Caring for the Whole Musician brings together insights from two expert musicians and educators to consider the relationship between mental and physical health and artistic practice for musicians. Offering a holistic perspective that encompasses the whole being – body, mind, and heart – this book provides emerging musicians with tools, practices, and mindsets to address key challenges throughout their journey. The first part, Awareness, addresses wellness and embodiment in music, exploring how our bodies are constructed and how the use of our bodies as instruments affects function. Using approaches including Body Mapping and the Alexander Technique, this part helps readers discover adverse habits that interfere with natural movement, and nurture awareness of the body. The second part, Mindfulness, explores how meditative practice can be incorporated into every stage of concert preparation and embedded within the daily life of the musician. Offering mindfulness exercises related to each stage of the music-making process, these chapters provide strategies for readers to enhance their well-being and focus. Centered in the understanding of the musician as a whole being, this book provides an essential guide to how practices of awareness and mindfulness can allow musicians to better care for themselves and flourish in their artistic careers.

Caring for the Whole Musician brings together insights from two expert musicians and educators to consider the relationship between mental and physical health and artistic practice for musicians. Offering a holistic perspective that encompasses the whole being – body, mind, and heart – this book provides emerging musicians with tools, practices, and mindsets to address key challenges throughout their journey. The first part, Awareness, addresses wellness and embodiment in music, exploring how our bodies are constructed and how the use of our bodies as instruments affects function. Using approaches including Body Mapping and the Alexander Technique, this part helps readers discover adverse habits that interfere with natural movement, and nurture awareness of the body. The second part, Mindfulness, explores how meditative practice can be incorporated into every stage of concert preparation and embedded within the daily life of the musician. Offering mindfulness exercises related to each stage of the music-making process, these chapters provide strategies for readers to enhance their well-being and focus. Centered in the understanding of the musician as a whole being, this book provides an essential guide to how practices of awareness and mindfulness can allow musicians to better care for themselves and flourish in their artistic careers.

Inclusive Music Histories: Leading Change through Research and Pedagogy models effective practices for researchers and instructors striving either to reform music history curricula at large or update individual topics within their classes to be more inclusive. Confronting racial and other imbalances of Western music history, the author develops four core principles that enable a shift in thinking to create a truly intersectional music history narrative and provides case studies that can be directly applied in the classroom. The book addresses inclusivity issues in the discipline of musicology by outlining imbalances encoded into the canonic repertory, pedagogy, and historiography of the field. This book offers comprehensive teaching tools that instructors can use at all stages of course design, from syllabus writing and lecture planning to discussion techniques, with assignments for each of the subject matter case studies. Inclusive Music Histories enables instructors to go beyond token representation to a more nuanced music history pedagogy.

This book provides an overview of professional musicians working within the healthcare system and explores programs that bring music into the environment of the hospital. Far from being onstage, musicians in the hospital provide musical engagement for patients and healthcare providers focused on life-and-death issues. Music in healthcare offers a new and growing area for musical careers, distinct from the field of music therapy in which music is engaged to advance defined clinical goals. Rather, this volume considers what happens when musicians interact with the clinical environment as artists, and how musical careers and artistic practices can develop through work in a hospital setting. It outlines the specialized skills and training required to navigate safely and effectively within the healthcare context. The contributors draw on their experiences with collaborations between the performing arts and medicine at Boston University/Boston Medical Center, University of Florida/UF Health Shands Hospital, and the Peabody Institute/Johns Hopkins Medicine. These experiences, as well as the experiences of artists spotlighted throughout the volume, offer stories of thriving artistic practices and collaborations that outline a new field for tomorrow's musical artists.

In The Mindful Musician: Mental Skills for Peak Performance, author Vanessa Cornett offers guidelines to help musicians cultivate artistic vision, objectivity, freedom, quiet awareness, and self-compassion, both on- and offstage in order to become more resilient performers. Contrary to modern culture's embrace of busyness and divided attention, Cornett's contemplative techniques provide greater space for artistic self-expression and satisfaction. With the aid of a companion website that includes audio files and downloadable templates, The Mindful Musician provides a method to promote attentional focus, self-assessment, emotional awareness, and creativity. The first of its kind to combine mindfulness practices with research in cognitive and sport psychology, this book helps musicians explore the roots of anxiety and other challenges related to performance, all through the deliberate focus of awareness.

Author Paola Savvidou empowers applied music instructors to honour and support their students' wellness through compassion-filled conversation tools, and hands-on activities both injury prevention, mental health protection, and recovery support.