An Alexander Technique Approach to Double Bass Technique Ethan Kind, M.M., certified A.C.A.T., Am.S.A.T. Table of Contents What the Alexander Technique Offers Performers Posture: Sitting and Standing Head, Neck, and Double Bass Left Arm Right Arm Torso, Shoulders, and Breathing Inhibition and Playing (letting go of bad habits) Accuracy (playing with faith) Slow and Fast Playing, Fragments and Focal Dystonia Whole Body Guided Release before Practicing or Performing When You’re Not Doing Something, Don’t Continue to Do It The Reasons Why Performers Resist Releasing Poor Physical Habits As a Gift (for everyone listening) Collected Short Essays in the Order Written What the Alexander Technique Offers Musical Performers The Alexander Technique makes it possible for musicians to perform without pain and wear and tear to their bodies. An Alexander Technique teacher shows the performer how to play his or her instrument with a sense of power, poise, and ease. What is it exactly that an Alexander Technique teacher does for the performing musician that makes it unique? We teach the performer to find the most effortless way to play her instrument. We teach the performer that her whole body plays the instrument. If the whole body is balanced, and the technique makes personal sense, the player will play without sacrificing her body. In the Alexander Technique the performer’s well-being is paramount, and if she takes care of herself, the performer will create an extraordinary performance. Alexander Technique teachers believe the means will take care of the ends. This means if the performer puts his awareness on his posture and technique and chooses to find the easiest way to play his instrument with the least amount of work and with high energy, he will not wear his body out. He will not create compression in his joints trying to maintain poor posture and simultaneously use too much muscle to play his instrument. This combination of using too much muscle to hold up a body off balance and using too much muscle to maintain the inefficient parts of his technique, makes it nearly impossible to trust his body to give him what he wants from his instrument daily. This muscling of his body and the instrument will eventually cause his body to hurt and potentially end his career. A performer needs a set of tools to be able to play in the zone every day. What are these tools? They are conscious control, inhibition, orders, direction, renewing the thought, opposition, balance vs. position, grounding, and troubleshooting. Conscious control is what F. M. Alexander called regaining control over the voluntary musculature of the body. If a client comes to me and says his neck and trapezius are hurting, and I tell him to just release these muscles, he’ll look at me like I’m crazy. The truth is he has lost conscious control over these muscles, and it seems to him there is no way to get them to release. It is the ability to tell your body what you want, so that it happens, that F. M. Alexander helped his students regain in everyday and specialized activities. Alexander called these instructions to the body orders. So, the student with the sore shoulder and neck says to himself, “My neck is free and my spine is lengthening, and my shoulders are widening, releasing, and floating on the ribcage”. This is an order given to the shoulder girdle and neck that invites the spine to lengthen and decompress. If you are patient and repeat these orders, your body will respond at a deeper and deeper level to these repeated thoughts of release, and you will have conscious control over your shoulder and neck. Repeating thoughts to release the neck and shoulder are called renewing the thought. When you renew a thought, you are repeating an order to an area of the body asking for release and expansion. All repeated thoughts directed toward an area of the body have an effect, and the more you repeat the thought, the more profound the release. As the release begins to be experienced consciously, your faith in your control over your body grows, and your thoughts are felt as having direct powerful experienced effects on your body. This is conscious control. Direction is the Alexander Technique principle that the head wants to lead the spine into lengthening in an activity, and this head leading the lengthening spine creates organized, elegant, graceful, powerful and athletic movement. So, core to this technique is that when you play an instrument, you do so with a released lengthening spine. This will organize and coordinate the whole body, so that you don’t damage the discs and impair the nervous system. Inhibition is the Alexander Technique tool that allows a performer to make changes to the way she plays her instrument, and not to replace one set of bad habits with another set of bad habits. Example: The moment a double bassist is about to play, he anticipates playing by locking his neck and then moves the bow. This is his lifetime habit, so he has always locked his neck before she plays. If she inhibits this habit which has been compressing the discs in her spine, then right before he plays he has chosen to consciously unlock his neck and then move the bow. To stop right before doing what you’ve always done, and choose to do something different is inhibition. It is an incredible tool for letting go of what doesn’t work, when you play your instrument. You get to choose to do something different, to simply stop doing what isn’t working and play without pain. Opposition is changing your relationship to the instrument, changing the relationships between the parts of your body, or changing your body’s relationship to the audience. If you allow yourself to be aware of the space between you and your instrument, or allow yourself to be in contact with the instrument without pulling toward it or pulling it toward you, then you really lower the tension level in the body. This means you flow upward with a lengthening spine, and you’re not compressing downward or arching your body forward into the instrument. Opposition between the parts of your body is allowing space between the joints. If we talk about the arms releasing out of the back, then we say, “Allow the hands to release away from the spine as you play”. This is hands in opposition to the spine, which allows you to have released arms as you play, and released/lengthening arms means you consciously create space in the wrists, elbows, and shoulder joints. The performer in opposition to the audience is the performer sending the performance to the audience, as he allows his head to lead upward. This is directing tied to opposition, and this allows the whole body to be balanced upward as he performs, rather than leaning forward off balance to connect to the audience. Choose to connect to the audience with your loving intention to give the music as a gift, not by sacrificing your body. A basic principle of the Alexander Technique is to choose postural balance over attempting to “hold” good posture. We recognize that the body is always in motion, and that when a performer tries to hold a position, whether posture or technique, she will cause pain and strain as she plays. Simply, you can’t hold a position as you play your instrument, without using too much muscle. This means you are simultaneously in motion and static at the same time, and this creates compression in the joints, which causes wear and tear to the body. I’ve talked about how the Alexander Technique wants you to have an upward flow in your body, but since we also want there to be opposition in the body, then there needs to be a downward flow also. This downward flow is grounding. Allow the head to be in opposition to the feet and legs and/or sit bones, and this gives the torso the platform it needs to be supported fully on the feet and/or sit bones. This full support on the feet and/or sit bones with the leg musculature released downward, means that the torso follows the head up off of free hip joints. So, from the hip joints down there is grounding, and from the hip joints up there is directing or up, as we say in the Alexander Technique Troubleshooting is one of my favorite things to do in this technique. If you can’t play a passage in a major piece of the literature for your instrument, then you are doing something wrong. Let’s assume you have the potential to play all of the great literature for your instrument, and if you can’t, you need to stop playing and figure out what you are doing technically and/or posturally wrong. This is troubleshooting. I love to do this with students. Every fine performer I have ever worked with who couldn’t play a particular passage was operating from lies about their ability and/or misconceptions about what was going on physically in the passage. Once we discovered the problem, then there was always a solution that worked, if the performer gave him or herself the gift of letting go of limiting beliefs that compromised his or her technique. Posture: Sitting and Standing Let’s take a look at your whole body as you play. We’ll look at sitting and standing. Choose a stool that is level or slightly tilted downward, has no lip on the front of the chair, and has a perfectly flat seat and is padded.