Alexander Technique Articles:

How can the Technique be applied to music and playing an instrument?

Again, it’s down to stimulus and reaction. Music is an enormous stimulus that we may or may not react to. Even just standing looking at the instrument or thinking of the music, is enough to agitate and over-excite a musician. The habits we enact in non-music related parts of our lives are, in the vast majority of cases, hugely exaggerated when music or an instrument enter the equation.
Musicians frequently refuse to play on defective instruments, but can be completely oblivious as to the defective, distorted way they are applying themselves. Pupils find it revelatory to discover how frequently (several times a bar) they want to completely distort the basic relationship of their body, just because they are about to produce a particular note. Instead of a musician being in the necessary overall state that is required to produce a note that demands skill, accuracy and precision, the musician at the vital moment suddenly makes an undetected involuntary jerky movement in themselves. Even a slight jerky action is enough to affect the quality of the note.
The musician hears there is something undesirable about the note and tries again. Without eliminating the jerky reaction to producing or changing a note, which the musician may or may not be aware of, that note is never going to sound right. A musician will never produce a satisfactory start to a note, a legato phrase, or have the necessary stamina, if their way of doing things involves jerky movements and defective co-ordination of themselves. I very much doubt that any instrumental or singing teacher would recommend this as helpful to the music, or if any pupil would deliberately build this into their technique, yet this is frequently what develops. Practising in this blind way will only reinforce the habits, making life more difficult for the musician, and guaranteeing they can no longer play as well as they once could. If this carries on unchecked this becomes the way of playing. It is very scary for a musician to realise that what comes out is not predictable. The musician starts to live in a state of anxiety.

“What can you do about the next note while you are playing this one?”
- Pablo Casals.

In Alexander work we learn the difference between “thinking” and “doing”. Every musician I have ever worked with admits that “think ahead” is stressed as an essential part of playing fluently. However, most of us mistake “think ahead” for “do ahead”. Convinced we are only thinking of the next note, in reality we have started physically preparing it. Shifts, chords, bow changes, breaths and words are all anticipated, resulting in the note or rest we are actually playing suffering from our attention wandering, and the muscles starting their over-excitable patterns which can lead to discomfort and tension. (In Alexander work this anticipation is called end gaining.) This preparatory reaction causes physical distortions and a change in the focus of the musician at the precise moment that they need to be working at their optimum efficiency.

Musicians hear this in the music, and may spend hours practising to eliminate these blemishes, with varying degrees of success if there is no real mechanism in place to discover the source of the problem. Frequently a musician is misled into believing they should prepare ahead more! All they are doing are reinforcing habits of end gaining and mind wandering.

As Pablo Casals asked Vivien Mackie in her cello lessons “What can you do about the next note while you are playing this one?” Her answer of course was “nothing”. That to me sums up what we can learn from Alexander Technique in its application to music.

For further reading I suggest:
“Just Play Naturally” by Vivien Mackie.
This is a delightful account of ‘her Cello study with Pablo Casals in the 1950’s and her discovery of the resonance between his teaching and the principles of the Alexander Technique’.