The way we make music
music pedagogy and wellbeing
Introduction
The interest in the health and wellbeing of musicians is of utmost importance. Somehow, many musicians tend to struggle with pain and injuries for different periods of time all through their professional career. In order to solve these problems, many different solutions are adopted, focusing mainly on different remedies that might return the body to its original order. Albeit, these different remedies, be it physiotherapy, yoga, tai chi or others, give the general feeling, that there is no solution that really solves these problems. So what are the key issues that should be addressed in order to find ways that might help a student preparing for a professional career to avoid injuries?
Health and Wellbeing
Before discussing one of the issues I consider to be the most important and point to a possible direction and solution, I find it is highly important to explore first some of the basic notions that underlie our concepts of health and wellbeing. For most people health is very much a divided concept, defined mostly by the absent of its counterpart; sickness. One says usually that he is alright and in good health in the absence of evidence to the contrary. So, when is one sick? It is when certain syndromes appear, such as fever, headache, pains etc. that prevent one from continuing one’s regular or habitual state of affairs. The concept of wellbeing is a bit more complex, possibly because of it being an abstract notion or because of its intimate relation to other concepts such as happiness or freedom. Intuitively though, it can be said that wellbeing means something more than just health. It means feeling well, feeling ease and comfort in doing and in being. So actually there is a slight difference between these two concepts. While health usually implies only the lack of sickness, wellbeing means something more about the quality of the regular state of affairs. When discussing these two concepts one has to be quite clear about which one of them we really want to discuss. Is the main theme at hand how not to get injured or is it how to do things with ease and comfort?
As a Feldenkrais practitioner working with musicians for many years now, I regard these seemingly different and separate concepts as one, as long as we understand that they both depend on the way we act. Since in the context of making music we tend to speak about injuries in the context of health, and not about viruses for example, the question that should be asked is not how to cure sickness and heal injuries , but rather what is it that makes a musician get injured or injure himself in the first place?
The key issue, from my point of view, is the general placement and relatively little importance dedicated to the body and to the dialectics of action in the study of interpretation. This is a large theme that spans beyond the limits of the present proposal. Here I would like to touch only upon three of the most basic and recurrent views of body and action in the world of classical music that I have encountered throughout my work:
· The body is negated or forgotten:
Very often the music itself is regarded as the most important issue, then comes the instrument and its mechanics and only last comes the human body and its dynamics. Students are very often encouraged to practice very long hours, repeating the same thing again and again, neglecting their own feeling of fatigue, because of the belief that in order to be a good musician one has to make a sacrifice. This is very characteristic of the study of music as product oriented, rather than process oriented.
· The body is reduced to mere posture:
Since the body is mostly regarded as a tool in service of the technique, it is very much viewed from a structural point of view; which is static and mainly normative in essence. In this way, concentrating on fixed relations between different parts of the body the musician acquires a feeling of control, but looses degrees of freedom and mobility. At the same time, since a rigid frame of reference is applied, the ability to feel what comes out from the body is reduced, as is the abilty to make a change.
· The (lack of) role of the body in feeling and learning:
When the body is viewed as a tool; another object in the musical field subordinate to the musical (auditory) input, a huge amount of important information from within the body (about the work the muscles do, the location of body parts in space,etc) is lost, due to attention directed elsewhere. This is a major problem in the way interpretation is taught, since a certain level of this information always plays a role, but could play a much larger one, if amplified.
A proposal
For me, the main answer to the question why musicians get injured is that they do something they are not aware of; that makes them act in an inefficient way and that in turn makes the force they exert act against their own body. This unnecessary effort strains the muscles and tendons resulting in inflammations and injuries. The only way I know, to prevent this from happening is to learn to feel what one does, in order to do better what one wants. The term better as used here denotes an improvement in physical terms, i.e. easier, more efficient, more comfortable, etc, way of executing, and not according to an aesthetic scale. This is the basic process that may give rise to awareness; the ability to direct attention to what one does, when one wants; to feel better what one is doing and in order to better adjust it to what one needs or wishes to accomplish. This definition stands true to the way music is sometimes taught, but only seldom is it taught based on the pedagogy itself; not mainly on what the student ought to do, but on how it feels in his body; moving one way or another and learning to feel the difference.
Basing the pedagogy on this concept the teachers should learn first to perceive what the student does in order to arrive at the musical results and than to suggest a variation so the student might feel the difference between one option and another. A learning process based on the feeling of the student enables him to seek information within himself and might even change the definition of health to make it closer to that of wellbeing. If health is viewed as one’s ability to pursue goals in conditions that constantly become favourable, then this general approach towards learning might have an influence far beyond the realm of health and in to the way one learns to make and interpret music. If from the very beginning of his studies the student learns to listen to what he does in relation to what it feels in terms of ease, pleasure etc, and then subsequently in relation to the music he produces, he will always have new information about the musical act, be it from the auditory channel or from within his body.
I have been working with musicians dealing with these issues based on my extensive experience in the Feldenkrais method. The programs I offer include workshops, discussion groups and masterclasses. The workshops are aimed at improving the quality of action by creating more awareness to what the student is doing. This is being done through movement sessions, discussion of the underlying concepts and application of all that to interpretation. They are normally tailored on demand in order to meet the necessities of the participants and might be dedicated to the dynamics of a concrete instrument, the pedagogy of music in general or to different aspects of the dynamics of the body and action in interpretation, such as breathing, the use of gravity to reduce effort, the feeling and use of inner spaces, the relation between voice and instrument etc’.
In the discussion groups I work together with music teachers in order to clarify the mechanics of the moving body and the possible applications of that to teaching. And in my masterclasses i demonstrate and teach directly how interpretation can be taught based on movement and bodily sensation as much as on musical knowledge.
Education and Experience:
Certified professional Feldenkrais practitioner since 1998.
MA. in Philosophy of Science. Thesis theme: The definition of learning in behaviour research .
Resident of Barcelona, Spain.
Work with musicians includes, besides individual sessions in private practice,
- Developing a new approach to pedagogy of voice and singing, together with Asumpta Matteu,an opera singer and singing teacher.
- Workshops on voice, body and movement.
- Workshops in the Escola Superior de Musica de Catalunya (Esmuc).
- Workshops in the school of traditional music (AMTP).
- Summer academy at Bangeres de Bigore, France.
- Workshop with violinist of the conservatoire regional de Bordeaux.
- A lecture about voice and the body at the fourth annual congress of the catalan association of teachers of singing.
Contact details
Ohad Nachmani
feldenkraiscatalunya@yahoo.com
+34938990211
+34666176463
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