Pedro de Alcantara's The Integrated String Player: Embodied Vibration is a practical guide for all string players: violinists and violists, cellists and bassists, but also gamba players and anyone who makes music drawing a bow across a string. Dozens of exercises, supported by a dedicated website with 80 video clips, cover all the basics of string playing, including left-hand articulation, vibrato, changes of position, double-stopping, sound production, string crossings, and many other techniques. Each exercise, however simple or complex, can become a meditation with the goal of integrating the musical, technical, and metaphysical aspects of a player's practice. Part I is devoted to the fundamentals of coordination, rhythm, and listening in depth. Part II focuses on the left hand, with an emphasis on healthy gestures that are charged with musicality and meaning. Part III covers the bowing arm, exploring innovative concepts such as expressive gesticulation, mechanical intelligence, and the use of the bow as the player's voice, both literally and symbolically. Part IV covers the integration of analytical thought and sensorial practice, providing an extensive study of the harmonic series, the circle of fifths, Tartini tones, and many other sonic aspects that are essential to a string player's musical freedom. In addition, the conversational, linguistic, compositional, and improvisatory dimensions of string playing are discussed and supported by multiple practical exercises. The Integrated String Player is addressed to players of all abilities and from all aesthetic backgrounds: students and professionals, teachers and performers, classically trained musicians and jazz players, chamber-music players and orchestral players.

To be a musician is to "speak music." When you have something to say and the means to say it, your gestures and sounds become both meaningful and free. Offering an innovative, comprehensive approach to musicians' health and wellbeing, Integrated Practice gives you the tools to combine total-body awareness with a deep and practical understanding of the rhythmic structure of the musical language, so that you can use the musical text itself as your guide toward psychophysical and creative freedom. The book shows you how to establish an imaginative dialogue between the relatively inflexible structure of music and your individual personality as a singer, instrumentalist, or conductor, and it explains how you can use the acoustic phenomenon of the harmonic series to make big, beautiful sounds with little muscular effort. Integrated Practice comes with more than a hundred and fifty exercises demonstrated by video and audio clips on an extensive companion website that will inform your daily practice, improvising, rehearsing, and performing. With this array of resources for every learning style, Integrated Practice is the essential handbook to personal achievement in successful, expressive musical performance.

A musician's life is filled with many stressful situations: passing auditions, rehearsing and performing with difficult partners, sitting for long hours in uncomfortable chairs, going on stage to face audiences large and small, who may or may not be receptive to the performance they are presented. And yet many musicians are able to surmount these looming obstacles with grace and balance, to find satisfaction and artistry in their music and build productive and lasting careers. Indirect Procedures will guide you around these obstacles and along that path to becoming a balanced and successful musician. Based on the work of Frederick Matthias Alexander, this book is a thorough and practical approach to the issues of musicians' health and wellbeing. Author Pedro de Alcantara introduces concepts and exercises for musicians to let go of excessive tensions, stay focused, and direct their energies as they handle the challenges of practicing, rehearsing, and performing. Complemented by an extensive, easy-to-use companion website, and working alongside Integrated Practice, this new edition of Indirect Procedures is an invaluable and essential resource for today's musicians to learn to sing, play, and conduct with less effort and stronger results.

Becky Cohen has a rough life. She’s an outsider everywhere she goes: shunned and mocked at school, at her violin lessons, and at home by her disapproving mother. Her only true friend is her brilliant little brother, newspaper-loving Benjy. She dreams of becoming a great violinist, but at the group lessons she’s forced to take at the Y, Becky panics and plays badly. Then Becky meets Mr. Freeman, her building’s handyman. He has a lot to teach her about becoming a musician, and being a friend. Gradually, Becky begins speaking her mind more often, and finds that people are actually listening. Then Mr. Freeman tells Becky about a local performing arts high school’s scholarship contest. With the lessons learned from Mr. Freeman and Benjy, can Becky overcome her fears and play what’s in her heart?

Teaching Violin, Viola, Cello, and Double Bass summarizes three centuries of string pedagogy treatises to create a comprehensive resource on methods and approaches to teaching all four bowed string instruments. Co-written by three performance and pedagogy experts, each specializing in different string instruments, this book is applicable to all levels of instruction. Essays on historical pedagogues are clearly structured to allow for easy comprehension of their philosophies, pedagogical practices, and unique contributions. This book concludes with a section on application through comparative analysis of the historical methods and approaches. With coverage from the eighteenth century to the present, this book will be invaluable for teachers and students of string pedagogy and general readers who wish to learn more about string pedagogy’s rich history, diverse content, and modern developments.

To live is to face problems and to find solutions for them. We do so consciously or unconsciously, using intuition, reason, imagination and many other faculties. We notice a situation, we draw conclusions from what we see, hear and feel, and we act on our conclusions in a constant process of observation, analysis and remedy. 'My shoulders are tight, because I am under a lot of stress, I need a good massage.' We observe a problem (tight shoulders), analyse the cause (stress) and seek a remedy for it (the massage). But what if we have misunderstood the problem? What if our description of the problem is based on false perceptions, or our analysis on false assumptions? What if the solution aggravates the problem? This book is about our suppositions, habits and behaviours. It is about posture and attitude, tension and relaxation, movement and rest. It is about interpersonal relationships, sports and performing arts. Above all, it is about embodied emotions and the body that thinks and feels. In this fully revised new edition, Pedro de Alcantara invites you to redefine the meaning of health and wellbeing, using the insights and tools developed by a man of genius: F.M Alexander.

Strategies for Teaching Strings: Building a Successful String and Orchestra Program, Fourth Edition, is an essential guide for prospective, novice, and experienced string teachers alike. This comprehensive text provides all the information necessary to develop and manage a successful school-based program. Based on the national standards for teaching strings and orchestra, the text covers performance objectives, strategies for teaching technical and performance skills, and solutions to common playing problems for elementary, middle, and high school skill levels. It also offers rehearsal strategies to develop large-group ensemble techniques, practical approaches to teaching improvisation, and advice on how to increase student recruitment and retention.