Musicians

Learn the Alexander Technique to understand how to:

• Reduce /eliminate/prevent repetitive strain injury
• Hold and play your instrument with more ease and poise
• Improve performance and musicality
• Reduce fatigue when playing
• Improve your enjoyment and pleasure in playing

If you play a musical instrument (or indeed sing), one thing that you have in common with ever other musician - whether novice or professional - is that you use yourself to play your instrument.

The use of yourself in playing
This includes how you sit or stand, how you hold your instrument, how you hold your head, how freely your fingers move, how you use your breath (to simply breathe or to create sound) and what you are doing with your legs and feet.
It also includes how much fear you have and how that manifests in your body, how hard you are trying to get the piece 'right', how long you are playing for without a break and how you feel about how you're playing.

Practicing
To play music well and in a way that creates joy rather than pain and frustration, your practice needs to include consideration and awareness of all these things.

Habit
Unfortunately, the habits and patterns of movement that you have in your day to day living are, unawares, taken with you into your music-making. Your habits feel right, and you begin your practice with unnecessary tensions. As you continue to practice, if you do not have the necessary awareness, you also begin creating new and often harmful habits of playing. As you try harder to be right (using your habitual sense of 'right') so your habit is strengthened. Somehow, the loop needs to be broken.

The solution
This is where Alexander's Technique is so powerful. Using gentle manual guidance and verbal instructions, I teach you how to stop your reaction to the idea of playing your instrument, and instead I guide you through what Alexander called 'the means whereby'; allowing your body to move freely, eliminating unnecessary effort. In time this new coordination becomes more natural to you and you can let go of your old habits whilst understanding how to cultivate and make continual improvement outside of your lessons with me.

Musicians who endorse the Alexander Technique
Over the years, a number of prominent musicians have publicly endorsed the Alexander Technique: Yehudi Menuhin, Paul McCartney, Sting, Julian Bream, James Galway and the conductor Sir Adrian Boult, to name but a few.