INTRODUCTION

A child prodigy who once played like an angel loses his innocence and becomes self-
conscious about his instrument, his music making, and his adoring public. Despite
much soul searching, he’s unable to prevent his performances from becoming ever
more erratic.
A young woman of flair and ability is marketed by her record company as a clas-
sical-music sex kitten. She admits to having developed three distinct personalities—
with her family, on stage, and by herself—to cope with the expectations and demands
made upon her.
Many orchestral musicians live in a state of apprehension and insecurity. Some
drink heavily before and after performances (and during the intermission as well).
Others take tranquilizers and anxiety suppressants. Most complain of multiple ill-
nesses seemingly related to work, including backache, headache, tendonitis, and a
plethora of nasty mental conditions.
The behavior of many eminent conductors, singers, and soloists deviates sharply
from accepted standards of human decency. The temper tantrums, canceled perfor-
mances, and generally outrageous comportment of the diva make the stuff of gossip
columns. We’re told that this is a necessary evil, a sign of an “artistic temperament.”
In sum, the waste of talent, the shortened careers, the inadequate performances,
the objectionable behavior, and the frustration, suffering, and pain are the norm of
the music profession.
Why is this so?
Many explanations come to mind: too much stress, the limits of the human body,
the harsh exigencies of modern life, music competitions, other people.
In Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient, Norman Cousins wrote that
“the most prevalent—and, for all we know, most serious—health problem of our
time is stress, which is defined by Hans Selye, dean of the stress concept, as the ‘rate
of wear and tear in the human body.’ This definition would thus embrace any de-
mands, whether emotional or physical, beyond the ready capability of any given
individual.”1
 This very definition of stress is problematic. Let’s borrow a concept from engi-
neering. A bridge is under the stress of traffic flow, for instance, or of the action of the
elements. Responding to the stress, the bridge strains—bending here, buckling there.
Over time the bridge suffers wear and tear and may finally crack or collapse. What
causes it to collapse? Not stress itself, but the way the bridge strains under stress.
Stress alone can’t cause a bridge’s collapse; proof of it is that many bridges have with-
stood centuries of unremitting stress without suffering much at all.
It may be difficult to define stress unambiguously. People react so differently to
the same stimulus that we can’t affirm that any one thing is, in itself, absolutely stress-
ful. Some musicians, for instance, tremble at the thought of public exposure, while
others enjoy going on stage and baring their soul in front of thousands of listeners.
Performing in public, then, isn’t necessarily stressful. An orchestra packed with mu-
sicians who live in pain will have a number of players who enjoy their job. Playing in
an orchestra, too, isn’t obligatorily stressful.
The stimulation of life is permanent and inevitable, and in itself it’s neither nega-
tive nor undesirable. In fact, without stimulation there is no life. Something becomes
stressful to you only if you react to it in a certain way. Depending on how you think
about it, then, stress—that is, stimulation—is a really good thing.
Ultimately, it’s the strain that hurts, not the stress. When Hans Selye defines
stress as the rate of wear and tear in the human body, he seems to be talking about
strain, not stress; a response, not a stimulus. It’s an all-important distinction, and
understanding it can change your life.
You may argue that well-built bridges withstand stress by design and construc-
tion, but that the human body wasn’t designed or constructed to bear what is made
to bear today. A small body isn’t made for playing the viola, a small hand isn’t made
for playing the piano, the human voice isn’t made to sing above the sounds of a mod-
ern symphony orchestras.
Here, too, things aren’t so clear-cut.
The violist William Primrose wrote that, for playing the viola, “having a large
hand and being of medium to large stature is an advantage, but certainly not a re-
quirement.”2 The pianist Heinrich Neuhaus, whose students include Sviatoslav
Richter, Emil Gilels, and Radu Lupu, went further. He wrote in The Art of Piano
Playing:

The anatomy of the human hand is . . . ideal from the point of view of the pia-
nist and it is a convenient, suitable and intelligent mechanism which provides
a wealth of possibilities for extracting the most varied tones out of a piano.
And the mechanism of the hand is, of course, in complete harmony with the
mechanism of the keyboard.3
Small hands with a small stretch have quite obviously to make much
greater use of wrist, forearm and shoulder; in fact the whole of the “hinter-
land,” than large hands, particularly large hands with a large stretch. . . . Some-
times this is just why gifted people with small and difficult hands have a better
understanding of the nature of the piano and of their “pianistic” body than

xvi • Introduction
 the large-handed and broad-boned4. . . . In short, they turn their drawbacks
into advantages.5

The human body, wondrously beautiful and richly endowed, is capable of meeting
all the demands of music making. To paraphrase Neuhaus, the secret lies in acquir-
ing an understanding of the nature of music making and of your musicianly body,
and in turning all potential drawbacks into advantages.
The human body may be perfectly designed for music making, you might say,
but not for the exigencies of the modern world. Have you tried to sit for six hours on
the crappy chairs typical of a rehearsal hall? Have you gone on long tours? If our
lifestyles are unnatural, it’s inevitable that we’ll hurt and suffer.
Horrible chairs are horrible, of course. But would a better chair eliminate our
health problems? In Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the Clown speaks a few
lines that help us recognize the limits of furniture design: “It is like a barber’s chair,
that fits all buttocks,—the pin-buttock, the quatch-buttock, the brawn-buttock, or
any buttock” (II.ii). Such a chair will never exist; there are too many types of but-
tocks out there. But even the most perfectly designed chair can’t give you health
if you don’t know how to use it. Badly designed furniture increases the likelihood
of discomfort, and well-designed furniture decreases it; no certitudes arise from
either.
Indeed, the whole world redesigned to perfection will not give you health if you
don’t know what to do with the world.
The logical consequence of blaming modern life for our problems is to wish to go
back in time—a sneaking desire we all feel on occasion. Indeed, people already felt
this way thousands of years ago. And, already then, it wasn’t a good idea to yearn for
olden times, as illustrated in the Bible: “Say not thou, What is the cause that the for-
mer days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this”
(Eccles. 7:10). In other words, yearning for the past isn’t smart. If our capabilities to
meet life’s demands are inadequate, then we need to increase our capabilities, rather
than decrease the demands made on them.
Competitions are another scourge. You might say that competitions have poi-
soned the music profession, destroyed the careers of young musicians, and perverted
the tastes of the public. In truth, competitiveness is an irrepressible human instinct,
and every culture at every junction of history has had a competitive element. Would
music be better served had the great singers of the bel canto era not been pitted
against one another in competition? Should Wales outlaw its annual Eisteddfod, the
competitive and yet celebratory festival of music and poetry?
Realistically, we can’t blame competitions themselves for the woes of any musi-
cian, young or old, winner or loser. It’s the attitude of the competitor that makes
competing either beneficial or harmful. Rod Laver, the great Australian tennis cham-
pion, said about winning and losing:

You do the best you can. If you don’t play your own game, you’re going to lose
it anyway. If you start to worry about the importance of the win before it

Introduction • xvii
 happens, you’re going to have yourself in a complete panic. You play the shots
as you see them. That, and don’t start wishing the shots to go in. When you
start wishing, you are in trouble.6

In a few lines Laver said many wise things. “Do the best you can.” “Play your own
game.” “Play the shots as you see them.” “Don’t start wishing.” In other words, let go
and be yourself. Laver’s words apply to the game of tennis, the game of music, and
the game of life.
Another favorite explanation for a musician’s problems is other people. Pushy
parents, you might say, cause young people to “lose it.” Record-company executives
pervert the public’s tastes. Conductors and administrators run orchestras into the
ground—unless it’s the fault of the musicians’ union.
Strangely enough, there exist happy and healthy musicians who had lousy par-
ents, and emotionally wrecked musicians who grew up in a loving environment.
Other people certainly play a big role in your life, but they don’t determine your life
outright.
Stress, human design, civilization, and other people, then, have all been consid-
ered part of a musician’s problems. For each of these causes, appropriate therapies
suggest themselves. Pushy parents cause psychological problems; the solution is
psychotherapy. Small hands cause tendonitis; the solution, physiotherapy. Bad chairs
cause backache; the solution, ergonomics. The stress of concert life causes perfor-
mance anxiety; the solution, beta blockers. Modern life causes unhappiness; the so-
lution, a return to Nature.
A diagnosis implies a remedy. Get the diagnosis wrong, and the remedy may
threaten the patient’s life. We can safely say that the way musicians diagnose their
problems has become part of the problems themselves, since stress, body design,
and furniture are demonstrably misleading factors.
Frederick Matthias Alexander (1869–1955) had a crippling health issue in his
youth: he tended to lose his voice when performing as an actor on stage. Doctors
and coaches couldn’t help him, so he set out to learn for himself what was causing
the problem. His years of self-observation and experimentation led not only to a
permanent cure for his vocal ills but also to insights on the essence of all human ills.
Alexander found the cause of our troubles not in what is done to us but in what
we do to ourselves. He saw that the problem was not in the stimulation of modern
life but in our response to it; not in the stress, but in the straining. The straining he
called misuse of the self—its cause not human design, civilization, or other people but
end-gaining. I explain both terms and their relationship in the next chapter.
Alexander found the common thread to apparently disparate problems. Instead
of saying that pushy parents cause neuroses, Alexander would say that end-gaining
causes misuse . . . and neurosis is but a form of misuse. Alexander didn’t think that
bad chairs caused backache. On the subject of children’s desks and their alleged
harmful effect, he said that “what we need to do is not to educate our school fur-
niture but to educate our children.”7 Alexander would similarly reformulate the
equation between body design and tendonitis, civilization and stress, and the other
explanations that we habitually give ourselves for our difficulties. In all contexts,

xviii • Introduction
Alexander offers a single equation: end-gaining causes misuse, and misuse causes
our malfunctioning—that is, our aches and pains, and also our unhappiness and
even despair.
What is the solution to end-gaining and misuse?
The answer is simple but elusive. It’s called non-doing—a powerful concept that
bridges the physical, the psychological, and the metaphysical, and that offers pro-
foundly satisfying answers to our quest as musicians and as human beings.
Non-doing, like all important existential concepts, is difficult if not impossible to
define—and, needless to say, difficult to learn as well. In Indirect Procedures I offer
you my understanding of Alexander’s insights, with a mixture of intellectual argu-
ment and practical suggestions for you to explore creatively. The gist of Indirect Pro-
cedures is that you carry within yourself the solutions to your problems, most of
which are of your own making to begin it. My companion volume, Integrated Prac-
tice: Coordination, Rhythm & Sound, takes what might appear at first a contradictory
view: music itself is a sort of map toward health and integration. If you know how to
read the map and follow it, music will heal your hurts. We might reconcile these two
views by saying that your habitual response to music causes problems; if you learn
how to respond to music differently thanks to non-doing, you might become able to
solve your problems.
Integrated Practice is supported by a dedicated website with 72 video clips and 25
audio clips illustrating its concepts and exercises. Indirect Procedures and Integrated
Practice are self-contained books; you don’t need to read one to understand the
other. Nevertheless, you might find it useful to study both together, or in alternation
or in sequence. To help you link their materials, throughout Indirect Procedures I
refer to the relevant sections of Integrated Practice, with an emphasis on the video
clips that you can, if you wish, watch without having to read their explanations
within the book.
Non-doing merits your attention over the long run. Study the materials on these
two related books over a few years. If they don’t help you, then you’ll be fully justi-
fied in buying an expensive chair and firing the cheap conductor.

Introduction • xix
This page intentionally left blank
 PART I

THE PRINCIPLES
This page intentionally left blank
 CHAPTER 1

THE USE OF THE SELF

We tend to compartmentalize different aspects of our lives. Into one box we put
things that we consider physical: the body, movement, posture, tension, and relax-
ation. Into a second box goes all that we consider psychological: moods, emotions,
feelings, opinions, and suppositions. And into a third box goes all that appears to be
metaphysical: symbols, metaphors, and spiritual concepts that transcend our every-
day existence. This determines many of our behaviors. For instance, we visit the os-
teopath to deal with the physical, the psychotherapist to deal with the psychological,
and the priest to deal with the metaphysical.
The separation of the physical, the psychological, and the metaphysical, however,
is illusory—and potentially handicapping.
In much of what we do in our daily lives, we musicians tend to cling to these il-
lusory separations. Off the top of our heads, we define technique (such as piano tech-
nique) as the physical means to actualize a musical conception. But don’t the mind
and the heart enter into it? We’ll look into technique in Chapter 13. A fine violin
teacher writes of stage fright as having physical, mental, or social causes. Pigeonhol-
ing the causes of stage fright, she sets up compartmentalized solutions as well. Would
a solution for your problems work when it chops you up into the body here, and the
mind there? We ponder the question in Chapter 18.
The simple act of brushing your teeth, for instance, appears to be purely physical,
involving your mouth, one of your hands, and little else. But it’s humanly impossible
to do any one thing without there being a psychological dimension. The emotions
associated with brushing your teeth are varied and intense, going back to your child-
hood and involving memories, fears, desires, pleasures, and displeasures. The act
contains faint or not-so-faint connections with every visit to the dentist, every meal
and its aftermath, every moment of vanity or shame regarding your teeth and your
smile. Further, brushing your teeth is a ritualistic act of cleansing that prepares you
for talking to someone intimately, for appearing in public, for going to bed at night
and entering the land of dreams, and so on. In truth, brushing your teeth reflects the
intertwined and inseparable coexistence of the physical, the psychological, and the
metaphysical—or to put it differently, body, mind, and soul.
 Sir Charles Sherrington, who received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medi-
cine in 1932, wrote compellingly about the fundamental unity of every human being:

Each waking day is a stage dominated for good or ill, in comedy, farce or trag-
edy, by a dramatis persona, the “self.” And so it will be until the curtain drops.
The self is a unity. The continuity of its presence in time, sometimes hardly
broken by sleep, its inalienable “interiority” in (sensual) space, its consis-
tency of view-point, the privacy of its experience, combine to give it status
as a unique existence. Although multiple aspects characterize it it has self-
cohesion. It regards itself as one, others treat it as one. It is addressed as one,
by a name to which it answers. . . . All its diversity is merged in oneness.1

Elsewhere he wrote that “the formal dichotomy of the individual [into ‘body’ and
‘mind’], . . . which our description practiced for the sake of analysis, results in arti-
facts such as are not in Nature.”2 To put it differently, body and mind don’t actually
exist as separate entities; these are artificial concepts that we humans invented in a
futile bid to understand the way in which we live and function.
To become an integrated and healthy musician, you don’t need to become better
aware of your body or to sing and play in a more physically relaxed manner. Instead
you need to bring together all your capabilities in a balanced whole, in which body
parts are interconnected, body and mind are interconnected, player and instrument
are interconnected . . . and player and music become one.
Enter F. M. Alexander.

THE USE OF THE SELF

Frederick Matthias Alexander, called F. M. by all who knew him, was born in Wyn-
yard, on the northwest coast of Tasmania, in 1869 (Figure 1.1). He spent part of his
childhood on his grandfather’s country estate, where he developed a lifelong love of
horses. At the age of 20, Alexander moved to Melbourne, where he pursued a career
as an actor. He thrived early on, touring Australia and Tasmania. Nevertheless, he
was hampered by vocal problems, in particular hoarseness on stage. Doctors and
vocal experts were unable to help him. Faced with the prospect of uncertain surgery,
the young Alexander, in a stroke of genius, decided instead to find out what he did to
himself that caused his troubles. His search led to insights and discoveries that we’ll
study throughout this book.
Alexander moved to London in 1904. He met with great success as a teacher,
counting among his pupils George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, Sir Stafford Cripps
(chancellor of the exchequer in the 1940s), and other luminaries. He published his
first book, Man’s Supreme Inheritance, in 1910. From 1914 to 1924 he shared his time
between England and the United States and wrote two further books: Conscious
Control and Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual. Later they were amal-
gamated and republished under the second title. During this time, Alexander started

4 • THE PRINCIPLES
FIGURE 1.1: F. M. Alexander
a friendship with John Dewey, the American philosopher of education. Dewey was
strongly influenced by Alexander’s teachings and wrote prefaces for several of his
books.
Alexander ran a teacher’s training course from 1930 to 1940, when he moved to
America on account of the war. His third book, The Use of the Self, came out in 1932,
and his fourth and last, The Universal Constant in Living, in 1945. Alexander returned
to England in 1943 and resumed training teachers in 1945. He died in 1955, aged 86,
having taught up to a few days before his death. Teachers trained by him have trained
other teachers in turn, and today the worldwide Alexander community of teachers
is several thousand strong.
Alexander’s writing style is a little hard for modern readers to get into, as he fa-
vored long and tortuous paragraphs, constant use of capitals and italics for emphasis,
and complicated formulations for his ideas and concepts. And yet his books are full
of well-argued insights and instructive anecdotes. Reading his books and taking les-
sons from a qualified Alexander teacher would go nicely together.
Alexander was a farsighted man. His genius was manifest not only in his theories
and practices but in his vocabulary as well. On the one hand, he relied on very little
technical jargon; a glossary of the Technique wouldn’t have more than half a dozen
terms. On the other hand, he refrained from using words that imply a separation of
body and mind, such as “body mechanics” or “mental states.” Instead, he spoke sim-
ply of “the self ” and its use and functioning.
The self is the whole of you. You react from moment to moment to life’s constant
stream of stimulation. Whether healthy or unhealthy, your existence is a never-end-
ing series of reactions to what you sense and imagine, leading you to choose “to do”
or “not to do.”
In all of your reactions, it’s impossible to separate body and mind.
Imagine yourself talking with a person you know (Figure 1.2). The subject mat-
ter is unimportant; so is the identity of your friend. In this situation both of you are
speaking. Each voice has its timbre, color, resonance, diction, and inflection. Both of
you use your vocal mechanism, lips, tongue, jaw, the breathing apparatus, and the
whole body besides. Each of you has a personal choice of words, grammar, and
points of view and ways of arguing them. You swear, or not; you stammer, stutter,
whisper, shout, laugh; or not. You gesticulate; you laugh by throwing your head
back; you interrupt your friend. Your friend lisps and drools. You’re loud, brash, un-
reasonable, angry. Your friend is timid, hesitant, unclear.
At no point during your discussion would it be possible for you to say that speak-
ing is purely physical or purely mental. The way you use your voice is a concerted
activity of your entire self. In fact it might be better to refer not to the way you “use
your voice,” but the way you “use yourself while speaking.”
The principle applies to everything you do. For instance, you don’t quite play the
violin; you “use yourself while playing the violin.” Ideally, then, you wouldn’t work
on the violin; instead, you’d work on yourself as you play the violin. Working on your-
self involves a mixture of perception and intention. How do you sense the situation,
and what are you going to do about it? The situation includes a lot of information
that you interpret and react to: the violin as an object; the technical and coordinative

6 • THE PRINCIPLES
FIGURE 1.2: Physical and mental unity

challenges of playing the violin; the stream of input from your teachers, colleagues,
and family; the weight of history when you approach Bach and Brahms; the immen-
sity of music itself. The situation is also pregnant with the assumptions you make
about the violin (how “hard” it is to play, for instance, or how “hard” you have to prac-
tice), aesthetic judgments you make about every note you play (“beautiful,” “ugly”),
and value judgments you make about what you do and who you are (“good,” “bad”).
Once you factor in all these elements, it becomes clear that you can’t quite practice
the violin as such; inevitably, you work on yourself as you practice the violin.
The secret of existence is simple: you’re whole and indivisible, and everything in
your life comes from how you react to every situation—that is, how you use yourself.
Alexander put it succinctly: “Talk about a man’s individuality and character: it’s the
way he uses himself.”3 To achieve integration and good health, you need to grasp the
unity of life and the role of your reactions, decisions, and choices in shaping your life.

INTELLIGENCE AND POSTURE

We tend to equate intelligence with the workings of the mind, and posture with the
workings of the body. It may be useful to reconsider these ideas in our quest for
integration.

The Use of the Self • 7

 Defining intelligence isn’t easy. A scholar who writes clearly and elegantly on an
academic subject drinks himself into a rage and beats his wife. Is the scholar truly
intelligent? Michael Brady, a professor at Oxford University, states that “[the ability
to reason or think] is not what intelligence evolved for. I think sensing and action—
not thinking—are the very well-spring of intelligence.”4 Heinrich Neuhaus, the
piano teacher, concurs: “When I speak of the ‘knowledge’ of an artist, I have always
in mind an active force: understanding plus action. Or simpler still: acting correctly
on the basis of correct thinking.”5 If you use yourself constructively, you are intelli-
gent. If you use yourself destructively and pay a price for it in health and happiness,
it won’t matter how beautifully you write that academic paper . . . you aren’t that
intelligent, after all!
Generally we understand posture as a bodily position we hold, consciously or
unconsciously, for some length of time. Mention “good posture” to an unsuspecting
friend, and he’ll immediately straighten his back, push his shoulders back, and hold
himself rigidly, in an imitation of a stereotypical soldier or a bad dancer. Posture,
however, is inextricably linked to a set of attitudes, thoughts, and feelings, most of
which you develop from the inside out and not from the outside in. Suppose you
want to find a good posture for sitting at a chair and playing long orchestral rehears-
als. You can’t quite go about it by simply arranging body parts. You sit in a certain
way so that you’re open, so that you can communicate, so that you can see and be
seen, so that you can wait and listen comfortably if need be, so that you can maxi-
mize your latent potential for musical, intellectual, and emotional action. Sitting
comfortably is far from a purely physical pursuit.
Posture and attitude, then, are closely linked. Posture and movement also are
more closely linked than generally believed. The biologist George Coghill knew
Alexander and supported his work. He wrote that “in posture the individual is mo-
bilized (integrated) for movement according to a definite pattern and in movement
that pattern is being executed. [The differences between posture and movement] are
relative, and one phase passes over imperceptibly into the other.”6
In short, there’s nothing to separate posture from attitude, nor posture from
movement. You’ll be healthier if you let go of the idea of good posture as a fixed ar-
rangement of body parts, and if you embrace instead the unity of body, mind, soul,
posture, movement, and attitude.

TENSION AND RELAXATION

Neuhaus wrote that “the best position of the hand on the keyboard is one which can
be altered with the maximum of ease and speed.”7 You might assume that you need
to relax physically in order to find these good positions. In truth, everything you do
is psychophysical, including the pursuit of relaxation; leave your mind out of your
physical pursuits and you’re unlikely to achieve the results you’re looking for. Physi-
cal relaxation, then, is more or less impossible. “Psychophysical relaxation” may be
possible, but is it desirable?

8 • THE PRINCIPLES
 Tension is a prerequisite of all human endeavors, and of life itself. Remove all
tension from your arterial system, for instance, and you’ll die. Take a musical instru-
ment such as the violin. Its taut strings exert tremendous tension on the instrument’s
body, which is set up in order to resist and oppose the strings’ tension. In the absence
of tension, the instrument would be completely unplayable. Music itself is a form of
tension—melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, and aural.
Viktor E. Frankl was a psychiatrist who survived the concentration camps thanks
to his innate ability (which we all share) to make choices even in the most harrowing
circumstances. In Man’s Search for Meaning, he wrote that mental health depends on
a certain degree of tension: the tension between who you are and who you can (and
perhaps must) become.

I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that

what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology,
“homeostasis,” i.e. a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a ten-
sionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a
freely chosen task. . . . If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch, they
increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined to-
gether more firmly together.8

Neuhaus wrote that musicians “sometimes mistake the concept of ‘favorable posi-
tion,’ ‘convenience,’ for the concept of ‘inertia’ [i.e. relaxation]. These are not only
two entirely different things, they are also contradictory. The attention required for
ensuring well-ordered, organized playing . . . excludes both physical and spiritual
inertia.”9
In short, tension creates and sustains life, and then carries it forward. On the road
to integration, you need to be not relaxed but in a more or less permanent state of
dynamic tension. If you suffer from pain—in your shoulders, for instance—you’re
likely to think you have too much tension and you need to relax. “Too much tension”
most often means the wrong kind and amount of tension, in the wrong places, for
the wrong length of time. Counterintuitive as this may be, the cause of wrong tension
is most often the lack of right tension. In such cases it’s fruitless to try to relax these
wrong tensions directly. The solution lies in creating the right tensions, and letting
relaxation come about of its own (Figure 1.3).
Suppose you stiffen your neck, shoulders, and arms when playing the piano. It’s
likely that you do so to compensate for a lack of necessary tension elsewhere—in
the legs and back, for instance. If you invest your legs and back with the energy you
need to support the arms and shoulders, your neck will relax itself. It’s also likely
that you stiffen your neck and shoulders because you’re aiming for a particular aes-
thetic and musical effect. You won’t be able to relax your neck and shoulders if
you don’t let go of your habitual aesthetic goals and seek a different way of making
music.
You become relaxed—or you appear relaxed, or you feel as if you were relaxed—
only when you bring many tensions into collaboration. Giovanni Battista Lamperti
wrote in his book Vocal Wisdom:

The Use of the Self • 9

 FIGURE 1.3: Necessary tensions

Relaxing a muscle is beneficial only to educate and discipline outermost mus-

cles to do their part in the process.
Otherwise it is weakening to the final output.
It is co-action, not non-action, that causes controlled effort to feel ef-
fortless.
. . . Singing is accomplished by opposing motions and the measured bal-
ance between them.

10 • THE PRINCIPLES
 This causes the delusive appearance of rest and fixity—even of relax-
ation.10
. . . The singing voice in reality is born of the clash of opposing principles,
the tension of conflicting forces, brought to an equilibrium.11

What characterizes good use, then, isn’t relaxation but the right tension—right in
type, amount, placing, and timing. We’ll give further thought to the question of po-
sitions, directions, tension, and relaxation throughout the book.

THE END-GAINING PRINCIPLE

Why do we misuse ourselves?
We’re forever tempted to blame our misuses on education, civilization, modern
life, family life, religion, the lack of religion, or any number of sources, most of them
having to do with other people, or with things that happened in our lives at some
point in the past. Alexander believed otherwise, having realized that the problem lies
not in what is done to us but in what we do to ourselves. We tend to pursue the
wrong ends for ourselves, or to pursue worthy ends in the wrong manner. The ulti-
mate cause of misuse, in Alexander’s understanding, is the universal habit of end-
gaining. Aches and pains, as well as problems of all sorts, come about because of our
goals and intentions. We “do” things wrongly because we “want” things wrongly.
Therefore, we can’t change our doing if we don’t change our wanting.
Without your being aware of it, it’s possible that you have preconceived ideas as
to what you want, or what you should want, or what other people want from you.
It’s only too easy to internalize goals other people set for you, without fully realizing
that those aren’t your own goals. Then you pursue goals from a misunderstanding of
who you really are or what you really want. The average musician performing the
mainstream repertory often doesn’t realize that “average” and “mainstream” can be
prisons for the mind, body, and soul . . . and yet this is what family, peers, and teach-
ers expect you to pursue in your musical life.
Your goals in life can come not from your loves but from your fears, in which case
most of your wants are compensations rather than worthy goals. Perhaps you play
the violin just because you’re afraid of disappointing or enraging your father, who so
wanted you to succeed where he failed. Then it won’t matter how “physically re-
laxed” you try to play the violin, because your motivation—the want, the goal, the
end you pursue—is existentially unhealthy.
It’s possible for you to hide behind a goal, which becomes “bigger than yourself.”
Some musicians have busy concert careers behind which lies an artistic or existential
vacuum. Their careers are bigger than themselves, and to pursue such a career is
to pursue an unhealthy goal. From time to time, a famous musician decides to quit
his or her career, much to the puzzlement of the fans and the media. Quitting, how-
ever, can make a lot of sense when it’s liberation from end-gaining.

The Use of the Self • 11

 You can be so invested in a goal as to reach obsession or psychosis. It’s easy to see
this “craziness” in other people, but a lot harder to see it in yourself. You play a pas-
sage you perceive as being difficult. Then you struggle with the passage. The fact is
that your very struggle is the reason the passage seems difficult in and of itself. Your
struggle is the difficulty! This is end-gaining, and it’s crazy. But we all do it, over little
things and over big things.
End-gaining is the most prevalent of all habits. It’s so widespread and insidious
that most people don’t realize that they, and others, are end-gaining all the time. To
drive a car on the hard shoulder of a traffic-clogged road is to end-gain. Weight-loss
diets are end-gaining; a healthy diet helps you attain your ideal weight, but a weight-
loss diet is usually unhealthy. To blame others for the results of your own actions is
to end-gain. To try to change others rather than change yourself is to end-gain.
The father who screams at a crying child for her to stop crying is end-gaining.
Likewise the conductor screaming at the seemingly disobedient orchestra. In truth
the out-of-control orchestra reflects faithfully the out-of-control conductor and
can’t therefore be called disobedient.
You can enter a music competition as an end-gainer, or not. Alexander recounts
this anecdote about a match involving a tennis player called W. H. Austin:

At one stage in the game, [Austin] was playing so badly he decided not to try
to win the set but as soon as he had made that decision, he began to play up
to his usual form. In consequence, he decided that now he would try to win
the set after all, and immediately reverted to the indifferent play that had
cause him “not to try.” It does seem sometimes as if human beings not only
like to be fooled by others but are keen on fooling themselves.12

To go directly for an end (to win) causes a misuse of the self (the indifferent play),
which makes the end unattainable. Enter competitions, then, wishing not to win but
to do your best, which may or may not assure you of a prize.
End-gaining pervades all the arts. Let’s take an example from the movies. Sister
Act features Whoopi Goldberg as a lounge singer who evades a sticky situation by
hiding in a convent. There she coaches the resident choir and transforms a bunch
of tone-deaf geeky nuns into a competition-winnin’, hip-swingin’, soul-liftin’ chick
ensemble. The movie is inspiring, funny, tightly constructed, and skillfully directed.
Sister Act 2, the sequel, features Whoopi Goldberg as a lounge singer who . . . well,
we don’t need to describe its plot. The sequel is mindless, implausible, and peopled
by imitations and caricatures of the original’s cast of characters. It tries to reproduce
the effects of the original by manipulating the creative process, which becomes not
an organic act of the imagination but a mechanical pushing-of-buttons and pressing-
of-levers. It’s end-gaining from the first frame to the closing credits.
It’s possible to end-gain in the process of composing a score, in the process of
learning it, and in the process of performing it. This means that there exist end-
gaining compositions, rehearsals, and performers. End-gaining, in fact, knows no
limits. It’s possible to end-gain in your choice of a concert dress, a concert program,
a route as you drive to the concert hall, and so on.

12 • THE PRINCIPLES
 End-gaining is multilayered and all-encompassing. It’s such a complex entity that
we can’t comprehend it to the full. Pondering end-gaining and trying to overcome it,
you’ll bump into contradictions, paradoxes, enigmas, and existential challenges of
every sort. Can you live daily life without goals? Probably not. Can you have any one
goal without end-gaining? Probably not. Should you just give up and end-gain any-
way? That may be costly to your health. What to do, then?

THE MEANS-WHEREBY PRINCIPLE

Alexander contrasted the end-gaining principle with a different approach to life.
Simply put, it calls for you to create and employ the best possible means to achieve
any given end. This involves the ability to wait and to make reasoned choices before
acting, permanent awareness of your own use, and willingness to give up achieving
your ends by direct means (such as yelling at a child to stop her crying) and go about
it using indirect procedures. This is the means-whereby principle.
Frank Pierce Jones, a teacher who trained with Alexander’s brother in the 1940s,
gave an interesting definition of the principle in the glossary of his book Body Aware-
ness in Action:

Means-whereby—The coordinated series of intermediate steps which must be

accomplished in order to attain an end. The means-whereby principle is the
recognition in practice that these intermediate steps are important as ends
in themselves, and that the most important step at any time is the next one.
Application of the means-whereby principle involves awareness of the condi-
tions present, a reasoned consideration of their causes, inhibition of habitual
or end-gaining responses to these conditions, and consciously guided perfor-
mance of the indirect series of steps required to gain the end.13

I disagree with one item in this definition. In a series of steps, the most important
step at any time surely is the one you’re performing at that very moment, in the
“here, now.” Imagine that there are five steps to execution of an exercise. If, for in-
stance, you’re going through the performance of the second step, it and it alone is
foremost in your mind—not the last step, not the outcome of the combined steps,
not the end you want to achieve.
Another definition of the principle is subtler and more powerful. It equates
the means-whereby principle with your own use. In other words, your use—your
thoughts, perceptions, actions, and reactions—is the ultimate means to achieve your
aim. To conquer a problem, you don’t work on the problem; you work on yourself
as you face the problem. Confusing as this may sound, to work on a problem can
become a problem! It takes time, practice, and multiple experiences to really grasp
that working on yourself is more efficient than working on the problem. Once you
understand the principle, however, you’ll be on your way to becoming a master prob-
lem solver.

The Use of the Self • 13

 To focus on the means is not the same thing as to give up on all goals. In truth,
nothing gets achieved in the absence of a goal. Without a goal, Beethoven wouldn’t
have composed his symphonies; without a goal, the symphony orchestra wouldn’t be
formed and maintained; without a goal, the theater house wouldn’t be built; without
a goal, the concert wouldn’t take place; without a goal, the listeners wouldn’t show
up at the right time and place. Goal setting, then, is fundamental, inevitable, and
desirable.
Nevertheless, you can achieve every goal in a variety of ways—some healthy,
some unhealthy.
Drawing a bow across the string is a goal. Your awareness risks attaching itself to
“bow, string” and slip away from “you in the here, now.” Then you might neglect the
factors that contribute to a successful bow stroke: the coordination of your whole
body, the rhythmic impetus that animates your gestures, your capacity to listen and
observe, your connection with sound and vibration. The difficulty, then, is balancing
two things: the goal (a bow stroke) and the means whereby you achieve the goal (the
way you use yourself).
Suppose you have a short-term goal: to hit a high note that you have often played
out of tune in the past. If you keep playing the note again and again, and if you keep
missing it, you’re concentrating on the goal and developing bad habits. Now sup-
pose you back off the goal and improvise variations on the passage without the high
note. You relax about the fight, the difficulty, the anticipation of failure. You open up
your field of perception, and you start listening more openly and broadly. In the
midst of this process, without further thought, you make a simple decision to play
the high note as part of your improvisation. You succeed beautifully. Then you’ll say,
“I didn’t do anything! It just happened!” This is the difference between end-gaining
and non-doing. It’s so marvelous that it’s literally “unbelievable.” It takes trust and faith
to accept that success in achieving your goals comes from giving up your goals—at
least your goals as you see them habitually.

USE AND FUNCTIONING

We tend to be concerned with symptoms and effects, and less concerned with their
causes. For instance, “my shoulders are tight” points at an effect. “I’m tightening my
shoulders” points at a cause. Let’s call the effect your functioning, and the cause your
use. They’re very intimately related: your shoulders will stay tight as long as you
tighten them. This sounds like wordplay, but it states a deep truth.
Alexander wrote that “the influence of the manner of use is a constant one upon
the general functioning of the organism in every reaction and during every moment
of life. . . . From this there is not any escape. Hence this influence can be said to be a
universal constant in a technique for living.”14
How you use yourself affects how you function. If something is wrong with your
functioning—for instance, if your shoulders feel tight—you need to change how you
use yourself, which means how you react to the world around you and to your own

14 • THE PRINCIPLES
thoughts and desires. It’s not your shoulders that give you trouble, but you who give
them trouble.
In every aspect of your life, you’ll end-gain if you work on your functioning. The
only practical approach is to work on the use that regulates and determines the func-
tioning. As Alexander says, from this there is not any escape.
A voice teacher asks her pupil “to sing in the mask,” or “to bring the tone for-
ward.” A singer who sings in a certain way might subjectively feel as if she were plac-
ing her tone forward, but this would be a result of her singing technique rather than
a technique in itself—an effect, not a cause. Frederick Husler and Yvonne Rodd-
Marling wrote:

The sounding of a resonating chamber [in this case the so-called mask] is al-
ways a secondary manifestation, the result of muscle movements in the vocal
mechanism. . . . It goes without saying that the first causes for the various
acoustic phenomena that occur in singing lie in the vocal organ itself, and it
is these that the voice trainer must learn to hear.15

The sounding of a resonating chamber is an aspect of the singing voice’s functioning.

It may be more productive to leave the mask alone and work on those aspects of
your voice that are more accessible to actual control—for instance, the combina-
tions of pitch, vowel, and intensity that create sounds and vibrations that give you
the sensation that you’re singing in the mask or placing the tone forward.
An orchestral conductor conceives an interpretation in his mind’s ear. The music
as he imagines it awakens certain emotional and bodily responses in him. Then,
much as a child marches enthusiastically to martial music, the conductor choreo-
graphs his bodily reactions to his conception of the piece, in the hope that the or-
chestra will reproduce the sounds that made him react this way in the first place. Yet
an orchestra can’t possibly become a cause, after the fact, to the effect that the con-
ductor mimics. The harder the conductor tries to make the orchestra obey his will,
the worse the orchestra plays. Soon the conductor throws one of his infamous tem-
per tantrums. The orchestra sounds no better at the end of each rehearsal. As for the
concert, it’ll be in God’s hands.
Mary Wanless writes in Ride with Your Mind:

Often, when I was riding a horse who seemed rigid and unyielding, a better
rider would take over, and I would watch the horse transform before my very
eyes, becoming far more beautiful in his movement, more proud in his car-
riage, and more willing in his demeanor. . . . When I rode him he was com-
pletely inflexible, but in the hands of one of these good riders he became a
malleable medium, ready to be molded into whatever shape and movements
the rider chose for him.16

The better rider doesn’t scream at her horse or whip him; nor does she tighten her
legs on the horse’s back to make him obey. Rather, she uses herself well, and the
horse responds accordingly.

The Use of the Self • 15

 Like a horse under different riders, an orchestra changes almost miraculously
under different conductors, thanks in good part to the differences in their use. If a
conductor wishes to improve his orchestra’s behavior, first and foremost he needs
to use himself differently, because the orchestra’s behavior is a function of his use.
It’s an inescapable fact: use determines functioning. I once attended a concert by a
youth orchestra in which the first half was conducted by an eager, puppylike young
conductor and the second half by Neeme Järvi, a towering musician with a mag-
netic, authoritative presence. Under the puppy, the orchestra sounded thin and shal-
low. Before the orchestra played a single note under Järvi’s command, however, its
silence already sounded different, just because of Järvi’s steadying presence at the
podium. He stood still in front of the orchestra and the musicians lit up in anticipa-
tion of untold marvels. And indeed, once they started playing everything was new
and different: sound, rhythm, phrasing, emotion, and meaning. It was hardly the
same orchestra.
Understanding the relationship between use and functioning is the key to free-
dom. Your use is your reaction to the world; your functioning is the result of that
reaction. Aspects of your functioning, such as difficulties and health problems, are
so visible, audible, and tangible that they completely absorb your attention and pre-
vent you from being aware of your use. But you can’t conquer your difficulties unless
you change your use—which isn’t your posture or your body mechanics, but your
integrated reaction to the world.

USE AND FUNCTIONING: A CASE HISTORY

Joanna was an accomplished concert pianist and teacher who sought the help of the
Alexander Technique after she was diagnosed as suffering from carpal tunnel syn-
drome, a painful and potentially handicapping condition of the wrist that includes
pins-and-needles, numbness, weakness of the thumb, and other disagreeable symp-
toms. Medical diagnosis suggests that it is caused by hormonal factors, arthritis,
an injury to the wrists, or wrist overuse, although the Penguin Medical Encyclopedia
states that “there is no obvious reason for it.”17 To treat it, medicine offers the choices
of rest, physiotherapy, cortisone injections, and surgery.
Alexander teachers propose a different perspective. Carpal tunnel syndrome isn’t
caused by overuse of the wrists, and not even by misuse of the wrists, but by misuse
of the whole self. To rest the hands isn’t a solution; as long as the misuse persists, the
problem will recur after the period of inaction. Localized wrist exercises could be-
come part of the problem, if they concentrate on a part while ignoring the whole.
Cortisone (which alleviates the pain without altering the condition itself) is a power-
ful drug with serious side effects. Surgery doesn’t address the problem of misuse.
Joanna’s wrist problem was symptomatic of a larger picture. In everything that
she did, at the piano and away from it, she misused herself. She habitually contracted
her head into her spine; twisted her trunk; shortened, narrowed, and curved her
back; lifted her shoulders; and created excessive tension in all her limbs.

16 • THE PRINCIPLES
 Her use (her “individuality and character,” in Alexander’s words) had other defin-
ing characteristics. Joanna was a volatile woman who reacted intensely to whatever
happened around her. Her speech was often agitated and suffused with sentiment.
Joanna, like many people today, was addicted to stimulation of all sorts: intellec-
tual, emotional, sensorial, gastronomic. She ate quickly, consumed large amounts of
sugar and chocolate, had digestive problems, and was several pounds over her ideal
weight.
She was a talented and well-trained pianist, technically proficient, musically so-
phisticated, and comfortable in front of an audience. She was bright, imaginative,
and enterprising. The level of her misuse was average, but it was catching up with her
and causing pain—as it usually does, sooner or later, in the average person.
For an Alexander teacher to treat her wrist and leave everything else untouched
would be unthinkable. Yet it would be equally preposterous to work on all her habits
of speech, digestion, interpersonal relationships, and piano playing, one by one,
until the habits were conquered. As habits, these are all manifestations of the same
constant: Joanna’s use and its influence on her functioning.
Obviously the solution to her problems lay in her stopping the end-gaining that
caused her misuse. In due course her good use would exert a constant, beneficial
influence on her functioning, including that of the wrist.
Besides demonstrating the relationship between use and functioning, Alexander
showed that there exists a certain mechanism of the head, neck, and back that affects
the total use of the self. He called it the primary control, and we’ll study it in the next
chapter (where we’ll see that the primary control isn’t a physical mechanism but a
psychophysical one with metaphysical dimensions). My work with Joanna consisted
largely of helping her change the use of her primary control, according to the prin-
ciples and procedures outlined in this book. We didn’t address her wrist directly.
Neither did we work on her speech, her dietary habits, or her piano playing. And
yet, over a period of time, she started eating differently and losing weight. She became
considerably less reactive, without losing her latent ability to react. She reported
finding new, startling colors at the piano. She changed her piano teaching, which up
to then had been dominated by pedagogical formulas and the drive for quick results.
She became less antagonistic in her relationships. Her good use helped her have a
trouble-free pregnancy. Mountain climbing, one of her hobbies, became easier. She
effected positive changes in every one of her habits—of work, food, love, and play.
Needless to say, she saved her wrist from harmful cortisone injections and an iff y
operation, and she saved herself from early retirement as a pianist.
Learning how to work on herself rather than on her problems took Joanna a lot
of time and thought, but its rewards were immense. If you’re willing to work on
yourself, you too can look forward to great rewards.

The Use of the Self • 17