Integrated Practice: Coordination, Rhythm & Sound - Softcover

De Alcantara, Pedro

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195317084 ISBN 13: 9780195317084

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2011

Synopsis

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 this title

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.

Review

"Integrated Practice is a remarkable tool for the aspiring musician on the road to understanding artistry." --Mimi Zweig, Professor, Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University

"Integrated Practice appeals to professional musicians and music lovers alike! This is a welcome guide through the vast field of practice routines. De Alcantara has a unique ability to bring this subject matter to life with convincing analogies and musical examples. Here, components such as rhythm, grid, sound, and coordination fit like mosaic stones into the larger picture of better and more efficient practice." --Babette Hierholzer, pianist

"Whatever your stage or role in musical life, Pedro de Alcantara will guide you in his masterly way: leaping, lunging, singing, howling, and improvising toward musical enlightenment." --Wendy Williams, flutist, Minnesota Orchestra

"A welcome addition to writing on the subject of the Alexander Technique and the application of its principles to music, the book is a testament to the breadth of the author's experience as a teacher...Wonderfully presented...Works well as a book one can explore over a period of time." --Music Education UK

"INTEGRATED PRACTICE delves deeply into the most fundamental elements of music and connects them to universal aspects of human experience: speech, vibration, clarity of expression and the rhythms inherent in every movement we make...An important addition to every musician's working library." --AmSAT Journal

"This fascinating, thought-provoking book aims to guide us to grasp and harness the connections between music, fundamental laws of nature, human speech and behaviour. Relevant to musicians of all ages and standards, its wisdom and insights are conveyed with a light touch, in a manner at once practical and imaginative, specific and universal, erudite and accessible." --The Strad

"Alcantara provides exercises including movements, poetic recitation, conducting, and an assortment of interesting analogies and stories...The variety of information will help musicians of any age develop better coordination between emotion and technique." --American String Teacher

"Alcantara's holistic teaching method, which interweaves the physical, theoretical, and interpretational aspects of making music, is one that many educators and performers will find useful...INTEGRATED PRACTICE is an intriguing and original read that will appeal widely to students and professionals alike." --Strings

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0195317084
• ISBN 13: 9780195317084
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 290