Thanks and Cheers!

The Body Mapping workshop yetsrday was wonderful in so many ways. The direct experience was paramont but also, being in Cambridge, in that neighberhood and with a group of guitarists was heart warming and rejuvenating.

I was a student at Longy from 69 to 74 and taught at Longy from 74 to 85. I had so many meaningul experiences and relationships in those years. I studied AT with Joe Armstong in the 70′s and almost took the AT teacher training. I do hope to take some lessons from you in the near future. I see the potential for great improvement through expanding attention and reorganizing everything in the field of awareness. As a guitarist, I have in the last few years realized the importance of “warming up” before playing. What I think may be missing, for me, is warming up the attention. I am going to attempt to focus less on the individual finger movements at the beginning of each session and instead establish awareness of the tactile, the kinesthetic and the full (including peripheral) vision sense. After that the fingers. But really, I think you showed me yesterday that once the fingers/hand/arm/whole body have done something (played a note or chord or whatever) successfully, focusing the eyes too much on the hands is really not necessary and probably puts a constriction on the musical expression. The kinesthetic sense must be allowed to work unfettered.

Sorry for getting carried away but I’m excited!!

BTW – interesting book by Joe Armstrong and Vivien Mackie “Just Play Naturally” (not sure if I spelled Vivien’s name right) Both are/were Alexander teachers. Vivien also is a Cellist who studied with Casals at Prades. Much of the book focuses on parallels between Casals’ teaching and Vivien’s experience at the Alexander training school in London.