Indirect Procedures: A Musician’s Guide to the Alexander Technique
Introduction
A child prodigy who once played like an angel loses his innocence and becomes self-conscious about his instrument, his music-making, his adoring public. Despite much soul-searching, he is unable to prevent his performances from becoming ever more erratic.
A young man, one of the outstanding talents of his generation, suffers from disabling back pain, due, it seems, to a birth defect. He needs major back surgery while still in his early twenties. His enormous success with the public and the critics notwithstanding, some of his fellow musicians — who have followed closely the blossoming of his exquisite gift — find some of his performances strangely dissatisfying.
A young woman of flair and ability is marketed by her record company as a classical-music sex kitten. She admits to having developed three distinct personalities — with her family, on stage, and by herself — to cope with the expectations and demands made upon her.
A magazine survey shows that an alarmingly large majority of orchestral musicians live in a state of constant apprehension and insecurity. Many of them drink heavily before and after performances, and during the intervals as well. Others take tranquillizers and anxiety-suppressants. Most complain of various illnesses seemingly related to work, including backaches, headaches, tendonitis, repetitive strain injuries, ulcers, and a plethora of mental conditions, including depression and plain unhappiness.
The behaviour of many eminent conductors, singers, and soloists deviates sharply from accepted standards of human decency. The temper tantrums, cancelled performances, and generally outrageous comportment of the diva make the stuff of gossip columns. We are told that this is a necessary evil, a sign of an “artistic temperament”.
The waste of talent, the shortened careers, the inadequate performances, the objectionable behaviour, the frustration, suffering, and pain are the norm of the music profession. Yet one asks, “Must it be so?” Is there something intrinsic to music-making that makes it inevitably painful?
The answer, of course, is no. We marvel at the effortless grace of Artur Rubinstein, at the high quality of his every performance, at his youthfulness in old age. We listen, enraptured, to the mastery of a Vlado Perlemuter, a Richter, a Perahia. We revere a Claudio Arrau, whose playing had the depth and breath of a wise old man and the dazzling virtuosity of a young competition winner. We take inspiration from great singers who remain great for decades, and who perform, teach, and live with quiet dignity.
Musicians of all ages and abilities, faced by seemingly insurmountable problems, have offered many good reasons for their shortcomings and failures. Yet, in light of the successes of other musicians, these reasons do not stand up to scrutiny.
A well-worn explanation for the troubles of a musician — and, indeed, of everyone else — is stress. In Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient, Norman Cousins wrote that “the most prevalent — and, for all we know, most serious — health problem of our time is stress, which is defined by Hans Seyle, dean of the stress concept, as the ‘rate of wear and tear in the human body.’ This definition would thus embrace any demands, whether emotional or physical, beyond the ready capability of any given individual.” [1]
This very definition of stress is wide of the mark. Let us borrow an image from engineering. We say of a bridge that it is under stress (from the constant traffic flow, for instance, or from the action of the elements) and that it, the bridge, strains. The bridge suffers wear and tear and may crack or collapse as the result — not of stress, but of strain. Stress is a stimulus, strain a response. Clearly it is the response that causes a problem, not the stimulus; after all, many bridges have withstood centuries of unremitting stress. The stress of life is permanent and inevitable, and in itself it is neither negative nor undesirable. Witness the many healthy musicians who thrive under the most stressful situations, including baring their souls in front of hundreds or thousands of people.
A related argument is that of “human design”. You may argue that well-built bridges withstand stress, but that the human body was not designed to bear what is made to bear today. This is a double fallacy: of “human design” and “modern civilization”.
Let us consider human design first. Many people believe that a small body was not meant to play the viola, or that a small hand was not meant to play the piano, or that the human voice was not designed to sing above modern symphony orchestras. This argument runs a long way. We were not designed to run marathons, to wear shoes, to walk on concrete, and so on.
Yet the argued insufficiency or inadequacy of human design is easily disproved. “For playing the viola,” said the violist and teacher William Primrose, “having a large hand and being of medium to large stature is an advantage, but certainly not a requirement.” [2] The pianist Heinrich Neuhaus, teacher of Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels, and Radu Lupu, among many others, goes further, and writes in The Art of Piano Playing:
The anatomy of the human hand is … ideal from the point of view of the pianist and it is a convenient, suitable and intelligent mechanism which provides a wealth of possibilities for extracting the most varied tones out of a piano. And the mechanism of the hand is, of course, in complete harmony with the mechanism of the keyboard. [3]
Small hands with a small stretch have quite obviously to make much greater use of wrist, forearm and shoulder; in fact the whole of the “hinterland”, than large hands, particularly large hands with a large stretch. … Sometimes this is just why gifted people with small and difficult hands have a better understanding of the nature of the piano and of their “pianistic” body, than the large-handed and broad-boned. [4] In short, they turn their drawbacks into advantages.
Let us abandon the “human design” fallacy, and agree that humans are “the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals”, fully evolved bipeds with lovely opposable thumbs and countless other attributes. The human body, wondrously beautiful and richly endowed, is capable of meeting all the demands of music making.
“Human design apart,” you may argue, “progress has led us so far from Nature that humans are now constitutionally unable to cope with the demands of modern civilization. Take orchestra chairs, for instance. They are badly designed. Or music competitions. Surely they are harmful. What about going on long tours? Living in big cities? Breathing in car exhaust? Life was better before. If only we could give up the rat race and move to the countryside. Or go back to the eighteenth century. Or the sixteenth. Or just return to Eden.”
Thus runs the “modern civilization” argument. The intentions behind it are noble, but the argument itself is flawed. Some observers, for instance, find chairs emblematic of the ills of modern life. They say that if only an ideal chair could be built, many health problems would be mitigated or eliminated. In All’s Well that Ends Well, the Clown speaks a few lines that help us recognize the limits of ergonomics: “It is like a barber’s chair, that fits all buttocks, — the pin-buttock, the quatch-buttock, the brawn-buttock, or any buttock.” [5] Such a chair will never exist. Further, no furniture, however designed, can give you health if you do not know how to use it. Badly designed furniture increases the likelihood of discomfort, well designed furniture decreases it; no certitudes arise of either. “What we need to do”, wrote Alexander, “is not to educate our school furniture but to educate our children.” [6]
Competitions are another scourge of the anti-civilization brigade. It is said that competitions have poisoned the music profession, destroyed the careers of young musicians, and perverted the tastes of the public. In truth competitiveness is a healthy, irrepressible human instinct, and every culture at every junction of history has had a competitive element. Would music be better served had the great singers of the Bel Canto era not been pitted against each other in competition? Should Wales outlaw its Eisteddfodau?
Realistically, we cannot blame competitions themselves for the woes of any musician, young or old, winner or loser. It is the attitude of the competitor that makes competitions either beneficial or harmful. Rod Laver, the great Australian tennis champion, said about competing:
You do the best you can. If you don’t play your own game, you’re going to lose it anyway. If you start to worry about the importance of the win before it happens, you’re going to have yourself in a complete panic. You play the shots as you see them. That, and don’t start wishing the shots to go in. When you start wishing, you are in trouble. [7]
As I noted, the logical consequence of blaming modern life for our problems is to wish to go back in time, a sneaking desire we all feel on occasion. Indeed, people already felt that way thousands of years ago. “Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this.” Beautifully written in Ecclesiastes, this advice can also be stated as “Yearning for the past is stupid.” If our capabilities to meet life’s demands are inadequate, then we need to increase our capabilities, rather than decrease the demands made upon them. The right way clearly is forwards, not backwards.
Another favourite explanation for a musician’s problems is other people. Some would argue that pushy parents, or pushy record executives, caused the young woman of my illustration to suffer from split personality. Orchestral musicians blame conductors and administrators for their woes. Conductors and administrators blame orchestral musicians and each other. Singers blame everybody.
Stress, human design, civilization, and other people, then, have all been considered part of a musician’s problems, and appropriate therapies suggest themselves. Pushy parents cause psychological problems; the solution is psychotherapy. Small hands cause tendonitis; the solution, physiotherapy. Bad chairs cause backache; the solution, ergonomics. The stress of concert life causes stage fright; the solution, beta-blockers. Modern life causes unhappiness; the solution, a return to Nature.
These solutions have been around for a long time, and have been tried by many sufferers. Yet the problems persist. If anything, the overall situation of the music profession is worse today than it was one or two generations ago. Disability and grief have increased, excellence has decreased.
A diagnosis always implies a remedy. Get the diagnosis wrong, and the remedy may threaten the patient’s life. We can safely say that the way musicians diagnose their problems has become part of the problems themselves. Psychotherapy, physiotherapy, drugs, and the rest have failed to solve the problems of musicians satisfactorily.
Frederick Matthias Alexander (1869-1955) understood the nature of human ills and proposed effective solutions, not palliatives or aggravations to these ills. As I wrote earlier, Alexander considered most of contemporary thinking fallacious. He thought that we erred both in the diagnosis and in the therapy. Alexander found the cause of our troubles not in what is done to us, but in what we do to ourselves. He saw that the problem was not in the stimulation of modern life, but in our response to it; not in the stress, but in the straining. The straining he called misuse of the self; its cause not human design, but end-gaining. I explain both terms and their relationship in the next chapter.
The advantages of Alexander’s approach are manifold. Alexander found the common thread to apparently disparate problems. Instead of saying that pushy parents cause neuroses, Alexander stated that end-gaining causes misuse. He would not say that bad chairs cause backache; again, he would suggest that end-gaining causes misuse. He would similarly reformulate the equation between body design and tendonitis, civilization and stress, and all the others.
Alexander’s discoveries offer both a diagnosis and a remedy, thereby unifying the whole of the equation: End-gaining causes misuse; the solution, inhibition — a concept which I discuss in Chapter 4. Thus is the Alexander Technique able to solve more problems, and more efficiently, than the piecemeal approaches of psychotherapy, physiotherapy, surgery, drugs, ergonomics, and firing the conductor.
[1] Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient (New York, Bantam Books, 1981), 65.
[2] David Dalton, Playing the Viola: Conversations with William Primrose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 7.
[3] Trans. K. A. Leibovitch (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1973), 72.
[4] Ibid., 109-11. My italics.
[5] II. ii.
[6] Man’s Supreme Inheritance (Kent: Integral Press, 1957), 91.
[7] Richard Williams, “Age of the Rocket Man,” The Independent on Sunday Review, 20 June 93, 11.