Who would not wish to play a musical instrument, to have at our command a piece of technology that outshone all others for centuries. We choose an instrument–a horn, a wind or a woodwind, a viol, a piano, or a drum. We learn how readily they play. We sense their potential. Shiny or somewhat worn, we hold history in our hands and begin to play.

After some experimental toots, squeaks, bangs, and bleats, we realize the road ahead is long. This technological marvel will require some serious technique. We long for control and get stiffness. We long for accuracy and get rigidity. We long for fluency and make mistakes. Quickly, we become discouraged. We find a patient, skilled teacher, and we soon learn that the instrument we must first free is the instrument of our selves.

We may have imagined that we are in control of most everything in our lives, only to learn that we are not in control of so much as our index finger. And here we come to our subject. At every point in our practice and endeavor there is help within us, in our instincts and our propensities for play and oscillation. To put these instincts in play for professional and amateur musicians, in the teaching and learning of a musical instrument, is the purpose of this article. There will be more articles to follow along these lines. Watch this space.

Instinctive action

We’re walking along at a good clip and come to a sudden stop; a baby carriage is pushed in front of us, a man with a crutch steps into our path. We need to think fast. How do I apply the brakes? How do I come to a stop without falling forward? How can I stay upright? Alright, no, we don’t do any of that. Our lizard brain, the cerebellum does that for us. It is responsible for all those refined postural adjustments. They are instinctive. 

Instinctive or knot

We’re not going to argue here about what is and what is not instinctive, rather, accept as instinctive those corrections and actions governed by the cerebellum, that small organ lying atop the brain stem, just below and behind the cerebrum. Though it be small, the cerebellum accounts for approximately 50% of the total neurons in the brain. It is the CEO, the chief executive officer, while the upper brain, the Board of Directors, mulls the CEO’s instincts lest his or her actions get the firm in trouble.

Celebrate your cerebellum

Let’s celebrate the mighty little fellow, the cerebellum. Let’s see if we can capture, bad choice of words perhaps, the elan, the rhythmicity, and economy of those movements, and bring them to our more highly skilled actions, the teaching and playing of our instruments. The cerebellum would have you launch movement, the upper brain would have you guide it. Guiding your bow across your strings, your sticks to your drum, or one note to the other, is the surest way to kill both music and your musical instincts. It is drudgery both for you and your listener. Lesson? Don’t guide. Let, launch, and liberate.

Even players of high proficiency–professionals–may find in the propensities of the cerebellum, lessons in playing. If your playing is getting stale, your abilities temporarily capped, look for activities that break the containment defined top to bottom by your fixed neck, your folded arms, your contracted shoulders, stiffened hips, locked knees, and rigid ankles. You instrument is telling their story. Break your shell. Awaken your expansive instincts. Let, launch, and liberate. Nothing breaks that shell more readily than squatting. Squatting, you say?

Let me lay a word on you: Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner’s term for his operas, complete works of art, he called them. The squat is the Gesamtkunstwerk of the human body. It speaks to the whole of us. It liberates the hips and their underlayment, the all-important perineal diaphragm. It flexes the knees that are so often locked, the ankles too. It relieves the neck of its postural fixity. Squatting puts the whole of you in play. It tunes the instrument that plays your instrument.

Our forefathers and mothers squatted

Our prehistoric forefathers and mothers, those who originated in North Africa, strode through great open fields of grass, savannahs they’re called. They hunted and were hunted. A noise, a rustle of grass, and they shot their knees forward; they bent at their ankles; they cantilevered their torso over their hips. They squatted. Squatting is instinctive. Can we marshal instinctive behaviors to help us in our play? Yes, we can.

In your practice room

Are you too old, too rigid, too stiff to squat? Nonsense. If you can comfortably and easily sit, you can comfortably squat. Sitting, in fact, is an interrupted squat. Likely, there’s a chair in your practice room. Before you play, squat, and let the chair interrupt you. Sit and stand several times if you’re game. Make it a part of your practice. Perhaps you’ll need to put your instrument together, take it from its case. Put your self together first. Make sitting and squatting a part of your practice form and readiness.

 In sitting and in squatting, it’s your knees that take you into movement. Imagine that you’re in a pool at waist heigh, and a full, gentle current of water comes from behind you at the knees. You’ll move with and in a wave, knees coming forward and bending, not at your imaginary waist, but where your leg joins the pelvis. It’s an instinctive folding of the self to reduce your height, and if you can relax the neck while doing so, you’re golden.

It is necessary to be a bit gentler in sitting than in squatting. Your derriere is going to be meeting wood or metal. Launching, of a ball or of your ankles, knees, and hips into motion, even though they may be instinctive, can have degrees of velocity, scope, and quality. Were that not so, every squat would be the same and every pitched ball would arrive at the same speed and position over the plate.

Forms of the squat

There are forms that we can assume in squatting. There is an athletic squat, the thigh at or near a right angle to the foreleg. It is for gaining strength and not of so much interest here. Another form, more for flexibility than strength, is the toddler’s squat, the derriere coming much nearer the floor, the knees comfortably apart but not widely spread, the feet under the knees at the same angle. That is our ancestral squat, alive in aboriginal peoples today, and the one of interest here.

Ankles and neck

There is vital connection between your feet and your head. Your ankle is the neck of your foot, your foot the ankle of the leg. From my good friend and colleague Mark Josefsberg comes this advice, walk as though you were drunk from the ankles down. See how that freedom radiates through hips and torso. 

Relax your neck until it tips down to your chest from your atlas, your top cervical vertebra. Your first cervical vertebra lives up there in the neck’s penthouse, between your ear lobes. Relax your neck so that your head comes down to your chest. Let your head rise by tiny increments and relax it again to let it come to the chest, each increment of greater height until your head is balanced on top of your atlas  with the most minimal effort.

Tension is telling

Imagine the jointedness of your instrument, an art, an assemblage handed down over centuries to enhance its resonance. What if the joints of your instrument became too rigid, stiffened with age and disuse, its resonance compromised. You can apply that idea to your body. 

It may be interesting to note here that play, in a mechanical sense, is oscillation. Our goal is to bring our bodies into play, into oscillation so that our instruments can do the same, oscillate and resonate. Tension is telling. Excessive tenseness in the body is transferred to your instrument and must be overcome by greater effort before our actions are  transformed into tone. Truly the instrument you’re playing is that of your self. How shall we free it? Instinctive play is a part of that answer.

More still on your squatting

Now, add something to your squat. Starting with your arms at your side, launch your arms outwardly and openly as you move into a squat. Toss tennis balls if they are on hand. With your fingers circling around the ball from above launch your hand as though you were flinging water from your fingertips.  String players, others as well, intersperse this play with your playing and see what you notice. 

Eagles

Be an eagle not the squirrel clutching at a nut. Can I injure myself in flinging my arms like that? Highly unlikely, in that a truly launched movement engages both agonist and antagonist muscles that instinctively act to limit your range of motion. However, the movement most never be violent. As in most things, rhythm is key. Rhythm is release.

That’s so fly

Let your squats and flying arms begin to connect with one another, each squatting movement demanding another.  Let rhythm take you into rising and squatting, into launching your arms, into flight. Each squat begets another. Your goal, to put the whole of yourself in play, in oscillation. It was the legendary teacher Pearl Ausubel who perfected this exercise. She married Alexander Technique to instinct and inspired my purpose here. Each moment, each squat begets another until movement becomes itself. “Rhythm is periodicity.”

The goal

My goal is to take this work into your classroom, to help those whose response to the demands of constant practice and play has been excessive tension, concern, and dysfunction. Together we’ll find in rhythm, instinct, and release, a way to begin anew each day, to undo the tyranny of habit. You’ll learn this way of working and you’ll want to teach it. You’ll count it as the best musically educational experience of your life. 

A week in your school, a modest $2500 plus my travel costs, or two sessions in one day $1500, plus my travel and lodging. Whatever the conditions, we’ll make it work. You owe this remarkable experience to yourselves and your students. Let’s play. 

Classes in the last 12 months have been conducted for University of Southern Mississippi, State University of New York:  Broome, and under the auspices of Music Teachers National Association, at Florida State University. 

Photo: Dadamwilson, Spiral Saxophone Quartet , Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International