Musicians Making Better Music with TCC

Music performance driven from low and deep within the body tends to be more expressive, beautiful, and powerful. Wind players strive to breathe and support their air from the lower abdominals. The higher singers go in their range, the more centered their grounding needs to be if they want to have a full, rich, supported sound. Pianists sink into the keys not with the arms and hands alone, but with their whole weight behind what they do. Great music doesn’t come from simply twiddling fingers, buzzing lips, or tightening vocal chords (though we tend to focus on these when learning technique.) Great music comes from deep within us. It is a whole-body experience. T’ai Chi Chih trains us to move from that center and put our mental focus there. When I see students find that depth, physically, they are able to put more grace, technical control, and ownership into their music.

Thanks to a small grant from Sigma Alpha Iota (a national music fraternity for women), I was able to travel to California in January for a T’ai Chi Chih Teacher’s Training. Since then, I have given a workshop for the SAI chapter and our music majors at Mississippi State University (where I am a music professor); have presented a clinic at the Music Teacher’s National Association Collaborative Conference in Toronto, Ontario in March; and have begun teaching a course and leading weekly practice sessions for music students. T’ai Chi Chih has been very well received by these groups. The clinic in Toronto was to a packed room; people outside the door were trying to get in. It was very exciting to see music teachers from all over North America so interested in T’ai Chi Chih!

The immediate physical benefits of T’ai Chi Chih are fairly clear. Many musicians suffer from neck, shoulder, back, and hand problems that arise with the hours of practice they must devote to their craft. Good posture and alignment can so easily be forgotten when we try to accommodate a musical instrument or unnatural singing stance. Not only is good alignment necessary for our general health, but also for our music-making. If we can alleviate unnecessary tension and poor body carriage, our tonal quality and musicality improve. We have more endurance because we are more efficient. We have better stage presence because of the way we carry ourselves and perform. Technical passages become easier as our moves become more fluid.

Now we get to the really important benefit of T’ai Chi Chih for musicians: the mental focus that is needed to perform at our best. The simple, repetitive moves of T’ai Chi Chih work really well to bring mental attention to the activity at hand. Music and T’ai Chi Chih are both moving meditations. Musicians have all had those fleeting moments, during a performance, when they suddenly realize that – just now – only the music existed, and no other thoughts were in the way. When this happens, we aren’t zoned out or on autopilot. We aren’t worrying about a difficult passage coming up, or a missed note, or the laundry, or any of those other things that invade our minds when we are trying to focus. The Self slips away and we are completely, singularly aware of the music we were making. Meditation is like a good performance – when we are completely present at that given moment, not thinking of the future or past. Remaining focused when performing is difficult, but it makes for very satisfying music.

We don’t make mistakes when we are fully present. We are calm and draw in the audience. We no longer have stage fright because the only thing that exists is now. (It’s only when we worry about the mistakes that we might make that we become nervous.) T’ai Chi Chih calms down distracting thoughts and can bring one to a place of mental focus easily and quickly. The more we experience that type of mental focus, the easier it becomes to access when it really counts. I like using T’ai Chi Chih with musicians because it is active. The mental awareness of self and one’s surroundings is achievable in the midst of coordinated movement, which is so close to what we do in music. Be in the moment. Move from the center. Let go of tension. These are some of the things that T’ai Chi Chih brings to my teaching tool bag.