Discovery of the Technique

Alexander's principle or method of organizing kinesthetic perception was initially discovered as a result of his efforts to find a way in which he could solve a problem he had of losing his voice, a problem which threatened his promises for a professional career as an actor in Australia around the turn of the century. None of the medical authorities he consulted could cure him or give him any clues about what might be the cause of his trouble. They could only prescribe that he rest his voice by entirely refraining from speaking for a period of time before each performance.

After following this advice and still achieving no relief from the hoarseness, he realized that he could not continue to accept performing engagements unless he was able to solve the problem. He then decided that the cause might lie in something he was unaware of doing to himself while he performed; so with great determination and care he set out to discover what it actually was.

Over a long period of extremely patient exploration and observation of himself saying his lines in front of a three-way mirror he finally saw that in preparing to speak he had a tendency to alter the poise of his head in relation to his neck. He then realized that this change in head balance was brought about by an unconscious stiffening or tightening of the muscles in his neck and that it also caused the compression of his throat which produced the hoarseness. In turn, he further noticed that this change in head balance also affected the distribution of muscular tension throughout his torso and even extended to include his limbs. It eventually became apparent to him that these changes he had been making unconsciously were all part of a regular and stereotyped pattern of stiffening which accompanied every attempt to recite his lines.

This pattern of stiffening which Alexander discovered he had been making can be compared to that of the startle pattern which has been shown clearly in the photographic study (Jones, Hanson, and Gray, 1964 and Jones, 1965)2  seen in Figure 1.

Startle Pattern: https://www.google.com/search?q=jones+startle+pattern&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiTod3Fv6zfAhXxmeAKHbF2C1wQ_AUIDigB&biw=1348&bih=593#imgrc=Gd5_4fR95rx1_M:

Between the two photographs it is easy to notice the visible changes in tensional distribution between the head, neck, and trunk since they are so severe; however, even though Alexander may not necessarily have made these tensional changes in such an exaggerated way when he went to speak, the patterns can be linked to each other because they both occur in response to stimuli. With Alexander the response occurred from the stimulus within him to speak, whereas in the startle pattern of Figure 1 the subject's response is to a stimulus from outside himself (the slamming of a door).

Eventually he learned that by expanding his field of attention to include what was happening kinesthetically within the postural reflexes of his head-neck-trunk relationship, he could choose to keep that habitual stiffening from taking place when he spoke and, in turn, could prevent himself from losing his voice. He called this process of prevention through expanding his attention "inhibition" (Alexander, 1910, Part I, chapter 3)-a concept which eventually proved to be the key factor in understanding and employing the whole principle that he had discovered.

The use of the term "inhibition" in connection with Alexander's principle has often proved to be very baffling to people having lessons because it is commonly thought of as having to do with a negative or suppressive type of activity. The way in which Alexander used it was to signify a conscious intention to prevent a response from being carried out by including in awareness certain aspects of kinesthetic perception which would allow the choice of a different or freer response to take place if it was necessary or appropriate.

Although a complete scientific investigation verifying the specific nuero-physiological aspects of the mechanisms of Alexander's principle has yet to be made, much has been done by Magnus (1925) and Roberts (1967) to show that there exists an integrating activity among the reflexes of the postural musculature in man and animals and that the quality of any of the more specific reflex actions of an individual are strongly affected by the activity of the head-neck reflexes.3

What Alexander went on then to discover was that in virtually every learned activity, whether it was speaking or playing a sport like golf, people tend to develop attitudes of anticipating according to preconceived ideas of what they think will be demanded of them. These attitudes of "getting ready," or anticipatory "sets," tend to bring with them a redistribution of tension similar to that which is seen in the startle pattern and in the reaction which Alexander found he was making to the stimulus to recite the lines of a play.4  He observed that often these sets are, as had been the case with him, entirely unconscious and go by unnoticed unless some disturbing pain occurs from an excessive stiffness caused by continually making them. Often they can be noticed in general ways, however, when someone "gets set" for something that does not happen as expected-for instance in reaching for a suitcase which one thinks is filled with heavy books but, in fact, is empty; or in preparing for an appointment which promises to be intensely disturbing emotionally only to discover that it is at a later date after all.

By helping people to perceive kinesthetically how "sets" occur as preliminary changes in the head-neck reflexes, one can teach them to inhibit habitual reactions to situations and to choose to allow the most appropriate or spontaneous response to happen at any given moment. Even if the habitual response is appropriate in the circumstance, the person still has a choice whether or not to allow it to happen rather than become a victim of it automatically.

The most essential factor about developing a more organized kinesthetic awareness that is unique to Alexander's principle and which distinguishes it from all other existing systems of awareness and control is the particular sequence of giving one's attention that he found necessary in order to bring about this more integrated quality in the skeletal musculature of the head-neck-torso relationship. This depends on a specific order in which one's attention is to be directed. It begins with (1) allowing the neck muscles to be as free as they possibly can be at any given moment. This freeing of the neck tends then to allow, in turn, (2) the head to be freed very subtly in a direction forward and out from the neck and trunk. Thus the head-neck reflexes are allowed to function in a more balanced way which in turn allows (3) a reflex lengthening and widening of the trunk. Eventually paying attention in this specific sequence becomes a "primary control" in every activity. It produces a fundamental integrating of all the above three elements as they are being attended to all together and one after another. (Alexander, ed. Maisel, 1974, p. xxiv)

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Development of the Technique

The method of helping or teaching people to experience this principle of organizing kinesthetic perception and developing a balanced control over their postural reflexes Alexander named the Alexander Technique. This technique then is basically a skill that a teacher acquires that allows him to use his hands in a certain way which can help to bring about and maintain this reflex balance in a pupil's anti-gravity musculature. It operates on the basis that if the teacher is maintaining the most balanced state of reflex activity in his own head-neck-torso relationship it alters the quality of muscle tonus in his hands in such a way that they can, in turn, most reliably transmit the same quality to the feeling in the musculature of the pupil.

Though the actual kinesthetic experience (the feeling) of this more balanced reflex action of the skeletal musculature is impossible to communicate by words alone, it is possible to convey verbally a more specific impression which can be used as an explanatory aid in teaching Alexander's principle. It is relevant only to an isolated part of the musculature, but it helps to illustrate the relationship of attention to muscle tonus with which the principle largely deals. If you will now draw your attention to your own hands while reading this page -- without moving your fingers at all in space --and if you will pay attention to one specific finger, say, the index finger of one hand as if you were intending to point that finger more in the same direction it is already pointing without actually moving it; you will notice that by that act of attention alone a change of feeling comes into the index finger that wasn't previously there.

If you will continue then to include in your attention that intent of pointing with the index finger while you go on to read this page, that same subtle yet heightened degree of muscle tone can be maintained. As your attention becomes more narrowly focused on reading you will probably find that the heightened state of tonus is lost in the index finger but also that it is possible to bring it back consciously and at will at any given moment. This altered state of tonus can be maintained in the background of your awareness while continuing to read or while doing any other activity.5  A reasonable explanation of this change in feeling could be that through this act of attention alone a heightened state of the stretch reflexes in the index finger can be brought about more than when attention is focused elsewhere in the organism or in the environment.6

What Alexander's technique tries to cultivate then is the experience of maintaining this expanded attention throughout the musculature of the postural reflexes and thereby allow the distribution of muscle tension to be at the most appropriate level for any specific activity or movement whether it takes up large amounts of space or is more stationary. So the main capacity with which one is dealing is that of attention.7  Alexander found that the majority of people suffer severely from habits of dispersed attention called "mind-wandering" or from over-fixating attention called "concentration". He saw clearly that both of these habits had definite correlations to the state of muscle tonus in the postural reflex mechanisms and that unduly excited emotions as well as attitudes of fixed prejudices were also distinctly recognizable by aspects of change in the same reflex patterns (again similar to the startle pattern in Figure 1).

In an Alexander lesson the pupil is often guided through some every day movement like taking a step, sitting, standing, or picking up something while the teacher's hands encourage him to maintain this more balanced reflex distribution of muscle tone. Each teacher's style and approach is slightly different and of course is usually widely varied depending upon the coordination and emotional state of the pupil at the moment of the lesson.

Often in the majority of people the kinesthetic sense is so deluded and the postural reflexes are so distorted from many years of habitual misuse that a whole new coordination must be built up almost entirely from "scratch". Initially the teacher may even have to use his hands in a way that can be considered almost physiotherapeutic, though it is still with the intent of teaching and re-organizing the pupil's awareness rather than a passive manipulation.

Acquiring a thorough mastery of Alexander's principle may take a number of years (sometimes as many as ten or more), and becoming a certified teacher requires three years of intensive daily training. Some people are immediately responsive to the Technique however, and need only a minimal amount of lessons (from 20 to 30 are often recommended) in order to improve and re-educate their capacity for attention enough to foster a process of growth which can continue in a positive way throughout their lifetimes.

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Personal Involvement with the Alexander Work

My own experience with Alexander's principle and technique began nearly ten years ago during my last two years of undergraduate music school. It came entirely by chance because an English flutist I was studying with for the summer was an ardent enthusiast, and his wife also happened to be a qualified teacher. He recommended that I have lessons in the principle with the idea that they would help me gain greater awareness and control in my playing.

I readily followed his suggestion because at that point in my college career as a music student I had nearly begun to give up on the possibility of ever achieving the standard as a flutist that I felt I definitely had the capacity to attain. In the beginning years of learning to play the flute I seemed to be making satisfactory progress, and teachers often pointed out that they thought I possessed far-reaching potential as a musician. But when I later began to prepare more seriously for a career as a professional flutist and started to study with a teacher in college who insisted on my adhering to a more rigid approach to increasing my technical proficiency, I met with seemingly insurmountable barriers.

In trying to force myself to pay attention exclusively to more specific mechanical problems in playing, I felt that I had to forsake my capacity for being spontaneously expressive that I had until then always valued as the most important and vital aspect of playing. Clearly, this teacher did not have a way to teach me to play the flute which would help me develop technical mastery without causing a harmful severance from attention to expressive elements.

I found this situation unbearably frustrating and felt that my strong aspirations to pursue a career as a professional musician had become almost totally thwarted. After only a few Alexander lessons though, I immediately saw the possibility of discovering through the help of the Technique a more suitable and total approach to playing the flute, an approach that would allow me to incorporate expressive and technical factors at one and the same time.

Not much preliminary explanation was given to me before I had my first lesson, but somehow I was eager to begin because I had noticed a special attitude or quality of presence in both this English flutist and his wife that made them seem different than anyone I'd ever met before. I knew it wasn't just because of their particular exciting and energetic charisma, but it seemed to be due to something that they understood about themselves or to something that they were aware of that was quite out of the ordinary. I noticed it more in terms of their interaction with me, with other flute students, and especially in the quality of their interaction with each other. The only verbal characterization I could give to this quality was "a kind of consistent easiness in getting along with people and a total lack of aggressiveness and selfishness".

As time went on and I grew more familiar with the Alexander work, I recognized why these qualities were present in these people, and the same ones eventually began to be allowed to come about within me as the result of the lessons. As I learned, that by inhibiting patterns of habitual stiffening in my head-neck-trunk relationship, I was also led to a more reliable sense of "appropriateness" in terms of my behavior and interactions with others. I realized that if other people behaved aggressively or offensively toward me, it would cause me to react in a way that made me interfere with the balance of my head-neck-trunk reflexes that I was learning how to maintain. Likewise, I also saw even more clearly how my inappropriate and unintentionally offensive habitual actions caused others to react in a similar stiffening way even though they probably weren't aware of much more than being annoyed or uncomfortable with me at those times.8

As lessons progressed I became increasingly aware of many drastic and excessive tensions I was making as I was playing the flute. They occurred even in simply bringing the flute up to my lips. (I found that I had always unconsciously brought my head forward and down several inches to meet the flute instead of raising the flute to the level at which my head would be at my most balanced standing height. I also discovered that I had been habitually locking my shoulders and elbows into a very rigid position which prohibited a free excursion of the rib-cage in breathing and a more flexible control of the fingers). Eventually, these excessive tensions became apparent as specific or stereotyped patterns that fundamentally distorted the balance of my head-neck-trunk reflexes that the Alexander teacher was helping me to perceive and experience in an increasingly sensitive and organized way.

A fundamental impact was made on me by the lessons from the standpoint of discovering how unaware I had been of all the unnecessary tension I created in my musculature in practically every other aspect of my daily life -- just sitting in a chair, standing, eating, reading a book -- and even more so when I would overreact emotionally to other people and situations. Every moment there was something to react to, and in each reaction I would usually be making far more tension in my head-neck-trunk relationship than was necessary -- particularly in my neck muscles that controlled the quality of balance of my head.

The situation in which I noticed I would overreact the most emotionally was that of performing in front of another person or an audience. Later I began to notice also that I could detect a tendency to interfere with the reflex balance of my head-neck-trunk relationship even just by thinking of an approaching performance or audition that might be as much as a week or two away.

In the past this tendency to become anxious or nervous about performing had interfered with my playing in a very disappointing way. Many times I would experience nervousness to the extent of trembling or clutching so much that it prevented me from producing a steady tone and interfered drastically with the control of my fingers. To be composed enough to allow myself to pay attention to the expressive elements of what I was playing was very far out of he question. Often my playing in performance situations sounded as if I'd never really studied the flute at all. At other times when playing alone, technical and expressive elements would be so much at my command that I would sound advanced beyond anything one would expect to hear from a student at the college level.

Eventually I was able to begin to gain control over this problem of dealing with stress in performance by recognizing and inhibiting the first slight signs of excess tightening that would come into my head-neck-trunk musculature which distorted the reflex balance that the teacher had been able to bring about with her hands in the lessons. The experience of freedom, lightness, ease of movement, and over-all calm that carried over from the lessons into the rest of the day and week gradually became a kinesthetic background or frame of reference to which all habitual reactions could be compared and evaluated. With this sense of freedom to choose how I would allow myself to react came an ever-increasing sense of security and self-reliability. It also helped me to incorporate more fully all the imaginative and expressive elements that only seemed to come into my playing before when I played alone.

By far the most impressive thing about having Alexander lessons was the fact that I knew that I was definitely learning to acquire this freedom and control and that it was something that anyone else could learn in the same way too -- a learning based on experiencing rather than on isolated intellectual activity alone. Very soon I saw the value and importance of teaching Alexander's principle to other musicians I knew who were confronting similar problems of coping with stress in performance situations. Many were also bogged down by an over-focusing on specific technical achievements that were unrelated to a concept of approaching playing in a more total psychophysical way. Seeing too that so many people from every walk of life desperately needed the help that Alexander's technique could give in making all aspects of their lives more fulfilling and in keeping with their true potential, I finally decided to enroll in the three-year teacher's training course in London, England to train to become a qualified teacher of the principle.

Having completed this training and having taught Alexander's principle for the past three years to many professionals and students in the performing arts, I feel that it is important now to draw attention in writing to some of the specific ways that problems of musical performers can be solved by using it. I think that the problem of stress chosen as the topic here is one of the most crucial to deal with since so many professional and student musicians are constantly confronted with it throughout their careers. The next section, therefore, will be devoted to giving a more detailed description of this problem in musical performance.

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The Problem of Dealing with Stress in Musical Performance

Dealing with stress or nervousness in musical performance is by no means an unfamiliar problem, even to some of the greatest artists. In Conversations with Casals (Corredor, 1956, p. 200) the great cellist at the age of 77 was asked: "In spite of your long years of playing in public, I believe you have always been nervous before a concert?" He replied: "Think of the number of great performers I have met in my long career--they all suffered from stage-fright, with some rare exceptions. (Fritz Kreisler, for instance, used to say he felt perfectly 'at home' on the platform.) But can you imagine that I have not known any artist as tormented as I am with nerves? The thought of a public concert always gives me a nightmare.......even now." Also speaking of how it is such a great necessity for a musician to take every chance to release muscular tensions in performing, he points out how the fatigue of the hand and arm in cello playing mostly come from the tension of muscles produced through emotion and "stage-fright" (Corredor, p. 199).

Casals went on to say "however, that the will of the performer must overcome this obstacle of tension due to nervousness and to this end the conscious practicing of relaxation will prove very beneficial to complete control during a concert." He also mentioned the necessity of going through "long exercises" of relaxation to keep up the suppleness of the arm and fingers and which would allow an "impulse to come from the center of the body instead of each extremity, which would group movements into a unified whole, producing better results and less fatigue". But as is the case with other noted teachers who likewise advocate "relaxation and naturalness" in playing, Casals did not say precisely how he dealt with these problems in himself nor did he prescribe any method to follow.9  It was to him: "rather like an image of what I feel at the time, not an easy thing to identify or to name".

Obviously Casals must have possessed a highly coordinated and sensitive integration of reflexes over which he had developed his own personal method of control that worked reliably for him when confronted with the extreme nervousness he confessed to have felt in performance situations. Unfortunately, however, most other musicians do not possess such a reliable method and are many times far less successful than Casals was in coping with the problem. Many often rely solely on an ability to play automatically without paying attention at all to what they are doing, trusting that if they abstract themselves by thinking of some other thought or image the performance will go successfully.

In a paper read at a conference on "Coordination in Music" at Michigan State University, Jones (1967) speaks of two contrasting incidents that illustrate this point very well. One was about an old Bostonian who had given up a career as a concert pianist after her marriage and was asked to perform by Koussevitsky at a small dinner party. She chose a piece she hadn't played since the turn of the century in hopes that it would be something Koussevitsky did not know. All she remembered were the opening chords, but by abstracting herself and looking steadily at a picture of a mountain lake which hung behind the piano she was able to finish the piece without a flaw. Had she thought for a moment of what she was doing, she said, the feat would have been impossible.

The other example is of an established professional musician with whom the ability to play automatically was not so reliable. Halfway through a concert performance he started thinking about a quarrel he had had that morning with his wife. This train of thought became so absorbing that by the end of the second movement of the piece he was playing, his attention was engrossed completely. He was unable to start the third movement and had to leave the stage with the piece unfinished.

No doubt countless stories of similar experiences could be found to show other methods of dealing with stress which various performers have found useful to some extent--such as Jacobson's progressive relaxation (Jacobson, 1929 and 1964), Coue's autosuggestion technique (Coue, 1923), or transcendental meditation (Forem, 1973 and Naranjo and Ornstein, 1971)--but none of them have become so strongly recognized by leading music schools and conservatories as being as significantly reliable as Alexander's principle. Some of the schools that have begun to incorporate the Alexander Technique into their curriculums or to consider it seriously by presenting it frequently in seminars are: Juilliard School of Music and Drama, Eastman School of Music, Indiana University Music Department, Michigan State University Music Department, Ohio State University Music Department, Iowa State University, Southern Methodist University; and in Great Britain: the Guildhall School of Music, the Royal College of Music, Dartington Hall School of Music, and the Glasgow Conservatory. In addition, scores of leading symphonic and solo performers both in America and abroad find having Alexander lessons indispensable to their careers--especially in regard to dealing with the problem of stress. (See personal testamonials in Appendix A for endorsements of the Alexander Technique by several professional performers and music educators.)

Not a great deal of writing or experimental work has been done, however, in exposing the relevance of Alexander's principle and technique to the problem of dealing with stress in performance. In light of that fact, it is hoped that the following parts of this thesis can help to further clarify this relevance by describing experiments in which the Alexander Technique was used with a group of student musicians.10

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PART II

DESIGN OF EXPERIMENT AND PROCEDURES USED TO TEST THESIS