Composition and the Alexander Technique

The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes

but in having new eyes.

-Marcel Proust

The Alexander Technique is well known in the performing arts. Frederick Matthias Alexander (1869-1955), a theatre actor who specialized in Shakespearian monologues, developed the technique in the course of his life due to some performing problems which stemmed from the wrong use of the self. In Alexander's particular case, his voice used to go out in performance due to unnecessary physical stress of the back and neck. So, after medical doctors couldn't find the real cause, and much less a solution to his condition, he began searching, not for answers, but for the problems. After pinpointing them, he realized that doing something about it would not help, on the contrary, it would sometimes make matters worse. So what did he do? Nothing.

Yes, nothing. If he was tensing his neck, he didn't do anything to attempt to relax it, he just thought to himself that he wanted his neck to be free. In this way he didn't do something that would trigger more unnecessary tension in other muscles so that his neck would be better, he just stopped interfering with the natural way we balance ourselves. The difference might seem meaningless, even just a semantic one, but it is huge.

So the Alexander Technique helps us achieve a better use of ourselves. A way in which body and mind blend into a whole. The difficult part is getting rid of old habits (We first make our habits, and then they make us. -John Dryden). We tend to believe that what we do is right (Everyone wants to be right, but no one stops to consider if their idea of right is right. -F. M. Alexander). Sometimes we think we're doing something we're not. We might feel we're standing straight, not realizing that our spine is bent a little to the side and our shoulders are just hanging to the front, collapsed.

Performing artists have benefited a great deal from Alexander's technique. The relation is of course obvious. The way an actor moves and speaks, and how a musician handles her instrument and produces sounds with it are a few examples. But how about in the way an artist creates an artistic piece/object? Can the Alexander Technique teach us something, about how not to interfere with ourselves for instance?

I'm not talking about the way someone sits at a desk or stands in front of a canvas. I'm talking about the creative process, about the means that bring about a result. Thought has plagued the way we conduct our lives since I-don't-know-when, and it has deprived us of an equally important part: physicality and the senses. Art has not escaped this privation. We tend to see much less of this problem in the plastic arts, since theirs is a very tangible and physical nature. Music, on the other hand, lends itself effortlessly to take the shape of thought. We don't just hear Beethoven, we sort of understand the philosophy within his works. We tend to think that Cage's indeterminate works set sounds free, allowing a more direct apprehension of them, but in reality the process of producing sounds was given the freedoms, not so much the sounds themselves. Thought has controlled a great deal of western music in recent centuries: counterpoint, sonata form, Beethoven, Wagner, (almost all Germans?), serialism, all the neo-musics, etc.

Of course we have some very fortunate exceptions: Mozart, Schubert, Chopin, Debussy, Stravinsky, Varèse, Scelsi, Xenakis, Ligeti, Feldman, Estrada... just to name some of the most remarkable ones. Mozart's physicality has had to suffer Beethoven's existential phylosophy. But of course, not everything in thought-propelled composers is just that. For instance, the way the aforementioned Beethoven goes to the depths of the piano and brings about an incredible resonance that blurs harmony and rhythm is just astounding.

But I shall not digress. Physicality, sound, movement. Three basics of music that are surprisingly not very acknowledged. I won't say that music is intangible, but since its tangibility lies in another field of apprehension it is somewhat more difficult to experience in those terms, hence its propensity to imitate linguistic and thought structures. But you won't be able to get near Mozart or Scelsi if you only look for harmonic progressions and eastern philosophies respectively. Here, sound and its movement go far beyond a symbolic arrangement.

Taking as a basis the union of mind and body in ourselves, we can consider the union of sound and movement in music. So, in these terms, what can the Alexander Technique bring to music? Or better: how can music be transformed by the Alexander Technique? By metaphor. Matthias Alexander developed his technique for purposes other than music creation. But he teaches us that the means are more important than the end itself (It is the means that determine the end. -H. E. Fosdick). Now of course we begin to think about our means of music-making. What habits do we have? Are they necessarily right or are they there because, well, they've always been there? Are we trying to reach something, just as Beethoven in his ninth symphony, just as most chord progressions? Are we trying to say something, therefore arranging sound in a way that its relations, not its qualities, finally give some meaning?

Now, besides addressing our means of music-making, we shall explore further into the means of the music itself. Is the music trying to get somewhere? Is it just a way to go from point A to point B? Is our music literally constipated from all the tension and frustration of not having a compelling musical equivalent to language anymore?

What is there between points A and B? Sound. And what is that? Air pressure, yes, but how do I perceive it? As matter in motion, or better, as evolving matter (read matter here as physical substance). Am I listening to the sounds themselves or to the intervals between them? The questionnaire can go on, and the further it goes, the more the music will change.

Am I advocating for a purely physical music? No. Thought is very important, and art has always shown that. But when its physical counterpart is forced to submit to it, the results rarely achieve artistic status. Do we have here then, with the Alexander Technique, the origins of a new style, or even better, as some scholars would like to say, a new compositional technique? No, no, no. It's just the attitude. And attitude is what we finally listen to in music.

(All quotes taken from How you stand, how you move, how you live: Learning the Alexander Technique by Missy Vineyard. Very good book with very good quotes in it.)

On knowledge and technique

"Who will dominate dominance, and what's left of the individual when he becomes the object of knowledge and technique?"

-André Comte-Sponville.

Although originally a question on medicine, a good one for composers.

Geography in music

The time-space duality is not only of vital importance in music, but it presents a different relation to that of extra-musical everyday experience. Basically, the sensation of space is also manifested in a temporal way in music. The analogy between a visual and a musical work resides in a fascinating translation where the spacial dimension is temporalized. And even though this is a very rich topic, I would like to deal with a derived and more specific one: musical geography.

It's common (perhaps too common and too ordinary) to link music with cultural aspects like society. And why not, since music is part of culture. But when culture feeds only on itself, it starts to smell funny. Reason enough not to be surprised when talking or thinking about certain music of how we rely not only on extra-musical terminology, but on extra-cultural references. Albert Einstein used to say that Mozart's music resembles the universe. On the other hand, Beethoven's music is perhaps too cultural and self-referent sometimes.

Then, if culture isn't everything, what more is there capable of permeating creative thinking and, therefore, artistic work? Geography and its peculiar phenomena. And here our conceptual world hopelessly collapses. No more self-references, no more abstractions, but simple perception of things and events. Of course, it's difficult to have geography without culture, it's difficult to have anything without it. But a culture that looses its grip from its environment begins to agonize, and eventually might die, unless it can transform itself and reestablish its links.

So what has happened with music? Precisely that, it has dissociated itself. Music has been theorized, finding refuge in the academic world. There they heroically safeguard how music is made, but not music itself.

But going back to geography, I remember one time I was able to understand this more clearly. In a road trip from middle to north Mexico a gradual change of the surroundings was made evident, which respectively went from complex and plentiful, to expansive and open. When the trip started, proximity between elements (crooked trees, weeds and plants, rocks, etc.) made the landscape contrasting and saturated. All this, along with the suspended fog that envelops everything around sunrise, generates a saturated and quickly-changing sensorial experience.

But the environment started to open up. The further north I went, space between elements began to widen, vegetation homogenized, the sky was clearer, and changes in general became slow and subtle. This great openness fostered a different perception, focused on the austerity of the landscape. But the quantitative simplicity of elements gave rise to a qualitative perception that resides within things. The open space revealed a subtle complexity of properties, not of relations. The slightly changing tones of vegetation, the reliefs of the land, the constitutive characteristics of hills and mountains. All this translating into long textured landscape moments of a rich plastic aesthetic. These are my familiar surroundings.

Is music an art form?

In the last few years of his life, Morton Feldman asked himself whether music was an art form or just a music form. Music poses a specific problem similar to that of science. Both, if we can call them languages, are peculiar at that. Whatever is manifested through them is supposed to be right, whether it is or not; the only difference being that a scientific proposition can cancel another one, music cannot do that.

Music, being so close to language as it has been, offers a beautiful paradox by being so distant from it. Music can state something, but it can't deny anything.

So, is music an art form? For now I choose Feldman's doubt. But let us suppose it can be. If so, then music should originate outside of music, for music that comes from music itself is only craft.

Cormac McCarthy's Music Lesson

I recently read Cormac McCarthy's The Road. One thing seemed very important and, more than interesting, essential to the novel: its form. I refuse to call it "structure", it's a very stiff concept. This work is very telling of non-european art. Its narrative doesn't push, it's not propelled towards something, to the inevitable conclusion/resolution/return. It is not your customary introduction to a well-balanced situation that turns into a conflict that finally dissipates into tranquility (or even not the customary tragedy that builds up and explodes at the end).

It dwells. No tranquil world is presented at the beginning. Instead, it submerges the reader into an apocalyptic world that father and son roam, and that world doesn't change. Actually, they do have a destination, south. That's all we know, and it's not much more than what they know. We can't be sure what happened, why is the world in such condition. We don't even know their names. But none of it is important, and that's the beauty of it (or at least part of it). It dwells in the human condition, in the bare elements of our existence.

It might not have an evident structure (the edifice that sustains a plot or in which a plot develops), but there is form, of course. Sometimes confusion may arise when structure and content aren't distinctly presented, which is the case here. There's a naughty habit of dividing things abstractly (some think that's being professional). We see ourselves as mind and body (and sometimes soul). Supposedly, a work of art has form and substance. By now we should know that, just like time and space aren't two separate things, these divisions are mainly abstract ideas. Sure, sometimes it's helpful to do it so one can better understand something. But the problem is that, when this happens, things are seldom put back together. This mind-set has taken artists, for instance, to automatically approach their activities in such a manner.

McCarthy gives us a novel whose form is its depth. Although there is always a sense of urgency due to the context, he creates long periods of stability, but you know it can't go on like that forever. And it doesn't. Sudden changes erupt, making your heart pump blood faster.

But what happens when stability reigns supreme? Are we just bored to death waiting for something interesting to happen? No. And here McCarthy takes us into a different dimension. Imagine being asked to draw the way in which a play or a piece of music evolves. We might try to do it in a cartesian way: left to right, up and down. That's not the way The Road evolves. Remember, it dwells. And when something dwells, it either starts going somewhere else or it dies. Here a new dimension appears, depth. The way he approaches details, smells, materials, sounds, desolation, love, it's sometimes breathtaking. But to make way into a different dimension has the implicit responsibility of affecting the whole, not just a part. As I mentioned, there's an immersion into detail, and to immerse also means to change the temporal scheme. The new motion determines different rates and graduations of change, as if straight lines began to reshape themselves into complex curves, accelerating and decelerating more subtly. So the traditional juxtaposition of contrasting parts does not determine the form of this work (that I would call structure). There's a beautiful cohesion of form and content in The Road.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg, form or substance? Unlike the chicken problem, I'm glad to know that in art, while either can exist first, they can be one and the same, interacting simultaneously, like life.

In music this has been very hard to do, or so it seems. Academies tend to present music in a fragmented way. They seldom say that, for instance, harmony, form and orchestration are closely related. They fail to bring it all back together, so what's left is just an autopsy. Music often dies on their desks, and they seem satisfied to manipulate its remains.

Poetry 2

If we can agree that poetry is that which transcends language by means of language itself, then we can argue that poetry might be anything that transcends its own medium. So, in those terms, music can be poetry. I believe some music achieves this level, but not all, even if it's great music.

Poetry

If you call yourself a poet, don't just sit there. Poetry is not a sedentary occupation, not a "take your seat" practice. Stand up and let them have it.

-- From Poetry as Insurgent Art by Lawrence Ferlinghetti