Integrated Practice: Coordination, Rhythm & Sound

by Pedro De Alcantara

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.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

290 pages, Paperback

First published July 8, 2011

About the author

My books include the children's novels "Befiddled" and "Backtracked" and works of non-fiction for adults, including "Indirect Procedures: A Musician's Guide to the Alexander Technique" and "The Alexander Technique: A Skill for Life" (published by Crowood). I travel the world giving seminars and master classes for all creative people. I'm currently finishing two new books -- a new novel for young readers titled "The Divine Computer" and a book for musicians titled "Integrated Practice." I'm also putting together a selection of my original improvisations and compositions for performance and recording.

Reviews

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr Alcantara is a good writer and presents a very well considered and imaginative approach to musical practice, which is grounded in sound Alexandrian principles and a thorough knowledge of the subject and associated disciplines. He has a sound theoretical understanding of music and of linguistics and demonstrates a wide knowledge of its history and evolution too.

His linguistic theories are particularly interesting as a means of teaching oneself to be a better prosodist and thus to speak more fluently through one's instrument.

I do feel though that he at times stretches ideas a little close to breaking point in order that they suit his overall premise or dresses up what are really very basic principles in rather unnecessarily complicated attire. It's difficult not to find oneself rather overthinking when trying to apply some of the ideas that he proposes. There is the danger that whilst one may become better co-ordinated and develop a great mechanical and musical understanding of the self and of the music, it brings with it the looming spectre of the Alexandroid.

Possible over-engineering aside though, I found this a thought-provoking and a useful addition to my reading on the subject of practice and performance as a musician.

The book is accompanied by freely available audiovisual resources, featuring Mr Alcantara and some of his students, comprising a number of interesting and potentially very useful exercises and ideas to help with co-ordination, sound-production etc.

[Alexis Niki · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great resource for any musician. Students, amateurs, and professionals alike will find much here to enrich both their playing and their overall approach to art, performance, and music-making. Website clips illustrate many of the exercises. If you're willing to do the work, your playing will improve--guaranteed!