Integrated Practice: Coordination, Rhythm & Sound Review

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Integrated Practice: Coordination, Rhythm & Sound ReviewFirst, if you're a musician or singer, amateur or performer, stop here and order this book. You'll be amazed at how it enhances your approach to your art, no matter how accomplished you already are. But if you need convincing anyway, here's what I thought.
Pedro de Alcantara is a cellist and teacher of the Alexander Technique, a method of achieving conscious control of the mind and body to regain the kind of natural coordination that many of us probably had only as kids. It's widely practiced particularly by actors, athletes, people wanting to overcome pain - and by musicians to help achieve a level of full, resonant and injury free playing. De Alcantara is also an original thinker and writer on all this (plus children's books!).
I'm an adult violin student (with a life-long background in other instruments) taking Alexander Technique lessons to improve my approach to playing. My teacher gave me de Alcantara's previous book, Indirect Procedures, to help me developing my performance capabilities. Having benefitted greatly from that book's combination of the philosophical and the practical, I pre-ordered Integrated Practice and devoured it when it came.
Integrated Practice is an application - and extension - of F.M. Alexander's thinking into the most fundamental notions of rhythm in practicing and performing music. The first section (half the book) is about reaching your own understanding of the internal rhythmic structure of the piece and communicating that to an audience. De Alcantara anchors the discussion in how humans relate to pulse, beat and rhythm in movement, language and poetry, and brings it into focus as the foundation for playing music. The second section explains key Alexander concepts and applies them to musical practice and performance. The third section develops the connection between the resonance of your instrument and rhythm.
You do not sit down and read this book - you engage it. There's a level of energy emanating from the page that demands that you get up and do what de Alcantara requires of you to internalize rhythmic feeling, or organize your body better for playing your instrument or try out the practice routines he describes. He (and the Oxford University Press) provide a web site with over 100 video and audio clips demonstrating concepts and techniques described in the book. I'm constantly getting up to go to a certain clip, walk around in certain rhythm or try something out on my violin, inspired by the detailed thought he's put into making new patterns of playing music accessible and the clarity with which he presents it.
On page 11, for example, he says, "Rhythm is coordination, and coordination is personality; ergo, rhythm is personality....[and, later]...Your musicianly duty is to think, breathe, and live rhythm all day long, developing your mastery of rhythm in speech, locomotion, song and dance, and in your every last gesture.... To start your work on rhythm, I propose that you walk in seven different ways."
Then, drawing text and music from Shakespeare, Greek prosody, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, spoken English, haiku, Pound, Whitman, Shoenberg and others, he explains his view that rhythm is fundamental to existence and teaches how to become attuned to it (supported by video illustrations).
In later sections, he goes on to improvisation, harmonics and other elements of becoming attuned to a piece of music at the most fundamental level, making the connection between the most abstract notions and putting them into practice.
I kept feeling, "Wait, how is it that for $30 I get access to this kind of detailed tutorial based on all this original thought - and that, if I'm willing to do the work, will improve my playing right away?"
Integrated Practice is the second in a series de Alcantara is calling "The Integrated Musician." I'd never heard the term before and many people may find it hard to grasp at first. But he has a way of discussing concepts at their most fundamental human level while anchoring them in the practical physical demands of making meaningful music. So a musician should just suspend disbelief with the confidence that you'll end up understanding what an "integrated musician" is.
Anyone who wants to make music better tomorrow than yesterday will want this book.
Integrated Practice: Coordination, Rhythm & Sound OverviewTo be a musician is to "speak music." When you have something to say and the means to say it, your gestures and sounds become both meaningful and free. Offering an innovative, comprehensive approach to musicians' health and wellbeing, Integrated Practice gives you the tools to combine total-body awareness with a deep and practical understanding of the rhythmic structure of the musical language, so that you can use the musical text itself as your guide toward psychophysical and creative freedom. The book shows you how to establish an imaginative dialogue between the relatively inflexible structure of music and your individual personality as a singer, instrumentalist, or conductor, and it explains how you can use the acoustic phenomenon of the harmonic series to make big, beautiful sounds with little muscular effort. Integrated Practice comes with more than a hundred and fifty exercises demonstrated by video and audio clips on an extensive companion website that will inform your daily practice, improvising, rehearsing, and performing. With this array of resources for every learning style, Integrated Practice is the essential handbook to personal achievement in successful, expressive musical performance.

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