Posts Tagged ‘Going for it in Musical Performance’

This ebook, Going for It in Musical Performance: Alexander Technique Guidelines and Other Considerations, is published on this website in a PDF format. It is written to give all performing musicians deep insights into the beliefs and bad habits that performers have that can end careers with pain, strain, tension, and injuries.
This ebook is also for sale on all AMAZON websites in a KINDLE format.
Located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A. (MOVEMENT THERAPY)

Many performers believe they are going for it in performance, but what they are really doing is creating excess tension in their bodies and compromising their technique.

I look at all of the instruments from piano, to guitar to clarinet, to singing etc. This ebook describes in detail the changes to the performing beliefs that are necessary to create intense and not tense performances. The basis of almost all beliefs that interfere with going for it is that it is taking too much of a chance to go for it.

I help the performer identify exactly what he or she is doing to cause so much pain and strain and injury in performance, and again how beliefs feed into performers injuring themselves and performing without intensity. Many performers have wonderful technique but the excess tension in their technique and posture and beliefs that limit inspired performing can cause intense pain, even when it is not visibly obvious what is going on in the body.

This ebook helps you, maybe for the first time, identify the subtle and maybe not so subtle beliefs and habits in your playing or singing that are making your good technique not work for you and why you continue to do them. All excess tension pulls bones closer together and causes wear and tear and pain throughout the body. When you begin to hurt in one area of your body, and if you begin to tense more and more to wall off the pain, then you cause other areas of your body to hurt, and your good technique seems not to be good technique. So, we explore why you don’t stop and perform with inspiration.

I’m a certified Alexander Technique teacher, and my training was designed to help me look at any performing musician and identify the obvious and not so obvious postural and technical problems that are causing pain and injury. I then show the performer what they’re doing and not doing that is compromising his or her technique. So many performing musicians have a very general postural and technical awareness of how they play the instrument or sing, but they aren’t always aware of how to make changes that can release the hurting in the hand or neck or shoulder etc.

I’m also writing from my background as a concert guitarist and as someone who has done a tremendous amount of psychotherapy and journaling to release the limits on my own music making. I learned to play the guitar as a gift to all with great intensity, and this is the basis of going for it.

When I went to an Alexander Technique teacher with carpal tunnel syndrome on the guitar, I wanted to get out of physical trouble as soon as I could. And I did! It is this experience as a hurting guitarist that I never forgot. After I finished my Alexander Technique training, it is this remembered pain and fear of having to stop playing and performing that I bring to my writing and teaching. It makes it possible for me to write clearly about the physical problems, psychological problems, and emotional beliefs that so many performers have that create artificial limits to their performing potential on an instrument and in singing.