Small Space, Tight Body

Pick up your instrument and play the passage that always gives you trouble, and watch where your eyes go. For most of us they go straight to the hands, or to the dots on the page, and stay there, and within a bar or two the world has shrunk to a few inches of fingerboard or a handful of keys. Your shoulders tighten up.

Your breath has stopped somewhere around the second beat. None of this feels like a mistake while it’s happening, because it feels like concentration, and concentration is what a hard passage seems to deserve.

We learned this way of paying attention long before we ever picked up an instrument. Think back to a classroom where things weren’t going well, and a teacher said, “Pay attention!” You furrowed your brow, narrowed your eyes, set your jaw and held your breath, and the teacher said, “Good job,” because that face looks like a child trying hard.

The face itself never taught anyone long division, but it was a signal the adults around us could read, and we kept it because it got rewarded, which is how a social shortcut became a physical habit that most of us still bring to every difficult thing we do.

Try this experiment now to feel it in about two minutes. Hold your hands in front of you and pretend there’s a needle in one and a thread in the other. Look at that tiny eye of the needle and try to thread it.

Oops, you missed. Try again. Missed again!

Now check two things: is your sense of space getting bigger or smaller, and is your body getting tighter or freer? In my experience most people find the space has shrunk to the width of the needle, and their shoulders, jaw and breath have all joined in. I sum it up in four words: small space, tight body.

Put the needle down for a moment and take in the room. There’s space behind you, above you and below you, out the window and across the street. Notice what your body does as the space gets bigger. Big space, free body. Then pick the needle back up and thread it again, with your eyes on the needle and the room still there around it: space between your hands, space between your hands and your face, space behind your head, and even space inside the eye of the needle, continuous with all the rest. Tighter or freer this time?

How you pay attention changes your body immediately. Narrow, gripping attention makes a narrow, gripping body, and a more open attention lets the body open along with it. I learned the core of this from Les Fehmi, a biofeedback researcher who spent his career teaching a practice he called Open Focus, and it’s one of the first two lessons I teach everyone who studies with me, because the change is so immediate and so easy to feel.

The usual fix gets this almost right. Musicians who notice they’ve been staring at their fingers tell themselves to look up at the audience, or the conductor, or the other players, and it can seem to help a little, but it’s an incomplete solution. What they’ve done is taken their tunnel vision for a ride: the center of attention moved, and the tunnel came along.

In actuality, you can keep your eyes on your hands, or the page, or the bow on the string, exactly where the music needs them, and just remember that there’s space all around you. That balance of a clear center and a wide surround is what I mean by mindfulness. I spent years getting it wrong in my own meditation practice, bearing down on my breath as if attention were a muscle I could strengthen by squeezing, and I still catch myself doing a version of it when a passage scares me.

When you try this on real music, you can expect something that will feel like bad news: you may make more mistakes at first. For some, that’s actually how you know you’re doing it right. Every passage you’ve played many times has a coordination pattern, a learned pathway your body takes through it, and the tension you’ve been playing with has become part of that pathway, helping you know where your hand is and what comes next.

Open up and you’ve changed the pattern, so for a little while the old landmarks are gone. If you tighten back in at the first wrong note, you’ll rebuild the old pathway exactly as it was. Stay open through the mistakes and the new coordination comes in quickly, and the freedom starts to support the notes instead of competing with them. I’ve watched this happen countless times.

This matters most in the practice room, because every time you play with tension, you’re learning more tension. Your technique, your notes and your memorized passages all get learned along with whatever your body was doing while you learned them, which is why a piece you can play perfectly from memory can still be a piece you play tight. Slow down to the speed at which you can keep the space around you.

Work in short chunks: notice the space, play the chunk, and repeat it until the space stays, then move on to the next one. Make the point of practicing not merely to get the notes right, but to get them right and be free.

Open Focus isn’t for everyone in every moment. Some people, especially those who are sensitive to sensory input, find that opening up floods them with noise, and a narrower focus is how they get through a crowded street or a loud room. If that’s you, close down when you need to. What I’m after is flexibility and choice, knowing that you can widen your attention when it helps and aren’t stuck in a tunnel you never chose. Even a small sense of space, noticed with care, counts.

Here’s something to try this week. Spend five minutes a day simply noticing the space around you, the way you might sit and listen to rain on a roof. Then take one phrase that tightens you and play it twice: once the usual way, and once after a pause in which you notice the space between your head and your hands and around the whole room.

Ask the same two questions each time. Is the space getting bigger or smaller? Is your body getting tighter or freer? If nothing changes the first day, nothing has gone wrong. The habit took years to build, and noticing it is where undoing it begins.

If you’d like to see this taught live, the full recording of this month’s Musician’s Tension Reset Lab is up on YouTube, where a room of musicians threads the needle together, plays a phrase both ways, and works through these same questions with instruments in hand.

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

Join my free, monthly, online class to stop fighting your body and play with ease when it counts: The Musician’s Tension Reset Lab