The Tension That Starts Before You Play
How to identify the “critical moment” that causes musician’s tension
I had a moment during my Alexander Technique teacher training that I still think about. An oboist was demonstrating her reed-carving process in front of the group. She was hunched forward, jaw tight, hands working the knife with the kind of grim determination you’d bring to defusing a bomb. She said she hated carving reeds, but it’s what oboists do.
The teacher watched for a moment and said, “When you’re carving your reeds, why don’t you think about the sound you’d like to have?”
Something shifted in the room. The oboist’s shoulders dropped. Her hands softened. Her face changed. She wasn’t suddenly in love with reed carving — but the frustration and bracing dissolved, as if someone had turned off a motor that had been running so long she’d stopped hearing it.
That was the first time I understood something that would later become central to everything I teach: the way you think can itself be the stimulus for tension… or for freedom.
I work with musicians who carry tension in their playing — tight shoulders, locked jaw, gripping hands, pain that comes and goes without clear physical cause. When they come to me, they’ve usually tried everything: physical therapy, stretching routines, ergonomic equipment, YouTube videos on “correct” posture. Some of it helped. None of it lasted.
The reason it doesn’t last is that most approaches treat tension as a physical problem with a physical solution. But what musicians experience as “tension” is almost always a coordination habit — a learned pattern of response, not a structural deficiency. And like any habit, it runs on stimulus and response.
This is where it gets interesting. Most people — and most teachers — think of the stimulus as something external. The tricky passage coming up. The conductor’s baton. The moment the bow touches the string. These are real triggers, and finding them matters. But they’re not always where the pattern begins.
Sometimes the stimulus is internal.
I was working with a violinist recently. He said his bow arm got tight when he started playing, so I had him pause right before the bow hit the string. Notice what’s happening. Let it settle.
It helped. But he was still tense.
So we went earlier. He noticed his arm tightening when his elbow reached shoulder height. I had him pause before that. Still tense. We kept walking it back. His arm was fully extended, the bow nowhere near the violin — and he was already gripping.
The trigger wasn’t the bow on the string. It wasn’t even the arm moving. It was the thought of playing. His body was responding to an intention, not an action. By the time the bow was in motion, the habit was already well underway.
This is more common than most musicians realize. The stimulus for tension can be something you want to do, something you’re about to do, or something you’re merely watching happen. I had another student who went on vacation in Europe and found herself tensing up watching a street musician play violin.
She wasn’t playing. She was standing in a crowd, listening. And her shoulders were climbing, her jaw was clenching, her hands were tightening — all from the idea of violin playing.
When I explored what was underneath with this student, we found something that goes deeper than any physical trigger. Her driving thought around music was “I want them to like me.” That purpose — seeking approval, playing to avoid judgment — colored everything. Every note was a test she could fail. And her nervous system, loyal to that story, kept bracing for impact.
I call this an inherited purpose (see chapter 5 of my book Soulforce for more on artistic purpose). It’s the story about what’s at stake when you play — a story you probably didn’t choose, but one that’s been shaping your body’s responses for years or decades. If that story says “I have to get this right to be safe,” then your body will brace before you play. It has to. It’s doing exactly what the story asks of it.
The question isn’t how to force your body to relax. The question is whether the story is actually true.
When I asked this student what she actually cared about in music — not what she was afraid of, but what drew her to it — she said something that stuck with me. She said that when she talks, she doesn’t feel like it’s magic that she can construct a sentence. But when she plays a phrase on the violin, she feels it’s magic. The vibration, the way a phrase resolves, the wonder of it.
That’s a very different purpose than “I want them to like me.” And when she connected to it — when that became the orientation rather than the fear — the anticipatory tension had less reason to grip. Not because she forced it away, but because the conditions that produced it had changed.
This is what the oboist’s teacher was doing, too. She didn’t tell her to relax. She didn’t correct her posture. She gave her a different purpose — “think about the sound you’d like to have” — and her body reorganized around it spontaneously. The tension wasn’t overcome. It became unnecessary.
If any of this sounds familiar, here’s something practical you can do right now.
The next time you sit down to practice, slow the process down. Not the playing — the preparation. Take the instrument out of the case. Set up the music stand. Tune. And pay attention. When does the narrowing start? When do you begin making a beeline for the next step, focused so hard that everything else disappears?
If you still feel tense, notice the thoughts going through your mind. Identify the exact moment when you get tense and ask yourself what you are thinking about or what you are paying attention to.
That’s your critical moment. The point where the stimulus fires and the habit kicks in.
When you find it, pause there. Not to stretch, not to breathe deeply, nor even to try to relax. Just pause. Interrupt the loop. Give yourself a moment of choice where before there was only automatic reaction. Notice the habit. Let it settle. Then continue.
If the tension is still there after you pause, you haven’t found the actual critical moment. Go earlier. Keep walking it back — the way I did with my violinist — until you find the point where the pattern truly begins. It might be further back than you think. It might be a thought.
And if you discover that the tension is connected to a story — something about what playing means, what’s at stake, what happens if you get it wrong — know that stories can change. They aren’t facts. They’re habits of mind, and they respond to the same approach as habits of body: find the moment, pause, and choose something more true.
You don’t have to make anything happen. You just have to notice what’s already running.
If you’d like to explore this in your own playing, I offer free 15-minute discovery calls. You can book one at soulforcearts.com/discovery.
And if you haven’t already, the Tension Reset Lab is a free monthly live session where I walk through these ideas in real time with other musicians. Sign up at soulforcearts.com/tensionreset.