Integrated Practice: Coordination, Rhythm & Sound

Pedro de Alcantara

Jul 2011 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

To be a musician is to "speak music." When you have something to say and the means to say it, your gestures and sounds become both meaningful and free. Offering an innovative, comprehensive approach to musicians' health and wellbeing, Integrated Practice gives you the tools to combine total-body awareness with a deep and practical understanding of the rhythmic structure of the musical language, so that you can use the musical text itself as your guide toward psychophysical and creative freedom. The book shows you how to establish an imaginative dialogue between the relatively inflexible structure of music and your individual personality as a singer, instrumentalist, or conductor, and it explains how you can use the acoustic phenomenon of the harmonic series to make big, beautiful sounds with little muscular effort. Integrated Practice comes with more than a hundred and fifty exercises demonstrated by video and audio clips on an extensive companion website that will inform your daily practice, improvising, rehearsing, and performing. With this array of resources for every learning style, Integrated Practice is the essential handbook to personal achievement in successful, expressive musical performance.

About the author

Pedro de Alcantara is a musician, writer, and teacher. His books include Indirect Procedures: A Musician's Guide to the Alexander Technique, The Alexander Technique: A Skill for Life, and the children's novels Befiddled and Backtracked. He lives in Paris and New York, and he travels the world giving seminars and master classes.