It may sound counter-intuitive, but one of the very best ways to improve as a musician involves putting away your instrument altogether. It turns out that a fitness regime - for mind, or body, or both - can be one of the very best things you can do to help maintain your mental focus and physical agility as a musician.
Yoga is the ‘best violin teacher’, claimed violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who took up the discipline in his thirties, studying with the Indian yoga guru BKS Iyengar. Menuhin became a serious, lifelong devotee and became so flexible that he once conducted the Berlin Philharmonic with his feet while standing on his head.
It turns out that Menuhin was something of a pioneer when it came to the marriage of music and yoga, and recent years have seen a blossoming of interest in musicians’ physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing. More artists than ever are exploring what ancient and modern martial arts and mind-body practices can bring to their music-making.
Let's meet six performers to find out how they look after themselves outside the practice room.
Musicians and their fitness regimes
Elena Urioste violinist
YOGA
I went to my first Bikram yoga class in 2009, and I fell in love with it. It’s an intense practice in a room heated to around 40 degrees celsius. Now I also practise a much more mindful, alignment-based flow yoga.
I’ve always been sensitive to how my arms feel when playing, and for years I had a lot of tension at the violin. When I started regular Bikram, all of a sudden that was gone. I also realised that my left and right sides were wildly unbalanced – I had favoured my left leg when playing since the age of five.
Once I figured that out, even just standing became really satisfying. Another thing that was really helpful musically was the practice of non-judgemental observation: you observe what happens and you don’t assign a feeling to it. You move on.
My friend and fellow violinist Melissa White and I set up Intermission, an artists’ colony-meets-yoga retreat. It’s become a really important part of our lives.
Hugo Ticciati violinist
MEDITATION
There are hundreds of traditions of meditating, but for me it’s the simple act of learning to be present in the now. It’s a cyclical process – by actively sitting down and meditating, one stills the mind. By that same process, you can then bring that stillness and a heightened awareness back into ordinary life.
Every morning, after taking a cold shower, I start with a series of physical exercises (‘hatha yoga’) and then some breathing exercises (‘pranayama’). Then, when it comes to the meditating itself, I focus on the ‘in’ and the ‘out’ of the breath, and as soon as thoughts come into my mind, I observe them, let them go and focus back on the breath – discipline and regularity are the essential ingredients.
I began practising meditation 20 years ago. At the time, my violin teacher was telling me that I effectively needed to start the instrument again from scratch, so I decided to do likewise with my mind. I think it has instilled a sense of spontaneity in my violin playing. It has taught me to take risks and not worry how people react – in short, to be more true to myself.
Jean Johnson clarinettist
BODY BALANCE
Body Balance is a mix of yoga, tai chi and pilates, lightly choreographed to music. The poses respond to the music’s rhythms and changes. It’s a secular practice and a complete workout for mind and body. It really helps my playing. The core and back aspects are very good for posture, and I’ve learnt how to breathe into spaces in the body I didn’t know I had.
Breathing is something we can work on throughout our entire lives. It’s always something that could do with tweaking. When you pay attention to your breath, you become grounded, which is so critical for playing music and performing. Beyond the breath strength that it takes to play my wind instrument, Body Balance helps with the rest.
As an instructor, I’m always aiming for perfection and to tap into the detail of movement. That’s something I bring into my clarinet practice, performing and teaching. I encourage my students to realise what’s really going on in every part of their bodies, and to be mindful and active in everything they do.
Andreas Haefliger pianist
SHAOLIN KUNG FU
I’ve been practising Shaolin kung fu for 14 years. I spend 60 per cent of my time at the piano and at least 20 per cent doing kung fu; it has given me such a tremendous life force.
Shaolin kung fu is a 2,000-year-old discipline developed in China by a monk from India, who introduced movement into yoga. These methods were so refined that they were later used to train soldiers. This particular martial art, however, doesn’t involve hitting anybody – the training is into the air.
The movements, though, are very forceful so they open up the body from the centre and give it many more possibilities of movement. As a result, I can play extremely softly – there are famous videos of kung fu monks who can walk on raw eggs by distributing their weight.
When you translate this to the piano, you can make pianississimo sounds, keeping your body completely open and finding the centre of the sound inside you. And the audience can really feel and hear the quality of those dynamics.
Scott Pingel double bass
HWA RANG DO
Hwa Rang Do (‘The way of the flowering knights’) is an ancient Korean martial art developed by a Buddhist monk around the fifth century. It’s very comprehensive – unlike many other martial arts, which tend to be either a soft or a hard style. So, for example, tai chi is soft whereas karate is angular and hard.
In Hwa Rang Do there’s a balance between hard and soft motion – sometimes the best response to a hard motion is a soft one, for instance. At college, I’d often practise my martial arts first and then transfer those skills to the music I was learning. Just as with the martial art, I’d be practising a new piece and manifesting its meaning through physical action and visualising what my hands needed to do: the distance of a shift, how it felt, etcetera.
However, what my martial arts training proved most helpful with was learning to control my heart rate and to cope with performance anxiety through deep breathing and mental preparation. As a bass player with the San Francisco Symphony, solo performance is a little out of my routine, as we’re more of a section instrument. So Hwa Rang Do helped me adapt to the environment by being flexible – after all, the tree that does not yield to the wind will break.
Jakub Józef Orliński countertenor
BREAKDANCING
I was 18 and studying classical singing when I discovered breakdancing – a type of street dance – and I totally fell in love with both. At university, however, I was told that breakdancing wasn’t the best thing for a singer.
The reason for this is that, for singing, you have to be flexible in your diaphragm and your muscles have to be relaxed. In breakdancing, by contrast, there are a group of intense ‘power moves’ where you need to tense your breathing system and supporting muscles. For spinning moves like windmills or head spins, your neck has to be stiff, otherwise it’s dangerous.
I wouldn’t do these moves before performing, but there are lots of other moves that are part of my warm up. They calm me down and wake up all of the muscles. It makes me feel in contact with my whole body.
When I started, I was neither a good singer nor breakdancer, so that was discouraging. But my theory was that singers need both stamina and energy. Movement really helps me, and breakdancing is like meditation. I usually do freestyle. It’s like with Baroque da capo arias: you can put something of yourself into the ornamentation. Once you know the rules you have total freedom. That really opens your mind.
Mindful musicians: a potted history
Spiritual practices and philosophies from the East have long interested Western composers. Beethoven read translations of Hindu Sanskrit scriptures in the 1810s, jotting down phrases from the Rig-Veda and Bhagavad Gita. Forty years later, Wagner became curious about Buddhism. He sketched an opera Die Sieger based on the religion’s legends, and although he didn’t complete the work, British composer Jonathan Harvey turned the episode into his 2006 opera Wagner Dream.
Gustav Holst went a step further, teaching himself Sanskrit and experimenting with writing ragas - melodic frameworks for improvisation in Indian classical music, similar to a scale or mode in Western music. Holst's operas Sita and Savitri were inspired by ancient Indian texts.
Western interest in the mind-body connection flourished in the second half of the 20th century. In the US, Steve Reich and Philip Glass explored yoga and transcendental meditation, while fellow American Pauline Oliveros became a karate black belt.
The French electronic composer Eliane Radigue converted to Tibetan Buddhism, and her related meditation practice had a big influence on her music. And in 2015 British composer Rolf Hind wrote a whole mindfulness opera, Lost in Thought.