body Archives

Heads Up — by Selma Gokcen

"In order to change the world, you have to get your head together first." —Jimi Hendrix Here is a question for you...what is the foundation of good balanced movement at the cello? There are many answers and many ways of defining balance and coordinated movement. The CelloBello website offers some great advice here. In this short blog, I propose to turn the question on its head, as we do in our work as Alexander Technique teachers. "How can we prevent interference with our balance?" And by defining what gets in the way of balancing ourselves with the cello, we can discover what to let go. Years ago, in my student days, I gradually made the discovery that something in my bow arm wasn't working. For years I tried to correct the [...]

By Selma Gokcen|2021-08-26T17:39:23-04:00May 19th, 2015|Categories: Alexander Technique for Cellists, Playing Healthy, Self Discovery|Tags: body, Selma Gokcen, Cello Schooling, CelloBlogs, Playing Healthy, cellobello, health, Alexander Technique|

Make it Your Own: Teaching Alexander Technique — by Selma Gokcen

The Alexander Technique has its own process of training to become a teacher of the work. Much like cellists, we take lessons from established teachers, we attend school daily and we begin from the beginning, with lots of preconceptions which are called habits. Our teachers constantly bring our attention to them, rebalancing and releasing negative patterns of use, mostly through their hands, sometimes through words, and often both. from http://www.alexandertechnique.com As the inner fog lifts and our sensory awareness improves, we begin to be able to "put hands on" others and transmit what we have received. It's so tenuous at the start and requires years of experience to be able to distinguish fine differences in the flow of energy up and down the spine, the various tension [...]

By Selma Gokcen|2017-10-30T04:56:49-04:00February 5th, 2015|Categories: Alexander Technique for Cellists, Playing Healthy, Self Discovery, Teaching|Tags: Alexander Technique, body, CelloBlog, Selma Gokcen, cellobello, performance, health|

Improve Your Talent: Breathing Awareness and Control — by Gregory Beaver

In "Developing a Technique to Improve Your Talent," I laid out 6 things that I have been using actively in my teaching to improve my students’ talent. This post will investigate the first of these, Breathing awareness and control. “I am so totes aware of my breathing!” you might be thinking, especially if you are a vocalist or a woodwind/brass player. However, in my experience, there are very few people who are truly aware of their breath. Breath awareness is not just about being able to breathe in and out and notice it. It is the ability to do something very complicated and still notice your breathing. For those who do not use their breath to create the music, it is about using your breath to provide energy and power when needed, and [...]

By Gregory Beaver|2022-02-28T11:40:29-05:00May 27th, 2013|Categories: Beyond the Traditional, In the Practice Room, Playing Healthy, Self Discovery|Tags: CD player, stomach, musicians, muscles, chest, strengthen the diaphragm, practicing, body, controlled frenzy, trouble passages, Technique, breathing, diaphragm, T’ai Chi, improvement, yoga, emit sound, cello, unbalancing the body, Beaver, heart rate, cellobello, weakness, talent, Gregory, Improve your talent, cellists, balance, advanced breath control, light-headed, control, Coordination, aerobic exercise, oxygen, Awareness, relaxation, breath control, simple formula, skill, breathing with scales, smoothness|

THINKING IN A NEW WAY—Overcoming Habits (Part 5 of 6): Fleet Fingers — by Selma Gokcen

"The body is like an instrument; it depends who is playing it." —F.M. Alexander In the Alexander work I do, I consider there are five stages in learning to let go of the left hand fingers in cello playing so they can be free to race around the fingerboard, as well as play expressively. The hand must be soft and empty of all intention in approaching the string. If it has preconceived form and shape, then it cannot function except within the confines of this preconception. In connection with this work, I often ask my students the meaning in Zen Buddhism of "the empty hand that holds the spade." We can think of the fingers as the end of a long chain of joints starting with the upper arm ball [...]

By Selma Gokcen|2023-11-06T13:44:57-05:00March 4th, 2013|Categories: Alexander Technique for Cellists, Beyond the Traditional, Playing Healthy, Self Discovery|Tags: paraspinal muscles, tension, sensation of opposition, cello, Selma, sensation of the back, Awareness, body, clarity, bow technique, function, sound production, Healthy, cello playing muscles, connection, bend, articulation, fingers are flexible, Alexander Technique, habit, expression, Gokcen|

Raising the Arms (Part 1) — by Selma Gokcen

You are a marvel. You are unique. In all the years that have passed there has never been another child like you. Your legs, your arms, your clever fingers, the way you move. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. - Pablo Casals Pablo Casals, ever aware of the miracle of life and of how gesture can be informed with thought and feeling, could elicit from his cello or from his orchestra sounds that could penetrate the heart. To watch him moving his arms as he played or conducted was to witness the reaching forth from his inner being to the outer world. Arms are conductors of the energy within. They bear the fruits of our thought [...]

By Selma Gokcen|2017-10-09T01:30:46-04:00April 23rd, 2012|Categories: Alexander Technique for Cellists, Performance, Playing Healthy, Self Discovery|Tags: Alexander Technique, Casals, Gokcen, expression, movement, power, anxiety, Selma, cello, Spine, cellobello, body, music, quietness, musicians|

So You Think You Know? (Part 2) — by Selma Gokcen

“Sensory appreciation conditions conception; you can't know a thing by an instrument that is wrong.” -F.M. Alexander. Our body-mind could be called our home. We live in it from the inside, looking out at the world. It provides our orientation, our focus, our sense of what is right and wrong, up and down, around us, beneath us and above us. All day long we are encountering and interacting with the world; stimuli are filtering through our senses and being evaluated against past experience. The question raised within us after only a few lessons in the Alexander Technique is the same one that F.M. Alexander grappled with for nine years as he searched for answers to the mis-use of his voice: what am I doing and how can I know that [...]

By Selma Gokcen|2017-10-08T03:12:40-04:00February 12th, 2012|Categories: Alexander Technique for Cellists, Playing Healthy, Self Discovery|Tags: movement, tension, Selma, cello, nature, cellobello, body, Preparation, Mind, Awareness, repetition, Sensory, lessons, healthy playing, Alexander Technique, progress, Gokcen, sensations|

Looking & Seeing — by Selma Gokcen

In my last column, I mentioned getting to know some of your habits at the cello…the worst ones can become your best friends, in that they will offer the richest material for work on yourself. So now we step into the arena. Looking at oneself is not easy. The same instrument that presents the problems is also doing the observing, so how reliable can our observations be when the instrument itself is faulty? This was F.M. Alexander’s dilemma. His vocal problem was hidden within himself, and so he set about observing himself in a mirror, later three mirrors, to see if he could discover any correlation between what he was doing with his whole body and his specific vocal defects. After long and patient examination, he identified several harmful habits, [...]

By Selma Gokcen|2017-10-08T02:56:56-04:00July 9th, 2011|Categories: Alexander Technique for Cellists, Playing Healthy, Self Discovery|Tags: self-observation, Awareness, Selma, body awareness, sound production, patience, practice habits, attention, Technique, body, Habits, breathing, Instruments, discovery, artistry, Coordination, Mind, cello, Gokcen, Observation, cellobello, movement, seeing, Practice|