Step into the transformative realm of the Mindfulness for Musicians experience, a laboratory where we elevate your musical journey through the profound effectiveness of Alexander Technique for musicians.
Alan Bowers
Alexander Technique for Musicians
Welcome, I am your host, Alan Bowers, an artisan dedicated to unlocking the potential of the human body and its boundless capabilities. Within the harmonious embrace of this class, I've crafted a space where musicians and vocalists enjoy transformative exploration.
Using Alexander Technique as a foundation, I have developed a body of highly replicable exercises and musician focused philosophy that guides you to uncover your unique human economy—a journey that unveils the optimal physical and mental engagement for musical expression.
I work with organizations, music clubs, colleges and universities dedicated to empowering their instrumentalists and vocalists not just to play music, but to embody a symphony of mindfulness, precision, and unparalleled performance. This is where music meets mindfulness, and your artistic journey reaches new heights.
Alexander Technique for Musicians
Cultivate mindfulness in movement.
As a vocalist or instrumentalist learning Alexander Technique, you’ll move differently, with greater direction, more significance - making each movement count. You’ll learn to move by expanding, rather than by contracting. You’ll learn that bodily inefficiencies, even tiny holds, reflect in your play and song.
You’ll discover exercises that are demonstrable and highly efficient. You’ll experience them in class and own them for life. Some of you may teach them and distinguish your pedagogy.
Together using Alexander Technique for musicians, we create games, exercises, and opportunities for mindful touch. You’ll learn that sometimes less really is more. Your teacher may notice too.
Breathing techniques for singers and instrumentalists
Breathe mindfully for performance and play.
Like the student mentioned above, using Alexander Technique, you’ll also breathe in a new way. You’ll learn that we expand to breathe, not breathe to expand, a subtle difference that is life-altering. We’ll settle your breathing for singing and playing once and for all.
We’ll expound several physiological truths that will undo nostrums, misuse, and over-doing. You’ll breathe more mindfully, using your entire torso, back, thorax, abdomen, ribs. You’ll want to run from the room and teach someone!
Expand and rise with Alexander Technique
Liberate your music.
By using Alexander Technique for musicians, you’ll discover that with your singing or playing, release must predominate over control. You’ll learn that overt guidance, studied, careful movement from one position to another, is the enemy of freedom in music making.
You’ll learn that mistakes, rather than being feared, generate novel forms of the game. You’ll cultivate liberation over care, expansion over contraction, rhythm over tension.
You’ll learn that your arms can rise like the wings of magnificent birds, that you can live, play, and sing in the gesture of expansion.
Honoring space between you and your instrument
Dance with the forces of the universe.
In these classes for Alexander Technique for musicians, you will create and honor the space and matter around you, the air between you and your instrument, between you and the piano with which you share the stage. This mindfulness gives your movement gravitas.
When you take the stage or take up your instrument you are plowing air. When you move toward your instrument or bring it to your body, you and your instrument are sails in a sea of air and you can live, move, and breathe in your play. This mindfulness in performance and play allows your toward to include away, and your away to include a toward. It is a dance with your instrument, a dance with the forces of the universe, and an opportunity to cultivate the mindset of the professional.
When you honor the space between, people notice. There’s something different about you and your playing, your singing. You may share the secret or not. “Oh, me, I’m just plowing air!”
Launching as a model for all skilled movements
Mastering the balance of control.
In the Mindfulness for Musicians class you’ll learn and practice that control in the hands and throats of a musician is never overt, never a doing but always an allowing. You’ll learn too that in your singing and play, such control comes at a very high cost.
You’ll learn a highly specific exercise, that the health-giving quality of launching and release is something innate. Imagine flinging a marble with, say, your index finger. You wouldn’t guide the finger or push the marble. You would launch it as though you were flinging a crumb from your fingernail. Launching is the model for all skilled movements, especially those of the musician.
Book Mindfulness for Musicians classes today!
Empower your instrumentalists and vocalists with skills and techniques they will benefit from now and in the future.
To start the conversation, email me Alan, at:
Book Mindfulness for Musicians classes today!
Empower your instrumentalists and vocalists with skills and techniques they will benefit from now and in the future.
To start the conversation, email me Alan, at: