Articles

Body Mapping and the Virtuoso’s Map Project

(Boston Classical Guitar Society’s interview with Jerald Harscher)

“Reports of debilitating and sometimes career ending injuries have become legend in the guitar community. More recently there has been a focus on preventative and holistic approaches to practicing and performance. Jerald Harscher and his work with Body Mapping are at the forefront of this area.”

Soundboard, Thomas Schuttenhelm

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

In the field of music training we are hearing more and more about Body Mapping. How did you become so involved with Body Mapping?

Looking back I can see that the seed was planted in 1990 while I was pursuing my Masters in Guitar Performance at Yale. Another guitar student in the program who had previously studied with Aaron Shearer shared with me some information that Aaron taught all his students – the thumb has three joints, not two. I was floored by this because once I comprehended this simple anatomical fact my technique immediately began to change for the better. In one week I went to a whole new level of playing ability. I had much better control over voicing and an overall improved coordination and facility. This was Body Mapping although I would not have called it that at the time. After graduate school I met and played for Aaron Shearer and he invited me to come work with him for six weeks in the summer of 1993.

What a great opportunity. How was your experience working with Aaron Shearer?

We had lessons everyday for these six weeks and that was just the beginning my wonderful and long relationship with him. We started out as teacher and student and then became great friends. Once in a very sober moment Aaron told me that of all his students I “understood his material and his teaching the most.” I would later help him with the upcoming revised edition of his method. He taught me so very much and I am so grateful for having known this great man. Originally when I went to him I had thought he would teach me more Body Mapping but he liked my technique and mainly focused on his learning methods. This was transformative as well but in the course of this I pretty much forgot about Body Mapping until 1995.

What was happening in 1995?

I had begun to experience the all too common nagging pains and my physician referred me to Physical Therapy (PT) at Mass General. I have to say Physical Therapy only made my situation worse. The best thing I got there was a referral out of the medical system to a practitioner in the field of Somatics. (the study of human movement) From that moment I began to improve. I was now out of the realm of this mechanistic medical model and working in an educative way with a skilled movement teacher. I learned that my shoulder blades move. Just like the earlier discovery of my thumb’s three joints I was taken aback because I would have never thought this. Here I was experiencing the gliding movements of my shoulder blades over my ribs and it was a marvel to me. I found this work with my Feldenkrais teacher so powerful that I subsequently enrolled in a training program called “Integrative Somatic Training Practice.” I was this lone guitarist among a class of professional Physical Therapists, Massage Therapists, Movement Therapists and a Body-Oriented Psychotherapist. One of my teachers was the world-renowned myofascial anatomist Tom Myers. I learned so much in that two year training but I began to feel that I was beginning to lose touch with an important part of myself.

You had gone pretty far afield. Was that difficult to reconcile?

I knew this field of Somatics had much to offer musicians but I began to feel as though I was losing my identity as a guitarist and musician. That made me very depressed until I discovered Barbara Conable’s book What Every Musician Needs to Know About the Body. Barbara was a career long Alexander Technique teacher who had written several books using the tool of Body Mapping for the training of Alexander Technique students and musicians. Barbara is very well known in the Alexander world and she had a lot of success helping musicians recover from injury when medical approaches had failed. She also founded an organization of musicians called Andover Educators – a non profit organization of music teachers saving, securing and enhancing careers in music with accurate information about the body in movement. I had found my true home. Here were a bunch of musicians from all over the world teaching this information from the field of Somatics to other musicians in a way that musicians could relate to and immediately use in music making. So, in addition to my earlier training in Somatics I would be certified by Barbara Conable as a teaching member of Andover Educators and now looking back I can see that have been on this path for almost twenty years.

As a teaching organization what does Andover Educators seek to accomplish?

Barbara has empowered us with this vision: Putting Music Training on a Secure Somatic Foundation. Currently music training is not on a secure somatic foundation and that is why we have so many injuries. Once music training is on a secure somatic foundation then musicians will no longer have pain or become injured from playing a musical instrument. No one goes into music thinking they will later have to suffer through pain and injury. This is the primary purpose of the course that I teach – What Every Guitarist Needs to Know About the Body. The course is the best way for a musician to begin this process of putting their practicing and their playing on a Secure Somatic Foundation. Ben Verdery has said that “this is the way all instruments will be taught in the future” and of course I agree. All students need this information from the very start.

What is required for music/guitar training to be put on a secure somatic foundation?

We need to introduce three new areas of systematic training:

1) Systematic training of Movement – using Body Mapping because it is the most efficient tool for the training of movement.

2) Systematic training of the Senses – all the senses not just ear training. We need to teach the sixth sense that is not some extra-sensory-perception but is an ordinary sense that we all have but as a culture have not named and that is Kinesthesia. (our movement sense)

3) Systematic training of Attention – Inclusive Attention is the type of attention that musicians need. We must free ourselves from narrowed concentration because it causes us strain. Generally attention is either mistrained or is random and left up to chance. We can do better.

What is Body Mapping?

At its core, Body Mapping is a process of self-inquiry. One becomes conscious of incorrect assumptions about one’s body – misconceptions of its structure, function and size. For most people most of the time the bodymap is entirely unconscious. But the bodymap can be made conscious. Once we become aware of our inner conceptions we can see if what we assume to be true about our bodies actually is true. I have never met anyone without some flaws in how they conceive of themselves. Interestingly the virtuosos I have been interviewing for the Virtuoso’s Map Project are very well mapped, especially in priority areas like the hands.

What is a Body Map?

Bodymaps are neuronal maps of our bodies in our brains. It’s not a metaphor: these are actual maps that brain scientists have known about and studied for over a hundred years now. Sandra Blakeslee, a science writer for the New York Times, has written a book called Our Bodies Have a Mind of Their Own – How Bodymaps in Our Brain Help Us Do (almost) Anything Better. We all have bodymaps although we were not born with them. They begin forming at birth and continue to grow and change throughout life because we grow and change throughout our lives. These maps are very flexible to change. Scientist use the term “neuroplasticity” that describes the flexible nature of the brain. For a musician perhaps the most important feature of our bodymap is that it governs movement.

What is the Virtuoso’s Map Project?

It’s a research project comprised of video interviews with musicians of extraordinary ability talking about how they conceive of their body’s structures and how they think about movement in their own playing. Essentially, we learn what they have intuited about their bodymap. I had been working with my own bodymap and the bodymaps of my students for many years and about two years ago I got the idea of interviewing great virtuosos. I wanted to see if a virtuoso’s map differed in accuracy and detail from that of a typical student or someone who may be quite talented but not a virtuoso. As it turns out the first person I spoke with, Manuel Barrueco, maps his fingers differently from most guitarists. Like excellent pianists, he maps the fingers all the way to the wrist. I believe Eliot Fisk has this mapping as well. The link between extraordinary virtuosity and accurate bodymaps was so compelling to me that I began to talk with every virtuoso I could. BCGS and Frank Wallace in particular have been very helpful in facilitating these interviews.

Who have you interviewed so far?

The virtuosos I’ve interviewed have been very generous with their time and have taken a great interest in this project. So far I’ve interviewed Eliot Fisk, Scott Tennant, Jorge Caballero, Goran Krivokapic, Dennis Azabagic, and a handful of Eliot’s fine students including Boston GuitarFest competition winners Steve Lin and Cecelio Perreira. Near the end of the interview I always give them feedback on what I learned about their bodymaps and this usually turns into a little Body Mapping session, which they appreciate in that they say they find it helpful.

Why would a typical guitarist need Body Mapping?

Because all guitarists move for a living (to produce any sound we must move) and the bodymap governs movement. All movement, even the micro-movements of fine classical guitar playing are based upon our bodymaps. The basis for our technique is the body map. For instance, if a guitarist has notions that the thumb has only two joints (a common mismapping) then the whole basis for thumb movement and technique will be off in some way, resulting in limitation and often stiffness at the joint nearest the wrist. After learning that there are three thumb joints, not two, a guitarist will then begin to move from the joint nearest the wrist. The result? A freeing of the tensions always associated with that common misconception. This not only pertains to individual players but from a teacher’s point of view the whole training process becomes easier and more efficient for all their students.

How does the map become “off”?

This is a topic of endless fascination for me. Many of the distortions of our bodymaps have to do with our language and the influences of metaphor. In music education we are constantly referring to the body, sometimes resorting to metaphor and various images often with mismaps built-in. Students are confused by this abstract language because it is so indirect and is usually only meaningful to the person using the metaphor.

There are also many cultural fictions that we have to deal with. Words like “waist” that refer to the body in a way that relates more to the clothes we put on our bodies and not our body’s actual structure. Clothes have “waists” but people don’t. There is no human structure that can account for the word. It ends up being harmful to people because they end up thinking of the whole upper body (the torso) as above this fictional “waist” and the whole lower body below as below the beltline. This common flaw ultimately disconnects us from our pelvic support below resulting in a great loss of support for our arms – a priority for guitarists and anyone who moves their arms for a living.

How does one become conscious of the body map?

As I mentioned before I once approached Manuel Barrueco after a master class and asked him how he conceives of the bony structure of his fingers. His immediate response was to say, “Oh, Jerald I don’t know, I don’t think about these things.” And I said, “Yes, I understand, our maps are often unconscious but we can make them conscious, so just take a moment.” He paused for a moment and then he began to sweep with his left index finger along the back of his right hand, sweeping all the way from the wrist toward the fingertip. He had never consciously thought this before that moment and therefore would never have mentioned it to anyone. But this conception is such an important feature of how he plays, for one it rules out any notion of a palm.

One of the common mismappings of the hand has to do with the ‘palm.’ Many guitarists who are limited conceive of a rigid palm with a solid plate-like bone kind of like a shoulder blade. So we tend to imagine a solid palm with four fingers and a thumb attached to it. I once explained to my dear teacher, Aaron Shearer, that the hand bones move and he said sharply “NO!” Later, he was completely astounded by the truth of this, realizing that he went his whole life being severely limited as a player by this all too common misconception.

In contrast, when I mentioned to Ben Verdery that some students believe that the hand contains a palm-bone, he could hardly believe me. If you could have seen his look of utter disbelief because he could not imagine how someone could ever think that way. It did not fit his map, his inner conception. But many musicians and music students do map a rigid palm and this again causes unnecessary suffering – pain, injury, limitation and frustration. The good news is that the brain is neuroplastic which means this harmful misconception is not permanently fixed or set. It can be changed. Mismappings can be corrected; sometimes overnight. Also, whenever we discover and fully correct any mismapping our playing will improve.

Are other common injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome related to mismappings?

Yes. For instance, mismapped forearm rotation is one of the primary causes of carpal tunnel syndrome. Nerves, tendons and blood vessels travel the space within the carpal tunnel. When a guitarist maps the radius (one of the two bones in the forearm) as the axis of rotation and not the ulna, a flattening often occurs in the carpals (wrist bones) reducing the amount of space within the carpal tunnel and causing friction.

Are disorders like Focal Dystonia related to the Body Map?

Yes. MRI brain scans of musicians with Focal Dystonia show a blurring in the bodymaps between neighboring fingers. This loss of differentiation evident in the bodymaps is a type of neuroplasticity gone awry. Focal Dystonias among musicians, then, are actually acquired, not diseases: not diseases as medicine defines the term, but disorders that are developed or learned. Again, the good news: musicians can change these maps, which explains why we hear more and more about musicians recovering from Dystonia.

So far, practitioners in the field of music medicine have proven that they have very little to offer us. By their own account (their own numbers), their therapies succeed in helping musicians recover 2% of the time. The reason they are so unsuccessful is because the problems that musicians typically have are not medical problems but movement problems. Of course I always insist that any injured musician first go see a physician to rule out disease. But if there is no disease then it is simply inappropriate to treat a musician with medical approaches. If we move well we will avoid injury. If one is not moving well and becomes injured they can learn to move well and recover. Any musician suffering from Focal Dystonia or any other injury can go to https://thepoisedguitarist.com/ and read the articles I have posted including Barbara Conable’s article How to Resolve Dystonias: A Movement Perspective.

So what’s in the future for the Virtuoso’s Map Project?

Ideally, John Williams. I want to put that out there because he is just so fluid. He’s in his sixties and has not lost any of that fluidity. I would love to hear directly from him how he conceives of himself and the movements of guitar playing. I want to hear the words he uses, what he is conscious of already and what he becomes conscious of in the course of the interview. I had that brief exchange with Manuel Barrueco. I want to interview him again in a more formal, research-oriented context. From the guitar virtuoso, I can see research extending to other extraordinary players of other instruments, then exploring virtuosity in other fields: how, for instance, does Tiger Woods map his arms, spine, legs – the basis for all those very cultivated swing movements? Wood’s was once asked in an interview why he would change his swing after winning most every major tournament. His response was “to get better.” That is the spirit that excites and motivates me in the somatic approach to guitar training. Invariably the same information that helps musicians recover from pain and/or injury takes one’s technical skill to new levels. In the future students will work with this information not because they are injured or in pain but because they have realized that it helps their playing.

Jerald Harscher lives near Harvard Square in Cambridge, MA. He teaches the course “What Every Guitarist Needs to Know About the Body” on a regular basis. To view video segments from the Virtuoso’s Map Project as well as segments from the course visit: http://thepoisedguitarist.com. Jerald can be contacted by email: jerald(at)thepoisedguitarist.com