"At the clavichord Bach is virtually still. He plays effortlessly, the movements of his fingers 'hardly perceptible.' Those fingers not in action remain motionless, 'quietly in position.' The rest of his body takes even '[less] part in his playing.' His hands do not contort or register any strain even in the most difficult passages. Bach plays expressively but his body expresses nothing." (Quoted by David Yearsley in Bach and the Meaning of Counterpoint.)

The bad news is that there are no YouTube clips of Bach playing the clavichord. The good news is that there are multiple clips of someone who corresponds to the above description of Bach.

I’m going to let Chick Corea (a master of the Oppositional Principle) introduce the guy in question. There are masters and there are gods . . . most musicians would agree that Art Tatum is a god. Well, no. Art Tatum is God.

In my next post I'll make a detailed study of his playing.

It all depends on how you do it, of course!

Your stillness ought to be the result of many tensions brought to balance, like a Kenneth Snelson sculpture in which multiple forces in multiple dimensions all contribute to the overall stability of the structure. If you organize your forces in this way, then music will “charge you up.” The fluid energies of music will oppose your stable forces, and music itself will come through condensed and powerful.

After you visit Snelson’s beautiful website, come back here and watch Samer Totah, a great oud player who focuses his movements where they can carry the greatest power.



A musician's freedom and wellbeing come from many sources. To be a musician is to “speak music.” When you have something to say and when you know how to say it, your gestures and sounds become both expressive and free. Understanding the language of music, then, is essential for your health. The key to mastering any language is rhythm. INTEGRATED PRACTICE contains an in-depth study of rhythm in music and in coordination, and it presents dozens of exercises to help you infuse your gestures and musical phrases with rhythmic energy.

Another aspect of your wellbeing is the balance between structure and inventiveness. Music, for instance, is based on predictable grids of chords, scales, and time signatures, and yet your music-making ought to be unpredictable and fluid. INTEGRATED PRACTICE shows you how to establish an imaginative dialogue between the relatively inflexible structure of music and your own individual style as a singer, instrumentalist, or conductor.

Most sounds contain multiple vibrations or partials, which together form the harmonic series—an acoustic phenomenon that determines timbre, consonance, dissonance, and much else beside. Knowing how to sense the partials’ shimmering vibrations and how to maximize them will help you make big sounds with little muscular effort, thanks to the power of resonance. INTEGRATED PRACTICE covers the harmonic series in detail and offers many exercises to release your innermost vibrations.

Much as you can improvise a last-minute dinner for six friends, you can use the skills of improvisation—and its creative frame of mind—to solve musical and technical problems. INTEGRATED PRACTICE includes novel approaches to improvisation as a sort of lifestyle, with exercises that you can apply to daily practice, rehearsing, and performing across the entire repertory.

INTEGRATED PRACTICE has a dedicated website with dozens of video and audio clips demonstrating the book’s exercises.



You can give extraordinary, extravagant, intense, intoxicating performances in this way: the body doesn’t move, but the music soars! Watch the violinist Ivry Gitlis playing  Camille Saint-Saëns’s “Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso” without losing his anchored feet and legs, without throwing his head about, and without huffing and puffing. It’s the music that goes crazy, as well it should!

What I call the oppositional principle in music—where the musician opposes the movement of music through the stillness of his or her body—applies to all fields of music-making. You might suppose that jazz musicians usually move an awful lot when they play. After all, those guys improvise crazy stuff and lead wild personal lives, right? Counterintuitive as it may seem, the jazz greats move almost not at all when they perform. Check this clip with Charlie Parker and Dizzie Gillespie—two of the greatest players ever—and watch how little they move. An interesting detail is that when Dizzie lifts and drops his trumpet, he does it at a very slow tempo, much slower than the tempo of the music.

Moral of the story: If you stand still, the craziness just gets deeper, broader—and better.



Depending on how you do it, holding your body still may have the effect of condensing and multiplying the energies of music itself. Your rhythmic drive and the richness of your sounds will actually be bigger if you don’t move a lot.

Imagine a canister full of gas. If you heat the canister, the gas inside will expand and push against the canister’s inner walls with ever-increasing power. Canned and heated gas, in other words, has more power than gas that isn’t canned or heated. Let’s call this compressed energy. The compressed energy of the expanding gas can be put to a constructive use, for instance to propel a rocket.

A few weeks ago I offered Louis Armstrong as an example of condensed energy when he plays the trumpet, though not when he sings. Here I offer you the Sardinian folk group Coro de Iddanoa Monteleone. The conductor moves a bit, the singers move almost not at all… and music itself moves with unstoppable power!