Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right,
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right,
B, A, B, A, Select, Neck Free!
Edit: This post has sparked a series of posts I’m sub-titling Primary Explorations. In this series, I’ll be describing what I think are some of the helpful ways to explore what FM Alexander means by ‘primary control’. There’s no end to the exploration of this mechanism, but these posts are designed to help you get a basic grasp of the coordination.
Happy Post Thanksgiving Food Coma!
I had a great visit in Alabama with family and friends and now I’m back into the NYC groove of teaching and writing. There are far fewer biscuits here (the Southern variety; not the British version) but I’ll surely find other means whereby I can stuff my mouth here this holiday season!
As you go about building your own Personal Practice Routine, you’re going to need to have a sense of what you can actually try out. FM Alexander describes 5 procedures/exercises that are wonderful ways to explore and develop your coordination. If you’ve had private lessons with me, I will have shown you how some or all of them work.
One of the keys to understanding these procedures is to have a sense of the quality of the weight of your head. If the head is pushing too far forward, this will create unnecessary tension and jam up the neck and back. The same thing could be said if the head is pushing back. So where the heck should the head be anyway?
The Use of the Self
Last week, I talked about how Alexander alluded to his personal practice routine. I think it’s a great resource; particularly his essay Evolution of the Technique. In it, Alexander describes how he noticed that his head would push back when he went to recite and that this was an unknown habit to him. One of the ways he went about exploring his coordination was to put his head forward and see how it felt.
I emphasise the word put here because many students of the Alexander Technique will do a lie down and simply think about relaxing their neck. Unfortunately, if the head is in a position that creates tension on the neck, purely imaginative thoughts will not create change. There must be a willingness to allow every fibre of yourself to move.
This might mean that you need to move and see what happens!
If you continue reading the Use of the Self, Alexander describes placing his head in the following positions to see how things feel:
Forward
Backward
Up
Down
Forward and Up
Forward and Down
Backward and Up
Backward and Down
He doesn’t mention tilting his head to the left or right in his experiments. If you notice that you tend to tilt your head in the mirror, you should add that into the mix of stuff and things that you play with!
Out of all of these things, the one that felt the most comfortable (and strange) to FM Alexander was the weight of the head in a forward and up position relative to the top of the spine. However, he found that it somehow felt stiff/wrong if he was also raising his chest (sternum) and narrowing his back (ribs). He’s quite clear in his essay.
If you want to improve your coordination, the best overall condition is to have the weight of the head forward and up while tending to prevent the chest from lifting and while tending to prevent the middle back from narrowing. There’s much more to your overall coordination than your head, neck, and back, but this is the foundation of EVERYTHING.
I believe it’s worth taking the time to understand it.
Developing a Sense of this Combination
Yesterday while playing the saxophone, I had one of those golden moments with my own development. The weight of the horn rests on my neck and it encourages my middle back to stiffen. There’s no logical need for this in healthy coordination; I just have an old habit that I’m unwinding. Logically, I know I don’t want this and I can feel that there’s more tension than I would like while playing.
My strategy for developing my coordination is pretty much is exact line with what FM suggests.
To start, I do all of my experiments with long tone exercises on the horn; I don’t try to play Charlie Parker or Bach. This allows me to coordinate the quality of myself and by extension my airflow.
From there, I have a chance to play with my head position. While I could move it into extreme positions of forward or backward, I know those hurt and don’t sound. But what about all of the micro positions in between? Am I able to move the head somewhere new and unfamiliar and still play?
The answer is that some of these positions sound like garbage and others sound good. Without the mobility and flexibility of the ribcage, the neck cannot rebalance between the weight of my head and the weight of my chest. The result is that tension will be held and the sound will be 💩 . It really takes some slow experimentation with these combinations of things to find something that tends to be good.
What Will You Explore?
In addition to moving the head forwards, backwards, up, and down, you can also bow the head down at the top joint (aka looking down towards the toes), or tilt the head up at the same joint (aka gaze up at the stars). If you can imagine that you’re wearing a hat with a wide brim, that may give you a good sense of where the tilt of your head is habitually. By gently playing with each of these placements - remember I don’t need any extreme movements per se - and allowing the ribs to be supple and voluminous, you’ll find quite of lot nuance to your own coordination**.
I may explore this while watching TV or drinking a coffee. It doesn’t take much time and it simply looks like I’m looking about the room, but it’s a great way of preventing yourself from getting stiff and seeing how the entire torso responds to a moving head.
In time, you will work your way down the entire torso and explore all aspects of its’ wonderful mobility with your simple, quiet, and additive thoughts.
If you try this exploration, let me know what you observe! I’m happy to share my thoughts. There are no wrong answers in explorations…but there are wrong conclusions! As long as we’re not married to conclusions, we’re in good shape to explore further!
**You must prevent the torso from leaning forward as you explore if you are sitting or standing; that’s a version of dead weight!