Have you ever made a quantum leap in your practicing?

You’ve tried, and tried. Put in more and more effort. Doggedly plugged away forever. And still you don’t get it.

Until one day, you let go somehow. Maybe you stepped away for a while, and you’re less invested in getting it perfect now. And lo and behold, you can do it. Like Neo at the end of the first Matrix movie, you suddenly know you don’t have to struggle.

I was playing some passages tonight that I have been working on for a very, very long time. I knew they were coming up again in the music, and yet again started to brace for the difficulty.

Finally, I remembered: Do less. Bracing won’t help. As we say in the Alexander Technique, “inhibit” preparing in the same old way. And my bow arm, which I’d unconsciously been pouring all my effort and anxiety about the difficult passage into, loosened. I found just the right amount of effort.

And darn it, what I thought was a problem with my left hand fingering simply fixed itself. Instead of bracing for the bullets, I just said “No”, and they stopped and fell to the floor. Well, that’s pretty much what it felt like, anyway.

What has changed for you in your playing as soon as you changed your thinking?

“You don’t have to practice boring exercises, but you have to practice something. If you find the practice boring, you don’t run away from it, but don’t tolerate it either. Transform it into something that suits you. If you are bored playing a scale, play the same eight tones but change the order. Then change the rhythm. Then change the tone color. Presto, you have just improvised. If you don’t think the result is very good, you have the power to change it- now there is both a supply of raw material and some judgment to feed back the process. This is especially effective with classically trained musicians who think they can’t play without a score or develop technique without exact repetition of some exercises in a book.” –Stephen Nachmanovitch, Free Play

This quote got me thinking for several reasons. One is the electrifying power of making up your own stuff, also known as improvisation. My 4-9 year old violin students beg to do this in their lessons (and we do). It is so great to be the boss of what your music should sound like, since in Western music we so often glamorize imitating someone else’s sound and composition.

The second reason is central to making real changes in both learning and healing from an injury:

Thinking in a new way.

It’s such a small, courageous step that makes ALL the difference.

The same old approaches to how you learn or how you treat your body aren’t working. Or, maybe, they’re working fine. Not great, not as fantastic as you could imagine, but… fine.

What could happen if you tried something new?

This year I’m trying new things at Harmonious Bodies, being brave to turn more towards teaching where I feel the real changes lie – though don’t worry, I’ll still be offering physical therapy sessions for the foreseeable future! I’m trying new methods in my violin teaching and new ways of practicing in my own musical growth. It feels good so far, like repotting a plant that got too big for its container.

What new ways of thinking are you trying out this year?

Checking in to say that I am now an official teacher of the Alexander Technique!

It’s been a long, life-changing and thoroughly worth it road to get here. I’ll say more about the details of my story in later posts.

For now, however, I am thrilled to say that I am offering lessons here in the DC area. Who can benefit? Anyone at all who has a body and could be more comfortable and have more ease in any sort of activity. Pretty much covers anyone, especially but not confined to musicians. Here’s a page that offers some great insights into what the AT is and can do for you.

Use the About Me/Contact page to find out more and schedule yourself some lessons for the new year, why don’t you. Your spine will thank you!

I have been busy this fall with the onset of a new group of young violin students. Enthusiastic, full of energy – often hard to direct that energy towards the study of the violin, but that is the special joy/challenge of grade schoolers!

However, I have a special place in my heart for adult amateurs, violinists and otherwise.

You’re the folks who, despite the pressures of the world to just go to work, come home, watch TV, and pay the bills week after week – have decided you will work towards something more. You’ve remembered the thrill you got from listening to that awesome piece or going to that amazing concert all those years ago, and you decided to pick up your instrument again. Or maybe for the first time, and you took a deep breath and, even though you’re the boss at work, you became a total beginner again.

And because you’re an adult, you know it’s hard work. You know it’s daily, weekly, monthly work and incremental progress. But you do it – because you can’t NOT do it. You are a musician, emerging (or re-emerging) bit by bit.

But there are the plateaus. You’re working along, your teacher’s great, you’re practicing – and it’s frustrating because you just can’t get moving. You’ve been working on the same concept forever. You just can’t get comfortable with that shift or that bowing or those new notes. You need a jumpstart.

That’s exactly the situation I’m opening up my Enhanced Lessons for this fall. For musicians who are looking for a turbo boost to their regular lessons to learn new repertoire, improve their technique, or find a new practice routine. (If you’re having pain or some other medical problem, physical therapy sessions are still what you’re looking for.)

This is the stuff I love – teaching with pulling out all the stops. I’ll use concepts from Alexander Technique, biomechanics, kinesthetic learning, and just plain musicianship to help you get past your blocks and get to the next level of playing! I’ll give you relevant tools for you to take home and immediately use to continue to teach yourself in your practice sessions. If you wish, I can communicate with your regular teacher to make sure you’re getting the best carryover of concepts from your usual lessons.

I’m a violin teacher, so I can give the most specific lessons on violin. However, biomechanical learning happens with every instrument as well as voice, so don’t let that stop you if you play something else – you’ll still move to the next level!

I’m offering a few options: to purchase a single lesson for $75, or to purchase a set of lessons together (2, 3, or 4) for $65/each. You can spread out the lessons at intervals that work best for you, within reason. Lessons can be arranged in my downtown DC office or the Takoma Park office. If you’re interested in the possibility of doing lessons at a distance over Skype, let me know and we can discuss.

Let’s do it! Here’s the payment button and contact link (scroll down past “physical therapy sessions”)

You can see the article I wrote for MajoringinMusic.com on the Alexander Technique for music majors! The photo above and on the article is of Robert Rickover of AlexanderTechnique.com and the Body Learning podcast. A special surprise bonus for me on the page is a video by Michael Frederick, an internationally renowned AT teacher.

Announcement coming very soon! Please stay tuned!

Stephen Nachmanovitch performs and teaches internationally as an improvisational violinist, and at the intersections of music, dance, theater, and multimedia arts. He is the author of Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art (Penguin, 1990). Born in 1950, he studied at Harvard and the University of California, where he earned a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness for an exploration of William Blake. His mentor was the anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson. He has taught and lectured widely in the United States and abroad on creativity and the spiritual underpinnings of art. In the 1970’s he was a pioneer in free improvisation on violin, viola and electric violin. He has presented master classes and workshops at many conservatories and universities, and has had numerous appearances on radio, television, and at music and theater festivals. He has collaborated with other artists in media including music, dance, theater, and film, and has developed programs melding art, music, literature, and computer technology. He has published articles in a variety of fields since 1966, and has created computer software including The World Music Menu and Visual Music Tone Painter. He lives with his wife and two sons in Charlottesville, Virginia.

He is currently performing, recording, teaching, writing, and obsessed with the improvisational possibilities of the viola d’amore and the tenor violin.

He can be found online at Free Play Productions.

I’m off to my second year at Voice Camp with Kathryn Armour! It is such an amazing week of learning. She and her husband, voice coach/accompanist Terry Woollen, make you feel like conservatory students for a week – but in a really positive way. It’s all integrated with Alexander Technique and couldn’t be better. I’ll let you know how things are going.

Have a great week!

I recently was inspired to write my musical autobiography, and thought it was great to see a blog post about this very topic after I had already begun on Innovative Ideas in Performance and Pedagogy.

I originally started to write it because I realized that the story of music in my life really was the underpinning of my whole life itself. Meaning, I’m a musician who likes science and trained as a physical therapist, not the other way around.

I highly recommend writing this for yourself. It really helped me to see how studying music helped me through transitions and low points in my life, and it helped me to see that life got so much better during the times when I really valued myself as a musician.

I found myself at one point addressing all musicians going through a hard time physically or emotionally:

I totally and completely respect all that music means and is to you. I understand. I know that others, maybe your healthcare practitioners, may think this is a hobby or a side venture or something that you can replace. I absolutely get it that this IS you. And I also know that recovery can be a difficult process. It can sometimes be convoluted, with ups and downs and false starts and a lot of inner discovery. It can be painful to let go of old habits that served you in the past, but no longer serve you well. But I am here to tell you, whether or not we work together, that you ARE a musician. Whether or not you are injured, whether or not you are a professional, wherever you are in your learning process or healing process, it is something you are that can never be changed. It chose you. So know this – that you are not a machine that plays one instrument. You are a beautiful multifaceted musician in your inner landscape.

I hope this is as healing to read as it was to write.

Best,
Diana

- There were so many interesting lectures, so many, in fact, that it was hard to attend to them all as there was a new speaker every 15-30 minutes! As coordinator Dr. John Chong said, though, it was meant to be like a buffet. We weren’t expected to be interested in or like everything, but there would definitely be things to enjoy for everyone.

- Dr. Gabor Mate, author of When the Body Says No, was a fantastic speaker. His main points were that in his experience as a general practitioner, he saw unexpressed stress and emotions as the true generators of disease, with the traditional risk factors (smoking, unhealthy diet, etc.) as exacerbating factors. He pointed out that the “nicest” people can be the worst repressors of their true needs, and thus can be at high risk for illness.

- Dr. Gottfried Schlaug presented on his research on the changes music can make in the brain (neuroplasticity). He showed some videos of music being used to facilitate speaking in a person with damage from a stroke to the left hemisphere speech area (Broca’s aphasia) and in a child with autism. The learners started with singing a phrase and then progressing to speaking it with inflection. He also spoke about the changes found to occur in the brain from studying music (yay!), among many other things.

- Marshall Chasin of www.musiciansclinics.com presented on hearing loss in musicians. Exposure to over 85 decibels for 40 hours/week will cause eventual hearing loss, a level common in orchestras and practice rooms. Decibel meters to measure sound exposure can be downloaded as an app (search app store for “free decibel meter), and Etymotic is one manufacturer of hearing protection earplugs.

It sure didn’t hurt that the conference was in Aspen, CO and that our entrance fee included standby tickets to the Aspen Music Festival!

I’ll report from the field!