Holding On for Dear Life

Selma Gokcen

“Doing in your case is so ‘overdoing’ that you are practically paralysing the parts you want to work.”

—F.M. Alexander

As an Alexander Technique teacher, I work with many cellists who are in distress—the kind of distress that means they can’t play for the time being. Their conditions vary from tendinitis to De Quervain syndrome to back pain to focal dystonia. The list is long but one thing most of them share is the habit of ‘holding on to themselves.’ What do I mean by this? When they are in a position of rest on my teaching table—lying on their backs with their heads also resting on a small pillow—they remain gripped by tension in their necks, backs, arms and legs that may take us many months to undo. They aren’t of course playing, nor even thinking about doing so, they are at rest….but their holding on has become part of their response to life in general.

So when we finish playing, do we pack up our habits with our instruments? And how much of our habits of movement do we bring to playing when we unpack that cello?

Before discovering the Alexander Technique, when I had problems at the cello, I always searched for their solution in the technique of the cello. It did not occur to me to look more deeply into what I was doing in my everyday life that might—and indeed did in the end—have a profound effect on my cello playing. What Alexander called the Use of the Self (how we use the whole of ourselves moment to moment) determines successful functioning in daily activities like sitting and standing, as well as skilled ones like singing or playing.

Alexander discovered that most of us go wrong in the preparation phase of movement, and after 20 years in the work, I am beginning to see just how strongly our neuromuscular system registers the ‘thought’ of doing something familiar and well-practised. So holding on arises in us from preparing to do something, not just in the act of doing it. And that’s how, very gradually, we are conditioned to use too much effort for everything we do, not just playing the cello.

At the risk of sounding like the church minister warning about lusting after thy neighbor’s wife being the same as bedding her, I invite you to make the experiment with an Alexander teacher. You only have to think about making a movement for the teacher to detect your intention. The preparation phase determines the effortless quality of the movement, so to raise the bow one takes care first of all not to tighten in the neck and not to contract the spinal column. This attention to the whole self makes the movements of our limbs so much easier and the fingers more accurate.

In truth we play the cello from head to toe and to honour this truth, our thinking, our awareness has to expand to include all of ourselves and our surroundings as well, which also contribute to our support and deserve our attention.

AUTHOR

Selma Gokcen

Selma Gokcen, born in America of Turkish parentage, has received critical acclaim for her imaginative programming. Along with Bernard Greenhouse and Jonathan Kramer, she presented a programme at London’s South Bank Centre, in New York and at the Kennedy Center entitled Pablo Casals: Artist of Conscience, celebrating the life and music of the legendary cellist.

Ms. Gokcen has performed with L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Presidential Symphony in Ankara, the Istanbul State Symphony Orchestra, the Houston Symphony, the North Carolina Symphony, and the Aspen Philharmonia, among others. Her recital appearances have taken her to such cities as Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Palm Beach, Charleston, S.C., and to Belgium, Italy and Turkey. In South America, she has toured under the auspices of the U.S. State Department. She has concertized in Australia and New Zealand, and given master classes in Sydney, Melbourne, Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.

In addition to solo appearances, she is an accomplished chamber musician and has participated in the Chamber Music West Festival in San Francisco, the Southeastern Music Festival, the Hindemith Festival in Oregon, and the Accademia Chigiana in Siena.

Ms. Gokcen holds the Doctorate of Musical Arts, as well as a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree from the Juilliard School, where her teachers included Leonard Rose, Channing Robbins, William Lincer and Robert Mann. She was awarded a First Prize from the Geneva Conservatory of Music as a pupil of Guy Fallot, and also studied privately with Pierre Fournier. In 1999 she was chosen by one of Spain’s greatest composers, Xavier Montsalvatge, to record his complete works for cello. She has also recorded Songs and Dances in Switzerland for the Gallo label.

In 1988, Ms. Gokcen became interested in the Alexander Technique, prompted by a lifelong fascination with the roots of habits and the difficulties of modifying them. Students often entered her cello studio seeking changes but unable to resolve their problems.

Eventually her reading brought her to the Alexander Technique, a discipline described by its founder as "learning to do consciously what nature intended". She came to London in 1994 and enrolled in a teacher training program at the Centre for the Alexander Technique.

Ms Gokcen was qualified as a fully-fledged teacher by the Society for Teachers of the Alexander Technique in 1998. In September 2000 she was appointed to the faculty of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, where she is also a professor of cello. She works with string, wind and brass players, singers and composers. She also incorporates her Alexander Technique teaching as part of her cello studio.

The Alexander Technique embraces what is today called holistic thinking--an indivisibility of the mind-body connection and the awakening of awareness of what Alexander called the "use of the whole self", which affects our functioning in all our activities, especially the highly complex skill of music-making. It is particularly useful in addressing breathing, coordination, and muscle tensions. Most importantly, the quality of attention developed through the practice of the Technique can transform a musician's relationship with their instrument and their audience.

Selma Gokcen is also the co-founder and Co-Chair of the London Cello Society.

www.welltemperedmusician.com
www.londoncellos.org

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