#The body and the archive how to#
#The body and the archive free#

We need to include in our body maps all our relevant senses: seeing, hearing, touching, and kinesthesia, the sense of movement. We secure wholeness and ease by an accurate and adequate body map. We musicians move for decades to play, sing, and conduct, so we need to know that we can choose movements that distribute effort throughout the whole body to achieve free, easy music making rather than isolating effort in a single part. Places of Balance illustration by Tim PhelpsĪs we work on our body maps, we are working by means of practical anatomy specifically on the quality of movement and its perception. the balance of our bodies on the arches of our feet, at the center. the balance at our knees, at the center, and the balance of our upper half over our legs, at the center, the balance of our thorax on our massive lumbar vertebrae, at the center, the balance of our arm structures over our spines, at the center, the balance of our heads on our spines, at the center, We may perceive balance and poise around our spines using our lively, on-going body awareness. When we play, well we play with our whole bodies, which are supported and organized centrally around our spines.

#The body and the archive free#

It is through the genuine understanding of weight delivery and balance that free breathing, and free use of the arms and legs, can occur. The foundation of Body Mapping is understanding how weight delivery and balance work throughout the body. Having a basic understanding about the body in movement can also clarify movement choices for us when we are in more stressful situations, helping us recover more easily when we are more apt to feel tense.

Thus the information that permits us to move more easily also freely enhances our performance. Then as artists, we can make musical choices based on movement choices that work well with the design of our bodies rather than against them, and we can make movement choices that enhance our music making rather than limit it.

But if yours is a problem of misuse, overuse and abuse, you must gain a clear understanding of how the body was designed and made to work as a whole to create music. Of course, a thorough medical check up with a physician is always necessary to rule out disease. If your map is accurate, you don’t have a problem because you already move well, but if it’s a bit off or totally off, you can have pain and potentially face the end of your career from injury caused by the faulty map. Body Mapping is the conscious correction and refinement of your body map. Your body map is your self-representation in your brain of your own body – how you think it is and how you think you move. Given the discoveries concerning the body map that have come out in neuroscience in the past few decades, we can now add music training on a secure neurophysiological foundation. The goal of the network is to put music education on a secure somatic foundation. In the late 90s, she formed Andover Educators to train musicians themselves to teach the course and bring them together into a network for the benefit of the rest of the musical community. Fortunately, organizations like the Performing Arts Medicine Association are changing this by hosting annual symposiums and sponsoring conferences concerning the health and well-being of musicians.īarbara Conable decided to bring basic anatomical information into a single course called What Every Musician Needs to Know about the Body, with a text by the same name. Musicians had instead relied on teaching traditions passed down from generation to generation that were not always based on accurate information about how the body is actually designed and efficiently used.

The Conables made them explicit and wrote of them in simpler language.ĭancers learn kinesiology and fitness professionals learn exercise physiology, but musicians have had no equivalent training until recently.

#The body and the archive how to#

Learning how to move more efficiently based on a corrected and refined body map allowed me both to play for long periods pain free and to achieve more musically-consistent results.īarbara and Bill had been working with the concepts of Body Mapping since the mid 1970s, though the concepts had been implicit in the earlier dense writings of F.M. The foundation for my Alexander Technique study was something my teachers, Barbara Conable and William Conable, called Body Mapping. The class was a revelation to me, not only because I was learning how to play pain free, but because I was able to play with the tone and the concept of sound I had always had in my mind but could never achieve consistently. When I mentioned to my teacher some pain I was having, I was advised to take an Alexander Technique class. As a performer with injury, I was very lucky as a university student.