Performance Archives - Page 7 of 9

Belly breathing vs chest breathing: why it’s a fake battle

Today’s post talks about the belly breathing backlash, and why I think we fall into a trap when we want to compare it to other ‘forms of breathing’.

I think it is fair to say that I encountered some resistance to my article last week on belly breathing. A small number unsubscribed from my email list, and I had a number of people (none of them singing teachers, by the way) wish to take issue with me over my characterisation of belly breathing.

The gist of many of the comments I have had rest on the creation of an either/or pair. Either we belly breathe, or we chest breathe. Either we do diaphragmatic breathing, or we do clavicular breathing. On rare occasions we may do both, but only in extreme circumstances, with the understanding that we are endangering our sound quality.

Hm.

If there’s one thing I have learned from reading FM Alexander, it is to be wary of either/or thinking. Alexander describes this as going from one extreme to the other:

“They are, in fact, too constricted in their mental attitude to give play to their imagination. From one extreme they have flown to the other, and so have missed the way of the great middle course…” *

What if, in our human desire for either/or extremes, we have created concepts of breathing that are too rigid in conception, and lead us to make distinctions that limit our ability to be flexible? What if there really isn’t such a thing as ‘belly breathing’ or ‘chest breathing’?

The evidence.

I’ve been doing a lot of extra reading** on all the different types of breathing people have mentioned. From my research, it seems to be the case that:

The diaphragm contracts, pushing the abdominal contents down. They have to go somewhere, and can’t go back (because of the spine) or down (pelvis in the way), so they go frontways instead.
This creates a pressure change between the cavity occupied by the lungs and the outside atmosphere. Air rushes in to equalise the pressure. The lungs fill. This is breathing in.
Now things get more complicated. If you’re lounging around in front of the TV, you probably aren’t going to need much oxygen. So your diaphragm won’t move much, and your lungs won’t fill very far. Therefore, your ribs and chest probably won’t move much, certainly not enough to trouble your intercostal muscles (they live between your ribs).
However, if you’re singing long phrases from Handel or Bach, you’re going to need more air. So your brain tells your diaphragm to get moving, and organises the intercostals to move, too. Everything is on the move, like in this image kindly supplied by Bill Conable.

The point here? You don’t, generally speaking, directly control what is going on. Your brain takes care of that for you, depending on what the activity is that you’re engaged in. Alexander compares it to a king, or the controller of a well-run office. If the office is running well, the controller doesn’t need to micro-manage every bit of filing.*** Similarly, if our mind and body are running smoothly, we don’t need to tell our diaphragms how far to contract!

A take-away point, and a challenge:

Try not to indulge in either/or thinking. You might be missing a wonderful wide middle path.
What would happen if you didn’t focus on your breathing while singing or speaking? What if you focused on something else, then let your brain take care of the details for you? What else could you think about that would be helpful?

* FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the Irdeat Edition, p.84. Or here: “The human creature continues to rush from one extreme to the other on the ‘end-gaining’ principle in his attempts at reform or ‘physical’ improvement…”, in Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, p.393.
** Contact me if you’d like a book list. For a good intro, go to this University of Leeds lecture transcript.
*** in Man’s Supreme Inheritance, p.60.

Why belly breathing is bunkum: the Alexander Technique perspective

Breathing is one of the most talked-about areas of concern for my students. Half are convinced that they aren’t breating properly. The other half have been taught all sort of fascinating breathing ‘facts’ and systems, and are convinced that they are breathing extremely well.

It’s the last group that I worry about most.

If you’re a singer, instrumentalist, actor, or yoga practitioner, you’ll have come across almost as many theories of how to breathe ‘correctly’ as you’ll have come across teachers. Anyone and everyone has an opinion on it, and many will happily sell you any number of lessons/products/systems so that you can do it better.

But… I’m going to set myself up as a target for what I’m about to write. I believe that a lot of these systems (and, frankly, a lot of what is taught in acting and singing schools) is a load of bunkum based on poor anatomical knowledge and woolly metaphor. Here are a couple of classics, and the problems I have with them.

Belly breathing.You can’t breathe into your belly – your lungs are nowhere near there, and your diaphrgm is positioned between your abdominal cavity and your lungs and keeps them separate. Even if the teachers know the lungs aren’t in the belly, I’ve met enough students who think they are to know that there’s something going astray in the teaching here.
Diaphragm breathing. I don’t understand what this is. I’ve looked at videos on YouTube, but they don’t help. Breathing in the everyday sense is the result of changes in pressure between the inside of your lungs and air outside your body. The diaphragm contracts and pushes the abdominal contents down and out of the way. I’ve seen no anatomical text that says that you can directly control your diaphragm muscle.
Chest breathing is bad, and shoulders shouldn’t raise. This is a pernicious piece of falsehood. I have heard students say that movement in the chest region is an indication of poor breathing. But the lungs are in the chest – it has to move! And if the chest moves, it is likely that the shoulder region will move a little too, simply because it sits over the top of the chest region.

So what can you do to improve your breathing?

Think. FM Alexander would want you to bring the power of your reasoning intelligence to bear on the problem. In 1910 he wrote that the deep breathing exercises and physical training of his own time “show an almost criminal neglect of rational method.” * I think FM would want us to look for what is rational in anything we are taught.
Know what you’ve got. Learn a bit of anatomy. Find out where your lungs really are. Knowledge is power – if you have a little knowledge of where things are, you are less likely to be bewitched by fine-sounding nonsense.
Work more generally. It is really tempting to want to concentrate on the one area that we believe is problematic. In FM’s time, a whole generation of children was taught a series of exercises that focussed on breathing in, but paid no attention to breathing out. But even more than that, because each part of us is connected to the other parts, it is highly likely that if there’s an imbalance in one area, it is likely to be related to an imbalance somewhere else. My students often experience their most dramatic improvements in breathing while working on something apparently unrelated, such as walking or lifting a tea cup.
Let go of metaphors and images. They’re helpful for a little while, but then they can just hold you back. One of my students recently had a breakthrough when she realised she had been taking the term ‘ribcage’ too literally – the ribs aren’t like iron bars, and do in fact move a lot during respiration.

What are your major bugbears with breathing? Do you have any breakthroughs to report, or funny images you want to lay to rest?

* FM Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.88.

Simple Steps to Successful Music Practice with Alexander Technique

This post is about why, as a musician, I have had trouble with the concept of practice; about wise words on the subject from FM Alexander and a sports psychologist, and some steps I’m trialling to improve my practice technique.

I started playing recorder when I was six. I loved it right from the start, but I was very inconsistent in my practice regime. To be blunt, I didn’t have one. I got by on a bit of natural talent (a very little bit), luck, and the odd guilt-provoked practice binge session. It was not a great way to get by!

The discipline of practice has been fascinating to me ever since. How do other people do it? What are they actually doing? Do long hours in front of the music stand really make a difference in and of themselves? It was, therefore, with some excitement that I read an article by a sports/music psychologist Dr Noa Kageyama entitled ‘How Many Hours a Day Should You Practice?’ What fascinated me was that Dr Kageyama took some pains to tease out exactly what it is that we are doing when we practice.

You will probably laugh when I tell you that it was a major realisation to me the day I realised that practice is actually a skill. It is something that needs to be done systematically and with a degree of reasoning and planning to be successful.

This is revelatory because I wasn’t taught that way. As a child learning how to play, I was told to practice, but wasn’t taught how to do it. It was just something that you did (or in my case, did as little as I could get away with!) Therefore I did it ineffectually.

In The Use of the Self, FM Alexander says that ‘willing to do’ something is all very well, but if you are directing your energy in the wrong direction, applying exertion and willpower will only speed you further along the wrong path.*

This was certainly the case with me. Because I didn’t know how to practice, I made fundamental errors, like going back to the beginning of a piece every time I made a mistake. The result was that I knew the beginnings of my music really well, but not the endings! Playing also became a stressful activity, because the playing of the music would get harder and harder and more stressful as I went along. It is very stressful beginning a piece of music when you don’t know if you are going to be able to make it through to the end.

If you practice poorly or with little strategy, you are likely to store up problems for yourself in the long run.

The solution? Teach people how to practice.

This certainly wasn’t done when I was a kid. Based on my experiences of my son’s music lessons, I am not convinced the situation has changed much. I don’t have any information, sadly, on the current state of pedagogy for childhood music education, and what it has to say about the issue of practice. (If you know anything, PLEASE contact me!) But from my reading so far, I can give these tips for the adults. They’re things that I’m experimenting with at the moment.

1.Goals. Have a goal for each practice session.

2. Keep it short. Dame Nellie Melba said beginning singers should only spend 10 minutes actually singing at any one time. I think that is really good advice for any musician who is grappling with the concept of how to practice. Even 10 minutes can be a long time to devote one’s whole mind to a task.

3. Practice without the instrument. Look at the music. Listen to other people play it. Clap the rhythms. Write out the words. Say them as poetry. Experiment!

4. Do it regularly. Do some every day. Equally, don’t beat yourself up if there is a day where you can’t. Julia Cameron suggests making a deal with yourself to do a certain number of days out of the week. I try for 5 days out of seven.

Do you have any other tips? Tell me about them!

*FM Alexander, The Use of the Self in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.440.
Image by nuchylee from freedigitalphotos.net

Steps to conquer stage fright: stop focusing on results

This is a series about conquering stage fright. First, we talked about the importance of knowing yourself. Then, we talked about the fear factor. Third, we talked about creating positive experiences to help fight the panic. Fourth, we looked at the importance of knowing what you’re doing. This week, we talk about the danger of focusing on results.

I have a number of students who are actors or musicians. They come to me typically because they feel that there is something that is holding them back from performing with the ease and freedom that they desire. A typical lesson goes something like this:

[student plays/performs brilliantly.]

Me: How did you do?
Student: Okay, I guess.
Me: What made it okay?
Student: Well, I didn’t hit that note quite the way I wanted, and this phrase didn’t quite work, and I think I could have out more expression into the piece, and my tone wasn’t as good as it could have been…
Me: Hm. But apart from those things, how did you do?
[Student looks puzzled.]
Me: Did you successfully carry out your plan?
Student: Ummm…

Now, the point here isn’t that the student is being hard on themselves. (They are, by the way.) The point isn’t particularly that they are attuned only to notice negative things about their performance. (Though this is a common problem with performers.)

The problem here is that the student is focused on the negative results. They are listening to the results – the by-product – of a process. When I ask about the process they were using to get their results, they just look puzzled.

If you are thinking and worrying and focusing on the way the performance sounds while you are in the middle of performing, you are focusing on something that has already happened. It is gone. You have no control over it any more. But if you’re thinking about the sound that is already out there, I can pretty much guarantee there’s one thing that you’re not thinking about.

The process that leads to the sound.

In other words, once you start judging your performance while you’re doing it, you effectively give up control over everything that is to come. And I hope you’ll agree with me that this doesn’t sound like a great idea.

So try keeping your mind on what is useful: your plan and your process. Spend the time working out what you want to achieve, and then focus on that. Block your ears, if you have to, just so that you get a sense of what it might be like to give up the addiction to mid-performance criticism.

Comfortingly, FM Alexander says this:

“the individual comes to rely upon his “means-whereby,” and does not become disturbed by wondering whether the activities concerned will be right or wrong. Why should he, seeing that the confidence with which he proceeds with his task is a confidence born of experiences…”

If we keep working on the process, results will come, and we won’t need to worry about them or listen out for them, because we’ll know that they are there. What a wonderful comforting thought.

Do you keep your mind on the process, or does your inner critic drown out your plan? Tell me about it in the comments.

Photograph by Kevin Leighton.

Steps to conquer stage fright: give yourself time

This is a series about conquering stage fright. First, we talked about the importance of knowing yourself. Then, we talked about the fear factor. Third, we talked about creating positive experiences to help fight the panic. Fourth, we looked at the importance of knowing what you’re doing. Last week, we examined how our general state of wellbeing (use of ourselves) affects our performance.

This week, we’re giving ourselves time.

Today in my singing lesson, I was reminded of what is possibly the greatest luxury any performer can give themselves.

Time.

Time is a slippery customer. It can seem to move so quickly. It can feel as though it is in someone else’s control. When I asked my students at Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama what they found hardest about doing auditions, feeling rushed came high on the list. My students felt as though they were not able to give themselves the time and space to give the calibre of performance they were capable of giving.

Note this: they felt as though they couldn’t give themselves time.

No one said they couldn’t. No one told them not to take a second to breathe. It was a choice that they made in reaction to the given circumstances (such as the general atmosphere in the room).

Allowing oneself a moment to stop is a fundamental tool within the Alexander Technique. When FM was trying to solve his vocal hoarseness, he realised that:

“if ever I was to be able to change my habitual use … it would be necessary for me to make the experience of receiving a stimulus to speak and of refusing to do anything immediately in response.”*

FM realised that if he didn’t give himself this pause, he was far more likely to speak using his body in the more habitual way that caused the hoarseness. If he received the stimulus but refused to do anything immediately in response, he gave himself the chance to put his new reasoned process into action.

So give yourself time.

Stand up. Pause. Then begin the speech.

Finish the sentence. Let it be finished. Then start the next.

Finish the musical phrase. Stop the breath. Allow the body to breathe in. Then sing.

If you stop, you give yourself a priceless gift: the chance to choose what happens next. So what will you choose?

*FM Alexander, The Use of the Self in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p. 424.
Image by Just2shutter from FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Steps to conquer stage fright: general wellbeing matters

This is a series about conquering stage fright. First, we talked about the importance of knowing yourself. Then, we talked about the fear factor. Then we talked about creating positive experiences to help fight the panic. Last week, we looked at the importance of knowing what you’re doing. This week, we’ll examine how our general state of wellbeing (use of ourselves) affects our performance.

I am a big fan of snooker, and one of the highlights of my year is the Snooker World Championships – 17 days of non-stop snooker action. I think many snooker fans will agree that one of the great excitements of the past few years has been the anticipation of seeing how player Ronnie O’Sullivan is going to fare in the tournament.

Ronnie is generally acknowledged to be the most naturally gifted player to ever pick up a snooker cue. But he is also widely acknowledged to have not achieved as many tournament wins as his prodigious talent would have suggested he might. Critics suggest that O’Sullivan’s temperamental streak leads to a lack of confidence.*

When Ronnie O’Sullivan won his first World Championship in 2001, part of his strategy for maintaining his focus through the long matches was by working on his general fitness. He took up running, and watched his diet and his sleep patterns carefully. He found that taking care of himself more generally led to a change in attitude at the snooker table.**

Why your general use/wellbeing matters.

FM Alexander wouldn’t have been surprised that Ronnie’s snooker abilities improved when he took care of his general wellbeing. FM wrote:

“the success of any particular process … must depend, primarily, on the general condition of psycho-physical development and control present…”

And he goes on:

“By chance or good luck a man may make a good stroke without having attained to a good standard in the general use of himself, but he can never be reasonably certain of repeating it, and the experiences associated with this state of uncertainty do not make for the growth of confidence.”***

In other words, if we want to be good at playing flute, or singing, or speaking in public, we need to pay attention to what we do with our minds and bodies more generally. If we are generally predisposed, as Ronnie O’Sullivan seems to be, to being hypercritical of ourselves, then that tendency will be exacerbated in our specific activity. If we are generally inclined to keep our shoulder muscles tense, then I can confidently predict that we’ll have them extra-tight just before we make that big speech.

This means that we can’t just think of conquering our stage fright when we’re performing. It is a whole-life process of change.

Here are a couple of questions that might get you started on the journey to improving your general psycho-physical condition.

What attitude do you have to life generally? Ae you a relaxed individual, or are you a little on the anxious side?
Think about the areas of your body that are most tense before you perform. Take a mental check on them now. How relaxed (or not) are they ordinarily?

Today, how can you move beyond your usual state of being?

* See the Wikipedia entry on Ronnie for references.
** He talks about this at length in his autobiography, Ronnie: The Autobiography of Ronnie O’Sullivan (co-authored with Simon Hattenstone, Orion, 2004).
*** FM Alexander, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual in the Irdeat Complete Edition, p.341.

Steps to conquer stage fright: Doing the work

This is a series about conquering stage fright. First, we talked about the importance of knowing yourself. Then, we talked about the fear factor. Last week, we talked about creating positive experiences to help fight the panic. This week, we’re looking at the importance of knowing what you’re doing.

Some of you may know that I’ve been in Australia for the past few weeks. Tonight on the news, there was a report about the preparations of Australia’s leading artistic gymnast Lauren Mitchell for the 2012 Olympics. After winning gold medals at the 2010 World Championships, Mitchell said she immediately began preparing her routines for London 2012.

She has been working on them exclusively ever since.

Sometimes we forget the levels of training and dedication that experts devote to their pursuits. In order to win a gold medal, Lauren Mitchell is working every day to make sure that she knows every split second of the routines she will perform later this year. And I am willing to bet that she is working on two different fronts:

The specifics of each routine – the protocols for each move she is going to make. FM Alexander would call this the “means-whereby.”
Her general condition, or the means whereby Miss Mitchell uses her body. (Don’t worry if the distinction seems tricky – this bit is for the Alexander teachers out there!)

Today I want to talk about the specifics – we’ll save the more general for next week.

If there is one lesson to take from Lauren Mitchell, it is this. Excellence takes work. If we want to be good at something, we need to do the work. For Miss Mitchell, it means breaking down her routines into split seconds, rehearsing each and every movement. It means making sure that she knows every movement so well that she barely needs to think about them at all.

So if I am to perform a new piece of music, I should know every note intimately. If I am giving an after-dinner speech, I should know not just every joke, but the position of every comma.

How well do you know the piece you are about to perform? What difference does it make to your nerves when you know it really well? Let me know in the comments.

*In the chapter I am looking at from Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, ‘Uncontrolled Emotions and Fixed Prejudices’, you will see that FM uses both ways of writing the words ‘means whereby’, and he seems to make a clear distinction between the two uses. See Irdeat Complete Edition, pp.341-2.

Steps to conquer stage fright: Know yourself!

A week or two ago, I did something I haven’t done in a fair while (and no, I won’t tell you just how many years!). I performed an instrumental solo in public.

It was only a local festival competition, and the audience wasn’t large. But it was a big occasion for me. For me, it was proof that I had finally found the key to the anxieties that I used to suffer before every performance. I was a stage fright sufferer.

And now I’m not.

Stage fright is a big problem, whether you’re a musician, a famous actor, or faced with giving the best man’s speech at your friend’s wedding. In fact, in the UK I believe that speaking in public ranks even above death as the thing that most frightens the general public!

In the next few weeks, I want to share with you the things that I have learned through studying the Alexander Technique that have helped me to conquer my stage fright. And for the first week, I’m going to start with the principle from FM Alexander’s work that makes it all possible.

Know thyself.

There’s a wonderful sentence in the introduction of FM Alexander’s final book. It’s towards the end of the chapter, and the unwary would find it slide past their eyes very easily. But it is pure gold. Here it is.

“I think I may confidently predict that those who are sufficiently interested in the findings I have recorded … will find their outlook and understanding … so completely changed that they will see that knowledge of the self is fundamental to all other knowledge”

Alexander makes three major claims here.

1. His work changes students’ outlook and understanding

2. His work is all about knowledge of the self

3. Knowledge of the self is prior to all other knowledge

This is important to stage fright sufferers because we tend to look for external fixes to our problems. We try imagining that the audience are in their underwear. We try deep breathing exercises. We walk; we pace. Some of us resort to alcohol to calm us down. Above all, we try to deal with the awful thought that our anxiety is all our own fault because we aren’t courageous enough.

This isn’t true. We don’t suffer from a lack of courage. We suffer from a lack of knowledge of ourselves: how we tick as humans. We need to know about adrenalin and the fight/flight response. We need to know about discipline. We need to know about attitude of mind.

And those are some of the topics that I’ll be dealing with in future weeks, because these are all areas where the Alexander Technique has helped me.

And does it help performers? Just listen to Dame Nellie Melba, pre-eminent soprano of the early years of the twentieth century:

“When we come to know that certain actions produce certain results, and when we can, at will, perform those actions, uncertainty is removed, and uncertainty is at the root of most of our fears. In singing, as in all else, the precept “Know thyself” is of the utmost importance.”

So. Do you know yourself? Do you know how you get your results?

Image by scottchan from FreeDigitalphotos.net

Be Persistent! Stickability, Creativity and the Alexander Technique

This is the fifth and final post in a short series on what FM Alexander can teach us about steps to creativity. The first post was called Make Mistakes! The second post was called Make Decisions! The third post was called Make Allowances! The fourth post was called Be Methodical!

En route to South Korea (and ultimately Australia), I found a wonderful documentary on the airline entertainment system last night. It was about Jascha Heifetz, the great violinist. According to the documentary, after living and touring in America for a few years, the young Heifetz began to enjoy the trappings of fame – cameras, cars, parties – and moved away from the highly regimented practice regime that he had previously followed. But after a particularly poor review by a journalist called Henderson, in which the reporter suggested that The performer was short-changing his audience, Heifetz was so shocked that he made massive changes in his lifestyle almost overnight. He became, once more, the consummate professional and utterly brilliant virtuoso.

The story fascinated me because it reminded me of another key characteristic of the great creative minds: persistence.

Heifetz didn’t quit. He didn’t ignore the criticism. He took the setback in his stride, accepted the criticism, and acted upon it.

In a similar way, FM Alexander faced difficulties in his efforts to find a solution to his vocal problems. He had spent months observing and experimenting. But after he had tried putting his head forward and up but still found that he could not prevent his habitual misuse of himself, he wrote this line:

“I now had proof of one thing at least, that all my efforts up till now to improve the use of myself in reciting had been misdirected.”

This sounds like a setback to me! But Alexander, like Heifetz, didn’t give up. He keep thinking, reasoning, observing and experimenting. He went right back to the beginning and started again. He worked really hard.

Setbacks are normal, no matter what our field of expertise. But our creativity demands that we overcome whatever seems to block our path. In fact, as with Heifetz and Alexander, the setbacks can often become a spur to even greater accomplishment. The key is not to give up.

What obstacles are challenging your creativity? And how are you going to spur yourself on?

Be Methodical! Planning, Creativity and Alexander Technique

This is the fourth post in a short series on what FM Alexander can teach us about steps to creativity. The first post was called Make Mistakes! The second post was called Make Decisions! Last week’s post was called Make Allowances!

I’ve been having an argument with some of my teenage students at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama lately. I have been trying to teach them about the usefulness of planning, how it has a central place in Alexander’s work, and how it can help them achieve their creative goals. They don’t like the idea of planning. They think it will stifle their creativity. “But it will destroy our spontaneity!” they insist.

So… What’s the relationship between planning and creativity? Does being methodical bring results? Or does it ruin your spontaneity?

FM and the mirror

Being methodical and going about things in a stepwise manner is at the very root of the work we call the Alexander Technique. When FM Alexander decided to find out the cause of his vocal problems and first stood in front of his mirror, he went about things in a stepwise manner. He decided to watch himself first in ordinary speaking. He knew that he was suffering when he tried to recite, so he looked at his way of going about ordinary speaking first, so he had something to compare to. He saw nothing unusual. Then he watched himself while reciting, and saw that he did things with the relationship of his head with his body that didn’t seem helpful.

But did he stop there? No! He watched himself in ordinary speaking again. And he saw the same changes with his head-body relationship, but smaller.

Now, this is a classic example of a methodical thinker. FM wasn’t satisfied when he found the difference between ordinary speaking mk.1 and reciting. He tried ordinary speaking again – just to be certain.

And FM’s creation of his work is full of this sort of methodical thinking. He would do some observations, gathering as much information as he could. Then he would have a good think. And then he would try an experiment, and give himself time to really work on it. Then he would go back to the mirror, to check what was going on.

Being methodical didn’t destroy Alexander’s creativity. It gave it a framework. Because he was so methodical in his observations, he ws able to make reasoned, targeted experiments. Because he had a framework, his creativity had a direction and a purpose. It wsn’t trial and error. There was room for spontaneity precisely because he ‘knew the territory’ so well.

The framework

Do you have a framework built around your creative experimentation? If not, then try Alexander’s:

Observe. Cover all the bases.
Have a good think.
Experiment!
Observe again

Try using this framework. You may find, like my young actors who gave it a go to try to prove me wrong, that it really does help you to be not just more organised, but more effectively spontaneous too.

Let me know what you think in the comments!

Image by nuttakit from FreeDigitalphotos.net