The Point of Practicing Is to Make Things Easy

For many years I tried very hard to follow the directions I was given in my Alexander Technique training: let the neck be free, let the back lengthen and widen. I took them as seriously as I had ever taken scales, thought about them while I played, and checked on them between phrases, and what I got for my trouble was… a stiffer body. Looking back, the problem is plain enough. I was trying hard to stop trying hard.

Most of the musicians who come to me know a version of this. The shoulder starts to ache, so you buy a new shoulder rest, and it helps for a week before the ache turns up in your neck instead. You rest.

You stretch every morning, see a physical therapist, and build your playing back up five minutes at a time, then ten, then twenty, and a few months later you’re right back where you started, or the pain has moved somewhere new. Every one of those choices makes sense if your body is a machine with a worn part, and that is the model nearly all of us were handed. None of it was foolish, and none of it means something is wrong with you. You did what everyone does, carefully and in good faith, and it kept moving the pain around.

What ties my years of chasing directions to your drawer of shoulder rests is the same mistake, made in two different costumes. I wrote about it in Soulforce, where I use the word Soulforce for the feeling of your heart and soul pouring through your sound:

What is insanity? It is to ignore anything that’s true. Let’s say you’re practicing a technique and making the same mistake over and over. In response to the mistake, you try harder and harder to get it right. Finally, you get it right - but then you notice how tense and drained you feel.

What you have just engaged in is not so much a step toward true artistic mastery, but a step into insanity. Why? The ultimate point of any technique is to better channel the fullness of your Soulforce, but this can’t happen when you try hard because trying hard constricts your body and emotions.

When you try hard, you focus on a narrow definition of what is right and ignore the impact your body and emotions have on the flow of Soulforce. Obviously, with your body compromised with effort and tension, you cannot fulfill the ultimate point of the techniques you practice. Thus, trying hard is a form of insanity because it ignores the ways that your quality of effort determines your artistic output.

When you try to create change through force and control, you are, in essence, optimizing a part at the expense of the whole. But there are no parts separate from the whole. The universe, your body, the planet, a work of art - all of these are wholes that both comprise smaller wholes and are aspects of yet larger wholes. They are also seamless, with no fixed beginnings nor ends. In the Story of Interbeing, all we have are means and wholes.

If insanity is ignoring anything that’s true, then sanity is taking account of that which has been ignored. For a musician, sanity is sensing how a flourish of their fingers is a movement not limited to the hand alone but involves their whole body. Sanity is practicing in a way that leaves them feeling open and free, knowing that how they practice becomes how they perform.

Sanity is working toward artistic excellence and, at the same time, letting go of rigid control over the outcome of any creative act. Knowing that the quality of the means creates the quality of the end, the sane answer to trying hard is trying easy.

Optimizing a part at the expense of the whole is a fair description of the shoulder-rest drawer. Each new rest is an attempt to fix one part, and the whole keeps answering by putting the strain somewhere else.

I have a tensegrity model that shows why. It’s a small structure of sticks held together by nothing but elastic, and when I grip one side and squeeze, the tension doesn’t stay where my hand is. It travels through the whole thing.

Some of the elastics go tight, others go slack, and there’s no way to predict which. Your body is a web like that, so complex and multidimensional that a whole-body pattern of tension can surface almost anywhere. A violinist can hurt in either hand, either shoulder, the neck or the back, and where it lands has less to do with the violin than with the web.

That’s why treating the spot that hurts keeps failing for tension and overuse. Physical therapy has its place, and when I broke my leg a decade ago I was very glad to have it. A tension habit is a different kind of problem.

Rest leaves the habit exactly where it was, so it’s waiting for you when you come back. Strengthening can strengthen the habit along with the muscle. Stretching treats tension as a flexibility problem, when what you’re dealing with is the quality of your movement, a behavior.

The mechanical model only works if there’s no choice happening in your body, and there is one: the habit says try harder, clamp down, brace, and you make that choice without knowing you’ve made it.

Habits are useful for exactly that reason. If you had to think through tying your shoes every time you left the house, you’d never get out the door. The very thing that makes them useful is what makes them so hard to change, because you’ve stopped being aware of what you’re doing, even when it hurts.

The useful question is when. Tension arises at a handful of critical moments in your music, the same ones every time: the first note, the shift, the high note, the leap. Recently I worked with a professional pianist and singer whose two moments turned out to be the very start of a song and a high passage she’d been bracing for. She rated her tension at four out of ten. Then she paused for a few seconds right before each moment, doing nothing at all, and went on. The start came in at a two and the high passage at zero.

I call that the Magic Pause. In the pause you’re literally doing nothing, simply waiting, not even trying to relax, because trying to relax is a contradiction, one that can leave you more tense and frustrated than before. What you’re waiting for is the anticipatory tension of the habit, the tension that arises before you even start, to subside.

Left unattended, it carries straight into the playing. The bad news is that you usually can’t stop it from arising in the first place; the good news is that you can outwait it. That usually takes three to five seconds, and once it has let go, you have a choice about how to continue that you didn’t have a moment ago.

This is close to the old advice to slow down and practice the hard spots, with a different reason underneath. Treating the hard spots as places that need more effort leads to more tension, and you can play them at half tempo and stay just as stiff. The point of practicing is to make things easy.

Repetition gets you part of the way there, since almost anything gets easier if you repeat it often enough, and repetition without awareness can just as easily ingrain the tension further. The rest of the way takes practicing ease itself. Playing slowly is for more than a better chance at the right notes: it’s how you bring awareness and choice into the moments where the habit used to decide for you.

Most of that pausing belongs in the practice room, where you can take long pauses. On stage you can tuck a pause into a rest, or the middle or end of a long note, or use what I call a micro pause, one so short only you know it’s there. How you practice becomes how you perform. If you practice your tension, you perform with tension. If you practice ease, you perform with ease.

It helps to remember where you started. Watch a small child move and you’ll see perfect ease and perfect posture, and nobody had to stretch or strengthen them into it. That is still your natural state. The bracing, the pain and the drawer full of gear are interference layered over it, much of it learned along the way, and none of it is who you are.

Here’s something to try this week. Take one passage that gives you trouble and play it once, paying attention to your body instead of the notes. Mark the two places where you tighten and give each one a number from zero to ten.

Then play it again, and right before each of those spots, stop and wait until the brace lets go before you continue. Rate them again, and ask yourself the question I ask my students: did you get the notes, and was it free? If the numbers don’t move the first day, nothing has gone wrong. You’ve found the two moments that matter, and that is where the work starts.

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

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