Perfect Poise, Perfect Life
Bring your body into balance and revolutionise your life
By Noel Kingsley
Publisher Hodder Mobius
AVAILABLE HERE

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Attending to basics

Yehudi Menuhin had the most natural technique (This DVD is of the very first concert performance ever to be filmed for cinema viewing - 1947)

It's about three months since I wrote about progress with my violin playing and almost five months ago I stopped playing music to focus on technique having decided that my fundamental problems lay not in my ability to play any specific piece of music, but in my overall technique and ability to play the instrument. What's the difference, I hear you ask? Surely one practices exercises or music in order to learn to play the instrument. Quite right, in part.

Before one plays a single note on an instrument, we have to position ourselves at the keyboard, or take hold of the instrument. This itself is one of the greatest challenges as just how we approach the instrument will influence how it sounds and also our ability to move freely from one note to another, with the required speed, agility, smoothness, quality of touch, sensitivity etc to produce a beautiful sound. It doesn't just happen.

Having played the violin for around two years, I was becoming more and more aware that no matter what piece of music I attempted to play, I always brought myself to the instrument in the same way, and every time I played, it sounded like amateur Noel Kingsley, trying his best, but with all the characteristics of my inexperience showing through. I was trying too hard, there were degrees of tension and even some rigidity in the way I held the instrument despite my experience as an Alexander Technique teacher and I'm glad now, that I had the eyes and awareness to notice. I told my teacher in late April that I was stopping playing music to attend to fundamental principles of technique; how I stood, how I held the instrument, the lightness of grip, the freedom of neck and shoulders, the overall poise and balance, all before I played a note. He was surprised, but agreed it could bring rewards and encouraged me.

I equate what I did to learning to drive a car in an empty parking lot where there are no vehicles to dodge, no pedestrians or traffic to contend with, no rules, and just wide empty space to get it all wrong and not worry. That way we can familiarise ourselves with the controls of the vehicle; steering, accelerator, brakes, gear changes, clutch and then we've got to look where we're going and what's behind in the mirror etc. Then when we're proficient we can go out on the road and hopefully not kill anyone. Taking all the anxiety out of driving lets us focus on basics in a way we can't do if there's traffic all around. Do you remember how tiring and stressful was 30 minutes of learning to drive a car?

So I decided to remove all the obstacles and 'traffic' from my violin playing; no precise phrases, no tempo, no tricky passages and I didn't worry too much about pitch. So after much thought and care in my approach to picking the instrument up and then eventually playing long single notes, I practiced such fundamentals, for days, then weeks. I started incorporating vibrato, particularly 'Fingertip Impulse Vibrato' as I had gleaned from various sources that although it is almost a dead technique and few modern players use it, this form of vibrato is credited with having given all the early 20th century maestros their individual sound. I'm a sucker for tradition as you might have gathered; I write letters with a fountain pen and wet ink, I even use grammar and phrase my words to the best of my ability. I use traditional camera equipment and delight in film and darkroom printed images. So I worked on Fingertip Impulse Vibrato.

The point I'm getting to in this rather long and round about way is.....that I've now started playing music again. Yes, actual pieces of music and I'm currently working on Massenet's Meditation, for those of you who may know the piece. And it's wonderful. Not only is it a wonderful piece, I'm so pleased with all the basic work that I gave to poise, technique and particularly vibrato. The sound I make now is not like Noel sounded four months ago. Having not played actual music for many months, I can now play so much better. My technique is more solid and reliable, I'm freer, I don't try too hard to play the music and have better fundamental technique even when I'm not thinking about it and concentrating on the music. My playing has changed and improved in ways that it could not have done had I continued just simply practicing pieces of music and doing exercises. And it sounds so much better too.

It's very easy when learning a new activity, be it a musical instrument, new sport such as golf or tennis to simply rush ahead and do the playing. But this way we can get into all sorts of habits that can undermine our performance and actually hold back our progress. It's much better to give lots of time to working on basics. Every experience we have goes into our subconscious and our muscle memory and will affect our future endeavours....every single experience does this, good and bad with equal measure. To perform well we need good technique and this only comes from repeating good experiences so a good technique becomes established into our system. To minimise 'bad' experiences such as bad golf swing with stiff shoulders, stiff and tense playing of an instrument, we need to establish the healthy qualities into our body so they are there when we are not thinking about them and concentrating on our game or music.

You can't go wrong by working on basics. If you want to read more of my experiments with violin technique and vibrato read some previous entries - Learning Vibrato - Hitting the Wall - Body Memory - Doing away with the shoulder rest - Avoid practicing mistakes - Muscle Memory and Hillary Hahn

Posted by Noël on September 6, 2007 7:54 AM | Permalink