The Choices We Make
by Kelly Mollnow Wilson. Feb 15, 2021.
As a musician, a manual therapist and a movement educator, I teach musicians to move with ease and comfort in order to deliver musically convincing, engaging and effective performances. Much of this work involves helping my students recognize the different kinds choices they are making in terms of their movement, their awareness, the amount of effort they are using and the way they deal with pain or discomfort. Musicians are used to making musical choices about tone color, dynamics, phrase shaping and vibrato styles. Musical intention is what guides these decisions, as musicians have to develop a clear idea about what they want the phrase and the overall piece to sound like. After that, it simply becomes a matter of choosing the right tools for the job in order to execute that musical intention.
Musicians need to know that they are also responsible for their own movement choices. Every sound we make as musicians is a result of movement somewhere; the task becomes finding the movement choices that support our musical choices. The problem is that most musicians are not trained to understand how their bodies are actually designed to move, unlike dancers and athletes, who are movers by definition. When musicians aren’t taught where a specific movement comes from or how it is executed, then they don’t have very many movement choices in their toolbox. This is where Body Mapping comes in.
One of the guiding principles of Body Mapping is to provide adequate and accurate anatomical information about how the body is designed to move. For example, ask yourself what pieces make an arm? The hand is one end of the whole arm, but where’s the other end? A whole arm contains a hand, a wrist, two bones in the lower arm, one bone in the upper arm, a collarbone, and a shoulder blade. Many people don’t have their collarbones and shoulder blades mapped as being parts of their arm structure and this is a bit of a problem.
There is only one place where the arm structure attaches bone to bone with the rest of the skeleton and it is at the sterno-clavicular (S-C) joint, where the collarbone meets the sternum. If your arm map is missing a collarbone, how is your arm attached? The collarbone and shoulder blade are attached at the acromio-clavicular (A-C) joint, so they move together. What would happen to the quality of your arm movement if you didn’t think your shoulder blades were supposed to move when your hands were in motion? Many times, musicians end up doing a lot of extra muscular work to hold things still instead of letting them move appropriately. If you don’t have accurate information about the different structures, how can you build a repertoire of choices about their movement?
In my teaching, I emphasize the global connections that are found throughout our bodies. For example, there are reasons that what you’re doing with your legs is having an effect on your breathing. One of these reasons is the fact that you have two psoas muscles, one on each side. They connect the lumbar spine with the femur and also intersect with fibers of the diaphragm. This is a direct muscular and fascial connection between your legs and diaphragm. Students learn that there are movement choices for leg movement that maximize breathing output and there are movement choices that impede breathing movement. They can, then, choose the movement that supports their musical intention. Musicians will say that they practice the piano or the flute. In reality, they’re actually practicing their body—the movements that make the music possible. In theory, the physical instrument should be the same every time. Performance is a series of movement choices that occur in a specific pattern within a specific time frame.
The type of awareness that is taught in body mapping is called inclusive awareness. It refers to being aware of information coming from all of your senses, not just visual and auditory information. Music education excels in teaching eyes and ears! But information coming in through the kinesthetic sense, your movement sense, is vital for musicians who move for a living. Tactile information coming in from anything touching the skin is important. Inclusive awareness also includes mental and emotional awareness. Many times, we spend a lot of mental and physical energy blocking things out. What would happen if we let things like a crying baby in the audience or the presence of the judges behind the screen just exist in our awareness? This is a choice! Being aware of the space above, behind, in front and to the sides of you is part of inclusive awareness. Perhaps the most important aspect of awareness has to do with the fact that you have to be aware of something before you can choose to change it. Imagine that you’re typing an email and you want to change the sentence you just typed to something less confrontational. You have to select the text before you can delete it. It works the same way here in regards to both movement choices and awareness choices. If you’re in a stressful performance environment and you notice that your vision is starting to become really narrow, almost like you’re in a tunnel, then you can choose to broaden your peripheral vision. You can choose to include the black border of the Manhasset music stand around the edge of the music. You can choose to bring your awareness back to your feet on the floor, your breathing, or any other strategy that is helpful to you. The awareness piece has to precede the choosing of strategies.
Another area that blends together awareness and movement choice has to do with how much effort you’re using to get the job done. How hard are you squeezing the keys, strings, or mallets? Is that amount of effort really necessary? If you are aware of the fact that your fingertips are going numb because you’re squeezing so hard, then you can choose to use less effort in your hands. Can you think of fingers being connected all the way back to your skeleton through your arm structure? Can you sense the support for your body from the floor or the chair? We want the effort to be distributed equally throughout the whole body rather than concentrated in just one or two areas.
Musicians also have choices to make when things aren’t going well and they’re experiencing pain or discomfort. Dr. Perry Nickelston at Stop Chasing Pain likes to say, “Pain is the body’s request for change.” Yet, many musicians keep playing until they absolutely can’t do it anymore and only then seek help. This is a choice—not necessarily a good one, though. Many of the injuries that musicians suffer from are more easily addressed right at the beginning, rather than months or years later. It’s not ok to be in pain when playing your instrument. Nobody chooses to be injured, but you can choose to get prompt medical attention.
For my manual therapy clients, choice is also an important part of the process.
First, clients make a choice to get help to address some aspect of their movement that’s lacking. Maybe there is pain, maybe there is a restricted range of motion. When clients leave my office, they can choose to take responsibility for their own behavior and do the homework they need to teach their brain new movement patterns. People who choose not to do the work and put in the time, don’t improve. Again ... it’s a choice.
So how do we learn to make intelligent choices as musicians? First, there has to be a willingness to be curious and explore all the possibilities. Second, it’s a matter of education. We learn by trial and error. When was the last time you were successful on your first try? Failure is necessary for growth. Think of toddlers learning to walk—they don’t quit when they fall the first time. When we make poor choices, we have to accept that responsibility and move on. My job is to help musicians discover the full variety and depth of choices they have at their disposal. Then the magic happens, resulting in an authentic, engaging, and brilliant performance. But this isn’t an accident, it’s the result of a series a great choices.
BIO
Kelly Mollnow Wilson is a musician, manual therapist and movement educator who teaches musicians to move with ease and comfort. Her teaching brings together a deep understanding of anatomy and human movement and a passion for empowering musicians to take ownership of their movement choices as they craft musically convincing and authentic performances. As a licensed member of the Association for Body Mapping Education, Wilson teaches Body Mapping at Oberlin Conservatory and has presented workshops around the US. As the owner of Precision Performance and Therapy, Kelly uses her skills as a Neurokinetic Therapy (NKT) Practitioner and Licensed Massage Therapist to provide manual therapy for those dealing with pain and discomfort. Her own experience with injury allows her to empathize with her clients and help fill the gaps that musicians frequently encounter when retraining and recovering from injury.
Her teaching career began as public school instrumental music educator in the Wooster City Schools (Wooster, OH) where her responsibilities included teaching band at both the high school and elementary levels and coaching girls sports. Kelly found that one of the things she loved most about coaching athletes was analyzing their movements and finding ways to improve efficiency, a skill that was eventually carried over into her work with musicians.
Ms. Wilson holds degrees from The Ohio State University and Baldwin-Wallace University. She teaches privately, performs as a freelance flutist in Northeast Ohio and is the lead author/flute author of Teaching Woodwinds: A Guide for Students and Teachers (http://teachingww.com/).
Website: www.precisionperformanceandtherapy.com.