Breathing and Feldenkrais for musicians of all instruments
A natural, quiet and effortless breathing counts in every serious musician’s agenda as a main topic to address, often right after healthy posture. However, it is rarely considered as one which they can use for problem solving. In this article I discuss the value of observing the breathing for musicians, and what I have learned from my experience with the Feldenkrais method.
The way to use breathing to our full benefit as musicians is to first bring the process itself to the foreground, then to notice all the places we feel the breathing, like the lungs and ribcage, the belly, throat and all the way to the mouth and nose, and finally to realize where and when the quality of the natural process is compromised. As challenging as it may be in the beginning, you can choose a challenging passage, repeat it multiple times, each time with increasing attention to these details. As a result, much of the tension will be gone once you find an uninterrupted mode of breathing.
During the work of practicing and essentially getting things done progressively better, like everyone in the field I often face obstacles. Asking myself “why does it not work? I have been practicing it for a while now”, I find that the answer is often related to the way that I breathe. Quite far from the thought that it is the finger that isn’t fast enough, or that better coordination has yet to be learnt, the breathing is happening all the time, and at the core of our body – and this is why it can be relevant to just about anything that we prepare for performance.
Zoom into breathing
It is well known that what we learn during the practice time is what we have available during our performance. And just as obvious, we should isolate the challenging phrases or passages from the larger piece in order to find the most effortless way to perform them. We take time for this search, and during that time the way that we breathe plays a main role in bringing us closer to what we wish to achieve.
I would like to give an example from my own experience, in order to clarify the steps toward a constructive practice session that is focused on the breathing. Like in any learning experience that is structured or inspired by the Feldenkrais method, taking rests in between the steps is very helpful.
1. Start: here I am in a practice session, learning a piece for an upcoming concert. It’s not the most demanding piece in my program, but after some sessions of studying it, I feel that there are still tough nuts to crack before I can present it on stage.
2. Overview: I play it once from the beginning to the end, and notice where exactly these places which require more work are. It boils down to some complex passages that I then mark in the score.
3. First evaluation: I start playing again from the beginning, with a purpose not to practice anymore, but to run-through just until the end of the first challenging passage that I just marked. Then I decide whether this passage is indeed not yet effortless.
4. Isolation: If I still failed to play that passage in the short run-through, even after dedicating some time during several days to learn it, I would run through it once more time, this time not from the beginning of the piece, but from the beginning of the passage itself, now attending mainly to the way my breathing changes as I play it.
5. Inner observation: It’s always worth attending to various locations where the breathing happens: the lungs, the ribcage, the throat, and the mouth, tongue and lips, and finally the nose. Yes, breathing always happens in all these places.
6. Insight: It is so surprising to realize that there is very often an indication, almost a reflection, of a musically challenging task in the quality of the breathing. The two are so well connected, that I feel that if I could follow only the breathing itself, detached from the performed task – I would be able to tell where the tough passages are happening.
7. Integration: the session is done and I take a couple of minutes to recap. Taking the time to think about one new detail that I could notice during the session, and then moving on to the next detail and so on. I see them once again without the instrument in my hands, in order to consolidate the lesson.
Back to our natural breathing patterns
We all know that breathing is a natural process, and that it happens in every moment whether we decide to be aware of it or not. Assuming that we stay in a room with available air to take in, we can actively hold our breath, but not for longer than the time oxygen will need to flow in again. Our body will then decide for us that it is time to inhale again and inhaling will indeed happen. Many levels and qualities of inhaling can be addressed to, from higher breath, where the chest is expanding more than the other active parts, to lower, where most movement occurs in the belly. But what each of us does when we breathe in a way that is natural to us depends on our habits and preferences.
What I have learned from the practice sessions in which I placed focus on the breath, is that during the time I practice on my instrument, I would repeatedly have moments in which my natural breathing pattern is disrupted, as if I hold my breath in order to help myself achieve a better quality in the movement. Somehow, this compromised breathing is built into the more challenging elements in the musical piece that I practice, and as this repeats itself enough times, the new breathing pattern is established and it is this pattern that I eventually might find having on stage. It is no surprise that the actual performance contains all the short moments in which the breathing is no longer as smooth as it could be; these moments have been practiced well enough to be present there in connection with the music.
The days at the Feldenkrais training allow me to define breathing as a main theme for myself from time to time. Since I started focusing on breathing, I can say that the ATM lessons really provide space to elaborate on that theme to the level that often the breathing itself becomes the most effective way to overcome many obstacles. Interestingly, the way to react to a sudden challenge by suddenly holding the breath is so evident in ATM classes and it seems to be everyone’s “default choice” and intuitive way to feel that they would have now an additional resource (even if this does not help). As the trainer reminds us to find back our natural breathing pattern, many of us suddenly find an improvement in the movement right after the smooth breathing is regained.
Putting conscious breathing into practice
These days I split my practice time into multiple, daily short sessions of ten minutes, with each session being goal-oriented. During this time I let the breathing be in the center of my attention for at least once a day. I would like to share the following ideas, rather than the workflow itself that was given above, for a constructive practice.
As soon as an impossible moment or a passage is recognized in the practice session, we can pause and attend to how our breathing has changed on that passage. It is worth playing it over again in order to attend mainly to the breathing. As soon as we focus on the breathing, we at the same time shift the attention away from the fingers, or in general from the distal parts, gradually seeing more of the proximal part that is the core, where the breathing movement is initiated. In this way, we are also less stressed about quickly improving the “faults in the movement sequence”, and instead we simply stay curious about what changed in the breathing pattern and why. We bypass the offensive process of seeing a problem and searching for its local cure, and instead we are involved in a creative process of raising curiosity to what feels different on a certain moment and why it does. Besides this benefit, the improvement of breathing will allow us to regain comfort as there is never a disadvantage in finding a smoother breathing mode.
From what I personally experience, I am more and more convinced that if we learn more about our breathing patterns and habits as they are related to our practice and performance activities, we can use it as a tool to improve our learning and developing musicianship.
As a musician, I dedicate time almost every day in practicing, reaching for better technique and expression, and testing what I reached in rehearsals and on stage. This is a very general description of what I do, but it already gives two essential phases in the workflow: learning the part by myself at the highest level, and presenting myself and the results of my work to others.
To conclude this fascinating theme of breathing as a tool for musicians, I wish to say that we can always choose to observe our breathing as we practice, and use it to spot points along the piece which still contain effort or tension, as the way we breathe on these points will reflect that. Moreover, we can use breathing as an effective tool to initiate promote an effortless mode of learning. And finally, we can even find out that some technical solutions become suddenly within our reach, as soon as we allow ourselves to breathe naturally and smoothly.