Feldenkrais’s Touch, Ephram’s Laughter, Gould’s Sensorium: Listening and Musical Practice between Thinking and Doing

ABSTRACT

This study addresses listening as a hinge between therapeutic and musical contexts. In the first two sections I examine the productive confluence of Jean-Luc Nancy’s thought and Moshe Feldenkrais’s somatic practice. I show that the ‘subject’ is configured as both embodied and enactivist. Drawing on Nancy’s work, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud and educational and developmental child psychology, I position the listening subject on a fulcrum of balance and imbalance essential to learning and musical practice. In the third part of this study, I concretize Feldenkrais’s ideals of correct action and listening in musical practice. Using Glenn Gould and empirical work on musical practice, I explore the significance of listening between acts of playing. Listening is proposed not merely as a phenomenological form of making sense (Nancy), but as a form of self-negotiation and an enactivist and imaginative space that leads to new possibilities of thought and refinement of action.

Notes

1 Norman Doidge, The Brain’s Way of Healing: Stories of Remarkable Recoveries and Discoveries (London: Allen Lane, 2015), 196.

2 For a history of somatic practices, see Martha Eddy, ‘A Brief History of Somatic Practices and Dance: Historical Development of the Field of Somatic Education and its Relationship to Dance’, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, 1 (2009), 5–27; and for a recent critical overview, see Sylvie Fortin, ‘Looking for Blindspots in Somatics’ Evolving Pathways’, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, 9 (2017), 145–57.

3 In the first volume of his biography of Feldenkrais, which covers the period up to 1951, the Feldenkrais practitioner Mark Reese chronicles Feldenkrais’s youth, his learning to fight on the streets of Palestine, his studies in judo and his scientific work in engineering in Paris, including his work in the laboratories of Joliot-Curie and that on the Van de Graaff generator (used in atomic fission experiments). Reese details Feldenkrais’s escape from the Nazis (in 1940), his work for the British admiralty on anti-submarine research and his move to the new state of Israel, where he worked with its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. After the publication of a picture of Ben-Gurion on the beach at Tel-Aviv, Meyer Levin published an article about Feldenkrais in the Jerusalem Post entitled ‘The Man Who Stood the Prime Minister on his Head’. Ben-Gurion and Feldenkrais were lifelong friends, and the former even tried to found a university in Israel that would specifically study the latter’s work. See Mark Reese, Moshe Feldenkrais: A Life in Movement, i (San Rafael, CA: ReeseKress Somatics Press, 2015).

4 Feldenkrais worked with musicians such as Yehudi Menuhin, Narciso Yepes and Igor Markevitch, and with the theatre director Peter Brook. Scholarship on Feldenkrais and musicians has focused primarily on technique rather than aesthetics or listening. It has included Alan Fraser’s four books on piano playing: The Craft of Piano Playing: A New Approach to Piano Technique, 2nd edn (Lanham, MD, and Plymouth: Scarecrow Press, 2011); Honing the Pianistic Self-Image: Skeletal-Based Piano Technique (Novi Sad: Maple Grove Music Productions, 2010); All Thumbs: Well-Coordinated Piano Technique (Novi Sad: Maple Grove Music Productions, 2012); and Play the Piano with your Whole Self (forthcoming). The other major book on the Feldenkrais Method and musical practice is Samuel H. Nelson’s Singing with the Whole Self: The Feldenkrais Method and Voice (Lanham, MD, and London: Scarecrow Press, 2001). Other practical resources include Jerry Karzen’s workshop In Tune with Yourself: Feldenkrais for Musicians (San Diego, CA: Feldenkrais Resources, 2010), and Mary Spire’s How to Understand and Work Effectively with Musicians (San Diego, CA: Feldenkrais Resources, n.d.). There has also been work on the Feldenkrais Method and performance anxiety: see Kristen Urbanski, ‘Overcoming Performance Anxiety: A Systematic Review of the Benefits of Yoga, Alexander Technique, and the Feldenkrais Method’ (BA dissertation, Ohio University, 2012), retrieved from <https://etd.ohiolink.edu> (accessed 13 March 2019). There is also forthcoming scientific work on the Feldenkrais Method and musical performance strategies from Gilles Comeau, Jillian Beacon and Donald Russell; see <https://piano.uottawa.ca/research_fr/research-on-piano-playing_fr/physical-aspects-of-performing_fr>. See also the studies on Feldenkrais in the special edition of the journal Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 6/2 (2015), ed. Libby Worth and Dick McCaw.

5 Susan Hallam states: ‘Playing a musical instrument, which demands extensive procedural and motor learning, results in plastic reorganisation of the human brain, including the rapid enhancing of existing connections and the establishment of new ones.’ Hallam, Music Psychology in Education (London: Institute of Education, 2006), 18. See also Simone Dalla Bella, ‘Music and Brain Plasticity’, The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology, ed. Susan Hallam, Ian Cross and Michael Thaut (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 325–42.

6 Moshe Feldenkrais, Awareness through Movement (London: Arkana, 1990), 10–24, 130–8. Feldenkrais’s ideal holistically embodies the ideas both of ‘body image’, synthesized by Sean Gallagher and Andrew N. Meltzoff as ‘perceptual experience of […] conceptual understanding of [and] emotional attitude to’ one’s own body, and of ‘body schema’, which is automatic and ‘operates below the level of self-referential intentionality, although it can enter into and support intentional activity’. Feldenkrais’s understanding of the body in this sense is closer to that of the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s thought, which the authors describe as a ‘body schema [that is] a dynamic form, a being-in-the-world, of which we have a “tacit understanding”’. See Gallagher and Meltzoff, ‘The Earliest Sense of Self and Others: Merleau-Ponty and Recent Developmental Studies’, Philosophical Psychology, 9 (1996), 211–33 (p. 216), available at <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3845406> (accessed 11 March 2019). See also Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 25–6, and Isabelle Ginot, ‘Body Schema and Body Image: At the Crossroads of Somatics and Social Work’, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, 3 (2011), 151–65; and, on infant development, Carl Ginsburg, The Intelligence of Moving Bodies: A Somatic View of Life and its Consequences (Sante Fe, NM: AWAREing Press, 2010), 112–43.

7 Moshe Feldenkrais, ‘Bodily Expressions’, trans. Thomas Hanna, Embodied Wisdom: The Collected Papers of Moshe Feldenkrais, ed. Elizabeth Beringer (San Diego, CA: Somatic Resources, and Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2010), 3. On proprioception and embodiment, see Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, ‘Body and Movement: Basic Dynamic Principles’, Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, ed. Shaun Gallagher and Daniel Schmicking (Dordrecht and London: Springer, 2010), 217–34. See also Gallagher, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 45–7.

8 Gallagher and Meltzoff describe the gap between the ‘body schema’ and ‘the perception of the body’, which is ‘never equivalent to a body image’. Gallagher and Meltzoff, ‘The Earliest Sense of Self and Others’, 216.

9 A good definition of FI is given at <http://www.feldenkrais.com/functional-integration> (accessed 11 March 2019). FI also has an improvisatory quality that is quite different from the techniques of improvisation used in music therapy. See also Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s ‘The Work of Dr Moshe Feldenkrais: A New Applied Kinesiology and a Radical Questioning of Training and Technique’, Contact Quarterly, 5/1 (autumn 1979), 24–7.

10 Moshe Feldenkrais, Dr Moshe Feldenkrais at Alexander Yanai, trans. Anat Baniel, 11 vols. (Paris and Tel Aviv: International Feldenkrais Federation, 1994 –2004), i (1995), 37.

11 On the neurophysiology of this, see Ginsburg, The Intelligence of Moving Bodies, 223–4.

12 Reese, Moshe Feldenkrais, i, 205.

13 Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the Twenty-First Century (London: Allen Lane, 2014), 59.

14 Doidge discusses this lesson briefly in The Brain’s Way of Healing, 187. Albert Rosenfeld also discusses it in ‘Teaching the Body How to Program the Brain is Moshe’s Miracle’, Smithsonian Magazine, 11/10 (January 1981), 1–6. See also <http://feldenkraisperth.com/feldenkrais-helping-children> (accessed 11 March 2019).

15 See Moshe Feldenkrais, ‘Functional Integration with Cerebral Palsy, Session I’, The Work of Dr Moshe Feldenkrais, 2 DVDs (San Diego: Feldenkrais Resources, 2007); also available at <https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=136092850277964> (accessed 25 March 2019).

16 The adductor tenotomy (cutting the origin tendons of the adductor muscles of the thigh) and obturator neurectomy (cutting the anterior branch of the obturator nerve) is sometimes performed on children with cerebral palsy. These children often have a hypertonia of the adductor muscles, making abduction difficult, obstructing normal hip development and putting them at risk of hip luxation (see <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adductor_muscles_of_the_hip>, accessed 28 August 2019). See also the work of Chava Shelhav (The Feldenkrais Method with Children Who Have Learning Disabilities (DVD), San Diego: Feldenkrais Resources, undated) and Carl Ginsburg, who describes a lesson Feldenkrais gave in 1981 to an 11-year-old girl with problems similar to Ephram’s. Ginsburg describes Feldenkrais’s ability to recreate ‘the developmental pathway for a child’: ‘Feldenkrais had developed in himself the possibility of imagining the experience of the child within the limitations of her development’ so that he could help her by providing the ‘stability’ she needed to learn how to organize herself. Ginsburg, The Intelligence of Moving Bodies, 178–82. For further information on Feldenkrais’s work with cerebral palsy and children, see <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2_G4NWRnNM> (accessed 25 March 2019).

17 Shaun Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 10. Gallagher invokes Merleau-Ponty’s idea of ‘intercorporeality’, which he describes as involving ‘a reciprocal, dynamic, and enactive response to the other’s action, taking that action for an affordance for further action rather than as the occasion for replication (simulation)’. Ibid., 77.

18 Feldenkrais, ‘Functional Integration with Cerebral Palsy, Session I’.

19 See Wayne Bowman, ‘Cognition and the Body: Perspectives from Music Education’, Knowing Bodies, Moving Minds: Towards Embodied Teaching and Learning, ed. Laura Bresler (Dordrecht and London: Kluwer Academic, 2004), 29–50. The philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy states: ‘Listening opens up in timbre, which resounds in it rather than for it […] Resonance is at once that of a body that is sonorous for itself and resonance of sonority in a listening body that, itself, resounds as it listens.’ Nancy, À l’écoute (Paris: Galilée, 2002); trans. Charlotte Mandell as Listening (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 40.

20 Ephram does not have an acculturated desire to ‘please the teacher’ or to anticipate what the teacher wants.

21 See Feldenkrais, ‘Functional Integration with Cerebral Palsy, Session I’.

22 The theorist David Wills might say in a different sense, as he states of listening, that it ‘was always already in prosthetic articulationality’. See Wills, ‘Positive Feedback: Listening behind Hearing’, Thresholds of Listening: Sound, Technics, Space, ed. Sander van Maas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 70–88 (p. 82).

23 On ‘forgetting how to’ do something after injury, see Jonathan Cole, ‘Agency with Impairments of Movement’, Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, ed. Gallagher and Schmicking, 655–70 (pp. 661–2).

24 Moshe Feldenkrais, Bodily Awareness as Healing Therapy: The Case of Nora (Berkeley, CA: Frog, 1997), 23.

25 Part of Feldenkrais’s assumption is that there is inside Ephram a pattern of learning for walking that needs to be activated. His role is to find the key, working out and reproducing the developmental patterns for and in Ephram – part of his ‘innate’ system, as Gallagher and Meltzoff call it – so that he can learn and improve movement function. On imitation and body schemas in infant children, see Gallagher and Meltzoff, ‘The Earliest Sense of Self and Others’.

26 Nancy, Listening, 9.

27 Wills, ‘Positive Feedback’, 74.

28 Kimberly Powell, ‘Moving from Still Life: Emerging Conceptions of the Body in Arts Education’, International Handbook of Research in Arts Education, ed. Liora Bresler, 2 vols. (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), ii, 1083–6 (p. 1083).

29 On Feldenkrais and disability, see Rosenfeld, ‘Teaching the Body How to Program the Brain’, 5. See also Feldenkrais, Awareness through Movement, 67–8. In the lesson with Ephram, Feldenkrais stops at one point and tells his assembled students, ‘Perhaps he [Ephram] will grow up [to be] a strong, nice man like everybody else, maybe better, because he has known trouble and overcome it.’ Feldenkrais, ‘Functional Integration with Cerebral Palsy, Session I’.

30 For a guide to disability studies, see Blake Howe, Stefanie Jensen-Moulton, Neil Lerner and Joseph Strauss, ‘Introduction: Disability Studies in Music, Music in Disability Studies’, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies, ed. Howe, Jensen-Moulton, Lerner and Strauss (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1–14. For an overview of studies in music education and disability, see Adam Ockelford and Graham F. Welch, ‘Mapping Musical Development in Learners with the Most Complex Needs: The Sounds of Intent Project’, The Oxford Handbook of Music Education, ed. Gary E. McPherson and Graham F. Welch, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), ii, 11–30.

31 A saying widely attributed to Feldenkrais in the Feldenkrais community.

32 This phenomenological turn is pursued in Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, 2nd edn (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007); Peter Szendy, Listen: A History of our Ears, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone Books, 2010); Daniel K. L. Chua, ‘Listening to the Self: The Shawshank Redemption and the Technology of Music’, Nineteenth-Century Music, 34 (2010–11), 341–55; François J. Bonnet, Les mots et les sons: Un archipel sonore (Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 2012); François Nicolas, Le monde-musique, 4 vols. (Château-Gontier: Éditions Aedam Musicae, 2014 –), i: L’œuvre musicale et son écoute ; and Thresholds of Listening, ed. van Maas.

33 A saying widely attributed to Feldenkrais in the Feldenkrais community. Feldenkrais perceives the ‘parasitic’ or contradictory set of embodied impulses; the desire to do or stop doing something is coloured by other habitual activities that, although they seem essential and pleasurable, may inhibit the clarity of a movement. Feldenkrais, The Potent Self: A Study of Spontaneity and Compulsion (Berkeley, CA: Frog, 1995), 25, 28.

34 Carl Ginsburg discusses the experience of listening to Gould’s recordings, some of Gould’s working methods and his refinement and self-organization of his nervous system in The Intelligence of Moving Bodies, 153–9.

35 See Feldenkrais, The Potent Self, 6–13. On action and will, see Cole, ‘Agency with Impairments of Movement’, 655–70.

36 Gould has drawn attention from disability studies. The musicologist S. Timothy Malony has diagnosed Gould’s persona in detail, concluding that Gould was autistic and had a form of Asperger’s syndrome. See Malony, ‘Glenn Gould, Autistic Savant’, Sounding Off: Theorizing Disability in Music, ed. Neil Lerner and Joseph N. Straus (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 121–36.

37 Pinker, The Sense of Style, 59.

38 Roger Scruton, Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 123. See also Nancy, Listening, 17; Aiden Evens, Sound Ideas (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 142–8; Anthony Gritten, ‘Resonant Listening’, Performance Research, 15/3 (2010), 115–22; Brian Kane, ‘Jean-Luc Nancy and the Listening Subject’, Contemporary Music Review, 31 (2012), 439–47 (p. 446); Gritten, ‘The Subject (of) Listening’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 45 (2014), 203–19; and Gritten, ‘Depending on Timbre’, Contemporary Music Review, 36 (2017), 530–43.

39 Nancy, Listening, 38.

40 See Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body, trans. Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), and Nancy, The Fall of Sleep, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009).

41 Lawrence M. Zbikowski, ‘Listening to Music’, Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous, ed. Keith Chaplin and Andrew Clark (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 101–19 (p. 106).

42 Nancy states that we are always ‘on the edge of meaning, or in an edgy meaning of extremity, and as if the sound were precisely nothing else than this edge, this fringe, this margin’. Nancy, Listening, 7.

43 Ibid., 31.

44 Gritten, ‘Resonant Listening’, 116.

45 The sense in which music is or is not embodied according to the variables of musical style and rhythm, for example, is a subject not essayed by Nancy. For more on music and embodiment and what he calls the ‘mimetic hypothesis’, see Arnie Cox, Music and Embodied Cognition: Listening, Moving, Feeling and Thinking (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2018).

46 Bowman, ‘Cognition and the Body’, 36. On enactivism, see in particular Francisco Varela, Eleonor Rosch and Evan Thompson, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), and Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions.

47 See Nancy, Listening, 26.

48 Bowman, ‘Cognition and the Body’, 36. Gallagher puts this a different way: ‘The best answers we have to the question of motor control indicate that most control processes happen at a subpersonal, unconscious level in the elementary timescale […] Both phenomenology and neurophysiology support a combination of perceptual and non-conscious explanations of how we control bodily movements, and they rule out reflective theory in the normal case.’ Enactivist Interventions, 141. What Feldenkrais discovered, however, is that through awareness of precisely these things, isolating functionality and making small changes through differentiated movements focused on a function, learning and facility can be improved.

49 Wills, ‘Positive Feedback’, 74.

50 See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Seminar XI), trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Hogarth Press, 1977), 55. For Nancy on Lacan, see Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), and Nancy, Listening, 28–9.

51 See Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function’, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2006), 75–81. When it does come to make a partial identification with its image, the child in Lacan’s thought is cut off from the pre-symbolic Real and forever feels this lack. See further Michael L. Klein, Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2015), 13–17.

52 On desire and fulfilment, see Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 54.

53 This aspect of listening is discussed in Robert Sholl, ‘Stop it, I Like it! Embodiment, Masochism, and Listening for Traumatic Pleasure’, Thresholds of Listening, ed. van Maas, 153–74 (pp. 153–5).

54 Musical performance should therefore be understood as part of an ecology that forms part of what the developmental psychologists Esther Thelen and Linda B. Smith describe as ‘characteristic of developing organisms […] self-organization, nonlinearity, openness, stability, and change’. Thelen and Smith, ‘Dynamic Systems Theories’, Handbook of Child Psychology, ed. William Damon, 4 vols., 5th edn (New York: J. Wiley, 1997), i: Theoretical Models of Human Development, ed. Richard M. Lerner, 258–312 (p. 267). Gallagher states, ‘Dynamic systems theory can be used to explain the complexities of brain function but it can also capture the dynamic coupling between body and environment.’ Enactivist Interventions, 40; this idea is elaborated on pp. 115–21 and 161.

55 Lacan states: ‘You see, the object of desire is the cause of the desire [object a], and this object that is the cause of desire is the object of the drive – that is to say, the object around which the drive turns […] It is not that desire clings to the object of the drive – desire moves around it, in so far as it is agitated in the drive.’ Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 243.

56 In Lacanian terms, a partial object which escapes but shapes desire is called petit objet a. Žižek defines this objet as ‘the pure lack, the void around which desire turns and which, as such, causes the desire, and the imaginary element which conceals the void, renders it visible by filling it in’. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality (London: Verso, 2005), 178. The term ‘drive’, Laplanche and Pontalis state, is ‘generally accepted by English-speaking psycho-analytic authors as a rendering of the German “Trieb”: a dynamic process consisting in a pressure (charge of energy, motricity factor) which directs the organism towards an aim. According to Freud, an instinct has its source in a bodily stimulus; its aim is to eliminate the state of tension obtaining at the instinctual source; and it is in the object, or thanks to it, that the instinct may achieve its aim.’ Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 1973), 214.

57 Slavoj Žižek, ‘From object a to Subtraction’, Lacanian Ink, 30 (2007), 130–41 (p. 132).

58 Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (London: Viking, 2007), 18. See also Vernon B. Mountcastle, ‘An Organizing Principle for Cerebral Function: The Unit Model and the Distributed System’, The Mindful Brain: Cortical Organization and the Group-Selective Theory of Higher Brain Function, ed. Gerald M. Edelman and Vernon B. Mountcastle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978), 7–50.

59 Nancy, Listening, 42.

60 Feldenkrais, ‘Functional Integration with Cerebral Palsy, Session I’.

61 Feldenkrais, Awareness through Movement, 46.

62 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Laughter Presence’, trans. Emily McVarish, The Birth to Presence, ed. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 368–92 (p. 390). Marie-Eve Morin notes that ‘for Nancy, to touch is always to touch a limit (and hence not to penetrate into or merge with what is on the other side) and hence to touch the intangible’. Morin, Jean-Luc Nancy (Cambridge: Polity, 2012), 65.

63 Feldenkrais explains in the lesson with Ephram: ‘Everything that is being achieved is integrated in a way which gives him surprise, pleasure and pride in his achievement so that he keeps on showing off and builds his own dignity and confidence … its Functional Integration, its not dealing with the muscle. Dealing with a muscle means “cut it”, … dealing with the function means dealing with his self-direction.’ Feldenkrais, ‘Functional Integration with Cerebral Palsy, Session I’.

64 Ibid.

65 Nancy, Listening, 3.

66 Peter Hallward states: ‘Nancy, on the other hand, seeks quite precisely to “touch” being as it withdraws from touch. Being is neither touchable nor merely untouchable, is a pure touching untouched by any touched. Rather than abandon being as untouchable, Nancy conceives being through this abandoning, as a touching absolved from the dimension of the touched (but also from anything merely untouchable).’ Hallward, ‘Jean-Luc Nancy and the Implosion of Thought’, Exposures: Critical Essays on Jean-Luc Nancy, ed. Ian James and Patrick Ffrench, special issue, Oxford Literary Review, 27/1 (2005), 159–80 (p. 169).

67 On the difference between hearing and listening, see Nancy, Listening, 5–6, 32. Also see Wills, ‘Positive Feedback’, 72–4.

68 Michael Gallope, review of Nancy’s Listening, Current Musicology, 86 (autumn 2008), 157–66 (p. 158). For a study of the practical ramifications of empathetic listening and negotiation in jazz improvisation, see Frederick A. Seddon, ‘Modes of Communication during Jazz Improvisation’, British Journal of Music Education, 22/1 (2005), 47–61.

69 Nancy, Listening, 7.

70 Ibid., 9.

71 Ibid., 8.

72 Peter Hallward understands Nancy as meaning that: ‘Presenting, or presencing, can only be said as a verb without a subject; presencing is what will come, and what has always been coming, both before and after the subject.’ See Hallward, ‘Jean-Luc Nancy and the Implosion of Thought’, 161. He further states (on p. 171) of Nancy’s ontology of the subject: ‘The subject can only exist, in other words, as non-subject, as a positing that escapes itself or a reflecting that abandons itself.’ In a therapeutic context, Ephram might be thought of as a locus for a ‘listening [that] is musical when it is music that listens to itself’. Nancy, Listening, 67.

73 A saying widely attributed to Feldenkrais in the Feldenkrais community.

74 Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 51.

75 For more on the symbolic cut, see ibid., 162–3. Zupančič does not use this (iceberg) metaphor, but explores the symbolic cut through Lacan’s statement, ‘The cry does not stand out against a background of silence, but on the contrary makes the silence emerge as silence.’ Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 26. Hallward places the importance of Nancy’s philosophy in a way that resonates with this thought. For Hallward, ‘It lies in the rigour and the persistence with which he subtracts a presenting of the world from what can be presented of the world itself.’ Hallward, ‘Jean-Luc Nancy and the Implosion of Thought’, 177.

76 Nancy, Listening, 21.

77 Nancy, Listening, 4.

78 Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 394. See also Sigmund Freud, ‘A Short Account of Psycho-analysis’ (1924), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1953–74), xix: The Ego and the Id and Other Works (1961), 191–212 (p. 196).

79 Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 395. Transference is understood as ‘a process of actualisation of unconscious wish’; it is ‘the terrain on which all the basic problems of a given analysis play themselves out: the establishment, modalities, interpretation and resolution of the transference are in fact what define the cure’. Ibid., 455.

80 Freud, ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety’ (1926), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. Strachey, xx: An Autobiographical Study: Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety; The Question of Lay Analysis; and Other Works (1959), 87–178 (p. 159). Feldenkrais discusses resistance extensively in his book The Potent Self. He states: ‘When an intended act contradicts a reflex action – although both have been started by the same event – the reflex impulses [Freud’s “compulsion to repeat”] arrive earlier, and we feel our body refusing to obey. The reflexively motivated attitude or movement of the body feels as pre-existing to us, and we become aware of resistance.’ Feldenkrais, The Potent Self, 23.

81 At one point in Ephram’s lesson Feldenkrais states: ‘We will reverse the experience of his life.’ Feldenkrais, ‘Functional Integration with Cerebral Palsy, Session I’. Feldenkrais therefore uses precisely what Freud calls ‘impulses that are the complete opposite of those which it knows as its own’. Freud, ‘Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety’, 159. In a more judo-like sense, Feldenkrais ‘deflects’ the compulsion to repeat pre-existing patterns in order to allow the formation of new ones. Feldenkrais wrote five books on judo: see Reese, Moshe Feldenkrais, i, 547. An essential technique of judo is Inasu, which refers to the deflection of the opponent’s attack by moving abruptly in a direction not anticipated by the opponent. Judo is a foundation of the Feldenkrais Method; see Feldenkrais, Higher Judo: Groundwork (London: Frederick Warne, 1962), xi–52.

82 A saying widely attributed to Feldenkrais in the Feldenkrais community.

83 Wayne Bowman and Kimberly Powell note that touch is fundamental to the composer and music educationalist Émile Jaques-Dalcroze’s thought. In 1921, Dalcroze noted that, ‘I came to the conclusion that the motive and dynamic element of music depends not only on the hearing but on another sense. This I took at first to be the sense of touch’; but he also noted that, ‘Musical sensations of a rhythmic nature call for muscular and nervous response of the whole organism.’ Quoted in Bowman and Powell, ‘The Body in a State of Music’, International Handbook of Research in Arts Education, ed. Bresler, ii, 1087–106 (p. 1090). Bowman and Powell (on pp. 1094–5) briefly discuss the Alexander Technique and the writings of Richard Shusterman on ‘somoaesthetics’, but they do not touch on the Feldenkrais Method.

84 See above, n. 33.

85 This thinking developed the work of the French physician Émile Coué, who thought of the use of effort and willpower as manifesting a lack of imagination or ability to use the imagination. See Coué, Self Mastery through Conscious Autosuggestion (New York: American Library Services, 1922; repr. London: Forgotten Books, 2013).

86 For a digest of this work, see Daniel Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload (London: Viking, 2015), 96–8. Levitin cites Earl Miller, an MIT neuroscientist, who states that our brains are ‘not designed to multitask well […] When people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost in doing so’ (p. 96). Levitin goes on to show that multitasking actually decreases effectiveness and productivity, or what Feldenkrais would call ‘potency’.

87 Feldenkrais, Learn to Learn (San Diego: Feldenkrais Resources, 1980), 9–10; also available at <https://www.feldenkraisresources.com/Learn-to-Learn-Feldenkrais-Booklet-p/1160.htm> (accessed 25 March 2019).

88 Christopher Connolly and Aaron Williamon, ‘Mental Skills Training’, Musical Excellence: Strategies and Techniques to Improve Performance, ed. Williamon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 224–9.

89 See Feldenkrais, The Potent Self, 113, and Reese, Moshe Feldenkrais, i, 284.

90 Esther Thelen became a Feldenkrais practitioner late in life. She trained under Mark Reese at Indiana University (Bloomington), completing her training in 2002. My thanks to Roger Russell for this information. See Thelen, ‘The Central Role of Action in Typical and Atypical Development’, Movement and Action in Learning and Development: Clinical Implications of Pervasive Developmental Disorders, ed. Ida J. Stockman (San Diego: Academic Press, 2004), 49–73 (pp. 69–71), cited in Reese, Moshe Feldenkrais, i, 183.

91 Thelen and Smith, ‘Dynamic Systems Theories’, 269. They also state: ‘This disequilibrium allows change and flexibility; the idea that too much stability is inimical to change recurs in many developmental accounts (e.g. Piaget, Werner) and is an assumption we also find essential for understanding development.’

92 Nancy, Listening, 16.

93 Ibid., 4, 35.

94 Feldenkrais, Thinking and Doing (Longmont, CO: Genesis II, 2013), 8. This work in fact comprises two chapters previously written as an appendix to a Hebrew translation (1929) of C. Harry Brooks’s The Practice of Autosuggestion: By the Method of Emile Coué (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1922; repr. London: Forgotten Books, 2012), which adumbrates Coué’s Self Mastery through Conscious Autosuggestion.

95 Feldenkrais, Thinking and Doing, 13.

96 Ibid., 14.

97 Feldenkrais, Thinking and Doing, 18.

98 Ibid., 21.

99 See Feldenkrais, ‘The Delay between Thought and Action is the Basis for Awareness’, Awareness through Movement, 45–6.

100 See Feldenkrais, The Potent Self, 6–13.

101 David Dubal, ‘Interview with Glenn Gould’, Reflections from the Keyboard: The World of the Concert Pianist (New York: Schirmer, 1997), 193–8 (p. 195).

102 Feldenkrais, The Potent Self, 8. Feldenkrais defines potent activity as the ‘sort of behavior we encounter in well-matured persons […] we gradually take responsibility for our own actions […] In those planes of life in which our maturity is least developed, we continue acting compulsively, we do (or we do not do) things knowing perfectly well that we want the exact opposite. Under these circumstances impotence appears.’

103 Dubal, ‘Interview with Glenn Gould’, 195.

104 See Lutz Jäncke, ‘The Motor Representation in Pianists and Violinists’, Music, Motor-Control and the Brain, ed. Eckhart Altenmüller, Mario Wiesendanger and Jürg Kesselring (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 153–72. In neuroscientific terms this might be understood as the brain making ‘representations’ of the world (the keyboard). See Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions, 13–21, and for anti-representationalist arguments, see pp. 83–106. These arguments prefer to see ‘action [as that which] involves temporal processes that can be better explained in terms of dynamic systems of self-organizing continuous reciprocal causation’ (see p. 105 and reworded on p. 161). Gould’s process seems to imply both these ideas, because the mental image is so strongly linked to an image of the physical realization. His internal process might be thought of as an attunement and a reconfiguration of a basic representation that can be ‘dynamically’ transferred to different situations (new pieces of music). Gould’s process, I would argue, relies on memory and imagination as ‘an active engagement with possibilities’ coupled to perception (see Gallagher, Enactivist Interventions, 188, 193). The possibilities or ‘affordances’ (a term used by the psychologist J. J. Gibson) give or create possibilities for learning through ‘action and interaction’, as Ginsburg puts it. Gibson’s thought here is remarkably similar to Feldenkrais’s ideal of an ATM lesson, which creatively explores different possibilities for such action. See Ginsburg, The Intelligence of Moving Bodies, 149–51.

105 Kevin Bazzana, Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 73. Bazzana cites a story by Ray Dudley (a fellow pupil), who recalls, ‘Gould was devastated by a minor memory lapse in an early conservatory concert, so Guerrero taught him to learn scores away from the piano.’ ‘By his late teens’, Bazzana states, Gould ‘was spending more time studying scores than practising them’. Ibid., 68.

106 The ‘learned nature of practice’ is discussed by Andreas C. Lehmann and Harald Jørgensen in ‘Practice’, The Oxford Handbook of Music Education, ed. Gary E. McPherson and Graham F. Welch, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), i, 677–93. Ioulia Papageorgi and Graham Welch underline the importance of the ‘neuropsychobiological design’ and the ‘biography of the individual’ within an ‘interrelated, socio-ecologically nested system’ in development and learning and a ‘symbiotic link between musical learning and the formation of musical identities’. Papageorgi and Welch, ‘How Do Musicians Develop their Learning about Performance’, Advanced Musical Performance Investigations in Higher Education Learning, ed. Papageorgi and Welch (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 171–86 (pp. 172–3). For an overview of practice, see Peter Miksza, ‘A Review of Research on Practicing: Summary and Synthesis of the Extant Research with Implications for a New Theoretical Orientation’, Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 190 (autumn 2011), 51–92.

107 These include ‘gripping a vase as it is pulled away; squeezing a rubber ball; “clapping” firmly with one hand (imagine catching a fly with one hand); rotating the wrist or elbow while keeping the hand loose; practising with one hand while holding it with the other [this in particular approximates what happens in FI when the weight of a person’s limb is taken over by the practitioner to remove the sense of gravity from the student, allowing them to be on a fulcrum where they are able to sense other possibilities of movement]; playing scales as smoothly as possible with just one finger; moving it [the finger] with the upper arm only; and practising on a table or using silently depressed keys in order to find the correct weight and voicing for chords.’ Bazzana, Wondrous Strange, 72.

108 Jonathan Cott, Conversations with Glenn Gould (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

109 On strategies for overcoming performance anxiety, see further Ioulia Papageorgi and Reinhard Kopiez, ‘Psychological and Physiological Aspects of Learning to Perform’, The Oxford Handbook of Music Education, ed. McPherson and Welch, i, 731–51. Gould’s issue with Beethoven’s op. 109 illustrates all three sources of anxiety: ‘physiological arousal, cognitive anxiety, and the task itself’ (p. 739), but his approach to solving the issue is more novel than the suggestions made in this study.

110 Cott, Conversations with Glenn Gould, 39. Gould also described playing deliberately ‘as unmusically as possible’ with the left hand only. Again, this was a way of disturbing habitual action conjoined to listening. Ibid., 39–40. Ginsburg discusses Gould’s use of radios with Beethoven, to show that ‘we often cannot learn when there is anxiety about the outcome’. Ginsburg, The Intelligence of Moving Bodies, 156.

111 The idea of breaking down tasks and partitioning musical learning is a common strategy that is also a form of constraint, but is not theorized in this way. See Lehmann and Jørgensen, ‘Practice’, 682–4. There is currently no theoretical work which examines how such tasks could be approached in different ways in a Feldenkraisian manner.

112 It must be added here that the degree to which, through Gould’s own practice, the sound is already habitually sedimented in the movement is unknown. A similar effect can be achieved when playing on an electric, weighted keyboard that is switched off.

113 See Feldenkrais, Awareness through Movement, 82–4.

114 Cott, Conversations with Glenn Gould, 40.

115 Dubal, ‘Interview with Glenn Gould’, 197.

116 See Papageorgi and Welch, ‘How Do Musicians Develop their Learning about Performance’, 178, citing Ingo Gerrit Meister, Timo Krings, Henrik Foltys, Babak Boroojerdi, Mareike C. Müller, Rudolf F. Töpper and Armin K. Thron, ‘Playing Piano in the Mind: An fMRI Study on Music Imagery and Performance in Pianists’, Cognitive Brain Research, 19 (2004), 219–28. See also Hallam, Music Psychology in Education, 22, 96–7. Hallam cites studies that examine the way in which ‘memory performance might be improved’, showing that ‘there was superior retention of musical fragments when they were learnt away from the keyboard’ (p. 96). Ginsburg discusses another example of Gould (cited in Geoffrey Payzant, Glenn Gould: Music and Mind (Toronto: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992), 93) mentally rehearsing on his own Chickering piano and holding on to this kinaesthetic image to overcome the problems posed by an unruly instrument in Tel Aviv. See Ginsburg, The Intelligence of Moving Bodies, 155–6.

117 Dubal, ‘Interview with Glenn Gould’, 198.

118 Ibid.

119 See Wills, ‘Positive Feedback’, 75. Wills cites as evidence Ching Kung, ‘A Possible Unifying Principle for Mechanosensation’, Nature, 436 (July–August 2005), 647–54 (p. 647).

120 See Jennifer MacRitchie and Andrew P. McPherson, ‘Integrating Optical Finger Motion Tracking with Surface Touch Events’, Frontiers in Psychology (2015), 1–14 (p. 11), also available at <http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00702/full> (accessed 11 March 2019). For similar studies, see Werner Goebl, ‘Motion Capture of Piano Performance’ (2008), <http://iwk.mdw.ac.at/goebl/pianomocap.html> (accessed 11 November 2016), and Hans-Christian Jabusch, ‘Movement Analysis in Pianists’, Music, Motor-Control and the Brain, ed. Altenmüller, Wiesendanger and Kesselring, 91–108.

121 MacRitchie and McPherson, ‘Integrating Optical Finger Motion Tracking with Surface Touch Events’, 11.

122 Feldenkrais, The Potent Self, xl.

123 Gould famously stopped playing in public in 1964, and became a recording artist only. See further Glenn Gould, ‘The Prospects of Recording’, The Glenn Gould Reader, ed. Tim Page (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), 331–57, and Tim Hecker, ‘Glenn Gould, the Vanishing Performer and the Ambivalence of the Studio’, Leonardo Music Journal, 18 (2008), 77–83. Agamben writes: ‘Only a power that is capable of both power and impotence, then, is the supreme power […] This means that, even though every pianist necessarily has the potential to play and the potential to not-play, Glenn Gould is, however, the only one who can not not-play, and directing his potentiality not only to the act but to his own impotence, he plays, so to speak, with the potential to not-play. While his ability simply negates and abandons his potential to not-play, his mastery conserves and exercises in the act not his potential to play […], but rather his potential to not-play.’ Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 35.

124 This again invokes Gallagher and Meltzoff’s gap between the ‘body schema’ and ‘the perception of the body’, which is ‘never equivalent’. See Gallagher and Meltzoff, ‘The Earliest Sense of Self and Others’.

125 In Lacanian terms, the recording process therefore provides a kind of equivalent process by which the child, staring at himself in his Mother’s arms in the mirror, comes to recognize himself as that child. See Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function’.

126 See <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JllD47HIees> and in particular <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chHJdmyIiRk>, in which Gould air-conducts his own recording.

127 Feldenkrais, The Potent Self, xl.

128 Feldenkrais, Bodily Awareness as Healing Therapy, 37.

129 Mark Reese shows how Feldenkrais was much impressed not only by Zen philosophy and the work of D. T. Suzuki, but also by the work of G. I. Gurdjieff, who devised mindfulness exercises for stopping. See Reese, Moshe Feldenkrais, i, 252 (on Suzuki) and in particular 430–47 (on Gurdjieff).

130 Here is an example of this law: if a person tried to lift a grand piano and a fly landed on it, they would be unable to discern the change because of the amount of effort and the increased muscle tonus required for this action. However, if the same person lifted a feather, the lack of effort required would allow them to feel the difference in weight when the same fly settled on the feather.

131 See Feldenkrais, Learn to Learn, 5, and Reese, Moshe Feldenkrais, 192–3.

132 For an overview of the science of memorization, see Caroline Palmer, ‘The Nature of Memory for Music Performance Skills’, Music, Motor-Control and the Brain, ed. Altenmüller, Wiesendanger and Kesselring, 39–53.

133 This is similar to what Gould does when he takes the weight of one hand with the other when practising. But the difference here is that Feldenkrais takes over the weight of and the agency for Ephram’s leg, for instance, while Gould still has power over his own hand.

134 I am not suggesting that motivation should be removed – it is a life-blood of musical practice – but that it is should be channelled and honed in a different manner. On motivation, see Susan A. O’Neill and Gary E. McPherson, ‘Motivation’, The Science and Psychology of Musical Performance: Creative Strategies for Teaching and Learning, ed. Richard E. Parncutt and Gary E. McPherson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 31–66, and Susan Hallam, ‘Motivation to Learn’, The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology, ed. Hallam, Cross and Thaut, 479–91.

135 A saying widely attributed to Feldenkrais in the Feldenkrais community (see above, p. 405).

136 For en excellent summary of Thinking and Doing, see Hillel D. Braude, ‘Between Psychology and Philosophy: A Review of “Thinking and Doing” by Moshe Feldenkrais’, Feldenkrais Research Journal, 5 (2016), <http://iffresearchjournal.org/fr/system/files/FRJ-5-Braude-160530.pdf> (accessed 11 March 2019).

137 See further Kate Liley, ‘The Feeble Fingers of Every Unregenerate Son of Adam: Cultural Values in Pianists’ Health and Skill Development’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Royal College of Music, London, 2019). See also Glenn Gould, ‘We Who Are About to be Disqualified Salute You!’, The Glenn Gould Reader, ed. Page, 250–5.

138 For some work around this topic, see Helena Gaunt, ‘One-to-One Tuition in a Conservatoire: The Perceptions of Instrumental and Vocal Students’, Psychology of Music, 38 (2010), 178–208. See also Anna Zabuska, Jane Ginsborg and David Wasley, ‘A Preliminary Comparison Study of Burnout and Engagement in Performance Students in Australia, Poland and the UK’, International Journal of Music Education, 36 (2018), 366–79. More positively, there is now a Healthy Conservatoires Network (Conservatoires UK) funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council; see their forthcoming website <www.healthyconservatoires.org>.

139 Bowman and Powell, ‘The Body in a State of Music’, 1089.

140 Ibid.

141 See further Cecilia de Lima, ‘Trans-Meaning: Dance as an Embodied Technology of Perception’, Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, 5 (2013), 17–30.

142 See Feldenkrais, ‘Introduction: Love Thyself as Thy Neighbor’, The Potent Self, xxxvii–xliv.