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Alexander Technique

Playing the Piano With Alexander

by Marcus Sly

This article grew from my exploration of the application of the Alexander Technique(1) to piano playing. As it is not possible to talk about this in isolation from my wider development as a pianist the article also includes insights that have come from other sources and from my explorations. The most important of these other sources is the writing of the late Abby Whiteside(2), an American piano teacher of, to me, seminal importance.

I am not a highly talented pianist by any stretch of the imagination, so I am unable to wax lyrical about how the Alexander Technique made me great, or about how it miraculously saved my concert career from injury. What I can say is that exploring the ideas of the Alexander Technique is gradually allowing me to make the most of what talent I do have, and helping me reach a new, deeper connection with the instrument and with music.

My explorations in this field began from one simple premise. That making music is natural, that we are designed to do it, and that it should be easy. A very few lucky people do find it easy, but most of us don't, particularly the piano which seems a complex and difficult instrument to master.

So why do the majority of people find playing the piano so difficult - why is it such a struggle? Or to put it another way, what are we doing that is interfering with our natural musical ability and why are we doing it? And is it possible to stop doing it so that our natural musical ability can function freely and intelligently?

The answer to the question, "what are we doing?", must of course be a personal one, although there tend to be similarities between what one bad pianist and another are up to. Why are we doing it? Generally because we have faulty, unexamined, and deeply held beliefs about what is involved in playing the piano. These have often been taught to us, either directly or through implication.

Here are some beliefs, usually unconscious, that many people have picked up in the course of life, and piano lessons.

1) The belief that piano playing is a matter of transferring symbols on a page into muscular movements. That playing the piano is simply a matter of hand eye co-ordination. This belief comes about because this is often how piano playing is introduced. Often this is all piano lessons consist of.

2) The belief that you need to use a great deal of muscular tension and effort in order to play the piano, particularly in 'difficult' fast or loud passages. This is usually learnt long before piano lessons. From an early age most people are taught that in order to succeed you need to try hard, use effort, and concentrate on the end rather than the means. This attitude is often reinforced in piano lessons because that is usually what the pupil does, and the teacher rarely seriously challenges it. Muscular tension can also arise from fear, which can over time become a fixed part of the response to the piano playing situation. Unfortunately for some children the piano lesson is a fearful experience where the teacher sits beside the pupil, pointing out mistakes one after another as the pupils struggles their way through a piece. The teacher may berate the pupil for making mistakes, for not practising as much as the teacher believes is necessary, or for some other reason.

3) The belief that rhythm is something that takes place solely inside your head. This is leant when rhythm being introduced and only ever referred to as 'counting', which especially for a young child means intense concentration on getting notes in the right place, according to an internal, intellectual number scheme.

4) The belief that details are more important than the overall picture, and that wrong notes are the greatest problem in playing the piano. This general attitude is, again, learnt early in life. People are rarely encouraged to look at the whole, but are taught to break things up and focus on solving details one after the other. So rather than an organic whole you end up with a succession of unconnected details. This may be reinforced in piano lessons through an insistence on dealing with problems through slow practice - isolating a detail from the musical flow and repeating it over and over again until it is learnt.

I feel that all these beliefs are fallacies which interfere or prevent an easy enjoyment of making music.

The belief that playing the piano (or any instrument) is a mechanical process of hand eye co-ordination is extraordinary when you think about it. Anyone who has not been shamed out of their musical inheritance as a child through being told that they are 'no good', or 'tone deaf', or through being laughed at be others, is capable of singing a simple melody in a musical way. It is natural and easy - the most basic form of music making.

If we take this easy natural music making as a template what does it tell us? Is it a form of hand eye co-ordination? Of course not. We hear a sound and move to produce it. It is the sound that comes first, and the body conveniently contrives to produce it for us. Compare this to the poor piano student desperately peering at the score, trying to make the fingers do what the symbols indicate. We are clearly talking about a different process all together.

So how can we get closer to this natural, ear-lead music making on the piano. How can we put the ear back in charge? The simple answer is by using it. Memorising music forces us to use the ear. Even better, transposing memorised pieces by ear puts the ear firmly in control. Improvising has the same effect. Through these activities, we start to learn the physical positions and relationships of the sounds we are wanting to hear. Our ability to hear a sound (internally) and move to produce it becomes stronger. The ear starts to dominate the eye, and is back in control where it belongs.

But this is only part of the answer. No matter how good our ears, they need a free, responsive organism to turn what they hear into beautiful, meaningful music. Many pianists suffer from all sorts of inappropriate muscular bracing and tension while playing, which over time comes to seem necessary. This is of course is a delusion.

What is the effect of bracing the legs, the arms, the torso and the head/neck in piano playing? The primary and most devastating effect is that it cuts off the player from their own musical responses. We respond to music through movement, obvious or subtle, in the torso, in the legs, in the arms, not just in the fingers - the whole organism is involved. In cultures which are less emotionally repressive than the Western culture in which the piano is most often played, this is so obvious that it doesn't need to be stated. But in the culture in which I grew up in it unfortunately does need to be stated.

A musical response which involves only the brain can barely be called a musical response at all. Music is movement, life, a physical sense of rhythm, an emotional response. This is why it is dangerous to first approach rhythm by teaching people to count. Counting in an intellectual activity. Rhythm is not intellectual, but physical. We feel it, we move to it, and from that movement comes action to produce sound which is already musically intelligent without the need for analysis. Movement is more musically intelligent than thought.

By holding on through fear we are preventing all this natural, physical musical response from taking place; we are cheating ourselves out of the true experience of music making in which the whole organism responds to produce the required sound as an intelligent, emotional response to the music. So we'd better stop doing it!

But we'd better stop intelligently. We've got ourselves into quite a mess. Obviously going limp is not the answer. We'd better become quite clear about what we are actually doing, not according to a theory but according to our own observations. We need to ask ourselves some questions.

"What am I doing, and in response to what am I doing it?"

"What is a likely result of my doing this?"

"Is there a valid reason for me doing this or is simply unexamined habit and belief?"

"What happens if I don't respond this way?"

"What if I allow a response to the music to happen, rather than a response to my desire to play the right notes?

There is no formula. We are experimenting, trying things out. Finding out for ourselves. A teacher can be a big help, but ultimately it is up to us - to be honest with ourselves or not, to change or not to change.

An example. The belief that you need to use a great deal of muscular effort with the arms to play louder and faster is a popular misconception. Many pianists waste an inordinate amount of energy and as a result get bogged down when playing fast or loud passages. Much of this wasted energy goes into the keybed. A moments thought will make it clear that any pressure used to hold the key down once the note has sounded beyond that needed to prevent the key rising prematurely is completely wasted. In fact the sound is released just before the key reaches the keybed. Yet is spite of this it is common to see players forcing a great deal of energy into the keybed. This is not only tiring, but stops the whole playing mechanism with every note or chord. It acts as a brake. The playing mechanism slams into the keybed and is firmly held there.

So can you stop doing this? Can the habit be met with a refusal to act in the habitual way? If you do not give into this temptation you may find that it is possible to release power just above the key bed without bearing down, so that the playing mechanism remains free and ready for action, and no energy is wasted. You produce a clearer, louder sound which an ease that can seem uncanny at first, and because you are not holding against the keybed the torso and legs do not need to brace to take the pressure, and there is greater freedom to respond to the music.

The fear of being wrong is heavily implicated in the difficulties we have in changing. It can be difficult to stop what we are doing if we have come to believe that it is essential for success, and consequently essential to our sense of self worth. It can take a long time to put aside the fear of being wrong, of making mistakes. How hard it can be to persuade someone that it means more to play an arpeggio as a grand gesture with some wrong notes than it does to play a disconnected nothing with all the notes right. It is easy enough to convince a person intellectually, but the fear remains. The fear which has been brought about by countless humiliations over the course of school and adult life, often reinforced by piano lessons. The fear that if you get things wrong, you are wrong, and therefore not worthy of respect or love. You have failed and are a failure. This fear is so strong that it will lead someone to deny all their innate passion, spontaneity and musicality rather than risk making a wrong note.

Music is not details, but movement. It is a whole going somewhere. If the movement is beautiful, the details adds charm. If the movement is stilted or choked, then the most skilfully executed detail will be meaningless. And the irony is that if there is real movement, momentum, rhythm, moving irresistibly forward, if there is an overall sense of rhythm, the details cannot help but be pulled into this greater movement and will come out right. So can you persuade yourself to let go of the fear of being wrong to give the right a chance to take you unawares?

Making music is not the preserve of a gifted few. It is the birthright of all of us. The great jazz pianist Bill Evans once said, "anyone can be great if they work within their limitations". There is truth in this. Whenever we allow our natural musicality to shine, no matter how large or small our talents, no matter how limited out technical ability, there is greatness, because music is great - a rich, inexhaustible phenomenon of nature.

***

(1)The Alexander Technique was originated by F.M. Alexander. It evolved out of his successful attempts to solve a vocal problem which threatened to end his career as a reciter. It involves learning to identify, understand, and prevent habitual responses which interfere with our natural balance and co-ordination mechanisms. For more information see "The Complete Guide to the Alexander Technique" at www.alexandertechnique.com.

(2)Abby Whiteside was an American piano teacher who spent a lot of time studying the playing of child prodigies and naturally gifted pianists in order to discover what they were doing that was different to other, less gifted pianists. She made a number of important discoveries about the psycho-mechanics of skilful piano playing. The Abby Whiteside foundation has a web site at www.abbywhiteside.org.

About Marcus Sly. I trained as an Alexander Technique teacher at NETCAT in Leeds, UK, and as a pianist at Leeds College of Music. I work as an Alexander Technique teacher and piano teacher. I am very interested in questions of authority and tradition in teaching, particularly with regard to the Alexander Technique. I also have strong interests in the fields of psychotherapy and counselling. Visit my website! www.marcus-sly.info

Copyright © 2002 Marcus Sly