Do you know about - Somatic education for Musicians
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These words could well recapitulate a musician's goals in using technique to perceive musical inspiration, whether it be refining a compositional idea or perfecting a demanding instrumental passage. Yet they were written to recapitulate the goals of a Sensory -Motor studying formula that uses polite movement and directed attentiveness to increase ease and range of motion, improve flexibility and coordination, and forestall and treat many coarse overuse and misuse injuries musicians encounter.
Tendonitis, Repetitive Stress Syndrome, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, sore backs, necks, shoulders, etc. Are all too coarse among musicians. Many conditions need curative attentiveness and it is wise to consult a physician when pain or ache alerts you to a problem. But treating the indication of illness may not get at the cause. Fortunately, there exist a estimate of methods oriented toward the improvement of body awareness in movement which can be used to forestall these injuries and, where they already exist, apply non-medical approaches to enhancing our functioning. Grouped together under the name "Somatic Education," these methods address postural and movement issues extremely relevant to musicians but often neglected in the pursuance of instrumental skills.
Its not surprising that movement schooling is of value to musicians. All music yield involves movement, and it follows that paying attentiveness to the way we move to make music will sway the music we make. Exploring this straightforward relationship can have profound affects on biomechanical condition as well as developing sensitivity and power in music production.
Historical Roots
Somatic (from the Greek work Soma, meaning "living body") schooling might be understanding of as a bodily schooling that does not isolate mind and body. The roots of the Somatic advent go back to the Gymnastik movement of Northern Europe and the Eastern U.S. While the late 1800's. These teachers shared ideas about posture and movement, which were at odds with dominant models in classical ballet, bodily education, religion and medicine. Gymnastik pioneers rejected the disjunction of mind and spirit from a mechanistically conceived body, encouraged self-developed values over conforming to an ideal, and approached bodily schooling as a unity of movement, body structure, and psycho-spiritual health. Following the disruptions of two world wars, strands of this shared foresight came together as old pioneers and new methods established schools and spread their work. Today thousands of educators practice methods such as Sensory Awareness, the Alexander Technique, Ida Rolf's Structural Integration, Moshe Feldenkrais's Awareness straight through Movement and Functional Integration, Gerda Alexander's Eutony, as well as Aston-Patterning, Body-Mind Centering, Trager Work and others. After exploring a few coarse threads running straight through these approaches, we'll look at the two most ordinarily used with musicians: The Alexander Technique and the Feldenkrais Method®.
Importance of Movement & Awareness
Musicians are customary with the understanding of our instrument being an prolongation of ourselves; and in a way, the original instrument is the self. A pinnacle in our species' evolution of motor skills, playing an instrument demands a extremely complicated use of the neuromuscular apparatus. But high-priced dinky of a musician's training involves refining one's ability to move efficiently, sense strains, and attend to more of oneself while manufacture music. Without this training, we unwittingly fabricate neuromuscular habits that are physically stressful and increase our vulnerability to injury. When the movement is poorly organized, soldiery are created that generate unnecessary heat in the joints, with shearing and other stresses in the connective tissue and muscles. Done repeatedly over time, damage and injury are more likely to occur. Postural problems from sitting and standing for long periods, instrument-specific problems (such as pain in a picking hand) and straightforward tension prominent to unnecessary muscular contraction are coarse results of inefficient movement patterns.
The first step to recognizing harmful habits is to find out what we do already, that is, come to be aware of our movement. When we exert a lot of muscular effort, it is impossible for our brain to make the sensory distinctions needed to improve our neuromuscular organization. With this in mind, many Somatic methods use gentleness, delicacy and slowness of movement to observation what is unquestionably happening. It is analogous to the way a slow ballad tends to recapitulate many nuances of the sound: tone, intonation, and time all come to be easy to observation when we slow all down. In the same way, paying attentiveness to subtle distinctions becomes easier when we slow our movement and avoid excess effort and strain.
Mind, Body And Environment-A Functional Whole
Movement occurs straight through an facts feedback process between our senses, muscles and central nervous system. As we move, our senses of touch, balance, sight and sound send our brain facts about our position and muscular performance and it responds by modifying the outgoing messages to our muscles. All this occurs in response to the challenges of our environment. You play a note, hear the sound, and make changes or adjustments for the next attack, all while considering the environment or context (the style of the music, the room or audience, other musicians). These elements exist as a functional whole--one never occurs in the absence of the others.
Similarly, the source of a given problem is often a mixture of a bodily limitation, mental, or emotional attitude, and the special challenges of the instrument itself. Each element may lead and working in one area will have results in another. The pianist's sore wrist may be linked to one or more of the following: a shoulder that does not move freely, a mental attitude that results in practicing too long without breaks and/or a bench height preventing comfortable arm position. Treatments that focus on one of these elements to the exclusion of the others are often dinky in effectiveness.
The holistic advent recognizes that difficulties are often part of a general basic dysfunctional movement pattern. The manifestation of the problem may be far from its source and enhancing the general pattern often improves exact complaint.
Finding Our Own Way
Just as separate styles of music call for separate instrumentation, aesthetic choices, and musical values, somatic educators identify that context and individuality play a critical role in determining standard action. For this reason, Somatic educators avoid general prescriptions for all to follow. Rather than espousing any one 'right' way of doing something they encourage individuals' in developing the ability to sense, discover, and decide what is best for themselves. They promote our ability to trust our subjective and immediate perceptions of ourselves and cultivate the capacity to distinguish between acting to conform to an "external ideal," and spontaneous natural performance born of knowing oneself.
Let's look at these ideas in performance in the work of two towering figures in contemporary education, F.M. Alexander and Moshe Feldenkrais.
Alexander Technique
F. Mathias Alexander (1869-1955) was an Australian-born actor who found himself losing his voice While performances. After doctors were unable to offer anything but rest as a treatment he began a standard study of himself which prolonged over a ten-year period. This study revealed that he pulled his head back when speaking which led to pressure on the larynx, and vocal chords and resulting hoarseness. This head and neck position also caused him to lift his chest, narrow his back and grip the floor with his feet. He thereby realized his speech organs were influenced by misusing his whole self. Alexander went on to refine these insights into a more sufficient use which he called "primary control". This consisted of having his head forward and up in conjunction with lengthening and widening his back. Yet in spite of having found a more sufficient society he confronted an obstacle: overcoming the force of habit that continually reinstated movement patterns deep in the nervous system. He saw that focusing on the end succeed was blurring the "means whereby" his movement took place. Alexander went on to refine a technique of "inhibiting" all automated impulses just at the occasion of movement and replacing this with "conscious constructive control." He overcame his habitual wrong use and not only his voice problem but his nasal and respiratory difficulties vanished too. The end of his experiment was the starting of a lifetime's work refining and teaching his technique first in Britain and later all over the world. Endorsed and supported by such influential habitancy as Aldous Huxley, John Dewey, and George Bernard Shaw, the Alexander technique proved especially critical to vocalists (and has been on the curriculum of acting schools and music conservatories for decades.) In a typical Alexander session, the instructor uses polite manual advice to increase the student's bodily awareness in basic movements such as sitting-to- standing, and walking. Students will be trained to inhibit habitual patterns and identify good coordination of the head, neck and trunk.
Gary Burton and the Alexander Technique Berklee College of Music executive Vice President and vibraphonist Gary Burton toll an injury-free musical work to attentiveness to his own biomechanics and lessons with an Alexander teacher. His interest in these matters came early in his development: "In my teens and early 20s," Burton states, "when I practiced, I did a lot of mental about how I was tantalizing and what was tantalizing and noticing tension. Over the years, I made changes as I became more aware of what was complicated physically." After a year of studying the Alexander technique, Burton developed a sense of how to hold his neck and head which felt correct. He developed a chronic body awareness and new habits compliance benefits that go beyond playing the vibraphone. "I've always had the unprovable assumption," he says, "that the theorize I've never had any back problems, after years of lugging a vibraphone around, lifting it in and out of car trunks, is because I'm quite aware how I move, when I pick something up where the pulls and strains are, and how to do it carefully."
The Feldenkrais Method®
Moshe Feldenkrais was a Russian-born engineer, physicist and athlete who worked with Nobel Prize winner Joliot-Curie in early nuclear research. As one of the first Europeans to earn a Black Belt in Judo (1936) he introduced this Martial Art to the West straight through his teaching and five books on the subject. In the early 1940's, after suffering a series of crippling sports-related knee injuries, he was given a 50- percent chance that surgical operation could fix his knees. But the doctors warned that if the surgical operation failed, he might end up with crutches or in a wheelchair. Feldenkrais chose not to endure the proposed surgical operation and instead be began to study neurology, anatomy, biomechanics, human movement development, and systems theory. Using his own body as his laboratory , after two years of study and experimentation, he taught himself to walk again. Feldenkrais prolonged his studies and tested his ideas with friends and colleagues, treating their aches and pains, muscle and joint problems, and even serious neurological conditions. By accessing the power of the central nervous ideas and our phenomenal ability to learn, he found he could achieve revision in habitancy where many other approaches had failed. He prolonged to refine his ideas into a ideas known as the Feldenkrais Method, eventually training practitioners in Israel and the U.S. Today, there are thousands of practitioners worldwide and the Feldenkrais formula is taught in numerous bodily resumption centers, universities, theater and music programs and society schooling centers.
While Alexander had focused on the head-neck relationship, Feldenkrais-- with his background as a Judo master--was especially interested in how the central, great muscles surrounding our pelvis and trunk properly do the hard work while the extremities fine-tune our movement. When, due to rigidities in trunk and pelvis, the smaller muscles are forced to take over work more efficiently done at our center, strain and injury often follow.
The Feldenkrais formula is taught in two formats. In group classes, called Awareness straight through Movement®, the Feldenkrais instructor verbally leads students straight through movements which moderately increase in range and complexity. Based on developmental movements, commonplace activities, or more abstract explorations of joint, muscle, and postural relationships, the emphasis is on studying which movements work good and noticing the changes in your body. As students come to be more aware of their habitual neuromuscular patterns and rigidities, they fabricate new alternatives with improved flexibility and coordination the result.
Private Feldenkrais lessons, called Functional Integration®, are tailored to each student's private studying needs. Performed with the trainee fully clothed (usually lying on a table or in sitting or standing positions) the practitioner, straight through polite touching and movement, communicates how you fabricate yourself physically and the trainee learns how to reorganize his or her body and behavior in more vast functional motor patterns.
Learning Not Healing
While there are clearly therapeutic benefits to both the Alexander Technique and the Feldenkrais Method, they are educational in nature and achieve their results by tapping our vast potential for self-awareness and self-direction. The studying process used is not goal-oriented but exploratory, and works much like the way we learned as infants to sit, stand and walk--essential abilities that we all learned without a teacher. Without the idea of achievement (and the judgmental performance that accompanies it,) students are free to eye what they are doing (not what they are "supposed to be" doing) and from there eye other possibilities.
Learning this way reduces compulsive, self-destructive movement patterns. Practitioner Paul Linden's criticism shows the results: "he didn't feel that he had learned a static formula which dictated the right way to play, but that he had increased his awareness so he was good at reading the cues his body and the sound of the music were giving him."
Both Feldenkrais and Alexander refused to accept the understanding of experts and rejected the Western cultural emphasis on one correct way for everyone. Rather, by paying specific attentiveness to their movement, they learned what they needed to improve their use of themselves. straight through the methods they founded they demonstrated their implicit trust in the individuals' ability to find his or her own way to good coordination.
Any agenda of treatment for overuse and misuse injuries should take benefit of the power of Somatic schooling which is the power of studying that is every person's birthright.
1 Don Hanlon Johnson, Body 2 Paul Linden Body Awareness schooling for Musicians: A Case Study Illustrating Basic Exercises and Principles
Copyright © 1996 by Richard Ehrman
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