This ebook, An Alexander Technique Approach to English Horn Technique, is published on this website in a PDF format. It is very detailed and practical, and it will give you the physical tools you need to take the limits off of your ability to create the accurate horn technique you want without sacrificing your body.
This ebook is also for sale on all AMAZON websites in a KINDLE format.
Located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A. (MOVEMENT THERAPY)
When you find an English horn teacher who wants to revamp all of your English horn technique, or at least a major part of it, and you know you have finally found the right teacher to give you what you need, how do you deal with it? Do you follow through and make the radical changes to your English horn technique, or do you walk away? If you don’t walk away, how do you go about making these huge technique changes to your English horn technique – letting go of a technique you’ve lived with for years that is severely limiting?
When I was 19-years-old I got accepted to the Royal College of Music in London, and the classical guitar teacher there wanted to change everything about my right hand guitar technique, and I knew it needed to be done. I did it. Also, two years after I revamped my right hand guitar technique, I went to an Alexander Technique teacher in London to heal carpal tunnel syndrome in my left wrist.
When I went to the Alexander Technique teacher I had internalized a right hand technique that worked, but I needed an Alexander Technique teacher to create a left hand technique that worked. I also needed the Alexander Technique teacher to create a whole body posture that unified my guitar technique, because when I had changed my right hand technique, I had been incredibly hard on myself.
Looking back on what I went through to finally create a classical guitar technique that worked, I remember how hopeful I was at the time that I would finally have a guitar technique that would let me do what I wanted to do on the guitar. But I was also in despair, because with every revelation from the guitar teacher and the Alexander Technique teacher, I was having to throw out everything I had lived by on the guitar.
As an English horn player who may be in the middle of being confronted by an English horn teacher and/or Alexander Technique teacher who can show you how to let go of all of the artificial limits on your English horn playing, how are you dealing with this?
You have the following choices: Walk away. Make the changes in despair. Make the changes in joy. Make the changes resisting making the changes. Spend a minimal amount of time each day, so that the revamping of your English horn technique seems to go on forever. Spend tons of hours every day determined to make the changes as quickly as possible, no matter how hard it is on you physically and emotionally.
Here is the middle ground, or the loving way. First, accept that being offered a chance to solve all of your limiting technique problems on the English horn is a wondrous thing. Better late than never is truly an incredible thing, but only if you’re ready to accept the gift. Be gentle, though. You may have to mourn the old technique for a while.
It would also be loving to suspend all of your performing obligations while you revamp your English horn technique. As long as you have performance obligations as you’re changing so much about your English horn playing, you are pulling in opposite directions, and blocking completing the changes. (This may be what your ego is sneakily doing – blocking transformation.)
When I was revamping my right hand guitar technique, I wasn’t aware of the Alexander Technique. It is the Alexander Technique tied to major technique changes on the English horn, that will allow you to lovingly practice as many hours as you want each day to complete your journey to an English horn technique that sets you free.
What the Alexander Technique does is focuses you on using your whole body with the most open expansive posture, as you let go of what didn’t work on the English horn, and internalize what does work.
The other huge piece you have to provide in this healing your English horn technique process, is the faith that the new technique and posture will become so effortless, that it will quickly wash away years of what didn’t work. In other words, if you tell yourself it’s going to take forever to replace the struggling old technique with the effortless new, then this is a particularly harsh form of resistance to doing what is a truly loving gift for yourself.
THAT LOVING GIFT IS LETTING YOURSELF ENJOY THE GIFT OF LEARNING TO PLAY THE ENGLISH HORN CONSCIOUSLY, WHICH MEANS TAKING 100% CARE OF YOURSELF AS YOU LEARN TO DO WHAT TRULY WORKS ON THE ENGLISH HORN.
