I often come back to Ed Kreitman’s four fundamental pillars of masterful teaching…

1. Mastery of the instrument
2. Ability to communicate with parents
3. Ability to communicate with children
4. A complete understanding of one’s teaching sequence, start to finish

Kreitman’s Complete Sequence

The complete understanding of one’s own teaching sequence is the pillar which appears most daunting to me.

Most teachers start their teaching journey with students who are in the middle. For example, many college student teaching programs send young music educators into public middle and high schools to teach students who have already started the instrument but are not yet masters. While this sort of teaching requires personal instrument mastery and hones communication skills, I don’t believe it really develops a music educator’s understanding of development itself.

To understand development, a teacher must move from the middle to the extremes. A teacher must come to know the way of the masters, inside and out, as well as the beautiful, beginning mind of a novice. Then, and only then, can a teacher start draw their own connective tissue from one extreme to the other.

Duke’s Holistic Vision

This idea of complete understanding is also reflected in Dr. Robert Duke’s principle of visioning the student as an accomplished learner, which I discussed a few weeks ago as a strategy to avoid “upside down” teaching.

Dr. Duke’s research shows that masterful teachers have an extremely detailed vision of exactly what the student will look like as a master. By visioning out to the very end of a student’s journey, a teacher can define student success, keep an eye out for issues that will prevent progress, and therefore make the learning process as efficient as possible.

The most important aspect of this vision of mastery, though, is that it is holistic. The vision of the student as an accomplished learner represents a moment in time in which all aspects of the student’s playing function successfully AND coherently. In other words, all components of the teaching process must meet and work with each other for the student to be successful.

If the vision itself isn’t comprehensive or holistic — leaving out any detail in the ecosystem of skilled movements, attitudes, and conceptual understandings which make up the act of playing the violin — then any sequential process you build from the vision is fundamentally misguided.

For example, if your vision of masterful performance includes expressive playing, then you must have a clear mental image of your student’s vibrato mechanics. If your vision of masterful performance includes your student’s vibrato mechanics, then you must have a clear mental image of left hand balance. If your vision of masterful performance includes your student’s left hand balance, then you must have a clear mental image of overall body balance.

What happens to make the journey from dominant to tonic in music is fundamentally connected to the way our the balls of our feet connect to the ground as we play.

Any fuzziness in my vision of playing directly corresponds to gaps in my teaching. And since every aspect of musical expression is tied to instrument techniques, which is in turn tied to muscle mechanics, I thought I would start my vision-clarifying with whole-body balance.

Ralston’s Understanding of the Body

Though I know theories of body movement have been applied to music making, such as the Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais Method, I decided to take a step back and explore the whole body as understood by martial arts masters.

My mind was completely opened by the writing of Peter Ralston, a student of martial arts since the age of nine and 1978 World Champion in Full-Contact martial arts. His philosophy of holistic body movement, Cheng Hsin, is described in Cheng Hsin: The Principles of Effortless Power. Each chapter dives deeper into body posture, movement of energy and force, mental awareness, and the dance of relationship with other bodies. The first chapter, though, which enumerates the Five-Principles of Body-Being is accessible and easy enough to experience even as you read these words.

The main topic of the chapter, body-being, is defined by Ralston as the full summation of our experienced selves in this moment.

Ralston says

“When we take on a task such as experiencing, learning, and adapting to the fundamental nature of Being, we need to begin by looking at what is most primary and present. Therefore we need to look at body-being. This is simply what appears “to” and “as” us when Being appears as a thing.  This includes the presence of body, feeling, and thoughts. Generally, our body-being is all that constitutes our conventional sense of being a living entity. In the study and observation of this way of being and its design, it is possible to notice some very basic principles that arise in the relationship to the experience or expression of this aspect of Being.”

Those principles are (1) being calm, (2) relaxing, (3) grounding, (4) centering, and (5) being whole and total.

Ralston makes effort to point out that words aren’t really the principles, in fact each phrase is really just a representation of what happens in the body when the natural principle is adhered to or aligned with.

To elucidate this difficult concept he uses the example of a garden hose.

The hose has a particular design and function. Certain principles determine its design. Yet the hose can be twisted such that it does not fulfill its function. In this case we cannot say that the principles have changed at all, yet the state of the hose is quite different from when it is allowed to function as it was designed to.

When alignment does occur with any principle, the original state of being appears.

As violin teachers we can understand this concept through the lens of bow arm mechanics. There is in which the right arm can naturally produce the most resonant rubbing of the open violin string via the appropriate contact of bow hairs. When the right arm is naturally moving, we can observe manifestations of posture such as opening and closing from the elbow, a bent thumb, and a hanging weight of the arm rather than pressure in the first finger. However the natural state of the arm can’t really be found each individual posture point. A natural arm isn’t merely a open/closed elbow, or a bent thumb, or a weighty arm. In fact, one could have a bent, yet tense thumb which actually restricts the natural movement of the arm. Those are just things that typically appear as the arm expresses its own nature. We can’t confuse the state (natural bow arm) with the principles (posture points).

With that said, I want to dive into each one of Ralston’s five principles.

Being Calm

Calm is not something humans do or control, rather a state the body can align to.

Calming our selves is not an appearance and isn’t dependent on situations. It isn’t something we have to make or force into being, but is that which already exists within us. Calm is a state of ourselves in which we can abide, or uncover.

I metaphorically think of calm as the sea in which everything floats, rather than the hard ground on which everything bounces.

Relaxing

Alignment to this principle requires remaining and/or returning to the unused or open state, the position of rest or natural function: allowing things to “sit on the floor” rather than “holding them up.” To relax we must actually endeavor to make all of our tissues completely supple, even limp. No joints should be locked, we should feel the body loosen and open, and this relaxed movement will feel very different from ordinary, day to day movement.

The only way to use gravity as a source of power  rather than your own musculature is to relax. You must relax into the earth rather than resist it. Ralston exclaims, “No matter how relaxed you become, relax more!”

It has also been demonstrated that deep muscular relaxation cannot coexist with anxiety. A calm mind seems to be the outcome of relaxing in this manner. Relaxing opens sensitivities, awareness, listening, and allows one to receive incredible amounts of energy from the earth and natural tissues of the body.

Centering

Our body is far more intelligent than just our mental facility. A very real “intelligence” exists at our heart or center, the lower abdomen.

This center intelligence, unlike the thinking intelligence, is where we should hold our attention. Putting attention in the center calms the thinking activity and emotional rollercoasters while shifting the body to a state of non-thinking, balance, awareness, and aliveness. All actions are done with more power and control when directed by and coming from the center.

Move your whole body from this place, your center of gravity, first. Allow your center to lead, and the rest of the body to follow.

Grounding (Sinking)

Grounding is aligning with a powerful relationship with the earth. Sinking begins with relaxing the muscles and dropping into a lower position, weight tending down. While standing still or moving you must allow your upper body to literally fall onto your lower body, and your lower body to literally fall onto/into the ground.

By allowing access to intrinsic strength by unlocking joints and disengaging bones, energy circulation circulation increases.

Being Whole and Total (Unity)

Not only must the whole body work together, but the small parts must be subservient to the whole. Every action must have it’s source in the feet (ground) and it’s direction from the center (centering). We must relax the myriad of muscles that could and would act inappropriately, so that the entire weight, attention, and energy all work together in one movement. Every action of the body must be felt at one time as one thing.

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I believe this five principles are most apparent in a video of Ralston playing at Tai Chi push hands a few years back.

It is clear to me that Ralston has a holistic vision of a masterful martial artist and how their body moves and functions in relation to all things. I will be borrowing his principles to develop a violin specific understanding of body movement.

Stay tuned to see how I uncover in principles of calm, relaxation, centering, grounding, and unification in violin playing bodies, and name some specific posture elements which I adhere to because I think they satisfy this holistic understanding of body mechanics. I’ll even venture into speculating how violin itself can be used to train calm, relaxed, centered, grounded, and unified movement.