"Effortless Mastery": The Unicorn of the Music World?
Is “Effortless mastery” real?
Almost every musician I talk to wants to achieve effortless mastery. It’s an idea with this mythical quality to it - kind of like the unicorn, or the philosopher’s stone, or the place where the rainbow touches the ground… The way that many musicians experience it is a lot like being in a dream and then spontaneously realizing that you’re dreaming; it’s very exciting and then - poof! It’s gone and you’re back in plain-old-vanilla reality.
What I’m going to share with you today is a very different picture. Effortless mastery is something you can practice and cultivate! If you want a flower, for example, then you need a few specific conditions to be met: a seed, water, soil, and sunlight. Similarly, effortless mastery has certain conditions under which it becomes more and more likely to arise in your playing. In this post I’m going to share with you some of these conditions and show you exactly how you can achieve effortless mastery for yourself.
In this post we will cover three topics:
What is “effortless mastery?”
What are the conditions under which effortless mastery is most readily achieved?
Steps you can take today to achieve effortless mastery
What is “effortless mastery?”
To master a craft to the point of effortlessness is one of life’s most meaningful and pleasurable experiences. Many musicians have read Kenny Werner’s book called “Effortless Mastery” - and it’s a great book - but few of us know how to make it real for ourselves. It comes and goes without rhyme or reason - or maybe it never comes at all - and when it does come it vanishes the moment we realize we’re in the flow of it!
Many of us are then left frustrated and disappointed that we can’t achieve this highly desirable state and we end up just forgetting about the whole thing. Effortless mastery becomes just some nice idea that seems to have the same level of reality as rainbows and mirages.
What I mean to show you is exactly how you can make effortless mastery a regular experience in your music-making. You can experience flow, presence, and a sense of limitless possibilities every time you pick up your instrument. You can experience a state of complete command of your craft, while at the same time not experiencing even the slightest sensation of effort. The mere presence of a musical thought and the intention to play music will transfer effortlessly and flawlessly into sound, without interference from your body.
What you will see is that, just as surely as when you mix a seed, soil, water, and sun you’ll get a flower, when you study Pain-Free Music, which is based on the Alexander Technique, you will be sowing the seeds of effortless mastery.
This brings us to the following question: if the conditions for a flower are a seed, soil, water, and sunlight, then what are the conditions for effortless mastery?
What are the conditions under which effortless mastery is most readily achieved?
In my mind there are two elements to effortless mastery - the mastery part and the effortless part. I’ll speak to each of these in turn.
“Mastery” consists of a great familiarity with the subject matter at hand. This basically means having repeated something enough times so that it becomes so ingrained that it’s second nature. If you are a trained, professional musician, then you are very familiar with this aspect. The conditions for mastery are as follows:
Daily practice
Excellent teachers
Studying scales and improving techniques
Learning repertoire
Studying the history of your craft
Performing regularly
Challenging yourself to achieve new levels of skill
You can achieve a certain amount of effortlessness through sheer repetition. However, you can also repeat something many times without achieving effortlessness, and you can also learn to play something with altogether too much tension in your body and then repeat it with that tension until the tension becomes an ingrained aspect of your performance. This is obviously not ideal. How do you achieve true effortlessness, then?
The “effortless” part is much less often taught by music teachers. About all most of us get is “just relax.” My teachers suggested that, and guess what - it didn’t work.
This is the more mysterious aspect of effortless mastery and it’s often ignored because people just don’t know how to go about it. Effortlessness needn’t be mysterious, however. Simply put, effortlessness is about stripping away what doesn’t need to be there; of “getting out of the way of yourself.” This, in particular, is the purview of the Alexander Technique.
When you study the Alexander Technique you study effortlessness. When you study effortlessness you are applying the principles of the Alexander Technique to what you do, whether you know it or not. Many people think the Alexander Technique has only to do with posture or alignment. And, indeed, when you study Alexander Technique your posture and alignment will improve, but to be honest I find posture and alignment pretty boring. There is something MUCH more exciting going on here, and a better way to understand Alexander Technique as being a quality of effortlessness that can be applied to anything you do.
This single factor also lays at the heart of recovering from chronic pain and repetitive strain injuries, too. There is, in fact, a direct connection between overcoming repetitive strain injuries and achieving effortless mastery. I am now going to give you an amazing insight into exactly this.
You see, the "Secret" of Pain-Free Music is that when you uproot the cause of overuse injuries, you are - at the very same time - laying the groundwork for effortless mastery.
This is because overcoming overuse injuries requires learning how to use your body more efficiently, easefully, and effortlessly and when you use your body more efficiently, easefully, and effortlessly an amazing thing happens: The mere presence of a musical thought and the intention to play music transfers effortlessly and flawlessly into sound, without interference from your body.
This is what lays at the heart of what I teach, and if you’re interested I can teach it to you. Just was we understand the conditions for mastery I spoke about before, we can also understand the conditions of effortlessness. Here they are:
Understanding that you tense your body habitually and unconsciously.
Overcoming the force of habit.
Understanding that tension doesn’t affect only the place where you feel it, but throughout your whole body.
Understanding the role of stress, pressure, and the fight-or-flight response in muscular tension.
Allowing yourself to play unhabitually, with less muscular tension, and in a more open and fluid manner.
I assure you that all these conditions are perfectly possible for you - I see it in my students all the time. And the easiest, fastest, most reliable way to achieve all these conditions is through studying in-person with an Alexander Technique teacher. Let me tell you a little story to illustrate this point.
There once was a young violinist who developed pain in his arms from playing violin. He sought answers and very diligently followed the advice of his teachers, colleagues, and many many health and wellness professionals. He knew he had to relax somehow but just couldn’t seem to do it, even with the help of all these people who claimed to know how to help him do just that. The pain only got worse and things weren’t looking good for his music career.
Then he tried an Alexander Technique class and in the very first session the Alexander teacher was able to show him a totally new way of using his body. His body felt unexpectedly free, surprisingly fluid, and in that instant he saw the underlying reasons for his pain and a clear path of how to overcome it. He then studied Alexander Technique very deeply, has overcome his pain, and now experiences effortlessness when he plays violin. Who was this young violinist? You guessed it - me!
I experience effortless mastery on a regular basis - and that’s no brag! It’s simply a matter of the kind of training I’ve done. That’s it! My students achieve effortlessness regularly, as well - and you can, too! If you study with me, here’s what playing music could be like for you:
A sense of being able to do whatever you want without interference from your body
A sense of being in control, in command
A sense of being connected to your audience
A sense of being totally at ease
A sense of being totally unafraid
A sense of flow, presence, and effortless creativity
A clear understanding of how this state came about and how to continue it throughout the entire performance
The conditions for effortless mastery are entirely achievable. All you need is to put in many years of work mastering your craft - which you’ve likely done already by now - and then to study effortlessness. And the best means for achieving effortlessness is the Alexander Technique, and the best means of studying Alexander Technique for musicians is Pain-Free Music.
Steps you can take today to achieve effortless mastery
First, go to my website and check out all the information there. Specifically, watch the previous episodes of this masterclass and listen to talk-throughs during your practice time. When you watch the episodes you’ll have the correct frame of mind for approaching effortlessness. When you listen to the talk-throughs you’ll be applying some very effective methods for making effortlessness real for yourself.
Go to www.painfreemusic.com/masterclass or www.painfreemusic.com/talkthroughs for more details.
Next, if you haven’t already, sign up for my Pain-Free Music Facebook group at www.facebook.com/groups/painfreemusic. In that group you’ll have access to lots of high-quality content and a group of people who are going through the same kinds of things you are. You can also ask me questions any time and I’ll answer them for you.
I also want to announce that I’m planning a new program, starting in the new year. It’s tentatively called the “Pain-Free Music Effortlessness Training Program” and it’s designed to do two things exceedingly well:
Reduce the number of days you experience pain from repetitive strain injuries by up to 86%.
Give you exactly what you need to achieve effortless mastery.
It’s a three-month program that combines private lessons, group classes, and online training, all designed to remove all the obstacles that keep you from playing music at the very highest levels of excellence.
I’ll be making a more formal announcement in November, and I’ll begin accepting applications in December, so keep an eye out! The formal announcement will take the form of a webinar entitled “Pain-Free Music Effortlessness Training - 6 Essential Shifts for Dramatically Reducing Repetitive Strain Injuries and Much More.”
That's all for now! See y'all around.
Joseph
