Relating to musicians and Alexander Technique
Playing musical instruments can be a source of mal-coordination. So many piano players gain their emphasis by bringing the body downwards towards the keys. It is only the arms, hands and fingers that should travel downwards. The body should be directly upwards.Patrick MacDonald (“The Alexander Technique As I See It” – Notebook Jottings p23)
Alexander Technique and Playing Slowly “The point of slow practice is not just to slow things down in order to play it perfectly. It’s about fine-tuning the execution, and looking for additional ways to play it even better while we are playing slowly enough to monitor and think about the little details. Are you cultivating the right habits, so that when the tempo increases, you are still playing it the right way? Or are there lots of inefficiencies, or bad…
A Lecture Given By Frank Pierce Jones at Indiana University School of Music, Bloomington March 10, 1975 It may not seem logical to go to an Alexander teacher who can’t sing or play an instrument and expect to learn something about musical performance. It isn’t illogical, however. The reason is that an Alexander teacher is concerned with unlearning rather than learning – with non-doing rather than doing, with subtracting rather than adding. The Alexander Technique is a method for getting…
“Most of Australia’s classical musicians are suffering from injuries due to poor playing techniques, and experts say more needs to be done to educate the industry and overcome what is still largely considered a taboo topic.” – ABC Online News, 2014 Injuries are unfortunately all too common in the world of musicians. “A 2012 survey of members from Australia’s eight professional orchestras found 84 per cent of musicians had experienced pain or injuries that interfered with their playing.” Back pain,…
Kurt Vonnegut would have said I was a man in a hole. I was 27 and working fulltime as a pianist when I developed RSI. For me it was pins and needles in both arms, pain and weakness in my hands, arms and shoulders. I lost my income, my career, and much of my social life which revolved around work. And I was told by some that RSI wasn’t real, so there was self-doubt as well. Definitely a man in…
It’s easy to find reasons to listen to a great musician, but not always so easy to find reasons to watch one. Arthur Rubinstein is different. Here are three reasons to be inspired when watching him at the piano. This footage was taken in 1950, the same year this footage was taken of FM Alexander. While Rubinstein and Alexander never met, Arthur Rubinstein certainly displays everything an Alexander student would aim for. What to look for 1. The ease of…
A crooked clarinet will make a crooked sound “There are musicians – some say there were more of them in the past – who get as much pleasure from a performance as they give, who always perform easily and well, and who use themselves so efficiently that their professional lives and their natural lives coincide. There are others, however, with equal talent and training, to whom performance and even practice are exhausting, and whose professional lives are cut short because…