About This Class
FREE workshop for AMS teachers and staff (use discount code at checkout)
When a student shows up tense, most of us do the thing we were trained to do: adjust their technique. Sometimes that works. Often the tension comes right back, or moves somewhere else, because the tension was never really about the technique.
This workshop is about what to do in that moment instead. You'll experience the difference in your own playing first - a short, practical sequence you can feel in your own body - and then leave with specific language and interventions for the moment a student grips, freezes, or fights their instrument.
Bring your instrument.
Structure:
- The tension you can't fix by fixing technique (why the default intervention often fails)
- Your own body first: a short experiential sequence, instruments in hand
- What to say and do when a student grips - specific language, specific moments in a lesson
- What this looks like across instruments (strings, voice, percussion)
Teachers will come away with:
- A practice framework they can use right away. Most of us were taught to say "play it six times until it's right," which is not effective for learning and tends to instill effort and tension with technique. Instead, I teach them how to make a passage feel easier at the end of a practice session than it did at the start, and how to hand that to a student.
- How to spot the physical habits behind discomfort early, and what to do before it becomes a reason a student quits.
- How to teach ease, sound quality, and expression directly, rather than hoping it arrives through repetition.
Joseph Arnold is a violinist & Alexander Technique teacher, director of the Soulforce Arts Institute and author of the award-winning Soulforce
Learn more at SoulforceArts.com
