless of where you are: an out-of-tune upright piano in a dusty storeroom is “its own thing” and has its own intrinsic merits, much like a perfectly tuned concert grand at Carnegie Hall. There are sounds that the outof-tune upright can produce that the tuned concert grand can’t! As long as you take things for what they are, instead of wishing them to be something else, you can dwell in an apparently imperfect setting and create special, magical, satisfying moments unique to the setting. Suppose the out-of-tune upright has several broken keys and an uneven action, some notes sticking, others not sounding altogether. Can you play it without misusing yourself, without stiffening your neck, without giving yourself tendonitis? It takes a specific technique to play on such an instrument. Technique

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Your technique is a collaboration engaging multiple partners: your whole body, your imagination, the instrument you’re using, the environment in which you find yourself, the public you play for, and the actual compositions and improvisations you perform at a given moment. If you approach a musical situation, in practice or in concert, with a fixed aesthetic idea, you might not be able to find the best possible techniques for that situation. A cello with a period setup (gut strings, short fingerboard, no endpin) requires quite a different touch from a cello with a modern setup (tungsten strings, long fingerboard, endpin). If your mind is stuck in modern-cello aesthetics, your period-cello technique can’t be borne new and fresh as it ought to. Imagine a really dry concert hall. If you keep wishing it to be more resonant, you’ll play with a technique inappropriate for the actual setting in which you find yourself. Your efforts to “make the hall more resonant” would be in vain, a waste of energy that ends up sabotaging your performance. Your healthiest technique, and your most meaningful technique, is in harmony with the possibilities of the environment. In a really dry concert hall, you might as well give a performance dimensioned to match the hall. The profane world is made of flesh and bones, immediate concerns, habits and needs, hard matter. The sacred world is made not of matter, but energy; not of flesh and bones, but intention and perception; not of immediate concerns, but connection and timelessness. Just as it’s possible to genuflect and pray in such a way that there’s nothing sacred about it, it’s possible to hold a cell phone and punch in a few numbers while being in touch with the sacred aspects of the gesture—which leads to communication, or a “communion” with someone else. Your instrumental and vocal gestures contain both worlds. It’s the sacred charge of the gesture that helps you connect technique and content. Find the prayer that lives inside each scale, and communicate its beauty to yourself and to your listeners. Let it be so for every note, every bow stroke, every trill, every upbeat, and every downbeat. Then you and your public will bask in the glow of your technique.

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C H A P T E R 14

AESTHETIC JUDGMENTS

During one of our lessons, I ask you to place yourself in a monkey position: keeping the back straight, bending your knees, and leaning forward from the hip joints. But the monkey feels all wrong to you: “Instinctively I prefer bending my back rather than my knees,” you say; “it’s more natural for me. I couldn’t possibly do a monkey in public. People would notice me, and I would lose my spontaneity and become self-conscious. I don’t like it!” The words that you use in defining what is right and wrong play a big part in your identity, and also in your actions. Meditating upon these words can help you pass from being bound to being free. And all these things you’ve said about the monkey apply to your musical choices, where you’re deeply concerned with right and wrong, naturalness, and spontaneity. It’s worth our while to look at these words in detail. When you say that bending your knees instead of your back isn’t natural, you define natural as “what you do habitually, without further premeditation.” The same word, however, has at least two other meanings. Alexander pointed out that certain acts and behaviors are considered right or wrong according to circumstance or ever-evolving societal values. In one religion, you must uncover your head before entering a sacred space; in another, you must cover it instead. These contrasting values are culturally based and relative. But when it comes to how you use yourself, Alexander believed that there exist absolute values that transcend circumstance. Stiffening your neck, just to give an example, is harmful, regardless of who you are; freeing your neck is healthy, regardless of who you are. This is how Alexander put it: A certain manner of use of the mechanisms is found in association with certain satisfactory standards of functioning and with conditions of health and well-being. We are surely justified in considering a manner of use that is associated with such desirable conditions to be “natural” or “right” under all circumstances.1

Natural, then, may mean “unpremeditated” or “intrinsically right.” Depending on what you want to say and whom you’re saying it too, you may have to define your terms to avoid confusion—in yourself and in your listener. The world abounds in well-coordinated people who do monkeys as a matter of course: small children at play, sportsmen and women, martial artists. When you learn the monkey as an adult, you do yourself a lot of good, since the position taps into the body’s innate strength and gives you tremendous mechanical advantage. In short, the monkey is truly natural—in accordance with the laws of Nature—and therefore intrinsically right. We use the word natural in a third way, for instance when we say that driving cars (or wearing shoes, sitting in chairs, or living in big cities) isn’t natural. In this context, natural means “distinct or separate from civilization.” Yet it’s possible to be healthy and happy in a big city where you wear shoes and drive cars, and unhealthy and unhappy living barefoot and carless out in the wild. There’s a natural way to live in the civilized world and an unnatural way to live away from the civilized world.

SPONTANEITY, INSTINCT, AND INTUITION You don’t feel spontaneous in bending your knees and doing a monkey, and instinctively you prefer to bend your back instead. Spontaneity and instinct are similar to naturalness, in that they can be defined and lived in multiple ways. In an introduction to Alexander’s Man’s Supreme Inheritance, the philosopher and educationalist John Dewey wrote: The spontaneity of childhood is a delightful and precious thing, but in its original naive form it is bound to disappear. Emotions become sophisticated unless they become enlightened, and the manifestation of sophisticated emotion is in no sense genuine self-expression. True spontaneity is henceforth not a birthright, but the last term, the consummated conquest of an art—the art of conscious control to the mastery of which Mr. Alexander’s book so convincingly invites us.2

In brief, there are two forms of spontaneity: the child’s and the master’s. In discussing the loss of spontaneity, it may be useful to establish the difference between self-consciousness and self-awareness. Although both imply a moment-tomoment measuring of your every action, self-consciousness denotes an uncomfortable, excessive preoccupation with yourself, and above all with the way others judge you; in self-awareness you don’t let judgment constrain you. In your life journey, then, there’s a loss of your first, childlike spontaneity, the spontaneity of not knowing; a difficult and sometimes fatal foray into self-consciousness; and the possibility of arriving at self-awareness, in which you attain a new spontaneity that approaches an enlightened state.

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Faced with a stimulus, you can react unthinkingly out of habit, or you can make a very quick decision based on an awareness of all possibilities at your disposal. Both types of reaction would be called spontaneous, but they couldn’t be more different! It might be helpful to make a distinction between instinct and intuition. In popular usage the two terms are used interchangeably, yet they mean distinct things. H. W. Fowler, the lexicographer, discusses the difference between instinct and intuition briefly in his Modern English Usage: While both, as faculties, are contrasted with that of reason, intuition is the attribute by which gods and angels, saints and geniuses, are superior to the need of reasoning, and instinct is the gift by which animals are compensated for their inability to reason. . . . [Quoting the English essayist and poet Joseph Addison:] “Our superiors are guided by intuition, and our inferiors by instinct.”3

Fowler puts instinct and intuition in evolutionary terms. In our voyage from the known to the unknown—our duty to evolution, so to speak—we abandon instinct to embrace intuition. In instinct, you’re a slave to habit; in intuition, habit is at your service. Some musicians balk at learning theory, analysis, and history, fearing that such knowledge would interfere with the spontaneity of their performance. Certain pop, jazz, and folk musicians even balk at learning how to read music altogether. But once you understand that there are two types of spontaneity and a difference between instinct and intuition, you might gladly embrace the study of theory and other related subjects, because in the course of time your internalized knowledge will help you give intuitive and spontaneous performances of great depth.

I DON’T LIKE IT We started our discussion with your doing a monkey. You quickly determined that you “didn’t like it.” Suppose I play the cello in a string quartet in which you play the viola. For musical reasons, I suggest that you play a particular long note in one bow. Before you try it, and partly as a justification for not trying it, you say: “I don’t like that; I prefer playing the note in two separate bow strokes.” Until you actually try something, however, you don’t quite have an opinion; instead you have a prejudice. You may have good or bad reasons for your prejudice, but even good reasons don’t turn a prejudice into an opinion. It’s not exact to say that you “don’t like” something you’ve never tried, be it eating oysters, dancing the rumba, or playing a long note on a single bow. To be exempt from prejudicial judgments, you have to free yourself from technical constraints. You can’t claim that you choose to execute a passage the way you do unless you’re able to execute it equally well in a range of ways. Cornelius L. Reid writes that “the benefit to be derived from a healthy coordinative response is that it

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provides absolute spontaneity of expression. . . . The singer then becomes able to express what he has to say the way he wants to say it, not the way he has to.”4 Among other things, functional freedom means being able to execute, freely and convincingly, interpretative choices you may not particularly like. Ivan Galamian wrote that even though a tone color produced by a certain type of vibrato might be contrary to the taste of a particular place or time . . . the ability to produce it cannot become obsolete, and, thus, it has a definite place within the inventory of the absolute values of a complete technical equipment.5

Spontaneity will come to you if you pursue not that which you like, but that which is free. The key to your quest is the ability to suspend aesthetic judgment—that is, the ability to sing and play in ways that might displease your ears or those of your neighbors. New sounds and techniques that may be essential to your freedom can feel “wrong” at first. Taste is a tyrant, and freedom tastes wrong to the tyrant!

DOING AND NON-DOING IN PERFORMANCE Alexander makes a distinction between relative and absolute standards of right and wrong: relative when subject to differences in culture and circumstance, and absolute as regards how you use yourself. When it comes to performance and interpretation, are there absolute standards, or are all standards relative? In other words, is there a way of playing, singing, or conducting that is intrinsically right, for it is associated with an intrinsically right way of using yourself? Would this way of making music transcend all considerations of taste? There are no clear-cut answers to these questions, but you might want to explore Alexander’s concept of non-doing and see if it suits you. It’ll take you a while to find out whether non-doing is natural or not, spontaneous or not, intuitive or not, agreeable or not. A saying is attributed to Richard Strauss: “It is the audience who should sweat, not the musician.” Another well-known saying complements it: “Play with a cold head and a warm heart.” To put it differently, it’s possible for you to create excitement rather than get excited. As a performer, you’re the designated driver: you need to stay sober, the better to guide your audience on their trip to a foreign land. Feeling in music arises of its own, through the freedom of your technique, your healthy sounds, and the substance of the music itself. Reid puts it simply: “Functional freedom awakens feeling, and when this happens it is not necessary to ‘put’ feeling into anything. It is there.”6 Use yourself well when you make music, and much of your interpretative work is done. Reid writes that “it is almost self-evident, granted a musical personality, that all tones truly free are either beautiful or legitimately expressive.”7 When you free your voice you become Nature manifest, and you’ll hold the attention of the audience with a single sound, a syllable or word, an open string 174

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drawn at the violin or cello, even a silent gesture as you prepare an upbeat in singing, playing, or conducting. To “put feeling” into your performances ultimately diminishes the expressive power of your music making. Wilhelm Furtwängler wrote that “every work carries within it its own ‘distance,’ from which one must consider it. To discover this distance and act accordingly is the principal duty of the performer.”8 It’s difficult to define this all-important distance. It may be a matter of how you invest yourself in performance: Are you trying to express your individuality through music, or are you trying to let music express its universality through you? Distance allows you to “bow to the music,” so to speak. Or the distance might refer to how you approach the score: from within or from without. You approach a score from within when you immerse yourself in the intricacies of the composition; the interplay of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic forces within it; the composer’s time and place in history; and the relationship of the individual composition with the Creative Source from which all compositions flow. You approach a score from without when you learn it by rote, from recordings, by imitating your teacher or other performers, by mechanistic rather than linguistic means. When you approach music from within, you subsume yourself into the music, which then appears to speak for you or through you. You may find it gratifying to put feeling into your music making, to get excited, to emote, to use outlandish tempos and dynamics and articulations, to use exaggerated slides and capricious rubatos, to linger on details at the expense of the whole. But you’d be missing out on something infinitely more satisfying. Nadia Boulanger, the great music teacher, said: I have always preferred the word “transmit” to “interpret,” it seems to take better account of the attitude necessary to those whose job is to shed light on a work. . . . In my opinion, once the interpreter takes over, the game becomes unbalanced. The interpreter gains, but the work loses. A sublime interpretation is essentially one which makes me forget the composer, forget the interpreter, forget myself; I forget everything except the masterpiece.9

Are you obliged to agree with Nadia Boulanger’s preferences? Of course not. To live is to make choices. You’re free to choose interpretation over transmission, selfexpression over self-effacement, making music from without over making music from within, a stiff neck over a free neck. Nevertheless, I think Alexander, Dewey, Reid, Fowler, Boulanger, and Furtwängler all hint at the paradox at the heart of human existence: to become your true self, you may need to give up your perceived individuality and subsume yourself into something bigger than yourself. Furtwängler wrote that “there are two mutually contradictory things: originality and naturalness. . . . Of the two—and let this be said to our age again and again— naturalness is the more important and the greater thing.”10 Embrace universal naturalness and you may discover your true originality. To get there isn’t easy, because what is right feels wrong, and what is wrong feels right. Hence the value of nondoing, distance, self-awareness, a free neck, a cool head, and a warm heart. Aesthetic Judgments

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C H A P T E R 15

IMITATION

I once watched a tall man stoop to walk through a low door. Trailing behind, his three-year-old son did what he thought he was supposed to do: just like his daddy, he too stooped to walk through the door. As children we constantly imitated our parents, siblings, caregivers, colleagues, and teachers. We’ve learned so much through imitation that we can hardly catalogue all of it. Our language skills, for instance, come in good part from our capacity to imitate other people. Had you been born without a talent for imitation, you wouldn’t be speaking your “mother tongue” very well, if at all! Imitation is an innate capacity, vital for our survival and growth (Figure 15.1). Imitation, however, is a tricky business. When we were little we didn’t have reliable criteria to help us determine what was healthy and what was unhealthy in our models, and we imitated both together. As adults, if anything we’re worse off: our innate capacity to imitate is by now handicapped by education, social constraints, and self-consciousness—that is, the filter of judgment, the main impediment to integrated activity. In figuring out what is what, discernment is useful (“this is brown, this is blue”), but judgment is a real obstacle to progress (“this should be brown,” “I hate blue”). We may have more discernment than children, but we’re also more burdened by judgment. Whether you started your musical training as a small child, an adolescent, or an adult, you learned many things thanks to imitation. Your imitation may have been instinctive when you were little or conscious as an adult, but you imitated nevertheless. Most likely you’re still imitating many models and will continue to do so as a matter of course. This is unavoidable and desirable. Much like the boy who stooped after his daddy, however, it’s possible that you’ve been imitating models in a manner detrimental to your well-being. Imitation becomes constructive when you pay attention to psychophysical processes rather than to the results of these processes. To help you understand what I mean, I’ll describe at length what happens when a musician imitates someone else’s results. Later we’ll turn our attention to processes.

FIGURE 15.1: Imitating daddy

IMITATING OUTWARD RESULTS In my youth I had a talented colleague who was in awe of Mstislav Rostropovich—a very great cellist with a gorgeous sound, dazzling technique, and a magnetic personality. Harry would attend his idol’s performances with score and pencil in hand, writing down as many fingerings and bowings as he could. Harry played the same pieces that his idol did, at the same speeds, with the same nuances. He copied his idol’s posture at the cello and his way of placing his instrument against his body. Imitation

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Some of Harry’s habits of imitation may have been constructive, but on the whole he was working on his cello playing from the outside in, rather from the inside out. His habits are typical of a young music student, and they merit detailed study. A musician with a compelling personality may well give his or her public great pleasure. And yet, sometimes the personality is so interesting that it tends to overwhelm the work of art represented by music itself. From watching a concert you can retain how fast the player is able to play, or how beautiful his or her sounds may be, or how dramatic he or she looked on stage. Or you can retain the transformative power of music itself, in which case you more or less forget the player, who “disappears” onstage and also subsequently from your memory of the concert. If you imitate someone with a compelling personality, you’ll miss an important point. Your idol is successful thanks partly to artistry, of course, but also partly to the force of his or her singularity. Imitating a singular human being will sabotage your own identity, since you’ll become “like someone else” rather than singularly yourself. A model’s personality, then, may be a hindrance to constructive imitation. Harry copies his idol’s bowings and fingerings. Like other elements of a musician’s execution, bowings and fingerings have a certain inner logic. They must serve the needs of the music, they’re somewhat bound by the physical characteristics of the instrument, and they must conform to the morphology and the use of the individual musician. Hand size and the stretch between individual fingers, for instance, sometimes predetermine the choice of fingerings. It seems unlikely that Harry will understand the logic of his idol’s choices by imitating them. Also, great musicians aren’t infallible. Everyone makes unintelligent choices from time to time, and some prominent artists make consistently dumb choices. Music editions prepared and signed by well-known musicians come with all sorts of indications: bowings, fingerings, breathing and articulation marks, pedaling, and many others. It’s both amusing and appalling to see how haphazard and inadequate these indications can be. To imitate the mistakes of others isn’t a good idea. You have all the right in the world to make your own mistakes, particularly if in the process you learn the laws of fingering, bowing, breathing, and so on. Besides copying some outward signs of his idol’s technique, Harry also copies many of his mannerisms, which are unrelated to either technique or aesthetics: a little grimacing, some heavy breathing, a tilt of the head to highlight the display of emotion. Mimicking mannerisms might allow you to “channel” someone else and enter the other person’s headspace. It’s therefore a potentially useful tool. But would you really learn to play the cello better if you huffed and puffed like the other guy? Many musicians have stage tics and mannerisms. Some people in the audience will find them charming, others distracting. It’s one thing if a musician has a strong inner core plus a bunch of mannerisms in the periphery, and another if a musician soups up his or her mannerisms on account of a wobbly inner core. Either way, constructive imitation requires that you distinguish the core from the periphery in a model. Nelson Mandela might appear in public wearing a business suit or a flamboyantly colorful shirt. In either outfit he’d be the same wonderful human being, the embodiment of healing energy. Just wearing a colorful shirt like Mandela’s won’t really help you become the embodiment of healing energy. 178

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The most important thing isn’t the model but what you do with it. After all, even the worst possible model would be useful to you if only you decided to imitate its contrary. We’ll get to this soon enough, but first let’s look at some specific models and what we can learn from them.

SINGULARITY AND UNIVERSALITY With the help of YouTube, I propose that you study four musicians who shared certain characteristics: the pianist Arthur Rubinstein (Figure 15.2), the violinist Jascha Heifetz (Figure 15.3), the violist William Primrose (Figure 15.4), and the cellist Emanuel Feuermann (Figure 15.5). There exist plenty of video clips featuring Rubinstein and Heifetz, but not many featuring Primrose and Feuermann. This isn’t important, as ultimately you only need to watch one clip of each. You might want to reread the sections “The Simplified Skeleton” and “Convexity and Concavity” in Chapter 2. In the simplified skeleton, the neck and spine belong together, and the head is somewhat autonomous relative to the neck; the back and shoulders belong together, and the arms are somewhat autonomous relative to the shoulders; the back and pelvis belong together, and the legs are somewhat autonomous relative to the pelvis. Our four models demonstrate the simplified skeleton in motion. Their bodies are circuits of connection in which the back remains relatively still even as the arms and hands fly around their respective instruments. The overall impression is one of economy and condensation: few movements beyond the strictly necessary, and no movements that would cause the neck to move too far from the spine, or the shoulders too far from the back, or the pelvis too far from the back. In sum, our models “think up along the spine.” Convexity is a form of outward affirmation, in which your steady inner core is a self-renewing well of energy that you direct and propagate as you wish. In contrast, concavity is a form of inward collapse, in which the absence of a steady inner core causes you to be ungrounded and wobbly. Many performers today hyperextend their spine and move their head so far in space that the neck disconnects from the spine. Their overall coordination is, therefore, concave. In contrast, our four models are convex. Convexity requires you to firm up your back and legs and keep your head relatively still, helping the neck stay connected with the spine. The well-distributed tension of convexity gives the impression of relaxation, while the lack of opposing forces in a floppy spine causes many compensatory tensions to arise. Our four models display necessary tension, which looks and feels like relaxation! Convexity and concavity are born of aesthetic preferences. Our four models leave their emotions in the background, so that music occupies the foreground when they perform. Then the members of the public may have their own emotions as they encounter the work of art, plainly displayed for all to see. Concave musicians try to “put emotions into the music” or to express their own emotions, which they teleImitation

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FIGURE 15.2: Arthur Rubinstein

FIGURE 15.3: Jascha Heifetz

FIGURE 15.4: William Primrose

FIGURE 15.5: Emanuel Feuermann

graph to the audience by means of the hyperextended spine and twisted head positions. Watching a concave performer, you see first and foremost the performer’s emotions, which upstage the work of art. You’re then likely to have an emotional response to the performer’s emotions, not to the work of art! Concave musicians become handicapped by health problems sooner rather than later, and they tend to have shortened careers. Convex musicians, however, lead long and productive lives. Rubinstein died at age 95, giving magnificent performances into the ripest of old age. Heifetz died at 86, having sustained a performing career for more than six decades. Primrose died at 78; YouTube has a clip of him playing as brilliantly in his late years as he ever did as a young man. Of our models, it was only Feuermann who died young, at age 41, on account of a botched surgery for an ordinary medical condition. Personal likes and dislikes needn’t come into play when you imitate a model. You don’t have to agree with Heifetz’s interpretations or approve of the way he treated his students in order to adopt him as one of your models. Heifetz’s stylistic choices were perhaps right at his time, less so today; but his use at the violin was intrinsically right and will remain so forever. From him you can learn how to direct and focus your energies, for instance, without necessarily learning his vibrato or his portamenti. Or you can, indeed, learn his vibrato and portamenti and subsequently decide whether you wish to employ them or hold them in reserve. It’s the universal dimension at the core of Heifetz’s use that interests us, not the particulars of his music making or his daily life. Similarly with our other models: they are all individual flowerings of a universal principle, which for the sake of convenience we refer to as convexity. We saw earlier how it’s impossible for you to affirm your individuality by copying someone else’s singularity. Paradoxical as it may seem, it’s by copying what is universal in all convex models that you take the first step in affirming your individuality.

THE NEGATION OF THE NEGATIVE The art of imitation doesn’t only mean getting inspiration from positive models. It may also mean refusing to imitate negative models, and deciding to do the contrary of what you consider negative in a model. Throughout your day you’ll spend time with some people who have good use, and some who have bad use. It’s great to soak up the energies of people who use themselves well, but what to do when in the presence of somebody who’s scrunched, disconnected, nervous, cynical, judgmental, depressed, or otherwise unhealthy? You can’t always avoid such people, and in fact you may well be in the constant presence of someone whose energies are toxic—a family member, boss, conductor, or stand partner. We might liken imitation to instinctive biological characteristics such as breathing, digestion, and circulation—innate functions that happen mostly without our being aware of them. The “imitation tap” is turned on pretty much all the time. It means that we risk imitating negative models even if we don’t want to. If imitation is 182

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to some degree like digestion (happening without awareness), it’s also to some degree like proprioception (happening without awareness but potentially subject to awareness). In other words, you “own” your imitation more readily than you own your digestion. Ownership starts with your ability to “do nothing.” Unless you know how to do nothing, your reactions will run out of your control. If a toxic stand partner in the orchestra makes you bitterly angry, it means that you too have become toxic in your own way, as if imitating the stand partner as your model. Your task, then, is to become able to choose imitating or not imitating someone as the case may be. Not becoming bitter at someone else’s toxic bitterness is a virtuoso task. Start easy. At first, just notice the people in your environment and your reactions to them. Better still, go full-time on the witness function and notice interactions among people not involving you directly, since you might be able to be a little more objective that way. It’s a well-known fact that people in conversation tend to mirror their interlocutors’ postures, particularly when the dialogue is empathetic. The guy you’re talking to crosses his arms; without being aware of it, you cross your arms, too. Or you intertwine your fingers, and soon afterward the other guy intertwines his fingers, too. You might find it useful to train yourself to notice other people’s posture, gesticulation, and arm positions; catch yourself imitating them, or about to imitate them; and then decide whether to do nothing or, indeed, to imitate them empathetically. Instinctive empathy leads you to imitate other people, and for you not to imitate them could be construed as an apparent lack of empathy. Empathy, however, is like all human characteristics: it contains both positive and negative possibilities. Khen Lampert writes that empathy “is what happens to us when we leave our own bodies . . . and find ourselves either momentarily or for a longer period of time in the mind of the other. We observe reality through her eyes, feel her emotions, share in her pain.”1 Go far enough into an empathetic mode, and you’ll “become” the other, with her emotions and her pain, and also her toxic energies. Being truly empathetic to a psychotic, for instance, would in fact make you psychotic. It’d be constructive to learn how not to imitate other people altogether, how to imitate people empathetically without poisoning yourself, and how to be compassionate without being empathetic. Then you can exercise your choices as you see fit. In addition, it’s also possible for you to decide to do the contrary of what you see in a model. I’ve long found it useful to challenge my students with verbal games during their lessons—for instance, asking them to say a few words in a foreign language of my choosing. You can feel threatened by such a request, or you can choose to do nothing, gather your thoughts, and decide whether or not you’ll agree to say “Auf Wiedersehen.” I once had a French student, Nathalie, who adamantly refused to speak English whenever I prodded her. One day she shared a lesson with another French student, Olivier, who also adamantly refused to speak English. Seeing her behavior mirrored in someone else, Nathalie realized that she had been needlessly rigid until then and immediately agreed to speak English. She negated the negative, as it were. And she decided not to “imitate herself ” anymore, breaking her own pattern of behavior. Imitation

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SIX SUGGESTIONS Imitation is an art, and mastering it involves craftsmanship and disciplined practice. Here are six suggestions for you to develop your imitative skills. 1. Suppose you’re perfectly willing to copy the worthy characteristics of a wonderful model you’ve encountered. You’d still run into a major difficulty. Thanks to faulty sensory awareness, you may think (or, more precisely, feel) that you’re copying the model as it is, when in effect you’re copying it as you perceive it to be. Glance just briefly at the picture of “The Thinker,” Auguste Rodin’s celebrated sculpture, in Figure 15.6.

FIGURE 15.6: “The Thinker”

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Now imitate his position. In all likelihood you have imitated him wrongly. The Thinker rests his right elbow on his left thigh, which happens to be an uncomfortable position. Most likely you placed your right elbow on your right thigh, though it’s also possible that you placed your left elbow on your left thigh, or even your left elbow on your right thigh! It’s also possible that you got it right the first time, which would put you in the minority. Submit a few unwary friends to the test, and see how often they, too, fail to see what is in front of their eyes. The moral of the story: make no assumptions, and hew to no certainties. “I may be wrong, but this is what I think and feel that the Thinker is doing. Let me check it. And now let me check it again.” 2. I once showed one of my students a particular movement. After attempting the movement, she said: “I don’t feel the way you look.” Perhaps it’s impossible ever to actually feel the way someone else looks, but my student had astutely detected a discrepancy between her gesture and mine. In Chapter 6 we studied the concept of the actor, the receptor, and the witness— the three roles that we all play in every situation. My student had seen something (through the combined efforts of the receptor and the witness functions), done something (through the actor function), and consequently felt something (through the receptor function). To solve the problem she detected, she needs to further engage the witness—the dispassionate and nonjudgmental function of observation, analysis, and synthesis. “What is my model doing? What am I doing? How do our gestures differ?” The witness function isn’t necessarily intellectual or verbal. Your witness can encapsulate a situation with a drawing, a sound effect, or a gesture. However you do it, bringing the witness into collaboration with the receptor will improve your capacity to learn through imitation, and to translate what you see in someone else’s use into what you do for yourself. 3. Suppose an insane person says, “The capital of France is Paris.” This would show that someone who’s wrong most of the time might be right part of the time. Now suppose the most morally objectionable person you know says, “The capital of France is Paris.” This would show that you don’t need to like a human being to agree with him or her. The models in whom you find inspiration—through imitation or otherwise—don’t have to be “good people.” Indeed, the model itself isn’t the most important thing in imitation; it’s what you do with the model that counts. Keep your mind free from assumptions and judgments, and you’ll learn from everyone you meet. 4. Develop an appreciation of what is constructive in an imperfect model, and copy it accordingly. One of my cello teachers never practiced the cello or performed the solo literature; he was often out of form, so to speak. Yet when he gave demonstrations at the cello he had such a positive presence that I benefited from imitating him even when he played out of tune and with a scratchy sound. I imitated his use, not his playing. 5. You’re better off copying inexperienced models who use themselves well than accomplished ones who use themselves badly. When I first took up ice skating I watched a little boy who was a paragon of good use. Some older children would whiz by, their bodies contracted and distorted by their competitive overeagerness. The little boy paid them no heed. Instead he stayed poised and “worked on himself,” going Imitation

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FIGURE 15.7: A model of intelligence

slowly around the rink while trying various gestures and steps. Despite being a beginner, he was a better teacher (for me and everybody else) than the faster, cocksure kids (Figure 15.7). 6. Although we readily understand that we imitate other people, it’s a little harder for us to understand that other people imitate us. People close to you pick up on your postures, your choice of words, your opinions, the clothes you wear, and many other characteristics. If you’re a parent or teacher, children and students will definitely imitate you, sometimes slavishly. The Golden Rule says, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” We might rewrite it a little and say, “Be unto others as you would have them be unto you.” You enjoy being with people who put out a healthy energy, and from whom you absorb good and interesting things. How about you, too, putting out a healthy energy so that others can absorb good and interesting things from you?

THE ESSENCE For imitation to be operative and healthy, you need to imitate not effects but causes, not the outward manifestations of coordination but the coordinative processes themselves, not what is singular in a striking model but what is universal in all good models, not the functioning of the self but its use.

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What gives birth to your gestures, movements, and reactions? Your wishes and intentions. How do these wishes and intentions become crystallized? Through your directions, which are a form of energy. If you imitate a gesture, you’re imitating the outward manifestation of thought and energy. It’s possible to observe a gesture and reverse-engineer it to somehow capture the energy that fed the intention that created the gesture. This may well be the highest form of imitation. Let’s conduct a thought experiment to illustrate it, using an imaginary quarterback making a throw during a game of American football. If you’re unfamiliar with the game, some of the time it involves a player (the quarterback) throwing a ball into the hands of another player (the receiver), who may be running down the field forty feet or more away from the quarterback. While the quarterback is preparing to throw, the enemy team is trying to topple him over, steal the ball from him, and stop him in any possible way. And the receiver, running down the field, is also being pursued by enemies. Professional players are physically huge, incredibly well trained, and ruthless. The quarterback stands, holding the ball. His teammates form a protective cordon around him. The enemy team is trying to break the cordon by wile and brute force. The quarterback surveys the field, sees a receiver in the far distance, and waits for the precise moment when the throw is most likely to reach the target. Then he throws, a microsecond before the cordon is breached and he’s toppled over. The ball travels the length of the field. The running receiver somehow evades his pursuers, reaches for the ball, and scores a winning touchdown (Figure 15.8). You’re watching this on a TV screen where you can forward and rewind the game, pause, zoom in and out, and change viewing angles. In short, you’re able to make a complete and free study of this very brief moment. Your task is to concentrate on the quarterback and figure out how on earth he manages to make such a powerful and precise throw in the midst of a warlike setting. There’s a certain posture involved, with the quarterback using his legs and back just so. There’s a mechanical aspect to the throw, with the quarterback using his shoulder and arm just so. Perhaps the quarterback curves his back when he lifts his arm, perhaps not; perhaps he moves his arm back in space before he throws the ball, perhaps not. You watch the clip and see how he does it. Here’s the thing, though: the particulars of the gesture are unimportant. What makes or breaks the play is not how wide apart the player sets his feet, for instance, but his inner attitude. At his disposal, he has both latent mobility and latent resistance. He keeps his cool and “does nothing” while preparing for the throw. He engages and balances his functions of actor, receptor, and witness. Although he has great powers of discernment (as regards time, space, force, rhythm, and so on), he doesn’t judge himself in the moment (“I’m good, I’m bad, this is good, this is bad”). He waits; once he decides to throw, he acts without further thought. He takes calculated risks, and at the same time he doesn’t rely on calculation alone, or even primarily; it’s possible that when he throws the ball he does so with no intellectual calculation at all. For these and many other reasons, he’s a perfect model for you to learn from. Absorb the lessons he has to offer, and you’ll be able to apply them to playing high

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FIGURE 15.8: Energy embodied

notes on the violin, tremolos on the double bass, chords on the piano, and everything else in your music life. The difficulty is for you to study this model, and all other models, without being literal-minded. Watch the model without preconceived ideas, and above all without making judgments. Watch him more than once, even if your first impression is negative. Watch him without rushing to conclusions; watch him with a receptive mind but not an acquisitive one; watch him for your own sheer enjoyment. 188

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When you start watching the quarterback, then, you must be able to “do nothing.” It takes time to become able to see behind a gesture and detect its animating energies. You need to ignore, to some degree, what your eyes are used to seeing, which is the gesture’s physicality. You can of course watch a quarterback’s physicality and learn from it. But behind the postures and gestures there lies the real source of his accomplishments: confidence, commitment, calm, a sense of rhythm, a sense of direction, the melding of intellect and intuition. You don’t have to limit yourself to a thought experiment and an imaginary quarterback. Go on YouTube and watch actual players during actual games. Look up John Elway, quarterback for the Denver Broncos in the 1980s and 1990s. Search for game highlights, or his top-ten career moments. Then let YouTube guide you toward other quarterbacks, such as Dan Marino and Peyton Manning. Put the clips on a loop, turn the sound off, and watch the clips as you play your instrument, letting the images become transformed into something inside you. Elway throws a ball, you play a fast shift on the cello; Elway throws a ball, you play a series of sforzandi on the oboe. The possibilities are limitless. I’ve used Elway only as an example of how to transform imitation into a creative pursuit. Needless to say, you don’t need ever to watch a quarterback in action. Once you embrace the idea of using indirect procedures to capture a model’s essence, you’ll see that interesting models abound in the world, and you’ll never be short of teachers.

LOVE, JOY, FIRE Through skillful imitation you might absorb not only a gesture’s physicality but also the animating force or energy behind it. This is true for all types of forces, including archetypal energies such as love, joy, generosity, and many others. Thanks to YouTube, you can study with the greatest masters. The singer Wayne Newton is known to many Americans as a Las Vegas-based entertainer with a complicated business life. As with our other models, however, we don’t need to ponder his life details at all. Instead we can concentrate on timeless and universal qualities that Newton embodied in his youth. On YouTube, use the keywords “Wayne Newton, Danke Shoen, 1968.” You’ll meet an elegant, focused, light-hearted, and light-footed 26-year-old. Observe how he walks and dances around the stage without losing the connection between the back and the pelvis. See how tall he remains at all times, as if he’s growing in front of your eyes—or maybe as if he’s “thinking up along the spine.” Then notice how he balances out excitement and control, keeping his head clear even as the band gets louder and louder. Alternatively, don’t worry about his physicality and absorb instead his delight in being alive in the here, now, and in sharing his gifts with the public. Newton seems to love life, music, his own voice, the band, the public, and everything else in the world. Imitation

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Then you might want to start believing that “thinking up along the spine in the here, now” is somehow connected with pleasure, generosity, and love. Perhaps they are one and the same. Some musicians embrace an aesthetics of struggle, purposefully putting a tremendous amount of muscular and emotional effort into their performances. Sometimes they win the fight, playing all the right notes and getting applause from the audience. Most often the struggle leads to a defeat, in which the musicians hurt themselves while hurting Bach, Mozart, Stravinsky, and whomever they come across, including the audience. Life in general, and music in particular, can be a game instead of a struggle. I don’t mean the word game as a few rounds of poker in a smoky basement room, but as an existential contest of wits in which you play against the end-gainer inside yourself. To win the game is to “do nothing” even as you make music on stage in front of an audience. Although the result of mastering the game is to live your life light-hearted and fleet-footed, the actual game is a serious business requiring a lot of determination. Every note you play or sing tempts you to engage in a struggle, and you have to be quite alert in order to do nothing! My favorite player of this game is the jazz drummer “Papa” Joe Jones (not to be confused with “Philly” Joe Jones, himself also a great drummer and master of the game). To get started on YouTube, use the search items “Papa Joe Jones Caravan 1964.” Then watch all available clips involving Jones. His physicality is exemplary, of course, and worth imitating. Whatever happens in the periphery (arms, hands, and fingers) doesn’t disturb the center (the wide back and free shoulders of someone who’s “thinking up along the spine”). But what makes Jones so special is the aesthetics that he embraces. Every little note “speaks,” as if animated not by a muscular command but by a linguistic one. Between making noises and making sounds, Jones always chooses making sounds, however loud the sound might be. He never puts on a show of brawn or bathos; instead, he highlights creativity, nuance, and rhythmic subtlety. He has a lot of fun “working on himself while playing the drums,” and his joy is so infectious that watching him will cure you of all illnesses. Suppose you really like intense, passionate music making, with a wealth of extravagant colors and rubato effects. The intensity, passion, and extravagance can be wholly in the music itself, not in your bodily movements. Counterintuitive as it may be, keeping yourself relatively still as you perform increases the punch of a passionate interpretation. On YouTube use the keywords “Ivry Gitlis Saint-Säens Rondo Capriccioso.” Musically, Gitlis lets it rip at the violin; physically and psychologically, he keeps his feet on the ground. Even when Gitlis digs the bow most intensely into the violin, he keeps “thinking up along the spine.” This apparent contradiction contributes to the excitement of his performance. The French writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau was once asked, “If your house was on fire and you could save only one thing, what would you save?” Cocteau answered, “I would save the fire!” You don’t need to save Gitlis’s fingerings and bowings. Just save the fire.

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C H A P T E R 16

DAILY PRACTICE

One day an amateur violinist I’ll call Stanley arrived for his first lesson. He opened his violin case, put his instrument in playing position, grabbed his bow, and declared, with complete certainty, “My problem is the right pinky.” It didn’t take an expert to see that his right pinky may have been “a” problem, but not “the” problem. Stanley was a highly strung man with incoherent patterns of thought, speech, and gesture. He held his breath before speaking, and whenever he paused between words he held his breath again. He had a hard time finishing his thoughts, which were for the most part filled with contradictory ideas. His demeanor came across as a failing struggle to stand up straight and not let his emotions overflow. As for his actual violin playing, it was in keeping with the way he used himself: a failing struggle, incoherent and contradictory. Stanley turned out to be one of my best students. We worked together for five years and had a productive relationship in which we both learned many useful things. By the end of these five years Stanley could play exquisite improvisations on the violin, although the violin itself had become a small part of his existence. For a musician, to practice is to solve problems. “The problem is never apart from the answer,” Bruce Lee wrote. “The problem is the answer—understanding the problem dissolves the problem.”1 Stanley had misdiagnosed his problems by focusing on his right pinky. It took a lot of time for him to become a better diagnostician, but his problems did dissolve once he understood them better. Daily practice consists in diagnosing and solving problems. The solutions may or may not require exercises. For certain problems, you may need instead to change your mind, shift your attention, stop, wait, or let go. And any one exercise you perform will be useful only if you practice it constructively. Alexander wrote that “a person who learns to work to a principle in doing one exercise will have learned to do all exercises, but the person who learns just to ‘do an exercise’ will most assuredly have to go on learning to ‘do exercises’ ad infinitum.”2 There are, then, two ways of performing the same exercise: according to principle, or haphazardly.

Working to principle is the essence of daily practice. It means taking into account your frame of mind, the coordination of your whole body, the rhythmic aspects of all gestures involved in each exercise, and the connection between technique and music—or, in more metaphysical terms, your connection with the Creative Source. We’ll look at all these elements in turn.

FROM HEAD TO TOE AND EVERYWHERE IN BETWEEN Alexander wrote that “all exercises are fundamentally the same, in the sense that the activity which goes to their performance is inseparable from the habitual manner of general use of the performer.”3 In other words, how you execute an exercise is synonymous with how your use yourself. Suppose I give you a specific technical exercise. You’ll benefit from practicing it if your mind is calm and free of preconceived ideas; if you suspend judgments of right and wrong for the duration of the exercise; if you direct the energies of your head, neck, back, shoulders, arms, legs, and feet; if you retain the capacity to act and observe your own actions; and if you perform the exercise according to its own technical and musical requirements. It all starts with your mental attitude. Every music teacher is familiar with the student who has great difficulty in understanding what is required, regardless of the simplicity of the exercise or of the clarity of the teaching. (This is a universal problem. It occurs not just between a teacher and a student but also among members of an ensemble dialoguing during rehearsal, between a conductor and a choir, and in many situations in daily life.) The student won’t listen to the instructions and won’t watch the demonstrations that the teacher offers. The student interrupts the teacher, carries on playing or singing while the teacher speaks, or watches the teacher’s left hand intently when she demonstrates a right-hand technique, or the hands and arms when she means for the student to watch her head and neck. Inattentiveness, overeagerness, fear of forgetting, fear of missing out, fear of being wrong, preconceived ideas, hurry, hesitation—as a result of this mental set, the student ends up performing exercises wrongly during lessons and at home. An awkward physicality is inseparable from a discombobulated mind and heart. What you “do” is what you “think.” If you want your practice to run smoothly, you have no choice but to work on the attitudes that animate your gestures. We might even say that you don’t ever practice the cello or the oboe; you “work on yourself ” through practicing the cello or the oboe. Clear your mind, stay calm, suspend judgment—and face the music, so to speak. The physical, the psychological, and the metaphysical are one and the same. William Pleeth writes: Pablo Casals, by his own account, made a habit of beginning each day by first playing some Bach, to “sanctify” the house, as he put it. I find this a wonderful 192

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idea, for not only does it sanctify the house, but it also sanctifies the mind: the spirit comes in touch with something marvelous, and gives the physical something to ride on. It helps one draw a circle around, or through, the physical and spiritual aspects of one’s being and playing so that there is a sense of completeness from the very start. If you warm up in the right way, all your practicing and playing will have a sense of completeness and integration. In the end it is not so much a matter of practicing something, but of living in a complete way and then starting to practice.4

The ideal warm-up is not a series of physical or technical exercises, but a gesture that affirms your wholeness. It can be a piece by Bach, of course, but anything will do if you approach it with a full heart. Use a scale or arpeggio, for instance, and execute it “to principle” from the first note onward—using your integrated self and infusing the gesture with musicality and rhythmic forward motion. “If you apply the principle to the carrying out of one evolution, you have learned the lot,”5 Alexander said. It might take you a long time to become able to perform your first exercise to principle, but if you really get the hang of it, all subsequent exercises will be much easier to learn.

ABOUT RHYTHM The great conductor Hans von Bülow said that “the musician’s bible begins with the words: ‘In the beginning there was rhythm.’”6 Breathing, circulation, locomotion, and lovemaking all demonstrate that healthy functioning is naturally rhythmic. Good rhythm improves use and functioning. Husler and Rodd-Marling wrote about the rhythmic dimension of muscles. By rousing a muscle’s rhythmic sense, deep-seated energies within it are released (as in all forms of organic life, muscles are rhythmically constituted). This makes for ease and freedom of movement. Life without rhythmic content is never very vital. A muscle that works unrhythmically is always a hampered one, and to practice unrhythmically means that in time every muscle is certain to deteriorate. As Plato defined it, “rhythm regulates movement.”7

When you learn a new piece, you might rush over easy passages and slow down difficult ones. You might claim that you’re concentrating on sound production, on fingering, or on getting the notes right, and therefore “the rhythm is not important.” Yet virtually all difficulties are conquered through good rhythm, not before it, and above all not separate from it. You have several choices when you can’t play a difficult passage up to tempo: play at a slower tempo, simplify the passage, or slow down the rate of changes of variables without changing the tempo. (I explain this last choice in the next chapter.) If you Daily Practice

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neglect rhythm, you won’t be able to regulate the body movements you need to master the difficulty in the passage. The companion volume Integrated Practice makes a detailed study of rhythm. Its dedicated website contains many video clips illustrating related exercises. The basic premise of Integrated Practice is that rhythm is the common element behind language, music, and movement—or words, sounds, and gestures. Instead of muscling your way through your repertory, you can learn how to ride the rhythmic energies of the music itself to feed your gestures, making your singing, playing, or conducting healthier as a result. Here’s a brief overview of the chapters in Integrated Practice that address the subject of rhythm, together with a list of their video clips. (Not every chapter includes video clips.) Chapter 1, “Words, Sounds, Gestures,” introduces the subject and presents exercises for you to learn and master rhythmic patterning. Refer to video clips 1, “”Prosodic Patterns I: Walking”; 2, “Prosodic Patterns II: An Overview”; and 3, “Prosodic Patterns III: At the Cello.” Chapter 2, “Prosody, or the Secrets of Rhythm,” studies rhythm in language and its relationship with rhythm in music. Chapter 3, “The Grid: A Life Principle,” introduces the concept of the grid as an organizational tool. A grid is a set of lines and numbers that underpin any human endeavor, from the game of chess to the game of music. (In music, for instance, one element of the grid is the meter of a piece.) The grid is relatively rigid and predictable. To use yourself well is to oppose the grid’s apparent tyranny with imagination and creativity. (In music, for instance, syncopations, off-beats, displaced accents, hemiolas, and rubato are elements of opposition against the rhythmic grid.) Chapter 4, “The Metric Grid,” shows you the basic rhythmic materials of which mainstream music is constructed. Chapter 5, “Coincidence: Intention and Gesture,” offers an exercise to help you infuse your physical gestures with a linguistic and rhythmic charge. This exercise is illustrated in video clips 4, “Coincidence I: At the Piano”; and 5, “Coincidence II: At the Flute.” Chapter 6, “Rhythmic Solfège,” shows you how to organize all rhythmic elements in music—the beat, the measure, a measure’s subdivisions, and a measure’s prosodic impetus—using movement in space. Please refer to video clips 6, “Rhythmic Solfège I: Beat”; 7, “Rhythmic Solfège II: Measure”; 8, “Rhythmic Solfège III: Subdivisions”; 9, “Rhythmic Solfège IV: Prosodic Impetus”; 10, “Rhythmic Solfège V: A Demonstration”; 11, “Rhythmic Solfège VI: An Overview”; and 12, “Rhythmic Solfège VII: At the Flute.” Chapter 7, “The Metronome and the Rubato,” shows you how to balance out order and freedom in music. Please refer to video clips 13, “Rhythmic Subdivisions I: The Basics”; 14, “Rhythmic Subdivisions II: An Application”; 15, “Rhythmic Subdivisions III: At the Piano”; 16, “The Five Metronomes I: 1, 2, 3”; and 17, “The Five Metronomes II: 4, 5, Plus.” Chapter 8, “Superbar Structures,” covers paragraphlike groupings of measures and shows you how to master them in practice and performance. Please refer to 194

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video clips 18, “Conducting the Superbar Structure”; and 19, “Walking the Superbar Structure.” Chapter 9, “Opposing the Grid,” shows you how the metric grid in music is an organizational factor that can help you play, sing, or conduct with less effort and more freedom. Please refer to video clips 20, “Internalizing the Grid I: Missing Downbeats”; 21, “Internalizing the Grid II: Hemiolas”; and 22, “Internalizing the Grid III: Provocations.” Chapter 10, “Patterning and Sequencing,” contains a detailed analysis of the rhythmic properties of an actual piece from the repertory and shows you how to translate the rhythmic energies of music itself into psychophysical energies that you can employ in practicing and in performing.

PRACTICING REPETITION In daily practice we inevitably repeat gestures, exercises, phrases, sections, and whole movements. About repetition, however, there exists a simple yet complex truth: to repeat something wrong is (but for three exceptions) necessarily bad; to repeat something right may possibly, though not necessarily, be good. The exceptions? You can justify repeating something that you know is wrong if by doing so you heighten your awareness of what you’re doing. You play the cello for me, and I notice that you contract your right elbow when you play a certain bow stroke. Perhaps you’ve never noticed that you misuse yourself in this way. I might ask you to do it again and bring your attention to the misuse, as a first step in your eliminating it. This repetition of something wrong is useful and at times obligatory. Doing something wrong on purpose may also help you cultivate an appreciation of what is right. After you become able to release your unneeded tensions, I ask you again to do the wrong thing and then contrast it with the right thing, which becomes clearer and easier to remember and recreate as a result. Now let’s imagine a different situation. You’re afraid of doing the wrong thing— missing out a note, flubbing the climax of a phrase, playing too loudly—and the very fear of being wrong causes you to misuse yourself and go wrong as a result. I might ask you to do the wrong thing on purpose, which may well help you get rid of the paralyzing fear of going wrong, and of the misuse that fear engenders. The argument for not repeating something that is right may appear strange at first. But “a human being becomes less human with identical repetition of the same action,” the basketball coach and Zen teacher Hiroide Ogawa wrote. “Shooting from the same spot over and over again is no more useful than tightening identical screws from eight in the morning until four. A different stance. A different position. A different ball. A different player. Now it counts!”8 Endless variations, big and small— of rhythm, speed, accent, intensity, tonality, and so on—are possible for every exercise and every gesture within the exercise. Daily practice is, to some degree, the art of being imaginative while repeating the gestures and exercises that your technique demands. Daily Practice

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Suppose you make a healthy, natural, and satisfying gesture that is intrinsically right. To do something right creates its own problems, above all the temptation for you to seek to reproduce the sensations this healthy gesture gave you. Instead of reproducing the sensations of a right action, you’re better off by engaging anew and afresh in its coordinative processes, the sensations being but an effect of these processes. “The experience you want is in the process of getting it,” Alexander said. “If you have something, give it up. Getting it, not having it, is what you want.”9

RELIABILITY AND CONTROL One of the reasons you repeat a passage many times over is to create a kinesthetic and aural memory of the passage, so that a command from your brain will retrieve this memory with ease and reliability during performance. Depending on how you pursue it, both this reasonable goal and the method of achieving it can create obstacles to technical and musical freedom. Clarity, precision, and reliability are desirable components of your technique. Yet striving for machinelike accuracy goes against the very nature of music making. Wilhelm Furtwängler was known for his electrifying performances at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic. He left room for chance and for collective improvisation, however uncomfortable this could be for himself and for his players. He writes: Nothing can be said against precision, but it practically eliminates the most important thing about playing, the intuition of the moment.10 . . . The possibility of rehearsing ad infinitum, which is sometimes portrayed as a special privilege, necessarily diminishes the sensitivity and consequently the quality of the conductor’s technique . . . , as well as the psychological sensitivity of the orchestra, which becomes used to typical, uninspired, craftsmanlike work.11 . . . Improvisation is lost as both essence and idea. Improvisation, which does not represent a mere accident, an attribute which one may or may not have, but rather simply the source of all great, creative, necessary playing.12

What Furtwängler says of overrehearsing is true of overpracticing and of overrepeating an exercise. There’s a distinction between being secure and feeling secure. Just as someone might feel sated only after overeating, so you might feel technically secure only after overpracticing. It might be good for you to make peace with the uncertainty inherent in creative music making and in public performance. You can never know in advance how things will turn out. It’s impossible to prepare for all eventualities, but it’s possible to accept and embrace the capriciousness of the moment. Even if the goal of machinelike reliability were desirable or achievable, would obsessive practicing be necessary? Probably not. You’ll master every difficulty after the fewest tries if you practice intelligently and economically. Practicing too much is as harmful as not practicing enough. Theodor Leschetizky was one of the great piano teachers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth 196

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centuries. His students included Ignacy Paderewski and Artur Schnabel. About his teaching, Harold C. Schonberg writes: Among his strictures was the falsity of the concept that long hours of practice were beneficial. He would not think of a student working six, seven, eight hours a day. “No one can do that without being mechanical, and that’s just what I’m not interested in. Two hours, or three at most, is all anyone should require if he will only listen to what he is playing and criticize every note.13

It’s virtually impossible for you to hear yourself with due attention over too long a period of time. This is an indisputable fact of daily practice. “Don’t forget, when a certain amount of effort is expended in practice, like in everything else, you then have to relax,”14 Jascha Heifetz said. “I do not think I could ever have made any progress if I had practiced six hours a day.15 . . . Even though I may practice three hours a day it is certainly not three hours consecutively, but rather three hours with frequent intervals for relaxation in between.”16 You may argue that it’s all very well for the brilliantly talented Heifetz to practice only a few hours a day, but that as an average musician you need to work much harder if you want to accomplish as much as Heifetz did. This is missing the point. Heifetz was able to make the most of his considerable gifts. To follow in his footsteps, make the most of your gifts, whatever they may be. You can’t “be” Heifetz; you can only be yourself. Heifetz was a model of good use at the violin. Good use entails reliable sensory awareness, the ability to listen to yourself accurately, and the ability to gauge tension, effort, and movement. Work on your use and you’ll practice more efficiently, thereby better fulfilling your talents. There’s an art in knowing when to go from one exercise to the next, when to take a break from practicing, and when to stop for the day. If you wish to create a clear kinesthetic memory of a given gesture, you’re better off playing that gesture five times perfectly in a row, rather than nine times perfectly and a tenth time imperfectly, thereby blemishing your memory of the whole set. Similarly, stop the day’s work before the onset of fatigue, not after. Quit at your best and your impression of the total practice session will be entirely positive, increasing the likelihood of success the following day.

THE PRINCIPLE OF OPPORTUNISM You’re late for a rehearsal. You rush down a crowded sidewalk, and you find yourself surrounded by tourists using the stop-and-go rhythm of sightseeing; a parent pushing an oversize stroller; a staggering drunk you’d prefer to avoid; and a gaggle of teenagers listening to music on headphones and paying no attention whatsoever to people around them. How do you move ahead and beat the clock? You observe the environment and take in its many players, and when you see one little window of opportunity that opens up as the drunk swerves to the right and a Daily Practice

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teenager to the left, you just go. You accelerate suddenly and you pass through every obstacle, without bumping into the drunk and without pushing anyone out of your way, and you make it to your rehearsal and avoid being fired from your job. That’s opportunism at work: you see an opportunity to do something you need to do or want to do; you sense that the conditions are right, the time is ripe, the gods are on your side—and you act without further deliberation. Sometimes the opportunity presents itself, and sometimes you have to create the conditions that  lead to the opportunity, using a handful of preparatory steps and indirect procedures. Let’s say you’re a pianist and you need to play two chords in succession with the right hand, one very far from the other across the keyboard. Twisting your neck and shoulders, you keep banging the chords on the piano. And you keep missing the chords. You need a different strategy. Give up playing the chords altogether. Sit calmly for a while. Then improvise a simple passage at the piano, playing a single chord a few times in a row, rhythmically and musically. Use these repeated, easy chords to make yourself comfortable, and when your body and mind, your rhythm, and your instrument are all collaborating, make a quick decision to play two chords wide apart. Zap! You hit the right chord across the piano! You created the opportunity: you calmed yourself down a bit, you decided on a few intermediate steps, and when you felt that the conditions were in place you took a calculated risk that paid off. Timing is fundamental. Too soon or too late, and the opportunity won’t be there; the drunk will stagger into your arms, and you’ll fall down on that sidewalk. Mental state is fundamental. Doing things impulsively and suddenly is problematic when you’re frustrated, angry, or hesitant. With a calm and clear mind, however, you may act swiftly without killing yourself. Physical responsiveness is fundamental. A cat jumping between two points in space shows good legs, good eyesight, good instincts, good intuition, good sensorial awareness. The opportunist might choose to be sneaky and do things slowly or imperceptibly to observers and partners. But the opportunist can’t be handicapped by sluggish gestures. Part of the principle consists in awakening the animal within and acting as if thoughtlessly, with sudden releases of energy. A good opportunist gets it right often, winning the game, striking the chord, avoiding the drunk, and so on. But to become a good opportunist, you need to be absolutely willing to go wrong. It’s always possible that the drunk will fall on top of you, but you can lessen its probability by timing your actions astutely. You can’t be sure that you’ll hit the chord, but you can greatly diminish the odds of missing it and greatly augment the odds of striking it. If instead you aren’t willing to go wrong, you won’t take the necessary risks and act in the swift manner that makes use of the window of opportunity and bypasses doubt and hesitation. Suppose you grab an opportunity, take a risk, and go wrong—for instance, you miss the chord. The true opportunist doesn’t dwell on the failure. Make a note of the failure, but don’t judge it—and, more importantly, don’t judge yourself on account

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of it (“It was bad; I’m bad”). If you do that, you’ll immediately interfere with your willingness to take intelligent risks. The greatest danger is not to take any risks.

ON MEMORY As a musician, you exercise your memory in many ways: aural, visual, muscular, verbal, analytical. Here we’ll limit our discussion to muscular memory and to learning and performing music by heart. Memory has three distinguishable phases: registration, storage, and retrieval. The better you register something, the better you memorize it. This is a platitude, but it merits a little attention. Alexander wrote of teaching a student how to do a whispered “ah.” Even before he had finished speaking, Alexander wrote, “the student was trying to memorize [the instructions], as they were given, by a ‘physical’ (sensory) process, i.e. by trying to ‘feel’ the instructions as they were spoken, rather than to acquire them by a process of remembering (‘committing to memory,’ as we say).”17 The student errs twice. First, he attempts to carry out the instructions before he has understood them. Second, he attempts to register the instructions by feel rather than by listening to them. If his feelings are unreliable, he risks learning something other than what the teacher is trying to teach him. His memory of these instructions will be faint, as he hasn’t really listened to them; and untrustworthy, as what the student “felt” is not necessarily what the teacher said. Feelings are a consequence rather than a cause. They arise naturally after the gesture, and trying to summon the feelings before the gesture tends to disturb the gesture. To memorize a gesture, first say “no” to the very wish of memorizing it. Do nothing while you listen, watch, or think as needed. Then consider the commands that the gesture requires, not the feelings that these commands entail. Now try out the gesture, which will come with feelings that you can use as feedback. There’s a hierarchy and a sequence: do nothing; observe and think; act; and then sense the consequences of the act. You may apply this working principle to all that you wish to memorize: a gesture, a technique, a set of instructions, a melody, an operatic role. Don’t start playing a new piece from memory too soon, lest you memorize wrong notes. Once you know your score fairly well, alternate practicing with and without music, at the instrument and away from it. Place yourself in a position of mechanical advantage and, while directing your whole use, hear the score in your mind’s ear. Lie on your back, for instance, and leave your score within easy reach. Run a phrase or section mentally; then, without leaving the position, take the score in your hands and check your memory for accuracy. You may also first look at the score and then run a passage mentally. Either way, you’re associating the act of memorizing with the act of working on yourself.

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Some artists learn and memorize whole scores before ever playing a note from them. This takes either innate genius or boundless discipline, but you may attempt it too, starting with short, easy pieces and building up to more complex ones. Given the right conditions, the more you have in your memory, the easier it is to memorize new materials. If you don’t have the habit of playing from memory, the first concerto can be daunting. Once you overcome the inertia of an untrained memory, however, “the experience makes the meat it feeds on,” to use a phrase of Alexander’s, and your memory will welcome new pieces ever more readily and reliably.

THE DISCIPLINE OF NONJUDGMENT Whenever a musician plays for me, I ask him or her, “What do you think of how you’ve just played?” Most often the first response is of the type “I didn’t like it,” “I liked it,” “It was kind of OK,” “It could have been worse,” “Yuck.” These judgments have little value from a practical point of view. What exactly did you like or dislike about your performance, and what do you intend to do about it? It’s not easy to answer these questions, but doing so is the unavoidable task for all musicians. Over time, become able to discern what your problems are, how they manifest themselves, what their causes may be, what solutions exist, and how to implement them. This all depends on your knowing yourself and making objective, practical assessment of your playing, singing, or conducting. Good assessments start from the general before moving to the particular. Since confidence and freedom go hand in hand, constructive self-assessments also proceed from the positive to the negative aspects of each performance. To judge your playing and diagnose your problems, then, first establish what aspects of it are healthy and satisfactory, and enumerate them in order of importance. Afterward, do the same to aspects that seem troublesome and unsatisfactory. Start by considering how you use yourself. What happens to your head, neck, and back when you play or sing? Is your head straight, or twisted? Does it contract into the neck, or is it going forward and up, away from the neck? Is your neck free, collapsed, or frozen? Is the joint between the spine and the skull free, or locked? Is your spine elastic, slack, or rigid? Is your back lengthening and widening, or shortening and narrowing? Are you moving or staying still? Are you moving from your joints in the hips, knees, and ankles, or bending at the waist? What happens to your shoulders? Then go on to ask all relevant questions about the arms, hands, fingers, legs, and feet. You needn’t ask yourself all these questions after every single effort. If you prefer, bypass an overly detailed analysis of every gesture and talk in more general terms about end-gaining, non-doing, concentration and awareness, and the relationship between effort and effect. You might capture the essence of your physicality in an epigram, a metaphor, a joke, or even a single word, gesture, or sound effect. After you scrutinize your use from various angles, consider music making itself. Most musical difficulties are caused by a lack of rhythmic clarity. You gain a lot by 200

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assessing your rhythmic precision and forward motion before thinking about intonation, sound production, or accuracy. Ask yourself if you have shed light on a piece’s inner construction before you inspect your ornaments or passagework. Give legato and continuity of musical line priority over right notes, right fingerings, or right words in song. Musical continuity and good use together make technical security easier to achieve. In sum, proceed from the general to the specific in both diagnosis and remedy. Cultivate practical and objective ways of describing your strengths and weaknesses. Consider your use at all times, with an emphasis on the orientation of your head and neck. Know your priorities, and keep to them. Take time to know what you want to do and how you want to do it. Try to determine if what you conceive, what you do, and what you feel that you do all coincide. Let rhythm do most of the work for you. Connect to the Creative Source by sanctifying your body, mind, hearth, and home. And don’t think too hard, for goodness’ sake!

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C H A P T E R 17

INTEGRATIVE PRACTICE STRATEGIES

The challenge in life is to learn how to keep your mind clear and direct your energies constructively—or, to use a now-familiar expression, how to “think up along the spine.” It’s relatively easy to learn how to think up when you’re doing nothing, alone in a safe environment. It’s a bit more complicated in action: as you sing, play, and conduct, during a concert, or whenever you face thorny musical and technical challenges. As the world spins, how can you find the time to keep your head from spinning? This chapter proposes four practice strategies to help you integrate psychological time and chronological time.

DELAYED CONTINUITY Whenever you speak, you can insert short silences between words without interfering with the meaning of what you say: Whenever you speak . . . you can insert . . . short silences . . . between words . . . without interfering . . . with the meaning . . . of what you say.

Each sentence lends itself to many variations. You can speak the words themselves at their normal speed and add silences. Or you can slow down the entire utterance, making the speed of the spoken words match the tempo of the silences. You can insert the silences after every word, after every couple of words according to their grammatical relationship, or in between phrases inside a long paragraph. Use the silences to clarify your discourse, and also to work on yourself—that is, to remind yourself to stay focused and centered, arrange your thoughts, lengthen and widen your back, and connect your thoughts to your voice. Depending on where you place

the silences and how you hold them, they can enhance the meaning of what you say. Orators, preachers, actors, and politicians often use such silences strategically. Like spoken language, music is made of syllables, words, sentences, and paragraphs within a logical construction. In music, too, you can choose to insert silences between fragments—the better to work on yourself, arrange your thoughts, and express yourself with freedom and power. We’ll call the art of inserting life-giving silences inside musical phrases delayed continuity. Few techniques are more effective in helping you clarify your thoughts and gestures. We’ll start with an illustration from the cello repertory (Example 17.1). The staccato bow stroke (fast, short notes with a bouncing bow) is difficult to play evenly and cleanly, and harder still when you need to coordinate the bow with the left hand. In this passage the difficulty is further compounded by a change of string every few notes: there has to be an adjustment in right-arm height for every string crossing, which may disrupt the evenness of the bow stroke. Write in a one-beat rest after the first note in each bar. Then use the silence to direct yourself and adjust your arm for the first string crossing (Example 17.2). Your muscular memory of the first, successful string crossing will take care of the next few crossings. Soon you’ll find that you don’t need to stop every bar. A single successful crossing allows you to carry on for several measures. During the silence, pay attention first and foremost to head, neck, and back; then to shoulders and arms; and then to wrists and fingers. This may seem quite a lot to think of in a pause that lasts less than a second, but a flash of a thought may be all that you need to energize yourself. You don’t have to actually do anything; being aware of your presence in time and space is enough. EXAMPLE 17.1: Adrien-François Servais: Caprice, opus 11 #2 Allegro con moto

4´ ´ 2 ´ ´ ´ 2 2 B # # 43 œ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ œ´ œ´ œ # œ´ # œ´ œ´ œ´ œ œ´ œ n œ´ œ´ ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ œ

´ 4 1 0 B # œ´ ´ œ´ œ´ ´ ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œR # œ œœ EXAMPLE 17.2: Delayed continuity Allegro con moto

´ ´ ´ ´ ´ B # # c œR ≈ ‰ ≈ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ œ´ œ´ œ # œ´ # œ´ œ´ œ´ œR ≈ ‰ ≈ œ´ œ n œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ ´ B # # œR´ ≈ ‰ ≈ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ ≈ ‰ ≈ œ´ œ´ œ´ ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œ´ œR R œ

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You can pause in the position in which you find yourself at the end of a segment, or you can immediately move into the position you’ll need to start the next segment. Practice both methods in alternation, and become able to pass easily from one to the other. Learn how to separate the directions that you give yourself to prepare an action from the consent you give yourself to act. In other words, command your elbow to prepare a string crossing without letting the elbow move or contract in any way until the time is right. Now let’s look at an excerpt from the vocal literature: a Mozart aria. Create silences long enough to fit in a phrase, in whole or in part, and then use the silences to think through the segment in your mind’s ear before performing it. Musical logic dictates the choice of breaking points. Some choices present themselves readily. Other phrases may demand thoughtful experimentation (Example 17.3). Make the silence as long as the segment, and use it to run the segment once in your mind’s ear. Or increase the number of silent rehearsals if you prefer. If a segment has four beats, add two or more groups of four beats. Think twice, sing once. Think thrice, sing once. Think ten times, sing once. Every time you practice delayed continuity, you have the choice of adding a single beat, two or more beats, or one or more silent rehearsals. You might change the meter and tempo of a passage but keep its pulse steady. Or you might use a freer sense of time and dwell in the silences without keeping a pulse. At times the composer writes in a change of tempo, an accelerando or ritardando, a fermata. You can choose to take them into account or ignore them. The important thing is for you to use your silences constructively, both for your use and for the clarity of the musical text. The companion volume Integrated Practice furthers the study of delayed continuity. Consult its index to find the examples of delayed continuity sprinkled throughout the book. Please refer to video clip number 38, “Practice Routines V: Delayed Continuity.”

ISOLATION AND INTEGRATION Alexander’s insights came about as he tried to solve a specific problem: the hoarseness from which he suffered as a young actor. After he set out to discover the causes of his hoarseness, he realized that his reciting deviated from his ordinary manner of speaking. Later on, he came to the conclusion that his speech itself deviated from ideals of use. Before working on his reciting, he needed to work on his normal speech; before working on speech, he needed to work on his whole use. Alexander took the argument further and established a general principle: The attainment of any desired end . . . involves the direction and performance of a connected series of preliminary acts by means of the mechanisms of the organism. . . . These preliminary acts, though means, are also ends, but not isolated ends, inasmuch as they form a coordinated series of acts to be carried out “all together, one after the other.”1 204

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EXAMPLE 17.3: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: “La Clemenza di Tito,” Act 1, Scene 2 Allegro

b & b c ˙.

Titus (tenor)

SeIal

-

b c ˙˙ .. b &

&b

b œ. œ.

b œ sa

-

per

-

-

Œ

œ

ro,

a

œ.

‰

œ œ œ

œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œ œ œ œ œ

œ

œ œ Ó

˙.

ci

De - i,

ne

-

œ œ œ. œœ œœ œœ œ œ œ œ œ

-

ces

œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œœ œœ. œœ. œœ. œ. œ ˙ œ. œ œ Œ œ œ ˙ œ f p œœœœ œœœœ œœœœ œœœœ œœœ œœœ œœœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

-

r œ

œœ œœ ? b œœ œœ b &b

-

œ

œ.

-

œ

b ˙. b & -

l’im

pœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ

? bb c

mi

œ

œ

˙

œ

rio

èIun

œ

˙

œ cor

œ

se

-

ve

b œ œ ˙ œ &b ‰ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

wœœ

? b œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ b

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œœ

˙˙

œ -

Ó

ro,

œœ œ

Œ

œœ œ

Œ

œ œ. f œ. œ

œ œ. œ. œ

œ œ. œ. œ

#œ # œ. œ. œ

Allegro

b &b

(Think)

˙.

œ -

SeIal

&b

b

œ œ De

&b

-

œ

i,

b œ ˙ sa - rio

-

l’im

Sing

Œ œ

˙.

a - mi (Think)

œ

èIun

œ cor

-

˙

per

œ -

Sing

˙.

Ó

SeIal

ro,

œ

œ œ Ó

ci

De - i,

œ se

œ -

ve

-

l’im - per - ro,

ro,

-

ces

-

sa

-

(Think)

œ

a

œ œ œ ˙

˙.

œ -

œ

(Think)

ne

œ œ Œ

Œ

-

˙.

œ ˙

œ

èIun

cor

se - ve - ro,

ci

œ œ

˙.

Sing

Œ œ

-

mi

Sing

ne

rio

œ

-

œ œ Ó

ces

-

To be comfortable with an exercise, a passage, or a piece of music, you need to be comfortable with all its constituents, together and in succession. Before you perform a challenging passage, isolate each component or “preliminary act” and make an independent study of it, the better to blend all components in an organized whole, “all together, one after the other.” There exist psychophysical components and musical components. Let’s suppose you’re a flutist of average coordination. When playing the flute you twist and shorten your torso, lift your shoulders, and droop your head. Your sound, rhythm, and phrasing are all affected by these habits. In truth, they are inseparable from these habits; your coordination is your music, so to speak. What can you do about it? 1. Put the flute away and work on your coordination alone. Direct your head, neck, back, and legs, without worrying about the arms and hands at all. Stand, sit, pace the room, or look at yourself in a mirror. 2. Keep directing your head, neck, back, and legs. Now add your arms to the mix. Lift them in front you, each in turn and both together, at different speeds and heights, angles, and distances one from the other, in pronation and in supination, with wrists in or wrists out, with hands open or closed, in alternation and in combination. Start with easy gestures, and increase the complexity and difficulty of combined gestures. 3. Keep directing your head, neck, back, legs, arms, and hands. Hold your flute and bring it up to your mouth without attempting to play. Catch yourself wanting to twist your torso or lose your head, and decide to “think up along the spine” instead. 4. Keep directing your head, neck, back, legs, arms, and hands, and hold the flute in playing position. You’re ready to add musical components to your sequence. Start by playing single notes, then scales and short passages, and then complete phrases and passages. Each step creates its own demands. The task is not to neglect the demands of all previous steps. Learning a melody is like building a pyramid. At the base there are the various scales and arpeggios, whole or fragmented, which combine to form the melody; at the top, there is the melody itself. Your pyramid needs solid foundations. If your scales and arpeggios are effortless and luminous, so will be your arias and songs. We’ll take another excerpt from Mozart as an illustration (Example 17.4). 1. Before you sing anything, take time to think about your use. Free yourself of hesitation and eagerness, and assume an attitude of nonjudgmental interest. 2. Start by singing one sustained note, in a vowel basic to all singing and to all human languages: either “ah” or “ee.” On that long note, perform a crescendo followed by a diminuendo. If in singing this note you tense up, go back to the first step and nourish yet again the directions and energies that precede and accompany everything you do (Example 17.5). Integrated Practice contains a detailed study of the messa di voce, or the art of making sounds louder and softer. The pertinent chapters are 18, “The Messa di 206

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EXAMPLE 17.4: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: “Die Zauberflöte,” Act 1, Scene 1 Larghetto

Tamino (tenor)

b 2 &bb 4 ≈

b b 2 ® œrK œ . b & 4 œœ œœ .. p ? b 2≈ œ bb 4 œ j œ. œ b &bb œ ‰ œ J R schön,

b & b b ‰ œœ œœ . . ? b ‰ œœ. œœ. bb

Œ

∑

wie

Dies

j œ œ. œœ ≈ . œœ œœ .. œ. RÔ œ Œ œ œ œ œ œr R R R

œœ œ

noch kein Au - ge

œ œœ œ . œœ. œ œ

‰ œ J

je

œ. J Bild

-

œ œ œ œ œ R R R R R

nis ist

j œœ œœ ‰ œ œ.

œœ œ

Œ

Œ

œ œ

Œ

be - zau - bernd

‰

œ

ge - sehn!

Œ

‰ œœ œ . œ. œ. œ. ‰œœ

Œ

EXAMPLE 17.5: A messa di voce on a single note

w b U b & b ah

EXAMPLE 17.6: An arpeggio Larghetto

b œ & b b 42 œ œ œ

œ œ œ

ah

Voce: Virtuosity of Contact”; and 19, “Practicing the Messa di Voce.” Three video clips illustrate it: numbers 66, “Messa di Voce I: The Basics”; 67, “Messa di Voce II: An Application”; and 68, “Messa di Voce III: At the Flute.” 3. After you sing a sustained note with freedom, proceed to an arpeggio (Example 17.6). 4. Sing an arpeggio again, extending its range beyond an octave (Example 17.7). If something goes wrong—a wobble or a jerk, a stiffening of the neck and shoulders, a change of heart—go back a step or two, and wait to resume your advance until you’ve cleared your mind’s ear from all flawed sounds, be they heard, anticipated, or feared. Integrative Practice Strategies

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EXAMPLE 17.7: An extended arpeggio Larghetto

œ œ œ œ b & b b 42 œ œ œ œ ˙ ah

EXAMPLE 17.8: A descending scale Larghetto

b œ & b b 42

ah

œ œ œœ œ œ ˙

EXAMPLE 17.9: A melodic approximation Larghetto

b & b b 42 œJ

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ

œ.

ah

EXAMPLE 17.10: A melodic segment Larghetto

b & b b 42 œJ

œ. œ œ œ œ œ

œ

‰

ah

EXAMPLE 17.11: Changing vowels

b U w b & b

ahIaw

,

U w ahIay

5. Now sing a descending scale. Keep in mind that you aren’t working on your technique; you’re making music (Example 17.8). 6. Begin to combine components in a form that resembles Mozart’s melody, without being as demanding as the melody itself (Example 17.9). 7. Take your scale closer to Mozart’s aria, still singing on an easy vowel (Example 17.10). 8. Before going on, sing a sustained note again, but over changing vowels. Attempt easier changes first—from “ah” to “aw,” for instance, or from “ah” to “ay.” Once you can do that without interfering with the continuity of the vocal line, try the sequence of vowels that Mozart’s text requires (Example 17.11). 9. Direct your neck, head, back, lips, tongue, and jaw. Then speak Mozart’s text, at first unmeasured and then in the rhythm of the melody (Example 17.12). 208

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EXAMPLE 17.12: Spoken text

j j r r r r r 42 œ œ . œ œ œ œ œ Dies

Bild - nis ist be - zau - bernd

j j r r r r r œ ‰œ œ. œ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ schön,

wie

noch kein Au - ge je ge - sehn!

10. You’re now ready to sing Mozart. If you fail to do it justice on a first attempt, go back to some of the preceding steps and try again. If you sing it perfectly once, go back a few steps all the same before singing it a second or third time. Spend more time on the simpler versions of the passage, and master each version before going to the next. Practice with ever-present rhythmic precision and drive. Notice where the difficulties lie as you progress from simplicity toward complexity, and direct your use accordingly. If you follow these guidelines, you’ll master this particular difficulty in the shortest possible time, gain confidence, and make further obstacles easier to overcome. Working on yourself and working on music making become one and the same. Technique and interpretation become one and the same. We might even say that you and Mozart become one and the same.

THE TRAMPOLINE String players, keyboard players, and trombonists, among others, all face a particular problem: the need to make sudden, large, fast, and accurate arm gestures. A cellist, for instance, may need to move the left hand quickly up or down the fingerboard over distances of a foot or more. A pianist may have to move her hands from one extreme of the keyboard to the other, sometimes over a fraction of a second. A trombonist may have to make big, sudden movements with the slide in order to pass from note to note. A fast and vigorous arm movement risks causing you to fling your head, contract your neck, and stiffen your legs—and miss the notes you’re aiming for. If the muscular memory of failure takes hold of you after missing a note a few times in a row, then your very wish to play the right note is likely to trigger a set reaction. You’ll tense up and miss the note . . . then you’ll start tensing up every time you aim for the note . . . then you’ll inevitably miss the note. To dissolve the muscular memory of failure, develop a precise memory of the destination of the gesture; prepare the start of the gesture; and give up the idea of hitting the right notes to begin with. 1. Let your right arm hang by the side of your body. Now close your eyes and touch the tip of your nose with your right index finger. You’re likely to miss your nose, or to hit it off center, or to feel a little unsure even if you find your nose spot on. Now tap your nose lightly several times in rhythmic succession; let your arm hang by your side; and touch the tip of your nose again. You’ll find the target more easily, having acquired a precise muscular memory of the destination you’re aiming for. Suppose you’re a pianist trying to play two chords far apart in quick succession. If your spine is slack, the vigorous arm motion will cause the head to contract into Integrative Practice Strategies

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the neck in a whiplash effect. First and foremost, direct your energies and firm up your spine. Rather than practicing the journey itself, now practice the destination, so that the journey may become easier. Play the destination chord repeatedly, with rhythmic clarity and drive. Then play the departure chord once and leap to the destination chord with no further thought. You’re more likely to land safely at the desired chord. It’s preferable to spend more time practicing the indirect procedure than attempting the goal directly. Or to put it differently, the desired chord is the problem; working on the indirect procedure is the solution. 2. Watch a cat jump up onto a table, and you’ll see how the cat moves down before jumping up. Oftentimes, so do basketball players preparing a jump shot. Prepare the gesture by a slight movement (of the fingers, hand, or arm, according to the situation) away from the intended destination, not toward it. This is a universal principle. The cellist who shifts his left hand from near the scroll to near the bridge (down in space but up in pitch) might point his arm in the direction opposite to the intended movement, as preparation for the movement itself. The springlike action helps overcome the inertia of the hand and release the arm. 3. It’s striking to an observant listener how the average musician prepares for important notes that are difficult to play or sing: the moment before the big event there’s a little hesitation, a little loss of heart that causes the continuity of the musical line to break. The secret of a good jump, then, is not to hesitate. And for you not to hesitate, you need to be OK actually missing the notes you’re aiming for. Suppose the passage you’re practicing at the piano demands a leap of three octaves. Play the passage with all its required rhythmic flow, but allow yourself to miss the leap itself: play a leap of two octaves, or four octaves, or of any old interval. You can let your hand fly right off the keyboard if you wish, as long as you do it with flair and good use. Once you overcome your hesitation, aim for the correct notes and let your fearlessness guide you in finding them. Give up getting the right note and you’ll find freedom; find freedom, and you’ll get the right note.

VARIABLES AND CONSTANTS If all things changed all the time, there would be chaos. If nothing ever changed, there would be no life. In every composition, from Gregorian chant to Italian opera, from Mozart to Boulez, the interplay of elements that change and elements that stay the same provides the very essence of the piece. In the iconic prelude in C Major, from Book 1 of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,” the pulse, meter, and rhythm are all constant. So is the contour of the ascending arpeggio and its articulation. These are all building blocks that don’t change for almost the entire duration of the prelude. A single element differentiates one measure from the next: a change of harmony and a corresponding change in pitch and fingering (Example 17.13). 210

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EXAMPLE 17.13: Johann Sebastian Bach: “Well-Tempered Clavier,” BWV 846, Book 1, Prelude 1

œ œ œ œ œœ œœ ‰ œ œœœœœ & c ‰≈ œ .œ œ œ œ œ ≈‰ œ .œ œ œ œ œ ‰≈ œ .œ œ œ ≈ œ. œ J J J J ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ?c & ‰≈ œ . œ J ˙ ?

œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ . . ≈ ≈ Jœ . œ ≈J J ˙ ˙ ˙

We’ll call each building block a variable, which means an element or factor that is capable of change, while also being capable of being rendered fixed. Pulse, meter, rhythm, contour, articulation, and harmony are all variables. In our example, a single variable changes once per measure. All other variables remain fixed throughout the measure and beyond it. The character of a piece is determined on one hand by the composer’s choice of variables, and on the other hand by the rate of change of variables. In our example, both the simplicity of the variables and their slow rate of change (only once per bar) determine how the piece strikes us listeners: we hear a sense of evenness, of calm and simplicity. The difficulties of a passage arise because a composer has chosen a large number of variables; or because some of these variables are in themselves complex or out of the ordinary; or because the variables change too quickly for you to execute all of them with equal ease. To perform successfully any passage from your repertory, you need to be comfortable with each variable contained in it and with the speed of the changes. Although sometimes the rate of change is uncomfortably slow, for most musicians technical difficulties arise when variables change too quickly. Musicians often deal with this by practicing difficult passages slowly. This is useful, but when you play a sequence of fast notes slowly you use different mechanisms from the ones you use in playing the sequence up to speed—just as you use your legs differently in running and walking. Further, to play a quick passage slowly will change the passage’s musical character, possibly undermining your efforts to master it. Instead of practicing slowly, keep intact those variables that determine the character of the piece and slow down not the passage’s tempo but its rate of change of variables. Here’s a simple illustration, using the beginning of the Bach passage quoted earlier (Example 17.14). In Bach’s original version there is one change of variable per measure. We’ve cut the rate of change in half, to one change of variable every two measures. While looking for a solution to his vocal problems, F. M. Alexander realized that he misused himself every time he decided to speak. To break down the link between Integrative Practice Strategies

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EXAMPLE 17.14: Slowing down the change of rate of variables

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ & c ‰ œ .œ œ œ œ œ ‰≈ œ .œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ .œ œ œ œ œ ≈‰ œ .œ œ œ œ œ ≈J ≈J J J ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ?c œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ & ‰ œ .œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ .œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ .œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ .œ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ .œ œ œ œ œ ≈J ≈J ≈J ≈J ≈J ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ ? the intention to speak and the habitual misuse the intention engendered, Alexander invented an interesting strategy. He would direct his use silently, and then he’d decide to speak. Immediately after making that decision, Alexander would choose freely among three possible courses of action: 1. Carry on directing, and do nothing. 2. Carry on directing, and do something other than speak (raise his hand, for instance). 3. Carry on directing, and actually speak. In time his directing became such a priority relative to his actual goals that Alexander finally became able to speak without misdirecting himself. In music making, too, you have the choice of doing what you are about to do, waiting a while before doing it, or doing something else altogether. A simple scale provides a good illustration (Example 17.15). At any one point in the scale you have the choice of going ahead, of stopping at a certain note and repeating it, or simply playing any note you wish (Example 17.16). You may also alternate freely among the possible choices (Example 17.17). At the piano, to play a one-octave scale entails changing the position of the hand at least once. Let’s say that on average you change the position of your hand once every four notes. By rewriting the scale you can change hand positions less often, perhaps once every eight notes. This gives you more time to prepare each change (Example 17.18). To study the procedure in greater detail, we’ll use an intricate excerpt from the cello repertory: the opening phrase of a concerto by Haydn (Example 17.19). The passage is full of technical challenges. The traditional method consists of practicing it slowly and grindingly. But this so changes the character of the passage and its technical aspects that we can’t consider it a proper solution. Choose to keep intact the variables of pulse and musical character. You won’t play the same piece slowly, but a different piece at the same tempo as Haydn’s. 212

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EXAMPLE 17.15: A fixed scale

œ œ œ œ

&c œ œ œ œ EXAMPLE 17.16: Choices

&c

&c

œ œ œ œ œ

œ œ œ œ

&c

œ

œ bœ œ œ œ

EXAMPLE 17.17: A flexible scale

&c

œ œ œ œ

œ bœ œ #œ

œ œ œ œ

œ

EXAMPLE 17.18: Slowing down the rate of change of hand positions 1

2

3

2

&c œ œ œ œ

3

1

2

2

œ œ œ œ

3

1

2

3

œ œ œ œ

2

œ

EXAMPLE 17.19: Joseph Haydn: Concerto for cello and orchestra, Hob. VIIb/2 in D major Allegro moderato

B ## c

j œ

œ

œ œ œ œ œ . œ œJ ‰

œ

œ œ. œ. n œ. œ. b œ. œ .

œ œ œ nœ

6 F œ œ œ œ œ œœ œœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ #œ œ œ œ œ œ œ . #œ œ œ œ B ## œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ # œj œ Ÿœ œ œ œ œ œ n œ œ œ œ B ## ? œœ œœœ œ œ œj ‰

Start by doing nothing, a fine working principle to prepare any task (Example 17.20). Think up along the spine. Be ready to act, and yet willing to wait. As you continue to think up, begin to plan the musical unfolding of the phrase ahead. Think of sound, full yet free; of articulation, clear and even; of forward motion, sure and compelling. Think of the work to be done by your arms, hands, and fingers. Hear the sounds of D major in your mind’s ear. Without losing your upward thought, and having prepared your gestures in the pulse and character of Haydn’s melody, begin playing a repeated note (Example 17.21). Integrative Practice Strategies

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EXAMPLE 17.20: Do nothing Allegro moderato q = 60

B ## c EXAMPLE 17.21: Pulse and character

EXAMPLE 17.22: Ornaments

B ## c œ F

œ

∑

..

œ

œ

..

B # # c j œ œ j œ œ .. œ œ

EXAMPLE 17.23: Repeated figurations

œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œœ œœ œ œ B ## c œ ..

You’ve slowed down the rate of change of variables without eliminating those variables—tempo, pulse, articulation, bow stroke—that give the phrase its character. Once you can play this note beautifully, in the spirit of Joseph Haydn and of F. M. Alexander, add the grace note without letting it disturb the core (Example 17.22). Without stopping the repeated performance of your Haydn-like simple notes, renew your upward and outward directions and move on to the next event in the melody (Example 17.23). Several variables change here: rhythm, articulation, bow stroke, left-hand position. The rate of change of variables—your psychological time—is slow enough for you to have no fear altogether. Repeat this new figure until you’re comfortable with it. Alternate playing Haydn’s original figure with its inversion. Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy! Then, move on (Example 17.24). Your next task reminds you of the first note of the melody in length and character. Work on your use, reaffirm the pulse and character of the passage, and match the bow stroke and articulation that you employed earlier (Example 17.25). Continue to think up and prepare the next gesture, which is somewhat trickier as it involves a bowing challenge and also a challenge for the coordination of right and left hands. Separate these two challenges and deal with the bowing alone, to begin with (Example 17.26). You’ve introduced one variable (the sextuplets and their bow stroke) while delaying another (the sequence of descending pitches and their left-hand activity). 214

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EXAMPLE 17.24: A short segment

œ œ œ œ. œ œ B ## c œ J ‰ Œ EXAMPLE 17.25: Pulse and character, restated

B ## c

œ

œ

œ œ

..

..

EXAMPLE 17.26: A bowing challenge

B ## c

œ

œ œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ

œ œ. œ. œ. œ. œ.

6

..

6

EXAMPLE 17.27: Bow and left hand, coordinated

B ## c

. œ œ œ. n œ. œ. b œ. œ . œ œ J ‰

œ

6

EXAMPLE 17.28: Joseph Haydn, reinvented Allegro moderato q = 60

B ## c

œ œ œ œ

∑

F œ œ. œ œ B # œœœ J ‰ Œ #

j œ

œ œ œ. œ. n œ. œ. b œ. œ . œ œ B # J‰ #

œ œ œ œ œœœœœœœœœœœœœœœœ j œ

œ œ

œ œ

œ œ œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. œ œ œ. œ. œ. œ. œ. 6

6

6

Practice using your bowing arm with authority, and your left hand will benefit thanks to bilateral transfer. Render your bow strokes clear, regular, and alive. Then introduce the chromatic scale fragment of the original passage (Example 17.27). Compare Haydn’s original phrase with the way you’ve been practicing it (Example 17.28). Your transformation of Haydn’s phrase is a way of learning how to think up and play at the same time. It helps you solve technical and musical problems without Integrative Practice Strategies

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separating technical skill from musical content. And it offers you a gateway into the world of improvisation. The companion volume Integrated Practice makes a detailed study of improvisation and its multiple uses in a musician’s life. Consult chapter 20, “Improvisation: A Lifestyle.” Among other things, it contains an exercise—similar to the procedure just studied—that you can use to bridge the gap between improvising and performing written compositions. This exercise is illustrated in video clip number 69, “Improvising Fauré I: Scales & Arpeggios.” It also shows you how to improvise solutions to technical and musical problems. This is in video clip number 70, “Improvising Fauré II: Local Techniques.”

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C H A P T E R 18

STAGE FRIGHT

Buddhist tradition lists five great fears that we all have to deal with: fear of dying, fear of illness, fear of dementia, fear of loss of livelihood, and fear of public speaking. The last element on the list may surprise you, as it doesn’t seem to be on the same level of urgency as the fear of losing your mind or dying. In truth, however, there are many people who will tell you they’d rather die than speak in public—and they really mean it. There are different ways of interpreting what the Buddhists call fear of public speaking. Literally, it’s the fear of giving a business presentation, a toast at a wedding, or a valedictorian address in high school. Less literally, it’s the fear of expressing yourself in public, subjecting yourself to the scrutiny of others, having your own opinion and being responsible for it, or facing up to authority and possibly being punished for it. We all live in two spheres: the private and the public. In the private sphere we do as we please. We have our own thoughts, we make our little decisions, we get up late in the morning (or not), we practice without worrying about how we sound (or not), and so on. In the public sphere we interact with other people, with varying degrees of intimacy and commitment. Going to a café and ordering an omelet is a public act. For an intensely private person, it can be an uncomfortable interaction: getting the waiter’s attention is hard work, telling the waiter what you chose is hard work, and eating your omelet while other people look at you is hard work. To go to lessons and rehearsals entails being in the public sphere. Auditions, competitions, and concerts all happen in the public sphere. Everything in the public sphere potentially triggers the fear of speaking in public—from the most banal interaction with a waiter to the most demanding solo concert performance in front of thousands of people. We might rename the fear and call it the fear of passing from the private to the public sphere. Just as intensely private people find it difficult to “go public,” there exist people who are more comfortable in the public sphere and who find it difficult to be alone with their own thoughts. Who knows what might lurk deep inside the imagination of a happy extrovert? The extrovert might not fear the public sphere, but like every-

one else he or she needs to face the challenge of passing smoothly from the private to the public, and back again, every day as needed. If you suffer from stage fright, most likely you’re suffering the existential fear of passing from the private to the public sphere. You’re in good company, since every human being has to make the passage and be comfortable with it, and few people manage a perfect voyage every time. The Buddhists are right: the fear of speaking in public, like the fear of dying, goes deep and determines many of our behaviors. Some musicians, writers, and thinkers have ditched the expression “stage fright” and have adopted “performance anxiety” instead, considering it a more helpful description of the issue in question. I think stage fright has a nice ring to it: two little syllables that tell the whole story. Vocabulary, however, is personal. If you prefer, take a red pen to this chapter and change “stage fright” to “performance anxiety,” or “the public sphere,” or “the fear,” or “the thing.”

THE CONDITION OF STAGE FRIGHT Stage fright means many things to different people, and defining it isn’t easy. To a lucky few, the anticipation of a performance and the performance itself are both wholly positive. To others, the anticipation is negative, yet the performance positive. To others yet, both anticipation and actual performance are negative. Further, these negative reactions manifest themselves differently from person to person. Some shake, others have the runs, others still have an urge to fall asleep and disappear. Stage fright may even be desirable. Bruce Lee wrote that “the experienced athlete recognizes [the presence of stage fright] not as an inner weakness, but as an inner surplus.”1 Many great artists have suffered from stage fright all their lives. Is it possible that stage fright was part and parcel of their greatness? Tito Gobbi sang frequently with Maria Callas. He recounts: Despite her tremendous, unparalleled triumph she remained desperately nervous. On each day of performance she would phone me to say she could not sing—she had no voice left, or else she must change everything in the second act. I would be half-an-hour on the telephone consoling the poor girl and encouraging her. “All right,” I would say, “you don’t sing. It is enough for you to appear. You just act and I’ll do the singing—All right, you change whatever you want. You know we understand each other—,” and so on.2

Callas’s every performance was thrilling to the audience, and we can probably assume that Callas herself must have been pleased with at least some of her performances some of the time. Perhaps she excelled not despite her stage fright but because of it. Heinrich Neuhaus went so far as to deride musicians who didn’t suffer from stage fright: The main reason [for stage fright] is the great spiritual tension without which a man called upon “to come before the people” is unthinkable: awareness 218

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that he must communicate to the people who have come to hear him something important, significant, deep, different from the daily humdrum experiences, thoughts, and feelings. This type of nervousness is a good and necessary feeling and anyone incapable of it, who walks on to the platform as a good official walks into his office certain that today, too, he will perform the tasks required of him, such a person cannot be a true artist.3

The word awe means a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or wonder. When you witness certain natural phenomena, such as heavy lightning storms or gigantic sea waves, you may well be awestruck—or so full of awe that you’ll find the waves or the storms “awful.” When you perform a masterpiece by an immortal composer in front of two thousand people, you become a preacher or prophet, communicating extraordinarily powerful messages to the audience. Like gigantic sea waves, this can seem awful! Neuhaus wasn’t wrong about the exalted nature of performance. Nevertheless, he suffered from such crippling stage fright that his performing career was compromised. “Positive stage fright” may be preferable to “no stage fright,” but “crippling stage fright” seems a lot worse than “no stage fright.” It’s in your interest, then, to understand how stage fright affects you and what you can do about it. We tend to think that stage fright starts in the mind and spreads throughout the body. We apprehend fear of failure in our minds; this apprehension “gives” us stage fright; and stage fright in turn causes our limbs to shake and our breathing and digestion to become abnormal. This implies a separation between body and mind. William James, one of the pioneers of modern psychology, wrote in his Textbook of Psychology about “surprise, curiosity, rapture, fear, anger, lust, greed, and the like”: Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly from the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion. . . . Every one of the bodily changes, whatsoever it be, is FELT acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs.4

James suggests that the bodily state is the emotion, which arises immediately from the perception of the “exciting fact”—that is, the situation in which you find yourself. According to James’s theory, what causes stage fright isn’t your mind having a fear that makes your body shake, but your reacting viscerally to a stimulus. The distinction is important, since working on the mind, working on the body, and working on how you react to a situation differ somewhat. Stage fright is a reaction to a stimulus: the passage from the private to the public. The solution to it starts with your “doing nothing,” and then working on yourself and choosing your priorities. Wherever you are and whatever you do, it’s impossible for you to pay attention to every last detail of the environment, since you’d go into Stage Fright

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sensory overload and become psychotic. You see, hear, and feel only a fraction of what’s going on. The mix of attention and inattention is completely individual: no one else sees the world exactly as you do. It’s in that mix that you might find the solution to stage fright: by paying more attention to your inner core and less to what other people may or may not be thinking about you, by paying more attention to the moment than to the past or the future, by paying more attention to the means you use to make your music than to the ends you attain as a musician.

FIVE STRATEGIES The best way to deal with stage fright is over the long run and by working on yourself from day to day. Nevertheless, there exist several short-term strategies, including during the moments immediately preceding your performance. Some strategies appear to be eminently mental, others eminently physical. But once you embrace the idea that you work not on the thing but on yourself as you face the thing, body and mind more or less disappear and give birth to your self instead. 1. PREPARATION AND ADAPTATION

Stage fright arises out of a number of situations. Perhaps you’ve chosen too difficult a piece for your audition, or haven’t given it adequate preparation. This may create warranted stage fright: it’s only natural to be afraid of performing in exceptional circumstances something that you can’t play in normal circumstances. On rare occasions, exceptional circumstances lead people to overcome their inadequacies as if by miracle, but it’d be foolish for you to count on this happening. One way of avoiding stage fright, then, is to prepare your pieces well. Nevertheless, even the best preparation doesn’t guarantee that you won’t have stage fright during performance. It’s also possible that obsessing about preparation might actually create fertile ground for stage fright. You can become addicted to preparing ceaselessly and to worrying about not being prepared enough. Necessary as it is, preparation helps you the most when you also develop your adaptability. Stage fright sometimes engulfs you because you slept badly the night before the concert or you met heavy traffic on your way to the concert hall. Despite knowing your pieces inside out and being otherwise well prepared, you then find yourself jostled or distracted. There are two approaches to dealing with this kind of problem: become extremely disciplined about all aspects of your daily living, so that you always sleep well and never arrive late for a concert; or become extremely flexible about meeting unusual circumstances without losing your cool. In reality, performance circumstances are almost never completely ideal: the stage lighting is different from the rehearsal; there is a draft; the floor squeaks; a child fidgets in the third row. Rather than trying to control circumstances, it’s more productive for you to become adaptable to unpredictable circumstances.

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Preparation and adaptability are complementary faculties. By being prepared, you become more adaptable; by being adaptable, you prepare more efficiently, and you also stop worrying too much about preparation. Refer back to Chapter 12, which focuses on working on yourself and contains many tips on how to develop your adaptability. 2. INNER PREPARATION

The imagination is a powerful force, which we all use for both positive and negative ends. Imagine a violent accident involving a butcher and a meat cleaver, and you’ll be filled with revulsion. Imagine a cat basking in the sunlight, and you might start purring in empathy (unless you hate cats, of course). When it comes to stage fright, the traditional advice is to use your imagination to visualize giving successful performances, until the image becomes so clear in your mind’s eye that it brings about actual success. Place yourself in a position of mechanical advantage—the monkey, the lunge, or semi-supine, for instance. Send upward and outward directions for your whole self, from head to toe. If you make these directions your priority, your thought processes will become associated with the strength and stability of your good use. Now carry on with these directions as you visualize. Imagine yourself performing successfully. Or imagine a member of the audience, watching you perform and taking pleasure in the concert that you’re giving. Another route is possible. It seems counterintuitive, but you can conquer stage fright by visualizing not your successes but your failures. Place yourself in a position of mechanical advantage, pace the room, sit, or stand as you wish. Then imagine yourself in a concert situation, suffering from stage fright. Imagination being so powerful, you’ll soon feel queasy. While visualizing, renew your upward and outward directions. Think of the elasticity of your spine and the strength in your back and legs, the looseness of your jaw and tongue, and the natural expansion of your rib cage as you breathe. In other words, “think up” even as you suffer from the disconnecting effects of stage fright. Time this meditation well in advance of a performance. Do it every day for a while. Your upward and outward directions will slowly become more powerful than your imagined stage fright, and end by overcoming it. By the time the concert occasion arrives, you’ll have spent all your capacity for fearing stage fright and worrying about it. 3. RITUALS

The practice room is ordinary, the concert stage extraordinary. You can practice as much and as often as you like, but in all likelihood you won’t have the opportunity to perform as much and as often as you practice. Performing is extraordinary, then, partly because it happens less frequently than practicing.

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In truth, it remains extraordinary even when it does become frequent. The concert artist who plays a hundred recitals a year still finds that walking on stage is unlike any other experience. Performing is extraordinary because it is exalted. To perform frequently, useful as it is, doesn’t automatically eliminate stage fright, as it doesn’t change the exalted nature of performance. You respond to the exaltation of a concert situation by entering an exalted state yourself—a state of wonderment and uplift, sometimes tinged with dread and uncertainty. It’s difficult to describe the exalted state. Its characteristics are fundamentally different from ordinary experience, and the words and thoughts from ordinary experience can’t encapsulate the new experience, which feels contradictory, paradoxical, or plain weird. Your perceptions become altered. You might be in the presence of someone you know well, but suddenly the person seems bizarre to you, her features distorted, her behavior incomprehensible. Or you feel your own body as having a spongy quality that seems not wholly human. Perhaps you hear your voice as if coming from a source outside yourself. Go deeper into the exalted state, however, and you may experience pure joy and unconditional love. Concert preparation might involve your seeking this state willingly; or knowing in advance that you’ll enter the state and agreeing to do so, like a good child; or keeping your sense of perspective and humor as you start shifting from ordinary to exalted; or staying grounded even as you become uplifted. Consciously or unconsciously, we all engage in rituals to ease and accomplish the passage from ordinary to exalted. I suggest that you become more acutely aware of the passage and use rituals more proactively. Depending on your inner state, to pour yourself a glass of water may be a ritualistic gesture. Water is a vital, divine element. In the sounds of water flowing from the tap to the glass you hear rivers and oceans. Raising the glass to your lips, you sense yourself as a participant in a meaningful, symbolic interaction in which you’re receiving the blessings of the universe. Paradoxically, you might see yourself as both the center of the universe and a tiny little speck in the vast universe. It actually makes perfect sense, since to be part of something big is to belong in its bigness. The simple act of pouring yourself a glass of water and all the other actions in daily life carry symbolic and metaphysical charges. Ironing a blouse, shining a pair of concert shoes, showering or applying makeup, going for a walk, eating, napping, and talking to people can all help you pass from the ordinary to the extraordinary, if only you so wish. Use these ordinary gestures in preparation for public performances. Better still, live permanently on the frontier between the ordinary and the extraordinary, enjoying every sublime moment of every transcendent day. Then your concerts will become a natural extension of your exalted life, free from stage fright and yet full of excitement. 4. TENSION IN THE GREEN ROOM

Many musicians believe that stage fright is caused by too much tension, and that its solution is relaxation. Tension, however, is inevitable, necessary, and desirable. What you need isn’t to eliminate tension but to direct it toward your artistic purpose. 222

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Sometimes a nervous performer gathers his or her tension in a violent way. Heinrich Neuhaus recounts an instructive anecdote: “Anton Rubinstein [a great Russian pianist of the 19th century; not a relation of Arthur], as everyone knows, was very nervous and once even broke a mirror in the artist’s room with his fist before walking on to the platform (this seemed to have calmed him).”5 Punching a mirror is perhaps too risky a solution. Letting out a few animalistic shouts might be safer. Martial artists often use shouts to overcome their opponents. The shout scares the opponent while allowing the martial artist to direct and focus his or her energies. Stand still and let out a big shout while keeping your neck free. Or swing your trunk and let your arm fly as you shout. Aim your blow at the accompanist’s head, for instance, but train yourself to stop the blow a microsecond or so before you actually hit the guy. Think “Miss Piggy,” and while you’re at it look her up on YouTube for inspiration. (Use the search terms “Miss Piggy karate chop.”) Or refer back to Chapter 10, where you studied the art of shouting without hurting yourself. If you’re shy about shouting in public or if your accompanist refuses to play the game, there’s another way for you to gather, organize, and dispense your energies in the green room. I apply pressure to the cello string. The string naturally resists my pressure. Thanks to the string’s resistance, the cello and I connect, and the end result is the release of sound. Two ballroom dancers prepare to move across the dance floor. The man uses his hands to apply pressure to the woman’s back and arms, pushing here, pulling there, twisting here, and squeezing there. The woman resists her partner’s various pressures, and through their play of pressure and resistance the partners connect and become a stable entity. The end result is the release of movement across the dance floor. Operative in music, in dance, and in multiple situations from daily life, this chain of events might be called pressure, resistance, connection, and release. It shows pressure and resistance to be not just useful but downright fundamental, since without them there’s neither connection nor release. Visually scan the backstage area or dressing room. You’ll see walls, corridors, doors, doorways, and doorknobs, as well as music stands, rehearsal pianos, chairs, tables, brooms, and a multitude of other props. The architecture of the environment, the furniture, and all other objects offer you the possibility of your working with pressure, resistance, and connection. We’ll look at three examples among the many things you can do. 1. Walk up to the rehearsal piano and stand with your body lightly pressing against it. Place yourself in a close-footed lunge, with one foot a little ahead of the other and the front leg gently bent. Put your hands on the piano, pointing your elbows out and your wrists in. Now apply multiple pressures to the piano—with your body, with your legs, with your hands. Be gentle and yet active with fingers, palms, and wrists, as if you’re about to push the piano. The piano resists every one of your pressures; because of the resistance you meet, body parts connect; because you’ve created a circuit of connections, you release tension, energy, breath, thought, and emotion. It might be enough to do it for one minute, just before you go onstage. Stage Fright

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2. Stand in a lunge by a closed door. For the sake of description, we’ll assume that the door has a round knob with a strong spring, common in many public environments. If the door has a handle rather than a knob, the exercise’s fundamentals don’t change much. Wrap a hand around the doorknob, giving the knob the gentle but firm protection of your entire hand. Twist the knob a little, and the spring resists your movement. Twist the knob further; the knob turns, and yet its spring keeps attempting to return the knob to its resting position. Now you have an opposition of forces within your own hand: you’re willingly turning your hand one way, and the knob’s spring is trying to turn your hand the opposite way. If you firm up your arm slightly, the opposing forces have a connecting effect on the arm and, beyond it, the shoulder and back. A few quiet moments performing this exercise might take you away from the worries of the public arena and into the world of connection and pleasure. The exercise has the merit both of diluting your stage fright and enhancing your technique: the oppositions in your hand, arm, and elsewhere along your body are completely in harmony with the exigencies of instrumental technique. Drawing the bow across a string, holding an oboe in playing position, or striking a chord at the piano, you can and must use some version of these oppositions. 3. Suppose there’s a column somewhere in the backstage area. Walk up to it and place your hands, open but not overstretched, on the column, as if you’re about to shake it or move it. Keep your elbows pointed gently out, away from your body; and rotate your hands in such a way that the little fingers are pointing down in space, creating an opposition between the elbows and the wrists. Now try to bring your hands in, each toward the other. The column will resist and oppose you, and if you keep your spine firm, your back will lengthen and widen. Firm up your elbow and try to bring your body closer to the column. Your elbows will resist and oppose your back, strengthening and stabilizing it. Keeping your elbows firm, imagine that you want to rotate your hands further. But since your hands are already pushing in toward each other, they themselves will oppose the rotation that you’re wishing to cause. Your oppositions and resistances multiply, and so do your connections. The end result is a flow of release, including the discharge of some precious pleasure-giving endorphins flowing from the good ol’ brain to the good ol’ soul (Figure 18.1). 5. THE CHEMICAL APPROACH

Beta blockers are a relatively new class of drugs. Originally meant for treatment of angina and high blood pressure, they were soon being used by performers and athletes for suppressing stage fright and enhancing performance. In some sports, their use has since been declared illegal. In the short run, beta blockers can be useful. If on account of stage fright you give five failed performances in a row, you may well expect to fail the sixth time around; then you risk failing as the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Beta blockers might help you break the vicious circle of failure and give you a fresh start. In the long run, however, beta blockers may be more of a problem than a solution. Side effects in224

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FIGURE 18.1: Circuits of opposition

clude “lethargy, constriction of the smaller air-passages, aggravation of asthma, spasm of arteries in the legs . . . and even, though rarely, spasm of the coronary arteries to worsen the very angina that the drug was supposed to prevent.”6 Beta blockers highlight the chemical dimension of human existence: you swallow a little pill, it dissolves and enters your bloodstream, and in no time you think, feel, and move in a new way. Drugs, alcohol, caffeine, sugar, and chocolate, among Stage Fright

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others, have the capacity to alter your mood quickly and dramatically. In principle, you could employ multiple chemical means to alter your psychophysical state and combat stage fright. For the fidgety player who’s sensitive to caffeine, drinking coffee before a performance would be a big mistake. For the shy player who’s sensitive to chocolate, however, it may be a good idea to eat a chunk of dark chocolate ten minutes before going onstage. Chocolate contains theobromine, an alkaloid resembling caffeine that works as a powerful stimulant. The word itself is revealing: it comes from the Greek for “food (brōma) fit for a god (theos).” The word enthusiastic also refers back to theos, and it means “possessed by a god, divinely inspired.” When you eat chocolate (the food of the gods) you become enthusiastic (possessed by a god). Find the right dosage and the right timing, and chocolate could be your cure for stage fright. For one player, eating a banana chock-full of magnesium, vitamins, and minerals might work better; for another, the solution might be to perform on an empty stomach. You have to find out for yourself, through trial and error, what works best for you. And you also have to educate yourself on the risks and dangers inherent in every approach, from beta blockers to bananas. (Eating fruit when your stomach is unsettled can give you the runs!)

ON CONFIDENCE Our whole existence is played in an arena delimited by notions of insecurity, modesty, confidence, and arrogance. It’s difficult to define these terms unequivocally, since our inner states sets a bias: someone who’s insecure tends to see confidence as arrogance, and someone who’s arrogant tends to see modesty as insecurity. The insecure and the arrogant won’t ever agree on what they mean by “modesty” and “confidence.” You can suffer from handicapping insecurity and yet call your insecurity “modesty,” which is a virtue you hold dear in your moral cosmos. How can you overcome your insecurity if you feel that it is, in fact, a virtue? Stage fright sometimes arises from this confusion. When you make music, you create oscillations and vibrations that occupy the room or concert hall, propagating from you to the audience as a form of energy. Regardless of how you sing, play, or conduct, you’ll inevitably cause an energetic change in the environment. The change can be big or small, but there’ll be a change nevertheless. We learn our manners from very early on, through nonintellectual means that imprint the manners all the more deeply. If you grow up in a culture of self-effacement, altering the environment might seem immodest to you—a daring act, something rude and insensitive to others. It may be difficult for you to shed your modesty, climb onstage, and shake the walls of the concert hall. Reasonably speaking, however, to make music is to alter the environment. There’s an implicit contract between you and the audience: they attend your performance 226

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hoping that you alter their environment, and even requiring it of you. It’s the very reason for which they go see you. One solution to the barriers of modesty is for you to pay attention to the oscillations you create, and not worry too much (or at all) about how those oscillations affect your listeners. The oscillations are your business; the listeners’ reactions are their business. Clarify the distinction between the two and you might mitigate your stage fright, since you’ll become focused on your business, which is “how you use yourself.” If you constantly work on yourself in everything that you do, then you won’t perform on stage anymore; instead, you’ll “work on yourself as you perform on stage.” It gives birth to an aesthetics of presence, of flow, of pleasure and joy. And it helps you redefine success and failure: you succeed when you enjoy yourself and learn something from the moment, regardless of the outcome. There’s a real likelihood that the audience, too, will enjoy your performance if only you stop worrying about the audience. Paradoxically, taking care of yourself may be the best way to take care of other people.

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CONCLUSION

Imagine that you’re an illiterate adult. Whether you’re aware of it or not, every one of your behaviors in daily life is determined, compromised, or otherwise touched by the fact that you can’t read or write. You develop unconscious patterns of compensation, with costly crutches and blockages. Hundreds of problems, big and small, arise every day because of your illiteracy. The very way you think about yourself and the world is a function of your illiteracy. Now suppose you learn how to read and write fluently. Perhaps you do it overnight and by magic, perhaps over months and years of training. Either way you pass from illiteracy to literacy. Your life will change dramatically, in every respect. Most of the changes will be for the better. You’ll become a freer human being, more adaptable, more productive, healthier, and happier. Countless battles—reading a bus timetable, for instance—will be forever lifted. You’ll have permanent access to all books in all libraries, to newspapers and magazines, to postcards, to e-mail, to every form of written expression. Your emotions will change, too. Feelings of inadequacy, insecurity, guilt, and shame will lift and maybe dissipate forever. There exists a little space between stimulus and reaction, and it’s in this space that you can choose your reactions, thereby choosing who you are. It can be very difficult to catch a glimpse of that space. But being in the space, owning it, and mastering it is much like passing from illiteracy to literacy: it changes everything in your life. It actually creates life, so to speak. Before you master the space, you confuse stimulus and reaction, and you’re a victim of that confusion. Once you master the space, you aren’t confused anymore, and you stop being a victim. You choose your reactions, and in some ways you choose your reality. Will studying the Alexander Technique take you there? It’s difficult to say. In some ways, the Alexander Technique doesn’t really exist. A man called F. M. Alexander had a number of experiences from which he drew a number of insights, which he tried to share with other people, who are now trying to share them with

us. This process of propagation and dissemination is messily bound up with the subjective quirks of everyone involved. There exist, then, thousands of “Alexander Techniques.” Alexander’s insights don’t lend themselves to a reliable method with clear-cut principles and procedures leading to guaranteed results. There are many inevitable challenges. For instance, on account of faulty sensory awareness (the gap between who you are and who you think you are) you’re likely to have the wrong idea about what your problems are and how to solve them. Also, you need to undergo your own experiences (not Alexander’s), leading to your own insights (not Alexander’s). The space between stimulus and reaction creates infinite possibilities for sensing, choosing, and doing. You can’t predetermine your path through infinity. This means that you simply can’t know, beforehand, where the path will take you or even whether it’ll take you anywhere useful. Embracing the principle of uncertainty, however, can make you much more comfortable than seeking for certainty, since certainty is a very scarce commodity. The music profession is changing very fast. Formerly reliable ways of making a living as a musician are shrinking. Symphony orchestras are going bankrupt and closing down. Freelance gigging is much harder to come by than 30 years ago. Digital piracy makes it difficult to sell recordings. Music isn’t a priority in most school districts, so you can’t count on a job teaching kids. The name of the game is adaptability, and to play it you have to become good at letting go—of certainties, of suppositions and assumptions, of habits, beliefs, likes and dislikes. Letting go, however, is the hardest thing in the world. Suppose you’re miserable in your orchestral job in the crappy symphony with the mean conductor. Are you willing to literally let go of it, change careers, learn new skills, sell the house in the suburbs, and rent a small apartment downtown instead? You actually don’t have to keep the job that makes you so miserable. A monastic existence suits some people very well. You can spend your days making music by yourself or with friends, going to parks and museums, watching the sunset in wonder. If you agree to live a materially modest life, it’s quite doable. It’s not easy, mind you—it requires letting go. Traditional music training tends to take you away from your innate creativity. As a child you were imaginative and playful in all your endeavors. You improvised songs and dances, lyrics, narratives, games, and many other things. By the time you finished conservatory, however, you had become a slavish follower of the written score in the canonic repertory. Play one wrong note and you’re DEAD. Many performers are so afraid of composing, arranging, transcribing, transposing, and improvising— and otherwise connecting with the Creative Source—that they prefer to worry endlessly about the one wrong note, or even about the possibility of the one wrong note. You could perhaps choose to worry less and allow wrong notes into your life, maybe even seek them. It’s not easy—it requires letting go. Some musicians never wanted to become musicians in the first place, never enjoyed practicing, never enjoyed performing. They became musicians because their parents wanted them to, or because in their youth they didn’t know what they wanted to do anyway. For some people the absolute best thing to do is to quit altogether: Conclusion

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stop playing, stop performing, sell the instrument, and go do something else that they actually enjoy. It’s not easy—it requires letting go. You can have so much invested in pain that to stop hurting might make you feel that you’re “nothing.” There aren’t easy solutions to existential dilemmas, but to understand the nature of the dilemma is a valuable first step. The mental, the physical, and the metaphysical are inseparable, and for this reason you won’t be able to find a physical answer to what is in fact a psychological and metaphysical situation. You’re part of an immeasurable whole called the Universe, and to really become yourself you may have to give up your isolated identity, become “nothing,” and then meld into the unfathomable, where you’ll become “everything.” It’s not easy—it requires letting go. These are just illustrations of the fact you have choices at your disposal. In order to choose, you need to know how to “do nothing,” thereby allowing multiple possibilities to present themselves to you. Doing nothing is a sophisticated skill requiring alertness, commitment to the moment, and the willingness to become responsible for your path in life—which is determined by what you choose to do and what you choose not to do, what you choose to hold on to and what you choose to let go. To do nothing, to choose, and to let go are heroic undertakings. It takes courage to let go of pain. It takes courage to approach the awe-inspiring Creative Source. It takes courage to quit what is familiar and try something new and different— something unpredictable, unreliable, and uncontrollable. But if you undo your habits, you might undo your pains and your fears. I think it’s a good idea.

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. Norman Cousins, Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient: Reflections on Healing and Regeneration (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 65. 2. David Dalton, Playing the Viola: Conversations with William Primrose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 7. 3. Heinrich Neuhaus, The Art of Piano Playing, translated by K. A. Leibovitch (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1973), 72. 4. Ibid., 109. 5. Ibid., 111. 6. Richard Williams, “Age of the Rocket Man,” The Independent on Sunday Review, 20 June 1993, 11. 7. Frederick Matthias Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance (Kent, UK: Integral Press, 1957), 91. Subsequently referred to as MSI.

CHAPTER 1 1. Sir Charles Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, 2nd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947, 1961), 14. 2. Ibid., xvi. 3. F. M. Alexander, “Teaching Aphorisms,” in Articles and Lectures: Articles, Published Letters and Lectures on the F. M. Alexander Technique, with a foreword by Walter H. M. Carrington and notes by Jean M. O. Fischer (London: Mouritz, 1995), 207. Subsequently referred to as Aphorisms. 4. Steve Conner, “The Brain Machines,” The Independent on Sunday Review, 7 November 1993, 76. 5. Neuhaus, Piano Playing, 87. 6. F. M. Alexander, The Universal Constant in Living (London: Mouritz, 2000), xxi. Subsequently referred to as UCL. 7. Neuhaus, Piano Playing, 101. 8. Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 127. 9. Neuhaus, Piano Playing, 105. 10. Giovanni Battista Lamperti, Vocal Wisdom: Maxims Transcribed and Edited by William Earl Brown (New York: Taplinger, 1931), 29.

11. Ibid., 63. 12. Alexander, UCL, 106. 13. Frank Pierce Jones, Body Awareness in Action: A Study of the Alexander Technique, with an Introduction by J. McVicker Hunt (New York: Schocken, 1976), 195. 14. Alexander, UCL, xl. 15. Frederick Husler and Yvonne Rodd-Marling, Singing: The Physical Nature of the Vocal Organ. A Guide to the Unlocking of the Singing Voice (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), 72. 16. Mary Wanless, Ride with Your Mind: A Right Brain Approach to Riding (London: Kingswood Press, 1991), xvi. 17. Peter Wingate, with Richard Wingate, The Penguin Medical Encyclopedia, 3rd edition (London: Penguin, 1988), 96.

CHAPTER 2 1. F. M. Alexander, The Use of the Self (Kent, UK: Integral Press, 1955; first published in 1932), 28. Subsequently referred to as USE. 2. Alexander, MSI, 23. 3. F. M. Alexander, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual (Downing, CA: Centerline Press, 1985; facsimile of the 1st [1923] edition), footnote to p. 10. Subsequently referred to as CCC. 4. Cornelius L. Reid, Essays on the Nature of Singing (Huntsville, TX: Recital, 1992), 59. 5. Gerhard Mantel, Cello Technique: Principles and Forms of Movement, translated by Barbara Haimberger Thiem (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), 3. 6. Alexander, MSI, 120.

CHAPTER 3 1. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990), 74. 2. Ibid., 72. 3. In Alexander, UCL, xx. 4. Alexander, CCC, 146. 5. Quoted by Sacks, Clinical Tales, 73.

CHAPTER 4 1. Charles Scott Sherrington, The Brain and Its Mechanism (Cambridge: University Press, 1934), 10. 2. Ibid.

CHAPTER 5 1. Alexander, USE, 13. 2. Patrick Macdonald, The Alexander Technique as I See It (Brighton: Rahula Books, 1989), 5. 3. Ibid., 78. 4. Alexander, USE, 39. 5. Alexander, CCC, 157.

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6. Alexander, MSI, 122. 7. Bruce Lee, The Tao of Jeet Kune Do (Burbank, CA: Ohara, 1975), 203. 8. Helena Matheopoulos, Maestro: Encounters with Conductors of Today (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 446.

CHAPTER 6 1. Alexander, Articles and Lectures, 203. Subsequently referred to as Aphorisms. 2. Lee, Jeet Kune Do, 8. 3. Ibid., 12. 4. Hiroide Ogawa, Enlightenment Through the Art of Basketball, translated by H. Taniguchi, James N. Delavaye, and Otis McCrail, with images by Peter Nuttall (Cambridge and New York: Oleander Press, 1979), pages not numbered. 5. Husler and Rodd-Marling, Singing, 107. 6. Cornelius L. Reid, The Free Voice: A Guide to Natural Singing (New York: Joseph Patelson Music House, 1972), 97. 7. Constantin Stanislavski, Building a Character (London: Methuen, 1968), 220.

CHAPTER 7 1. Alexander, UCL, 76. 2. Alexander, Aphorisms, 203. 3. Ibid., 194. 4. Ibid., 203. 5. Alexander, MSI, 114. 6. Alexander, UCL, 55. 7. Alexander, CCC, 149. 8. H. H. Stuckenschmidt, Ferruccio Busoni: Chronicle of a European, translated by Sandra Morris (London: Calder & Boyars, 1970), 86. 9. Alexander, Aphorisms, 197.

CHAPTER 8 1. Alexander, MSI, 168. 2. Richard Shepherd Rockstro, A Treatise on the Flute (London: Musica Rara, 1967, reprint of the 2nd edition, originally published in 1928), 427. 3. Dalton, Primrose, 174. 4. Quoted in Rockstro, Treatise, 420.

CHAPTER 9 1. Mantel, Cello Technique, 144. 2. Janos Starker, “An Organized Method of String Playing,” in Concepts in String Playing: Reflections by Artist-Teachers at the Indiana School of Music, edited by Murray Grodner (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1979), 138. 3. Joseph Horowitz, Conversations with Arrau (New York: Knopf, 1982), 105. 4. Jones, Body Awareness, 65.

Notes to Pages 63–126

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CHAPTER 10 1. Vernon E. Krahl, “Anatomy of the Mammalian Lung,” in Handbook of Physiology: A Critical, Comprehensive Presentation of Physiological Knowledge and Concepts, Section 3: Respiration, Wallace O. Fenn and Hermann Rahn, editors (Washington: American Physiological Society, 1964), 213. 2. Emilio Agostini, “Action of the Respiratory Muscles,” in Fenn and Rahn, Handbook of Physiology, 381. 3. Jere Mead and Emilio Agostini, “Dynamics of Breathing,” in Fenn and Rahn, Handbook of Physiology, 421. 4. Reid, Dictionary of Vocal Terminology, 88. 5. Reid, Essays, 168. 6. Alexander, MSI, 188. 7. Ibid., 139. 8. Ibid., 195. 9. Alexander, CCC, 201. 10. R. A. Cluff, “Chronic Hyperventilation and Its Treatment by Physiotherapy: Discussion Paper,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 77 (October 1984): 855, 856. 11. Husler and Rodd-Marling, Singing, 36. 12. Alexander, CCC, 200. 13. Reid, Dictionary, 42. 14. Michael McCallion, The Voice Book (London: Faber and Faber, 1989), 39. 15. Husler and Rodd-Marling, Singing, 42. 16. Reid, Dictionary, 42.

CHAPTER 11 1. Jones, Body Awareness, 68.

CHAPTER 12 1. Joseph Horowitz, Conversations with Arrau (New York: Knopf, 1982), 109.

CHAPTER 13 1. Stuckenschmidt, Busoni, 79. 2. Ivan Galamian, Principles of Violin Playing and Teaching, 2nd edition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1985), 5. 3. Ibid., 2. 4. Husler and Rodd-Marling, Singing, 112. 5. Wilhelm Furtwängler, Notebooks 1924–1954, translated by Shaun Whiteside, edited and with an Introduction by Michael Tanner (London: Quartet Books, 1989), 9. 6. Neuhaus, Piano Playing, 79. 7. Ibid., 33. 8. Ibid., 2. 9. Ibid., 82. 10. Furtwängler, Notebooks, 30. 11. Joan Chissell, Schumann (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1948; 3rd revision, 1977), 23.

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Notes to Pages 129–168

12. Ibid. 13. Neuhaus, Piano Playing, 12. 14. Ibid., 1.

CHAPTER 14 1. Alexander, USE, 74. 2. Alexander, MSI, xxi. 3. H. W. Fowler, Modern English Usage, 2nd edition, revised by Sir Ernest Groves (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 295. 4. Reid, The Free Voice, 18. 5. Galamian, Principles of Violin Playing, 4. 6. Reid, The Free Voice, 109. 7. Ibid., 86. 8. Furtwängler, Notebooks, 139. 9. Bruno Monsaingeon, Mademoiselle: Conversations with Nadia Boulanger, translated by Robyn Marsack (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1985), 95. 10. Furtwängler, Notebooks, 127.

CHAPTER 15 1. Khen Lampert, Traditions of Compassion: From Religious Duty to Social Activism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 157.

CHAPTER 16 1. Lee, Jeet Kune Do, 20. 2. Alexander, UCL, 216. 3. Ibid., 55. 4. William Pleeth, Cello, Yehudi Menuhin Music Guides (London & Sydney: Macdonald, 1982), 10. 5. Alexander, Aphorisms, 201. 6. Quoted by Neuhaus, Piano Playing, 33. 7. Husler and Rodd-Marling, Singing, 107. 8. Ogawa, Basketball, pages not numbered. 9. Alexander, Aphorisms, 196. 10. Furtwängler, Notebooks, 32. 11. Ibid., 35. 12. Ibid., 36. 13. Harold C. Shonberg, The Great Pianists (London: Victor Gollancz, 1974), 280. 14. Herbert R. Axelrod, ed., Heifetz (Neptune City, NJ: Paganiniana, 1976), 124. 15. Ibid., 123. 16. Ibid., 124. 17. Alexander, CCC, 278.

CHAPTER 17 1. Alexander, USE, 38.

Notes to Pages 168–204

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CHAPTER 18 1. Lee, Jeet Kune Do, 69. 2. Gobbi, My Life (London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1979), 100. 3. Neuhaus, Piano Playing, 211. 4. Quoted by Sherrington, Nervous System, 259. 5. Neuhaus, Piano Playing, 211. 6. Wingate, The Penguin Medical Encyclopedia, 3rd edition (London: Penguin, 1988), 64.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexander, Frederick Matthias. The Use of the Self. Kent (UK): Integral Press, 1955. First published in 1932. ———. Man’s Supreme Inheritance. Kent (UK): Integral Press, 1957. First published in 1910. ———. Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual. Downing (CA): Centerline Press, 1985. Facsimile of the 1st (1923) edition. ———. The Universal Constant in Living. Long Beach (CA): Centerline Press, 1986. Facsimile of the 1st (1942) edition. ———. Articles and Lectures: Articles, Published Letters and Lectures on the F. M. Alexander Technique, with a foreword by Walter H. M. Carrington and notes by Jean M. O. Fischer. London: Mouritz, 1995. Axelrod, Herbert R., ed. Heifetz. Neptune City (NJ): Paganiniana, 1976. Chissell, Joan. Schumann. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1948. 3rd revision, 1977. Cluff, R. A. “Chronic Hyperventilation and Its Treatment by Physiotherapy: Discussion Paper.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 77 (October 1984). Conner, Steve. “The Brain Machines.” The Independent on Sunday Review, 7 November 1993, 76. Cousins, Norman. Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient: Reflections on Healing and Regeneration. New York: Bantam Books, 1981. Dalton, David. Playing the Viola: Conversations with William Primrose. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Fenn, Wallace O., and Hermann Rahn, editors. Handbook of Physiology: A Critical, Comprehensive Presentation of Physiological Knowledge and Concepts. Section 3: Respiration. Washington: American Physiological Society, 1964. Fowler, H. W. Modern English Usage. 2nd edition. Revised by Sir Ernest Groves. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Frankl, Viktor E. Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985. Furtwängler, Wilhelm. Notebooks 1924–1954. Translated by Shaun Whiteside, edited and with an Introduction by Michael Tanner. London: Quartet Books, 1989. Galamian, Ivan. Principles of Violin Playing and Teaching. 2nd edition. Englewood Cliffs (NJ): PrenticeHall, 1985. Gobbi, Tito. My Life. London: Macdonald and Jane’s, 1979. Horowitz, Joseph. Conversations with Arrau. New York: Knopf, 1982. Husler, Frederick, and Rodd-Marling, Yvonne. Singing: The Physical Nature of the Vocal Organ. A Guide to the Unlocking of the Singing Voice. London: Faber and Faber, 1965.

Jones, Frank Pierce. Body Awareness in Action: A Study of the Alexander Technique. With an Introduction by J. McVicker Hunt. New York: Schocken, 1976. Lampert, Khen. Traditions of Compassion: From Religious Duty to Social Activism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Lamperti, Giovanni Battista. Vocal Wisdom: Maxims Transcribed and Edited by William Earl Brown. New York: Taplinger, 1931. Lee, Bruce. The Tao of Jeet Kune Do. Burbank (CA): Ohara, 1975. Macdonald, Patrick. The Alexander Technique as I See It. Brighton: Rahula Books, 1989. Mantel, Gerhard. Cello Technique. Translated by Barbara Haimberger Thiem. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975. Matheopoulos, Helena. Maestro: Encounters with Conductors of Today. London: Hutchinson, 1982. McCallion, Michael. The Voice Book. London: Faber and Faber, 1989. Monsaingeon, Bruno. Mademoiselle: Conversations with Nadia Boulanger. Translated by Robyn Marsack. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1985. Neuhaus, Heinrich. The Art of Piano Playing. Translated by K. A. Leibovitch. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1973. Ogawa, Hiroide. Enlightenment Through the Art of Basketball. Translated by H. Taniguchi, James N. Delavaye, and Otis McCrail, with images by Peter Nuttall. Cambridge (England) and New York: Oleander Press, 1979. Pleeth, William. Cello. Yehudi Menuhin Music Guides. London & Sydney: Macdonald, 1982. Reid, Cornelius L. A Dictionary of Vocal Terminology: An Analysis. New York: Joseph Patelson Music House, 1983. ———. Essays on the Nature of Singing. Huntsville (TX): Recital, 1992. ———. The Free Voice: A Guide to Natural Singing. New York: Joseph Patelson Music House, 1972. Rockstro, Richard Shepherd. A Treatise on the Flute. 2nd edition, 1928. Reprint, London: Musica Rara, 1967. Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales. New York: Harper Perennial, 1990. Sherrington, Sir Charles Scott. The Brain and Its Mechanism. Cambridge: University Press, 1934. ———. The Integrative Action of the Nervous System. 2nd edition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1947, 1961. Schonberg, Harold C. The Great Pianists. London: Victor Gollancz, 1974. Stanislavski, Constantin. Building a Character. London: Methuen, 1968. Starker, Janos. “An Organized Method of String Playing.” In Concepts in String Playing: Reflections by Artist-Teachers at the Indiana School of Music, edited by Murray Grodner. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1979. Stuckenschmidt, H. H. Ferruccio Busoni: Chronicle of a European. Translated by Sandra Morris. London: Calder & Boyars, 1970. Wanless, Mary. Ride with your Mind: A Right Brain Approach to Riding. London: Kingswood Press, 1991. Williams, Richard. “Age of the Rocket Man.” The Independent on Sunday Review, 20 June 1993. Wingate, Peter, with Richard Wingate. The Penguin Medical Encyclopedia. 3rd edition. London: Penguin Books, 1988.

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INDEX

abandoning ideas of what is right to embrace what feels wrong, 78, 79 abdominal muscles, 130 absolutes effect on sensory awareness, 43 right and wrong, absolute standards of, 174 action, 78–85 actor, receptor, witness, roles of, 80–83 chain of events: conception, inhibition, direction, and action, 35 hesitation and eagerness, 83–85 judgment vs. choice, 79–80, 85 microsecond between deciding to act and acting, 85 opportunism in, 85 preparation for, 47 primary control, 35 right and wrong, acts and behaviors considered in light of, 171 tempo-rhythm, 84, 85 well-spring of intelligence, action as, 8 See also non-doing active vs. passive listening, 76 adaptability uncertainty, embracing, 229 working on one’s self, 157–158 addiction to stimulation, 17 additive vs. linear directions or instructions, 62, 156, 157 aesthetic judgments, 171–175 distance, 175 doing and non-doing, 174, 175 functional freedom, 174

imitation of aesthetics, 189–190 judgments and assumptions, 171–175 perceived individuality, 175 prejudices and opinions, 173, 174 proprioception, effect of, 38 relative and absolute standards of right and wrong, 174 spontaneity, instinct, and intuition, 172–173 suspension of, 174 words used to define what is right and wrong, 171 aikido, 65 “Alcantara Technique,” 94 alcohol for stage fright, 225, 226 Alexander, Albert Redden (A. R.), 153 Alexander, Frederick Matthias (F. M.), 90–94, 228 biographical information, 4–6 notion of nonduality, 89 paradox at heart of human existence, 175 photos, 5, 92 “the breathing man,” 130 vocal problems, 63, 78, 204, 211 working on himself, 150, 157 working to principle, 91, 93, 99 writing style, 136 “all together, one after the other,” 156, 157 altered states of consciousness, 132, 222 amorality witnesses’ amorality, 81 See also judgments and assumptions anatomy and physiology breathing, 129, 130 direction, 63–64 physical self, 3

anchoring of pelvis, 149, 150 anxiety. See stage fright application of Alexander Technique, 163–227 arms coordination, challenges of, 150 direction, 67–69, 72–73 flying arms and back, 72–73 power and strength, 122 primary control, 24 reaching out, 111–128 simplified skeleton, 146 unbendable arm, 68–69 Arrau, Claudio, 125, 157 arrogance, 226 assumptions. See judgments and assumptions attentiveness, working on one’s self, 159–161 attitude imitation of, 187 unity with body, mind, soul, posture, and movement, 8 See also thinking up along the spine auditory aids for working on one’s self, 160, 161 “Aurora,” 51 Austin, W. H., 12 automatic reactions to stimuli, 44, 45, 47, 52, 56 awareness, working on one’s self, 159–161 awe, 219, 230 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 210, 211 back coordination, challenges of, 150 flying arms and back, 72–73 lengthening and widening, 60–62 monkey and lunge positions, 96–110 primary control, 24 proprioceptors in, 37 simplified skeleton, 148, 149 sleeping on back, 152, 153 See also constructive rest; primary control; supine position; thinking up (thinking up along the spine) balance pelvis, mobility of, 149 role of head and neck, 19 spine, flexing of, 97 vestibular system in inner ear, 37 See also coordination balanced tension, 133 Balanchine, George, 59, 60 balloons, use for primary control exercise, 33 bananas for stage fright, 226 being wrong. See right and wrong

240

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Index

beta blockers for stage fright, 224–226 bilateral transfer, 45, 122–124 biographical information regarding F. M. Alexander, 4–6 bladder hyperventilation, effects of, 132 inhibited action, 57 Blakey, Art, 23 Body Awareness in Action, 13 body’s unity with mind, soul, posture, movement, and attitude, 8 boredom, working on one’s self, 150 Boulanger, Nadia, 175 boundaries vs. boundlessness, 74 Brady, Michael, 8 brain and bad habits, 95 neuroscience research, 37 projecting messages from brain to mechanisms, 58 technique seated in, 165 Brancusi, Constantin, 155 breaks from work and practice, 151, 152 breath, 74–75, 129–134 blowing cold and hot air, 71 breath support, 132–134 complexity of breathing, 129–131 coordination, challenges of, 150 direction, 74–75 exhale, 131, 132, 137, 138, 143, 156 gasping, 27, 52, 53, 130, 131, 150 glottal stroke, 138 hyperventilation, 132, 150 in-breath (inhale), 27, 131, 132, 138, 143, 150 inseparability of physical, psychological, and metaphysical, 130 “letting be and letting go,” 132 out-breath (exhalation), 131, 132, 137, 138, 143, 156 overbreathing, 132 self-awareness, 133 self-consciousness, 131 shallow, 138 simplified skeleton, 148 support, 132–134 underbreathing, 132 voluntariness of breathing, 130, 131 See also whispered “ah” “the breathing man,” Alexander as, 130 Buddhist tradition, 217, 218 Building a Character, 84 Bülow, Hans von, 193

bursitis, 122 Busoni, Ferruccio, 95, 165 caffeine for stage fright, 225, 226 Callas, Maria, 218 cameras, use in working on one’s self, 160, 161 Caprice, opus 11 #2, 203 carpal tunnel syndrome, 16–17, 122 Casals, Pablo, 22, 117 CDs and DVDs, use in working on one’s self, 161 Cello Technique, 35 center of energy, 34 centrifugal energy, 71 centripetal energy, 71 change primary control, 34–35 sensory awareness, changing one’s mind, 43 See also working on one’s self channeling someone else, 178 See also imitation character, 7, 59, 154 Charles, Ray, 127 cheekbones, 134, 137 children childlike spontaneity, 172 imitation of parents, 176 chocolate for stage fright, 225, 226 choices, 228–230 default choices, 160 vs. judgment, 79–80, 85 classes, lessons, and teachers, within Alexander Technique, 93, 94 clear-headedness, 79, 202, 207 flashes of thought in life-giving silences, 202–204 clenched teeth, 139 Cocteau, Jean, 190 Coghill, George, 8, 38 cold air direction, 71 See also breath concavity and convexity imitation, 179 primary control, 24–29 pronation and supination, 114–115 See also thinking up (thinking up along the spine) concentration vs. awareness, 64–65 conception chain of events: conception, inhibition, direction, and action, 35 proprioception forming of, 38 See also sensory awareness

Concerto for cello and orchestra, Hob. VIIb/2 in D major, 213–215 confidence, 26, 189, 209 self-assessments, 200 stage fright, 226, 227 uncertainty fostering confidence, 43 conscious control, 4, 130, 143, 172 defined, 34 proprioception, 37–39 See also consciousness Conscious Control, 4 consciousness altered states of, 132, 222 sensory awareness, conscious control, 38 See also conscious control constants and variables, 210–216 Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, 4, 34, 111 constructive reaction, 154 See also working on one’s self constructive rest, 145–153 illustration, 147 simplified skeleton, 146–149 See also semi-supine position; working on one’s self convexity. See concavity and convexity coordination capacity to move any and all joints, 97 challenges of, 149–151 face with jaw, 134 imitation, effectiveness of, 186 monkey position, 99, 100 technique, 166 working to principle, 99–101 See also balance copying. See imitation cortisone, 16, 17 creativity, 133, 229 Creative Source, 168, 175, 192, 201, 229, 230 and direction, 62 and imitation, 189 uncertainty, embracing, 229 Cripps, Sir Stafford, 4 daily practice. See practice daydreaming, 150 deafness, 37 delayed continuity, 202–204, 213 Dewey, John, 6, 172, 175 diaphragm, 130, 132 “Die Zauberflöte,” 207

Index

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241

direct vs. indirect functioning of organs, systems, and reflexes, 18 direction, 57–77 active and passive listening, 76 anatomy and physiology, 63–64 arms, 67–69, 72–73 boundaries vs. boundlessness, 74 breath, 74–75 cold and hot air, 71 centrifugal energy, 71 centripetal energy, 71 chain of events: conception, inhibition, direction, and action, 35 cold and hot air, 71 concentration vs. awareness, 64–65 directed listening, 75 duration, intensity, and dynamics, 76 as energy, 58, 59, 65–75 exercises, 65–75 expanding and contracting, 76 flying arms and back, 72–73 fountain, acting as, 71–72 free neck, 61, 76 front and back, 73 glacier, acting as, 71 hand exercises, 65–67 “hand-pulling-the-breath” gesture, 74, 75 hats enlarging or contracting energetic space, 73–74 imagination, 69, 70, 73–74 legs and feet, 74 lightness and heaviness, 70–71 linear vs. additive directions, 62 magnet, acting as, 71–72 movement, 74 multitasking, 64–65 perception, field of, 67, 69, 75, 76 process involved in projecting messages from brain to mechanisms, 58 pronation and supination, 115 pulling down vs. thinking up, 60 relaxed extended arm position, 67–70 resistance and opposition, 69 rhythmic information, 75–77 spatial information, 75–77 speaking, 74–75 support and suspension, 69–70 as tendencies, 59 in time and space, 75–77 touch, 75 unbendable arm, 68–69 verbal commands, 61–63

242

•

Index

voice, 74–75 volcano, acting as, 71 and words, 61–63 working on one’s self, 77 See also thinking up (thinking up along the spine) discomfort, 146, 154, 157, 158 See also working on one’s self dizziness, 132 doing and aesthetic judgments, 174, 175 in performance, 174–175 vs. sensory awareness, 145 See also non-doing Domingo, Plácido, 50 dramatis persona, 4 Duruflé, Marie-Madeleine, 126 dynamic sitting, 118 eagerness, 83–85 ears, 37 control of laryngeal muscles, 133 deafness, 37 See also sensory awareness elbows out, wrists in, 116–117 Elway, John, 189 emotion concert situation, exaltation of, 222 emotional sweating, 132 feeling within performances, 175 technique, emotional dimension of, 169 emptying before filling, 56 See also inhibition; non-doing; void end-gaining, 11–13, 17 difference between end-gaining and non-doing, 14 sensory awareness, negative effect of end-gaining, 36 endorphins, 224 energetic spaces, 65–75 definition of energy, 77 See also direction enlightened state, 172 excitation vs. inhibition, 45 exercises direction, 65–75 for the jaw, 135–137, 142–144 shoelace exercise, 135, 136 shouting, 142–144 for stage fright, 223, 224 tongue twisters, 140–142 exhalation, 131, 132, 137, 138, 143, 156 See also whispered “ah” existence, secret of, 7

existence paradox, 175 existential fears, 217, 218 extroverts and introverts, 217 eyes. See vision face, 74, 139, 143 coordination with jaw, 134–136 illustration, 135 release of facial muscles, 139 shoelace exercise, 135, 136 faintness, 132 Fauré, Gabriel, 95 fears in Buddhist tradition, 217, 218 existential fears, 217, 218 failure, fear of, 219, 221 goals stemming from, 11 improvisation, fear of, 158 stage fright. See stage fright working on one’s self, 158–159 feedback, 35, 167, 199 feeling within performances, 175 See also aesthetic judgments feet, 24, 118, 119, 123, 124, 143, 192 in constructive rest, 147 direction, 74 interconnection of body parts, 166 monkey and lunge positions, 96–110 supination of, 113 Feuermann, Emanuel, 179–182 fingers reaching out, 111–128 relative strength, 126 flying arms and back, 72–73 football player, imitation of, 187–189 foreign language “ah,” 139 “forward and up,” 61, 62 fountain and magnet, 71, 72 Fowler, H. W., 173, 175 framework, 89 indirect procedures, explained, 95 See also direction; end-gaining; inhibition; self Frankl, Viktor E., 9 free neck, 61, 62, 76, 77, 175 vs. self-judgment, 77 working on one’s self, 156, 160 functional freedom, 174 Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 161, 167, 168, 175, 196 Galamian, Ivan, 165, 166 gap between who you are and who you think you are, 229

gasping, 27, 52, 53, 130, 131, 150 Gauguin, Paul, 41, 42 gesticulation, 6, 73, 183 challenges of coordination, 150 Gitlis, Ivry, 190 giving directions. See direction Gleannie, Evelyn, 37 glottal stroke, 138 goals habitual aesthetic goals, 9 vs. means, 11, 12, 14, 48 stemming from fears, 11 See also end-gaining Gobbi, Tito, 218 Godowsky, Leopold, 169 Goldberg, Whoopi, 13 good use, 11, 17, 24, 34, 45, 85, 154 total pattern of good use, 60 See also thinking up; working on one’s self habits, 78, 95 holding and handling objects, 119–121 lying on back, useful in disconnecting faulty habits, 152 primary control, 34, 35 reaching out, 111–128 reactions to stimuli, 44, 45 vs. reflection, 50 See also end-gaining; misuse of self hands, 65–67, 111–128 carpal tunnel syndrome, 16–17, 122 fountain and magnet, 71, 72 hand-pulling-the-breath gesture, 74, 75 hands-on-the-back-of-the-chair, 156 injuries and healing process, 124–128 pronation and supination, 114 reaching out, 111–128 resistance and opposition, 69 and touch, 93 volcano and glacier, 71 hats enlarging or contracting energetic space, 73–74 Haydn, Joseph, 212–215 head coordination, challenges of, 150 “forward and up,” 61, 62 illustration of poise of head, 19 relationship between head and neck, 19, 20, 29–30, 145 simplified skeleton, 146, 147 See also primary control headaches, 139

Index

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243

healing, 153 heart, effect of hyperventilation on, 132 Heifetz, Jascha, 179, 180, 182, 197 here and now, 13, 14, 47, 79, 151, 159, 189, 190 hesitation, 83–85 holistic understanding. See whole self Horowitz, Vladimir, 157 Hotteterre-le-Romain, 108 “how” vs. “what,” 167, 168 Husler, Frederick, 15, 83, 132, 133, 166, 193 Huxley, Aldous, 4 hyperactivity, 132 hyperventilation, 132, 150 illnesses, 21, 139 and faulty awareness, 39 rest following, 153 imagination direction, 69, 70, 73–74 See also visualization imitation, 176–190 actor, receptor, and witness, 185 aesthetics, imitation of, 189–190 attitude, imitation of, 187 causes and effects, 186 “channeling” someone else, 178 children and parents, 176 convexity and concavity, 179 coordinative processes, 186 essence, 186–189 highest form of, 187 imitating outward results, 177–179 imperfect models, 185 instinctive empathy, 183 judgments and assumptions, 185 love, joy, and fire, absorption of, 189–190 negative vs. positive models, 182–183 outward results, 177–179 simplified skeleton, 179 singularity and universality, 179–182 suggestions for developing imitation skills, 184–186 YouTube, 179, 189, 190 immorality vs. amorality, 81 improvisation, fear of, 158 in-breath (inhale), 27, 131, 132, 138, 143, 150 index fingers, 126 indirect procedures, explained, 95 individuality, 7, 17, 24, 56, 154, 175, 182 inertia primary control, 24, 28 self, 9

244

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Index

inhibition, 44–56 automatic reactions to stimuli, 44, 45 default reactions, 47 stimulus and reaction, space between, 52, 56 chain of events: conception, inhibition, direction, and action, 35 defined, 45, 53 exercising skills of inhibition, 52, 53 habit vs. reflection, 50 and need to react, 53 risks and dangers in processes of inhibition, 56 See also non-doing injuries, rest following, 153 inner core, 26, 28, 178, 179, 200, 220 inner ear, 37 inner space, 56 See also inhibition; non-doing insecurity, 226 instinct, 172–173 instinctive empathy, 183 intuition, distinguished, 173 Integrated Practice (companion volume), 110, 112, 113, 117, 118, 121, 124, 133, 194, 204, 206, 216 integrative practice strategies, 202–216 intelligence, defined, 8 intention, 11, 45, 48, 58–60, 69, 170 as element of technique, 167 gestures and intentions, connection between, 165, 168 illustration, 68 interplay of intentions and energies, 73 misuse, 212 working on one’s self, 6 interpretive work, 174 See also aesthetic judgments “intrinsically right,” 172 introverts and extroverts, social interactions, 217 intuition, 9, 37, 80, 173, 174 instinct, distinguished, 173 melding of intuition and intellect, 189 stage fright, 221 stillness, 190 working on one’s self, intuitive processing of information, 159 James, William, 219 Järvi, Neeme, 16 jaw, 134–137 coordination, challenges of, 150 exercises, 135–137, 142–144 misalignment of jaw and temple, 139

muscles, illustration, 136 release of tension, 139 shoelace exercise, 135, 136 See also whispered “ah” joints within body, 96, 97 number of, 96 Jones, Frank Pierce, 13, 125, 126, 153 Jones, “Papa” Joe, 77, 190 judgments and assumptions aesthetic judgments, 171–175 chain of events: think, play, judge, 35 vs. choice, 79–80, 85 discipline of nonjudgment, 200–201 free neck vs. self-judgment, 77 imitation, 185 permanency of desire to judge, praise, or condemn, 76 practice, nonjudgment in, 200–201 proprioception, effect of, 38 public scrutiny and stage fright, 217 words used to define what is right and wrong, 171 working on one’s self, 160, 161 See also right and wrong Kleiber, Carlos, 64, 65, 77 Kleiber, Erich, 64, 65 “La Clemenza di Tito,” 205 Lamperti, Giovanni Battista, 9–11 language. See words larynx, 131, 133, 138 latent mobility, 118 learning experience, 89 indirect procedures, explained, 95 See also direction; end-gaining; inhibition; self Lee, Bruce, 64, 79, 218 legs coordination, challenges of, 150 monkey and lunge positions, 96–110 primary control, 24 Lehmann, Lotte, 95 lessons, teachers, and classes within Alexander Technique, 93, 94 letting go and letting be, 21, 43, 56, 91, 132, 153, 229, 230 See also inhibition; non-doing life-giving silences, art of inserting, 202–204 linear vs. additive directions or instructions, 62, 156, 157 lips, 6, 71, 156, 208 coordination, challenges of, 150

shoelace exercise, 135, 136 See also whispered “ah” listening, 54, 75, 76 lively neck brace, 31–33 lunge position, 103–106, 109 illustration, 105 stage fright strategies, 221, 224 Lupu, Radu, 77 lying on back, 145, 152 See also semi-supine position Macdonald, Patrick, 59, 61 magnesium for stage fright, 226 Mandela, Nelson, 178 Manning, Peyton, 189 Man’s s Search for Meaning, 9 Man’s Supreme Inheritance, 4, 172 Mantel, Gerhard, 35, 122 Marino, Dan, 189 martial art, life as, 159–160 McCallion, Michael, 133 means vs. goals, 11, 12, 14, 48 means-whereby principle, 13–14 mechanical advantage, 91–94, 97, 154, 172, 199, 221 constructive rest, 145, 149 illustrations, 92, 146 stage fright, 221 See also lunge position; monkey position meditation, 77, 102, 119, 171 stage fright, 221 and study of technique, 169 memory, learning to perform by heart, 199–200 mental attitude in practice, 192–193 Messi, Lionel, 84 metaphysical self, 3 method, etymology of word, 155 mind unity with body, soul, posture, movement, and attitude, 8 See also self mindfulness, 151 mirrors, use of, 160–161 misuse of self, 11 intention to speak, 212 moving from misuse to good use, 45 sensory awareness, negative effect of misuse, 36, 39 See also working on one’s self Mitchell, Arthur, 59, 60 Modern English Usage, 173 modesty, 226, 227

Index

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245

Monet, Claude, 155 monkey position, 97–103, 109 illustration, 107 stage fright strategies, 221 against the wall, 101–103 working on one’s self, 156 moral judgments, 80, 185, 226 immorality vs. amorality, 81 motivations self, 11 movement direction, 74 pronation and supination, 116 unity with body, mind, soul, posture, and attitude, 8 See also self Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 205, 207 multitasking, 64–65 naming something as owning it, 53 natural, defined, 171, 172 natural breathing, 129, 130 Nazário, Lelo, 51 neck coordination, challenges of, 150 free neck. See free neck lively neck brace, 31–33 relationship between head and neck, 145 simplified skeleton, 146, 147 See also primary control negative vs. positive models for imitation, 182–183 Neuhaus, Heinrich, 8, 9, 167, 169, 218, 219, 223 neuroscience research, 37 neutrality, 56 See also inhibition; non-doing Newton, Wayne, 189 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 167 non-doing, 6, 46–48, 187, 190, 230 constructive rest, 150, 151 difference between end-gaining and non-doing, 14 habitual and automatic reactions to stimuli, 44, 45 here and now, 47 misuse to good use, moving from, 45 as natural, spontaneous, intuitive, or agreeable, 174 in performance, 174–175 real test of non-doing, 78 sleep, transformation from “doing” “non-doing,” 153 unfamiliar acts performed with awareness and control, 47

246

•

Index

working on one’s self, 159, 160 See also action; doing nonduality, notion of, 89 nonhabitual gestures, 78 nonjudgment. See judgments and assumptions nonmonkey position, 98 See also monkey position normal breathing, 129, 130 nose, 29, 132, 137, 138, 209 See also sensory awareness not knowing, 172 numbness from hyperventilation, 132 observations proprioception, effect of, 38 working on one’s self, 160, 161 Ogawa, Hirohide, 83, 195 opportunism, 85, 197–199 opposition. See resistance and opposition ordinary gestures in preparation for public performances, 222 out-breath (exhalation), 131, 132, 137, 138, 143 See also whispered “ah” overbreathing, 132 Oxford University, 8 paradox at heart of human existence, 175 pauses and short silences, 202–204 paying attention. See working on one’s self pelvis, 148–150 monkey and lunge positions, 96–110 primary control, 24 Penguin Medical Encyclopedia, 16 performance anxiety. See stage fright physical relaxation vs. psychophysical relaxation, 8 physical self, 3 nonduality, notion of, 89 “pins and needles” from hyperventilation, 132 posture defined, 8 unconscious adjustments in, 37 unity with body, mind, soul, movement, and attitude, 8 See also self practice, 191–216 delayed continuity, 202–204, 213 departures and destinations, 209–210 integrative practice strategies, 202–216 isolation and integration of components, 204–209 building blocks, 211 large vs. small gestures, integrating psychological time and chronological time, 209–210

memory, learning to perform by heart, 199–200 nonjudgment in, 200–201 opportunism, 197–199 rate of change of variables, 211 reliability and control, 196–197 repeated gestures, exercises, phrases, sections, and movements, 195–196 rhythm, 193–195 singing one sustained note, 206–209 springlike actions, 210 strategies, 202–216 technique, 168–170 technique and interpretation as one and the same, 209 variables and constants, 210–216 warm-ups, 192–193 prejudices within aesthetic judgments, 173, 174 presence “here, now,” 13, 14, 47, 79, 151, 159, 189, 190 sitting in the moment, 118 primary control, 18–35, 176 arms, 24 back, 24 as center of energy, 34 change, 34–35 concavity and convexity, 24–29 conception, inhibition, direction, and action, 35 as defined by Alexander, 17, 35 direct vs. indirect functioning of organs, systems, and reflexes, 18 feedback, 35 four practical exercises, 29–33 habits, changing, 34, 35 head and neck orientation, 19, 20, 29–30 and identity, 33–34 inertia, 24, 28 inner core, 26, 28 legs, 24 lively neck brace, 31–32 neck-spine, 20, 30–31 occupying space around head, 32–33 passing from doing to non-doing, 21 pelvis, 24 and personality, 20 poise of head, illustration, 19 as psychophysical process, 21 resistance and opposition, 28, 29 shoulders, 24 simplified skeleton, 21–25 stage fright, 18 think, play, judge, 35

three points of spine integration, 24 whole of you, 19–21 Primrose, William, 108, 113, 179, 180 principles of Alexander Technique, 1–85 private vs. public sphere of living, 217, 219 procedures within Alexander Technique, 87–161 pronation and supination, 112–116 convexity and concavity, 114–115 direction, 115 hands and wrists, 114 movement, 116 resistance and opposition, 115 shoulders and back, 114 proprioception, 37–39 psychological self, 3 nonduality, notion of, 89 psychophysical challenges, 8 whispered “ah” breath, 137 primary control, 21 working on one’s self, 160, 161 public speaking, 217 See also stage fright public vs. private sphere of living, 217, 219 pulling down vs. thinking up, 60 qikong, 65 quadrilateral transfer, 122–125 Ravel, Maurice, 95 reaching out, 111–128 bilateral and quadrilateral transfer, 122–124 dynamic sitting, 118 elbows out, wrists in, 116–117 hand injuries and healing process, 124–128 holding and handling objects, 119–121 illustration, 120 power and strength in arms, 122 pronation and supination, 112–116 convexity and concavity, 114–115 direction, 115 hands and wrists, 114 movement, 116 resistance and opposition, 115 shoulders and back, 114 receptors, roles of, 80–83 recitation vs. ordinary manner of speaking, 204 recordings, use in working on one’s self, 160, 161 recovering from injuries, 153 Reiche, Eugen, 108 Reid, Cornelius L., 34, 83, 84, 130, 132, 133, 173–175 relative standards of right and wrong, 174

Index

•

247

relaxation, 3, 4, 8–11, 143, 145, 179, 197 and coordination, 134 direction, relaxed extended arm position, 67–70 hesitation, 83 and loud playing, 122 shoulders, 99 stage fright, 222–224 reliability and control, 196–197 relinquishment (letting go and letting be), 21, 43, 56, 91, 132, 153, 229, 230 See also inhibition; non-doing repeated gestures, exercises, phrases, sections, and movements, 195–196 resistance and opposition, 59, 69, 114, 115, 223, 224 constructive rest, 149, 150 latent resistance, 118, 187 primary control, 28, 29, 31 pronation and supination, 115 resting following injury, operation, or illness, 153 See also constructive rest; sleep restlessness, 150 rhythm, 193–195 daily life’s rhythms, 151 direction, rhythmic information, 75–77 Ride with Your Mind, 15 right and wrong abandoning ideas of what is right to embrace what feels wrong, 78, 79 aesthetics, 171–175 being wrong, effect on sensory awareness, 41–43 ever-evolving societal values, 171 “intrinsically right,” 172 relative and absolute standards of right and wrong, 174 See also judgments and assumptions rituals for dealing with stage fright, 221, 222 Rockstro, Richard S., 109 Rodd-Marling, Yvonne, 15, 83, 132, 133, 166, 193 Rodin, Auguste, 184 Rostropovich, Mstislav, 177, 178 Rubinstein, Anton, 223 Rubinstein, Arthur, 117, 179, 180 Sachs, Dr. Oliver, 37 Schumann, Robert, 167 secret of existence, 7 self, 3–17, 40, 52, 131, 133, 160, 227 aesthetic judgments, 171, 174 daily practice, 192, 194, 195, 200 defined, 6 dramatis persona, 4

248

•

Index

end-gaining principle, 11–13, 17 functioning, 14–17 goals vs. means, 11, 12, 14 inertia, 9 inhibition, unlocking process of self-discovery, 55 intelligence, 7, 8 intrinsically right way of using self, 174 means-whereby principle, 13–14 misuse, 11 motivations, 11 physical, psychological, and metaphysical, 3 posture, 7, 8 primary control, use of self in, 28, 29 reacting, 16 relaxation, 8–11 secret of existence, 7 symptoms and effects, 14 technique, 166, 167–170 tension, 8–11 “universal constant in technique for living,” 14 use and functioning, 13–17 The Use of the Self, 6, 63, 78 wanting things, 11 See also misuse of self; whole self; working on one’s self self-awareness, 90, 133 gap between who you are and who you think you are, 229 vs. self-consciousness, 172 self-consciousness, 45, 53, 98, 125, 131, 171, 172, 176 self-fulfilling prophecies, 224 semi-supine position, 145–152 backstage breaks during concert intermissions, 151 mental practice, 151, 152 simplified skeleton, 146–149 stage fright strategies, 221 stillness, 151 See also constructive rest sensory awareness, 36–43 absolutes, 43 being wrong, 41–43 changing one’s mind, 43 conscious control, 38 vs. “doing” and “thinking,” 145 end-gaining, negative effect of, 36 faulty sensory awareness, 39–43 intelligence, sensing as well-spring of, 8 misuse of self, negative effect of, 36, 39 reasons for malfunctioning of senses, 39, 40 roles of actors, receptors, and witnesses, 80 sixth sense, 37–39

stimulus and reaction, 42 working on one’s self, 160, 161 See also proprioception sensory overload, 81, 82, 220 Servais, Adrien-François, 203 shallow breathing, 138 Shaw, George Bernard, 4 Sherrington, Sir Charles, 4, 47 shoelace exercise, 135, 136 short silences, 202–204 shoulders, 21, 24–29, 40, 192, 200 coordination, challenges of, 150 in dance of head and neck, 29, 30 pronation and supination, 114 reaching out, 111–128 scrunching, 40, 59, 61, 78, 114 simplified skeleton, 146 tension, 9, 14, 15, 18 See also thinking up (thinking up along the spine) shouting exercise, 142–144 shyness vs. eagerness, 83–85 sickness. See illnesses side effects of beta blockers, 225 sight. See sensory awareness silence, 16, 31, 32, 53, 61, 62, 67, 70, 82, 94, 143 whispered “ah” vowel, 137, 138 delayed continuity, 202–204 as energy, 74 silent music, 121 simplified skeleton, 146–149 Sister Act, 13 sitting, dynamic, 118 sixth sense, 37–39 skull, 134 jaw. See jaw misalignment of jaw and temple, 139 shoelace exercise, 135, 136 sleep comfort, 152 and stage fright, 220 transformation from “doing” “non-doing,” 153 working on one’s self, 150 smell, 36 See also sensory awareness smiling, 134, 135, 137, 139 sniffing, 131 soft palate, 134 soul unity with body, mind, posture, movement, and attitude, 8 See also self spatial information, 75–77

spine primary control, 20, 30–31 simplified skeleton, 146 using hip, ankle, and knee joints without bending spine, 98 See also thinking up (thinking up along the spine) spiritual tension, 218 spontaneity, instinct, and intuition, 172–173 stage fright, 217–227 anticipation of performance, 218 beta blockers, 224–226 confidence, 226, 227 defined, 218 endorphins, 224 exercises for, 223, 224 handicapping insecurity, 226 mechanical advantage, 221 meditation, 221 opposition of forces, 223–225 preparation and adaptation, 220–222 primary control, 18 relaxation, 222–224 rituals, 221, 222 self-fulfilling prophecies, 224 separation between body and mind, 219 strategies for dealing with, 220–226 tension, 222–224 Stanislavski, Constantin, 84 Starker, Janos, 23, 117, 122 stimulation addiction to, 17 and reaction, 89, 228 sensory awareness, 42 Stokowski, Leopold, 112, 117 strategic silences, 202–204 Strauss, Richard, 174 students, lessons, and teachers, within Alexander Technique, 93, 94 sugar for stage fright, 225, 226 supination. See pronation and supination surgery, rest following, 153 surrender (letting go and letting be), 21, 43, 56, 91, 132, 153, 229, 230 See also inhibition; non-doing swallowing, 148 sweating, 132 t’ai chi ch’uan, 65 tape recorders, use of, 160, 161 taste, 36 aesthetic taste. See aesthetic judgments See also sensory awareness

Index

•

249

teachers, lessons, and classes within Alexander Technique, 93, 94 technical framework, 89 indirect procedures, explained, 95 See also direction; end-gaining; inhibition; self technique, 165–170 and coordination, 166 definition of, 165–167 emotional dimension of, 169 heightened awareness of self, 169 as meditation, 169 practicing, 168–170 technique and interpretation as one and the same, 209 use of self, 166, 167–170 “what” and “how,” 167, 168 temple and jaw misalignment, 139 Temporal-Mandibular Syndrome ( TMS), 139 tendinitis, 122 tension, 8–11 hyperventilation, 132 jaw, release of tension, 139 stage fright, 222–224 Textbook of Psychology, 219 theobromine, 226 “The Thinker,” 184, 185 thinking chain of events: think, play, judge, 35 and intelligence, 8 vs. “sensing” and “doing,” 145 thinking in action. See direction thinking up (thinking up along the spine), 108, 109, 179, 189, 190, 202 whispered “ah” breath, 137 explained, 59–62 “how” vs. “what,” 167 illustration, 84 and speaking, 63 timidity vs. eagerness, 83–85 tongue coordination, challenges of, 150 shoelace exercise, 135, 136 See also sensory awareness; whispered “ah” tongue twisters, 140–142 touch, 36, 93 direction, 75 expression of musicality, 168 See also sensory awareness trampoline gestures, integrating psychological time and chronological time, 209–210

250

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Index

uncertainty, embracing, 229 underbreathing, 132 unity of body, mind, soul, posture, movement, and attitude, 8 See also self universal constant in living, 14 The Universal Constant in Living, 6 “unpremeditated,” 172 upward thought. See “thinking up along the spine” use of self. See self variables and constants, 210–216 Végh, Sándor, 77 vibration, 14, 15, 37, 132, 150, 226 direction, 74, 76 and primary control, 31, 33 and shouting, 144 vibrato, 34, 115, 117, 174, 182 changing problematic vibrato, 44–47, 56 videos, 160, 161 vision, 36 hyperventilation, visual disturbances, 132 See also sensory awareness visual aids for working on one’s self, 160, 161 visualization direction, 62, 72, 73 recovery from pain, 153 stage fright strategies, 221 vocabulary. See words Vocal Wisdom, 9–11 voice, 6, 15, 26 balloon exercise, 33 concavity and convexity, 27–29 delayed continuity, 202 direction, 74–75 sensory awareness, 36 See also whispered “ah” void emptying before filling, 56 of proprioception, 37 See also inhibition; letting go and letting be; non-doing volcano, acting as, 71 voluntariness of breathing, 130, 131 von Bülow, Hans, 193 vowels singing one sustained note, 206–209 See also whispered “ah” Wanless, Mary, 15 warm-ups, 192–193

“Well-Tempered Clavier,” 210, 211 “what” vs. “how,” 167, 168 whispered “ah,” 137–144 in foreign languages, 139 ideal breathing, 129, 130 shouting, 142–144 tongue twisters, 140–142 working on one’s self, 156 whole self, 7, 16, 57, 156, 158 inhibition and non-doing, 47, 55 primary control, 19–21 stage fright, strategies for, 221, 230 whole universe, 230 Wieck, Friedrich, 167 words, 53–55 aesthetic judgments, words used to define what is right and wrong, 171 direction, verbal commands, 61–63 exercising skills of inhibition, 52, 53 expansion and deepening of vocabulary, 54 listening, 54, 75, 76 music as like spoken language, 203 naming something as owning it, 53 recitation vs. ordinary manner of speaking, 204 speakers and listeners, 54 thinking up and speaking, 63 triggering shame and guilt, 55 working on one’s self, 6, 7, 95, 154–161 adaptability, 157–158 whispered “ah” breath, 156 Alexander working on himself, 157 assumptions and judgments, 160, 161 attentiveness and awareness, 159–161 auditory aids, 160, 161 boredom, 150 breaks, 151, 152 case study, 16–17 CDs and DVDs, 161 coordination, challenges of, 149–151, 157 daydreaming, 150 default choices, 160 direction, 77

distortions, 160, 161 fears, 158–159 free neck, 156, 160 hands-on-the-back-of-the-chair, 156 healing, 153 ideal conditions, 157 illustration, 152 intellectual and intuitive processing of information, 159 intention, 6 Jones, “Papa” Joe, 190 judgments and assumptions, 160, 161 martial art, life as, 159–160 means-whereby principle, 13 mirrors, cameras, and recorders, 160–161 monkey, 156 observations, 160, 161 perception, 6 problematic conditions, adaptability for, 157–158 psychophysical challenges, 160, 161 reality, 160, 161 restlessness, 150 sensory awareness, 160, 161 sleep, 150 stage fright, effect on, 227 subsuming yourself into something bigger than yourself, 175 technique and interpretation as one and the same, 209 working to principle, 99–101 wrists carpal tunnel syndrome, 16–17, 122 case history, 16–17 elbows out, wrists in, 116–117 pronation and supination, 114 writing style of Alexander, 136 wrong. See right and wrong YouTube as source for imitation, 179, 189, 190 “Die Zauberflöte,” 207

Index

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251