Practice Tips for Musicians Who Tense Up

When I was in college, learning to become a professional violinist, the only practice technique anyone had taught me was to play the hard spot enough times in a row and try to get it right. Maybe practice it at half tempo or change the rhythms around, too. I practiced that way for many hours a day, and before long I had tension in both arms, then repetitive strain injuries, and then so much pain that I couldn’t really play.

I saw doctors, physical therapists and massage therapists, and tried nearly everything you can imagine short of surgery. None of it worked, and what finally did was the Alexander Technique, which showed me something I couldn’t feel on my own: I was tightening my whole body while I played. I had gotten so used to trying hard that the effort had become invisible to me.

Playing a spot ten times in a row is a fine practice technique for a five-year-old. For anyone who wants enjoyment or mastery, it falls short, for a reason that’s easy to miss. Repetition ingrains whatever you bring to it, so if you repeat a passage with ease, the ease sinks in.

Repeat it while tightening, rushing, and quietly scolding yourself for the last mistake, and all of that sinks in right alongside the notes. Why is this important? How you practice becomes how you perform.

Repetition isn’t the villain here. The more you play something, the more familiar it gets, and familiarity is a large part of what makes hard music feel easy. Slow practice and practicing in small chunks work for a related reason: they lower the load on your attention, and an overloaded mind tightens the body. Keep doing all of that. The question is what else gets repeated along with the notes.

The next time you practice something hard and feel yourself tighten, notice what’s running in the back of your mind. For most of us it’s some version of “got to get it right.” Sometimes it’s hurry, because it seems there’s only so much time.

Sometimes it’s an imagined listener, a teacher or a bandmate you’re afraid of throwing off, and the embarrassment arrives before you’ve played the passage. The thought I hear most often underneath stage fright goes something like this: “if I make a mistake, nobody will love me.” There’s more to music than effort and shame, and neither one is why any of us picked up an instrument in the first place.

I think of mastery as having three parts: technique, effortlessness, and what I call the knowledge of the soul. Technique gives form to what you play, and it’s what nearly every lesson, method book and etude focuses on. You can get very good, even virtuosic, on technique alone, but I’ve sat through concerts where someone did things on the violin I could never do and walked out feeling nothing much.

Effortlessness is the second part, and I’d ask whether you can really say you’ve mastered something if you’re still getting tense. In my experience, a great many technique problems turn out to be tension problems: the player narrows in and tightens up to get it right, when what the passage needed was for them to let go so the body could do what it already knows how to do. The third part is the heart and soul behind the notes, the reason you play at all. Tension in the body is like a kink in the hose it has to flow through.

Here’s how to practice for effortlessness. I call it the Magic Pause, and it rests on one idea: tension is a “when” problem, not a “where” problem. It shows up at particular moments, usually just before the hard thing, which means those moments are where you can do something about it.

Pick a passage that tightens you up and play it once. Rate your tension from zero to ten, where zero is completely free and ten is stiff as a brick. Then find the exact moment you start to tighten, and if you’re reading from sheet music, put a little star above it.

I call these critical moments, and most pieces have several. Play up to the star and stop. For three to five seconds, do nothing at all.

Don’t try to relax, since that’s one more job to do; simply wait for whatever tension has gathered to subside on its own. Then play the hard part, and rate your tension again.

The timing of the pause matters more than its length. It has to come before you prepare the hard notes, not after your fingers are already in place, because by then the tightening has already happened. Once you’ve found all the critical moments in a piece, practice them this way every time.

The point of the practice shifts from getting the notes right to getting them right with ease, and every pause trains your body to meet that moment a little differently. You won’t pause like this on stage, and you won’t need to, because the practice room is where the habit gets built.

The same pause helps with two other moments. When you’re not sure what the next note is, stop and wait for it. You can’t force a memory to arise, and the harder you try, the tighter your body gets and the worse everything goes.

Mistakes are the other moment. A wrong note on its own is small. The train wreck comes from what you do next, when you tighten up after the mistake and the tension produces the next mistake, and the next. If you pause instead, your body’s knowledge of the piece has room to guide you to the next note.

That knowledge is worth trusting more than most of us do. When you play from the idea of getting it right, you’re imposing your will on your body from a concept of what the notes should be, micromanaging every finger. When you pause or play with more ease, the playing often gets better, partly because there’s less interference and partly because you’re learning that your body already knows how to play the passage. The more you play something with ease, the deeper that embodied knowledge sinks in, and the more you can rely on it.

The third part, the heart and soul, can be practiced too. In the workshop I played a short Bach minuet twice. The first time, I paid attention to getting the notes right.

It was in tune and the sound was clear, and it was flat. The second time, I paid attention to the emotional energy in my heart and my gut as I played, which I call listening to the Inner Audience Member. Nothing else changed.

The minuet came alive, and my body was freer while I played it. You can’t write heart and soul into the music with dynamics and articulation marks, since you can play those mechanically too. What changes the sound is what you pay attention to.

Pay attention to getting the notes right and your body tightens, and that’s what the audience hears. Squeezing your face to look like you’re feeling it doesn’t help either; that’s muscular tension masquerading as musical tension.

To practice this, notice which parts of your music are easy to play expressively and which aren’t. They’re usually the same spots where you tighten. Break the hard ones into small pieces, and see if you can play just two or three notes from the heart. When you can, add a couple more. That’s how you bring your heart and soul into the tricky passages instead of saving it for the easy ones.

None of this replaces learning the notes, the fingerings or the bowings, and if you’re injured, it doesn’t replace seeing someone who treats injuries. It’s a change in what the practice is for.

Here’s something to try this week. Choose one piece you’re working on, play it through, and put a star over every moment you tighten. Rate one of those passages from zero to ten, practice it with a pause before each star, and rate it again. If the number barely moves the first day, that’s fine. You’ve found the moments where your practice was training tension, and from now on every pause trains something else.

Joseph Arnold
Violinist, Alexander Technique teacher, and author of Soulforce
SoulforceArts.com

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