Musicians as Movers: Applying the Feldenkrais Method to Music Education

The Learning Process

The Feldenkrais Method is centered on the idea that life is a process, not a thing. This idea can equally be applied to music: Music is not a thing; it exists in the dimension of time. Making music or performing music is a process, not a result. Making music is the process that performers enter when singing or playing their instrument.

Processes go well if there are many ways to influence them. As soon as one attaches a value or expectation to the end product, problems arise. A focus on the end result can lead to music that is dull and lifeless. Thus, a musician always needs more ways to do what is desired than the one way already known, even if that one way is a good method in itself. Musicians who see no choices tend to feel that they cannot change the way they are already doing something—even when the way they are doing it brings about misery. ⁶

Feldenkrais believed that organic learning is about self-improvement and making connections of all kinds rather than achieving a specific goal. ⁷ This type of learning is both lively and slow. It takes place when a student is in a good mood, works in small intervals, and is unconcerned with success or failure. ⁸ It is useful for musicians to associate these values with individual music practice. Teachers can encourage students to schedule their practice sessions throughout the day and practice at times when they are able to have good focus and awareness. Teachers can encourage students to practice only as long as the practice is interesting and to be guided by how the process and the sensations of their movements affect the sounds they are creating rather than trying to get it “right.”

FM’s body-centered practice teaches students to think in terms of relationships, recognize sensations separated from the boundaries of words, find hidden resources within themselves, find new patterns, and carry these patterns over from one discipline to another. ⁹ All of these elements are relevant to students learning to play music.

Posture for Music Students

To play a musical instrument is to assume an unnatural position, or posture. This posture is often assumed for a long period of time during practice sessions, lessons, and performances. FM has a concept of posture that is not a static position but instead relates to action. When attention is focused on the action rather than the position to be achieved, most people naturally achieve the best possible body posture. ¹⁰ So it is important for music students to understand that when they hold an instrument or prepare to sing, they are assuming not a static state but instead a flexible posture that is part of a larger, ongoing movement. When students focus on the movements necessary to produce the sounds and work to make these movements as fluid and smooth as possible, they will not only experience greater joy but also achieve greater results. On the other hand, when students focus solely on the end result, many postural problems arise that can cause discomfort and strain.

Feldenkrais proposed that there are three qualities common to all well-learned actions/postures: (1) absence of effort, (2) absence of resistance, and (3) presence of reversibility—that is, the ability to stop an action, then restart it, reverse it, or drop it. ¹¹ These three qualities are detectable in any posture, and a movement or posture that lacks these qualities can lead to difficulties. When playing or singing music, these difficulties may be identified as technical problems, tension problems, or difficulty with expressiveness.

An example is the basic posture of sitting in a chair, which is a common position for instrumental musicians. Young musicians are taught to sit forward in a chair or on the edge of the chair. This is sometimes necessary: It enables smaller people to reach the floor. But then the habit remains as students grow and become able to reach the floor with ease. This pushing forward in the chair causes a forward tilt in the pelvis and a more pronounced curvature of the spine—and this posture can result in a tightening in the upper back and neck, excessive tension in the upper legs, and rigidity across the chest. All these characteristics are common complaints of instrumentalists who sit in chairs.

The tilted pelvis also cuts one off from the lower half of the body. Feldenkrais wrote, “No proper action is possible without good control of the pelvic joints; no correct posture is possible without the pelvis being able to move freely in all its articulations, in the hip joints and in the small of the back.” ¹² When sitting correctly, the weight of the upper body is centered over the hip joints and the sitz bones or rockers (the curved-shaped bones at the base of the pelvis), the back remains relaxed, and the legs are able to move freely.

This new sitting posture enables musicians to feel their center of gravity and is detectable in the tone that music students produce on their instrument. Typically, the tone is more open and warm as the structure of the body and the instrument are able to resonate together.

The Tonic State

The FM concept of tonic state is related to but not the same as the concept of posture. As Feldenkrais described it, “in the tonic state the muscles are not flabby and not contracted. The body feels light, the vessels neither dilate nor constrict, the body is not warm or cold, but just cool. The entire frame is tuned up not for violent efforts, but for smooth, easy action such as clear thinking, dancing, pirouetting.” ¹³ It is in this state that a person can maintain an action or activity for long periods without tiring.

The optimum place for all musicians to sing or play from is the tonic state. This state can be achieved and experienced through exercises that isolate the timing of the movements that initiate and sustain the sound—of the voice or an instrument. For wind instruments, this includes long tones and articulation exercises with reed, head joint, or mouthpiece; for stringed instruments, exercises with the bow.

An oboist, for example, reaches the tonic state through the timing of the movements that create the sound or tone of the instrument. When the breath and the embouchure, which control the vibrations of the reed, are balanced, the sound produced is focused and not forced. Oboe students must learn not to fight the sensation of resistance but rather to meet it: Fighting the sensation uses more effort than is required and leads to discomfort and rapid fatigue.

On brass instruments, exercises with the mouthpiece can demonstrate the tonic state by removing the distraction of holding the instrument. Sounding repeated pitches on the mouthpiece and getting the same response each time is a good way to demonstrate the balance between the breath and the embouchure. Once the balance is found—or in other words, the tonic state achieved—it becomes easier to work on the other aspects of playing music. For this reason, establishing a connection to the tonic state is a good first step whenever students begin to play or practice an instrument.

Variation and Repetition

In FM, the group-based ATM lessons are not “physical exercises”; instead, they are movement explorations that bring about improvements in understanding and the quality of movement by training students’ ability to feel how they move. Lessons focus on developmental movements such as rolling, crawling, and standing up; functions such as posture and breathing; or the kinetic possibilities of joint and muscle groups. Every ATM lesson combines a few dozen movements that are thematically organized around exploring a particular functional action.

The initial movements in a lesson occupy a very small space; the movements grow in complexity, magnitude, and speed through the lesson as the position of the body is altered. The variations make the movement easier, harder, faster, slower, smoother, larger, smaller, or just different. The constant adjustment to new sensations keeps the student’s attention focused, maintains interest, reinforces learning, and demonstrates the interconnectedness of the body. Repetition, in other words, is used in the ATM lesson as a means of exploration. Each time a movement is repeated, it is different; even when one tries, it is impossible to reproduce exactly what has just been done.

When a student’s attention is focused on the sensations of repeating a movement in both habitual and nonhabitual patterns, a world of possibilities opens up with which to build skill. ¹⁴ As students learn to move in new ways or experience their movements with greater clarity, the way that they think and sense themselves and their abilities also change to encompass more choices: They begin to see possibilities that previously they were not aware of. At the end of an ATM lesson, the original movement is revisited, and this is when it is possible to sense the full scope of the changes that have occurred.

Music teachers will find applying these concepts of variation and repetition to be useful for dealing with technical and musical issues. For music students, attempting to isolate the cause of a problem can be one of the most frustrating experiences. Just as a physical complaint may not originate where one thinks, the problem in a phrase of music is also often not where one might think it is. Through analysis, experience, patience, and self-awareness, however, students can develop the ability to uncover the root of the problem.

A good starting point is having students isolate the structure of the musical or harmonic line. Once this has been isolated, exploration through variation becomes easier. Technical issues can be removed from the musical context and subjected to numerous alterations—such as in tempi, rhythm, articulation, and dynamics. Each variant acts to reinforce the cell—whether that is a simple movement or a musical or harmonic line—in a different way while keeping the student’s attention focused. The variations may end up being far trickier than the original, and when the music student returns to the original musical phrase, the way an FM student returns to the original movement at the end of an ATM lesson, it is found to be not as difficult as once thought and often can be performed with new depth and clarity.

It is important that teachers remove the cell from its original context and have students work on it as an entity unto itself. This removes any emotional frustration that students may have built up and that may otherwise remain long after the passage has been fixed. It is also easier for students to work on the musical statement the composer is trying to make when they are not worrying about the notes. Once students have worked on the passage, they can put it back into its original context and repeat it to make it part of the bodily experience. In some cases, the true line emerges easily once the technical issues have been taken care of.

The awareness gained through variation and repetition applies to more than the original challenging phrase. Students who become aware of how each movement changes the context of the next movement can apply this to any music they play or sing. They may also become more aware of how the perception of each note within a musical line is dependent on the notes that surround it: ¹⁵ How loud a note must be played to be heard as piano is determined by the dynamics of the notes around it.

It is also useful for students to take frequent brief breaks after their focused activities. ¹⁶ In FM, the breaks are considered to be as important as the physical actions; they give students the opportunity to sense changes, allow the new learning to set, and try the movement afresh.

By using variation and repetition as tools, music students can come to experience music as a bodily experience and not just a visual and aural experience. Students who experience the ways that a single simple movement of the body can be influenced may find it becomes easier to see the vast potential of the movements in the music they play or sing and the range of possibilities in the interconnectedness of the musical line. Music teachers can ask students to experiment with tone color, dynamics, articulation, and quality of attack and decay. On a larger scale, students can experiment with phrase structure. Such experimentation creates a new exchange between the musician and the written music. In addition, students who experience doing something physically that they had not previously deemed possible often also see possibilities emerge for growth in the realm of musical interpretation and expressiveness.

Visualization in Performance

Visualization is an important aspect of ATM lessons. An ATM lesson’s initial movement may be located in a part of the body for which students have not already developed a clear self-image, which in FM has to do with “how accurately you can sense yourself both statically and in movement.” ¹⁷ For example, when asked to think of the index finger on each hand, one student may have a clear and detailed picture of both fingers while another student has a greater sense of the index finger on the dominant hand.

To access a particular part of the body then, students have to visualize it and imagine how it works. It is like creating a three-dimensional model of that part of the body—fingers or elbow joint or shoulder joint or diaphragm—to be accessed only within one’s imagination and then imagining how that part of the body moves with other parts of the body in the selected movement. After doing a visualization, it becomes easier and quicker to access a part of the body that seemed so isolated before. The perspective in FM is that “what you can do, you can imagine, and what you can imagine, you can do.” ¹⁸ By taking advantage of imagination, students can expand the realm of possibilities that are available to them. Developing their self-image, or how they sense themselves, helps them better understand what they are doing and leaves them with a more accurate picture of who they are.

Visualization is useful for dealing with technical issues in instrumental performance, such as learning a new fingering, articulation, or tricky technical passage. For example, the fingering for the top octave of a woodwind instrument can become increasingly confusing. In addition, these notes are rarely called for, so lack of familiarity adds to the sense of panic students experience when they realize they have to play in their highest register. Visualization works to develop a student’s self-image of the necessary posture—in conjunction with variation and repetition, which reinforce the action as a bodily experience.

Visualization in the FM sense includes every aspect of what is needed to access a movement. For wind and brass instruments then, it includes air control and speed and possible embouchure adjustments as well as the actual placement of the fingers needed to achieve the note. For another instrument, such as piano, effective visualization might include the feel of the keys under the fingers, the order of fingers leading the movement, and different situations for accessing the note. For a singer, this would include movements of the lips, the tongue, and the soft palate. To be most effective, visualization should occur in slow motion, with every detail of the movement imagined as if one is actually performing the movement. The goal is to feel the action in the body without any physical movement.