Playing in a chamber music festival like Yellow Barn or Marlboro is not only about the physical work involved in playing. There are other stressors like the number of pieces to be learned, the stress of working with highly accomplished and demanding faculty or “elders”, and the constant “raising of the bar” of one’s understanding of the music. There is very little opportunity of “coasting” on what one already knows.

These circumstances, necessary as they are to the development of a good musician, almost always express themselves in extra effort which accumulates over the day, and if not checked, over the weeks of the festival. Pain and aches start showing up and the fear they create adds to the holding of  breath and the unnecessary contraction of muscles. One ends up carrying the particular pattern of contractions that a particular instrument requires into the resting time and into sleep. It is as if one never stops playing completely. It also means that the next day, the work does not start from zero, it is added to the residue of the work from yesterday. After a week of this, the muscles are fatigued and the brain protests.

Unless, we find a way, at least once a day, to come back to our neutral, to the state of being where we give in to gravity and are able to feel how to let go of all work. That is where the Feldenkrais class comes in.  Through doing the movement variations that are the fundamental building blocks of our functioning, we learn to listen closely to the sensations that tell us about excessive effort or the opposite – the cessation of work and the giving in to gravity. We learn to know what no work feels like, so that we can start from zero and do just the amount of work we need for the current project.

That is what I mean by coming back to neutral.

In Yellow Barn at 5:00pm and in Marlboro at 9:00am musicians who have a free hour can come and learn what ‘Neutral’ feels like. Again and again they learn to recognize lightness and ease. They learn to take advantage of little breaks between rehearsals or in the middle of a piece to look for this feeling and reduce the accumulated effort.

In the first day of my stay at Yellow Barn Chamber Music School and Festival, the two pieces rehearsed were Schubert’s Rosamunde quartet and a Telemann flute concerto. Since I do not have a choice in this matter, and since all my students here speak the language of music, it is O.K. with all of us.

Settling into the lesson I was giving and feeling enhanced by the music, I was thinking about the similarities between a piece of music and the structure of a Feldenkrais lesson.

In a lesson the teacher thinks of an everyday activity, a “Function” in the Feldenkrais language, or a component of it, which he/she thinks will enhance the student’s life if done better, with less effort and with grace. The way to make it happen is by having a sensory conversation with the student’s nervous system which will bring about new learning. The tools we have are quite similar to composing a movement of a symphony.

The movement is composed around the Functions (note the similar word!) of a certain key, which are organized in a basic progression throughout the entire movement. Each one of these functions gets established by harmonical journeys away from it and back to it, or by circling it, which then highlights it. The digressions can be enormous, but as long as the composer has the original progression in mind, the listener feels that every sound is inevitable and that the piece ends exactly in the right moment. There is a tension that does not get completely resolved until the last sound.

It is an apt description of the ideal Feldenkrais lesson. Sometimes we use elements of other dynamic relationships from other lessons (functional progressions) to highlight a missing element in the picture the brain has of the chosen function. It is sometimes necessary to journey quite far in the service of a vision of home base. As long as the vision of what needs to be learned is clear until the end, there will be an internal, sensory logic to the lesson which will be appreciated by the student and establish new patterns of action. Here, in Yellow barn, it will mean better performance and injury free playing.

The responsibility I feel is great, since the musicians, most of the time, will have to play immediately after the sessions with me, either in rehearsals or in concerts. In every lesson I will give, like in a concert, I will have to be at my best.

The challenge is: by what means do I make my students rediscover the early, preverbal rhythms, timings and lines of movement with which we all come into this world and with which we respond to sound, especially organized sound? How do I make the idea of “Embodied Music” real for the performer?

A while ago I came across a documentary called “When the Moment Sings” by John Collins & Jon-Roar Bjorkvold, which describes and compares everyday movements of people in Africa and westerners in Europe. Song and rhythm, from the beginning of life, accompanies everything the Africans do. The rhythm is internalized and present whether they walk with 20 kilos on their head, shifting the weight beautifully from one leg to the other, whether they work in the field, whether they build a railroad or whether they dance. The music informs their movements and their movements inform their music in a continuous feedback loop. It is “Embodied Music” and there is where I got the inspiration for this name. You can imagine that the Europeans, hurrying to the subway, do not fare so well in comparison!

But as babies, we have the same capacity as the African babies. All babies love to be rocked, move rhythmically to music, and are delighted when they learn to negotiate gravity and find mobility with no effort. They learn it all by themselves! Later, culture and socialization overrules some of these innate tendencies and we stop listening to our internal music, but it is all there to be accessed.

As musicians, we cannot afford to stop listening. If we do not discover again these innate rhythms and movements when we play, we will either not get the results we want, or we will use the kind of movement that causes injury.

It is my passion to discover more and more ways to have people sense the embodiment of music.

As a Feldenkrais Method trainer, I have a lot of knowledge about movement and its imperative importance in life. I also have many tools to bring to bear in creating change. But when a person comes in the door or a group of people lie on the floor in class, the particular organization of life that is unique to this person and to the group demands from me a new organization of the knowledge and the tools I have. It is exactly this creative reassembling of tools to respond anew to a new situation that makes the Feldenkrais method so effective. This is why continuous learning on my part cannot be compromised. There is no turning away from learning if I want to be present with a new person and take the time to identify what is the change that will be most meaningful to her or his life.

As I am packing, I am humbly gathering the gifts I have to be able to do this.