The Importance of Body Awareness
When we practice, instrumental musicians often fixate upon the medium through which they make sound; that is, the wood or metal box or cylinder through which the sound vibrates. However, our instruments are not the only thing that is responsible for the sound we produce. Our bodies play a huge role in how well and comfortably we make sound.
For example: have you ever had a performance where everything just flowed, so naturally and smoothly? It feels like you barely had to work to produce the sound you want. That’s the ideal and the goal while performing.
And have you ever had a performance where you were so locked up it took massive amounts of energy just to play the opening lines of your piece? That’s often the reality. If it feels like you’re using tons of energy just to play a few notes, chances are your technique is inefficient and you are in fact spending all that energy.
When I was in high school, I subconsciously thought that as long as I hit the notes correctly or made the sound I want, it didn’t matter how I felt while doing it. That mentality led me to suffering 3 repetitive stress injuries before I hit 22, and it is taking a massive amount of unlearning and relearning to embrace a healthier approach to playing.
We make music with our bodies. They are our first instrument, and the most important – after all we live with them. So why aren’t we spending some of our practice time getting to know our bodies and how to use them?
That’s what this blog post is about.
Spending time getting to know how the parts of our body work together can lead to major breakthroughs in our playing. Cultivating body awareness is something we can do in a myriad of ways. There are whole disciplines out there dedicated to cultivating that body awareness! A couple of the major ones you may (or may not) have heard of:
Body Mapping is a wonderful discipline that delves into your perception of your body to find and unlearn harmful habits of moving. Did you know you actually have a physical and mental map of your body INSIDE YOUR BRAIN (wow) that is informed by the sensory input you receive and send to that body part? It’s called your somatosensory homunculus and is located in the sensory and motor cortices of the brain. Essentially, it’s a topographical representation of your brain’s perception of your body. The map’s most detailed parts are the parts of your body you use the most – your hands, face, and feet especially.
Your internal body map is how you perceive your body and informs how you habitually move. And, because your brain is plastic, you can have errors in your body map, and thankfully, change your body map too.
For example, have you ever thought where your neck starts? You’d think it starts about where your neck hits your jaw, right? I thought that was where my neck started for the longest time. But that is actually wrong! Your anterior neck at the jawline is actually not the start of your neck – you have to go up farther to between your ears. This is where your skull meets your spine, and where your neck begins. Crazy, right?
Now, if you work on internalizing this information (we’ll cover this in the Study portion of this series) it will impact how you habitually move and hold up your head. Knowing the real structure of your neck, arms, fingers, and other parts of your body can help us use our bodies more effectively to make sound.
The Alexander Technique is another discipline that cultivates body awareness. F. M. Alexander was an actor in Australia in the 20th century who lost his voice inexplicably during a performance. However, his doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. Having the unrelenting, type-A personality that many of us performers share, Alexander decided to figure out for himself what was going on – and spent the next 50 years of his life developing and teaching a method designed to find and release excess tension in the body.
Now, the Alexander Technique is a method taught by movement specialists all over the world and helps performers of all kinds – especially musicians. Having had only had a few lessons, I would love to learn more about this discipline, but the foundational exercise of constructive rest is my favorite technique that I learned.
The Feldenkrais Method is another type of awareness and movement discipline that integrates gentle movement and mindfulness to increase range of motion, ease and flexibility. It works on refining your perception of yourself and how you move to create ease in your everyday habits. The technique relies on auditory and verbal cues to explore new ways of movement. I have not had much direct experience with the method – if you have, please reach out to me on social media and share your thoughts and experience!
Apart from learning the above disciplines, there is more we can do to cultivate awareness of our bodies. Check in with your physical symptoms before, during and after your practice. Keeping a journal of your symptoms refines that self-awareness and helps us catch any early signs of pain or injury that we might just not be aware of in our busy day-to-day lives. I have found that taking time before and after my practice to notice how I am feeling in my body grounds me and makes me aware of any problem areas in my body I can pay special attention to while stretching, warming up and cooling down. Speaking of which…
PLEASE integrate a quick warm up and cool down as part of your practice time. Practice time is a work out for your body even if you don’t break a sweat! Asking your body to daily perform large-scale or fine-motor movements without preparing it to do so will increase your risk of injury. Ask any athlete! Here are some resources for warm up routines specifically tailored to musicians.
**A disclaimer – training your body should be part of your self-care as a human and musician, so I won’t include disciplines like weight training and Pilates in this discussion of practice methods. Any form of exercise is absolutely worth exploring to help us maintain our health and enhance our mental health, and is integral to preventing disease (read more here about how weight bearing exercise can help prevent osteoporosis).
I hope that after reading this you are also motivated to learn more about our first instruments! The techniques mentioned here are not comprehensive – finding a way to learn more about your body that resonates best with you is the most important. If you have experience with any of the above disciplines, or if there is one you love that I didn’t mention, I would love to hear about it!
Till next time, happy practicing!
To see the other posts in this series, see below: