Subject: Musical technique Date: Sun, 7 Jun 1998 11:33:39 -0300 To: Apart from spending my week getting my paper ready for Friday (I'm still going to send out copies to the people who asked -- it's a paper-in-progress, so Friday's version wasn't the final one), I've been spending a week at the Scotia Festival of Music (Tafelmusik is in town, and I get to see them much more close up and personal than I was ever able to living in Toronto!). I wanted to describe the recorder master class I saw, because it was very relevant to sorehand issues. The recorder player teaching the master class was Francis Colpron -- apart from being an amazing recorder player, he is the best teacher of anything I have ever seen. But almost all of the time he spent with each student was spent on things a person might do in a Feldenkrais or Alexander session, and not on fingering, technique, interpretation, phrasing, and so on. Basically, he focused on getting people to feel the ground under their feet and make use of it, allow their knees to move, breathe in a relaxed fashion (especially important for the recorder), visualize the space into which they are sending the sound, and the space inside their head in which the sound resonates, and set aside all their fears and anxieties about (for example) whether they were going to drop their recorder during along complicated passage, or hit a particular note. People's playing improved unbelievably in a very short period of time with this approach. Literally, the audience was grasping audibly with astonishment after two minutes spent in some visualization exercise would improve the player's tone three-fold. He kept on saying that there are a million people out there who have the fingers, who can force themselves to spend hours and hours practicing scales; there are very few people out there with good tone and with a kind of emotional connection to their bodies and breath that enables them to play the music expressively. I think there was another round of discussion about whether or not people can possibly give up practicing their instruments for a while after their injury starts. Watching this, I realized how much a person can do for their music that is dramatically effective without that kind of repetitive practicing for hours and hours every day. So you don't have to think of this time when you can't play as a time when you can't practice music. Just practice things like breathing and moving and being relaxed while you hold your instrument or while you think about playing; and trust that this has dramatic effects on your playing. (And if you don't play recorder and can't get Francis Colpron to teach you, or even if you can, take up Alexander or Feldenkrais.) I usually try to avoid speaking in the second person on sorehand (saying: you should do this, instead of: this is what I did), but it's been three years since I've touched my instruments! :( Now, to take my own advice, I should indulge the fantasy that I might play again some day, and start holding my recorders while concentrating on having confidence in the fingers stabilizing them, or breathing into them and developing tone without moving my fingers at all! -Lynette