A session with me

So, if you have an individual session with me, what do we do?

Well, you have come with a problem. Yes? Maybe a few problems. Maybe a general sense that things could be better. Or just to find out what my stuff is all about. It doesn’t matter. We’ll talk, and observe, and you’ll play something, and we’ll find out together what your concerns, attitudes and awarenesses are. They could be technical, musical, physical or psychological.

So we have 1. Fix it

2. Accept it

3. Do it more

Any or all of these might be appropriate.

It is mostly a matter of feeling which ones

seem to work for you.

Here are some examples:

A well-known cellist came to me about some issues with physical tension. As she played we located some places that felt tense. I massaged these places to reduce the tension. Then she played again and the tension returned. So I held the tense spots while she played so she could get a real feeling of what she does there while playing. I experimented with massaging as she was playing. This is always fun as it veers between being impossible to play, to realising new ways to play. We got somewhere but it seemed there was also a strong pull towards regaining the tension. Since this was so strong, I guessed it was worth trying either 2. (Accept it) or 3. (Do it more), to find the wisdom in the body that wanted this to happen so much. But just before I did, I had been moving her in a side-to-side motion. I noticed that her tendency was to settle slightly to one side when I stopped, so she was sitting with more weight on her left. Why didn’t I notice that before? When I pointed this out, she sat more centrally and it was as if all her tension disappeared. And, even more obviously, the SOUND! It was so much more open, resonant, and it seemed as if she could play anything!
Afterwards she sent me a note saying this “did more to change the sound than years of practice. Really incredible”
So this in the end was all about number 1. Fix it.

To book a session

I live near London, UK

A piano player had a problem with playing wrong notes! Every time he played, he tried to play everything really well, but it didn’t work - wrong notes happened randomly. It wasn’t all wrong, and it went wrong in different places each time, so it wasn’t really a technical issue.
I decided to try 2. (Accept it). I just told him I didn’t mind how many wrong notes he played. He could just play, and it didn’t matter how wrong it went. Just let it go wrong.
It took a while to get into this unfamiliar attitude, but when he did, all the wrong notes disappeared, and the playing was fluid and enjoyable for us both.
It seems that the determination to get it right was the thing that was stopping him from getting it right! Accepting the wrong notes made them go away.

A violinist wasn’t happy with her sound. There was a slight scraping noise in addition to the normal violin tone. She expended a lot of mental effort trying to make this scraping go away, often with some success, but found it difficult then to concentrate on the enjoyment of the music. It seemed that all her concentration was spent on avoiding this sound. Practice was a chore.
An obvious candidate for 3. (Do it more). What if she made much more of the scraping noise? How scrapy could it get? After an initial reluctance to make this ugly sound, she got into it. She started to really dig into the string with the bow, making more scrape than note. It was enjoyable to have such contact with the instrument. Suddenly an amazing, solid sound started emerging. She wasn’t pressing as hard now but there was still this feeling of physical contact with the violin, the sound was wonderful and somehow personal, and playing was just enjoyable.
It was as if before she had been skating over the surface, both physically and musically. The scraping sound was a like a little signal telling her this and trying to solve the problem. But it had been treated as something that must be eliminated.