Imagine a complete database of every conceivable gesture: all gestures for all purposes, from all cultures and all personality types. In your daily life and in your music making, you’re an individual embodiment of this infnite database, occupying your own corner of it. Going deeper into the gestural database and expanding your territory is a sure way to enhance your Creative Health.

This chapter presents games and exercises that require make-believing and pretending. You might fnd it unnatural to practice gestures that don't refect your personality or your aesthetics. But would you like to improve the use of your hands, wrists, and fngers? Would you like to refne your instrumental technique and energize your musical interpretations? Would you like to heal your hurts and overcome your handicaps? Come and play these games, even if they seem strange to you (Figure 5.1).

To start, you’ll speak and gesticulate in a variety of styles. Use a paragraph of written text, a poem, a set of instructions; count numbers out loud, in sequence or at random; talk to an imaginary audience; or practice together with a friend, a colleague, or a student.

• 1. Use both hands together, working symmetrically as a sort of metronome or marker of emphasis. Always use the same gesture, maybe a chopping motion which could be big or small in amplitude. You’ll embody a one-gesture personality.

• 2. Use a single hand, just adding a few random waves to the discourse. Do two versions, with your dominant and your nondominant hand. The waves are diferent from the chopping motions of the previous exercise (Figure 5.2).

A thing often isn't what you think it is about. Clapping isn't about clapping.

Clapping seems like an ordinary action that you perform without thinking. And yet, behind the ordinary action lies a world of possibilities. All you need is to pay attention. It changes everything.

Let's list a few of the reasons for which we clap and the energies we employ to clap: polite applause; extroverted celebration in a group; a reaction of surprise and delight at something that happened suddenly and unexpectedly, a soccer goal, for instance, a clever movement by a street dancer, a joke; forced clapping, when the unwilling assembly must clap to honor the dictator. Proud clapping, celebratory clapping, encouraging clapping; hypocritical clapping, ironic clapping, sarcastic clapping; two hands coming together and making sounds to hurt someone or to annoy someone; clapping to insult, to protest, to dismiss.

Each reason to clap creates its own clapping techniques. Joy and anger don't clap alike. The virtuoso clapper taps into a hundred motivations, employs a hundred gestures, and produces a hundred diferent sounds. The hands of the virtuoso are clever, skillful, and adaptable. Clapping, then, can become another way for you to develop your Creative Health.

We’ll write the clapping manual together, page by page, exercise by exercise.

There's a moment every dawn when the night starts dissipating and the day afrms itself, tentatively at frst. The light falling upon the city is special, hazy, otherworldly. You’re walking to the bakery down the block from your home, along the usual sidewalk, with the usual trafc going by next to you. But the light is so strange that you might feel that you’re in a movie set, where a story is being enacted and you are part of it, and you don't really know your lines or what the director expects from you. The experience is a bit dreamlike, a bit hallucinatory. “It's night and it's day, at the same time; it's both, or maybe neither. I don't know exactly where I am, and I don't know exactly who I am” (Figure 16.1).

We’ll call this a liminal experience. The word “liminal” means “of or pertaining to a threshold.” It's related to the word “limit,” which some scholars say might be related to the Latin word “limus,” which means “transverse, oblique.” I’ll put the dictionary aside and I’ll compose a little poem instead:

The liminal territory, which isn't necessarily an actual place in space, joins two seemingly separate or opposite states. The liminal experience consists in being in between two states or spaces, belonging to both at the same time (Figure 16.2).

Are you in pain? Creative Health may be able to help. But frst, let me speak more generally.

Creative Health is a way of paying attention. Creative Health is what you do, how you do it, and who you are as you do it. This means that Creative Health is all-encompassing: your dynamic response to everything that happens in your day and everything that happens in your musical life.

For some people, health might mean a series of numbers: red blood cell counts, cholesterol, weight, blood pressure. If your numbers are okay, you’re okay. This is a narrow defnition, and I’m using it here just to make an argument. It doesn't matter if few people believe in this defnition.

For other people, health is a broader concept. Diet and exercise, relationships, sleep patterns; posture, manner of dress, manner of speech; family life, work life, spiritual life: the list is long. You might have an unhealthy job, for instance, or be in an unhealthy relationship; your bed might be uncomfortable and causing you short-term or long-term harm; you might be addicted to irritation and frustration, to cynicism and arrogance. Health, good and bad, becomes synonymous with your entire existence. And taking care of your broadly defned health is a full-time job.

It's possible to have a healthy or unhealthy relationship with your musical instrument, with your colleagues, with the stage; with the scores that you study and interpret; with the totality of your career.

Daily life is a succession of informal rituals. Go visit your own imaginary day, and I’ll be your witness. The bed in which you sleep, alone or in company, is a ritualistic territory that encompasses two worlds and many countries: the world of day and the world of night, the countries of rest, renewal, dreams, agitation, intimacy, insomnia, past, present, and future. You wake up, or you fnd yourself awake; this in itself is a rite of passage, banal, ordinary, but a rite of passage nevertheless: you pass from night to day, from receptive subconsciousness to acquisitive consciousness, from no goals to goals.

Homework: Ritualize your bedroom, your bed, and your sleep.

Cofee or tea, it doesn't matter; preparing the drink is ritualistic, the cup is talismanic. Every object exists in the material domain and in the symbolic domain. Your mug might be a cheap one from the dollar store, but it's the child of Cup: the archetype of vessels and containers, of bowls and steins, of goblets and chalices. Perhaps you don't see your mug as the child of Cup. But it’d break your heart if you accidentally broke it; and it’d really, really upset you if someone else broke it. And when you hold the cup that holds the liquid, you receive—from the cup and the liquid, and from your hands and fngers— a sort of kaleidoscopic, magnetized memory of every cup you’ve ever touched and every cofee or tea you’ve ever drunk.

In my student days, I met a sensitive Argentinian my age who told me something I’ll never forget. He had grown up in a conservative religious household. From as far back as he could remember, he had been trained to walk close to the buildings out in the street, rather than in the middle of the sidewalk or near the curb; and to walk with his head down, his eyes on the ground. If he walked upright and in the middle of the sidewalk, head high and eyes alert to the world, God would think that the young man was occupying too much space and was being presumptuous and disrespectful, and he (the young man) should expect to be punished.

Within our distinct cultures, we’re permanently engaged in a dynamic play of opposing forces, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes awkwardly. My wife is taller than average. Years ago, a creative learning situation led her to a sudden realization: “I have the right to occupy all of my space!” Until then, she had unconsciously strived to make herself smaller due to implicit family and societal pressures. There followed a demanding process of recalibration and regrowth, which was by no means pain-free. A friend of mine, also taller than average, once shared something similar and yet quite diferent. He told me that people often equated height with strength, which made it harder for family, friends, and strangers to recognize the emotional vulnerability that he carried within. As a result, he had long felt misunderstood and unseen. He admitted that, given a choice, he would prefer to be shorter.

How you defne the notion of strength will predetermine how you use your hands, wrists, and fngers.

R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) was an American architect, inventor, and visionary. Like all visionaries, he had many ideas that were too far ahead of his time; ideas that seemed good and wonderful but were impossible to put into practice; and foolish and crazy ideas, too. But some of his ideas were given durable shape. He was interested in geodesic domes: hemispherical structures constructed with lattices of rigid triangular elements. Many such domes have been built around the world as auditoriums, greenhouses, sports arenas, storage facilities, and public art. Geodesic domes are surprisingly strong and stable structures, and they can withstand heavy loads relative to their size (Figure 11.1).

Explaining how it works would leave most of us confused and discouraged, besides not being necessary for our purposes. Instead, let's fast-forward from Buckminster Fuller to structural strength to tensegrity, which is an abbreviation of tensional integrity. Tensegrity, or a harmony of tensions, is one of the reasons why a geodesic dome is strong and stable. It appears that Buckminster Fuller himself coined the term in 1955, though sometimes it's said that the sculptor Kenneth Snelson (1927–2016), who studied with Fuller in the 1940s, is the term's conceptual godfather.

The ideal library is infnite, and the ideal librarian knows exactly what you’re looking for. My suggested reading list is the antithesis of that ideal: it's laughably incomplete, and I really don't know what you’re looking for. And yet, you might luck out and fnd something useful when my subjectivity briefy meets yours.

I wrote multiple books for musicians that address creative health directly or indirectly. Here they are, in order of publication.

• • Indirect Procedures: A Musician's Guide to the Alexander Technique (Oxford University Press, 1997; fully rewritten second edition, 2013). The frst edition has been translated into French (2000), German (2002), and Japanese (2009). The second edition has been translated into Chinese, simplifed characters (2018). The Alexander Technique lends itself to many interpretations and applications. Mine might be abbreviated like this: Become alert to the connections that organize and determine your existence: connections among body parts; connections among the physical, the mental, and the aesthetic dimensions; connections from gesture to gesture, from thought to gesture, from thought to thought, from thought to speech; connections between you and music itself, connections between you and the audience.

• • The Alexander Technique: A Skill for Life (Crowood Press, 1999; fully rewritten second edition, 2021). The frst edition has been translated into Japanese (2010) and Estonian (2013). This is a much shorter book, not specifcally for musicians.