Alexander Technique (AT) is taught at many conservatoires and music colleges, including the Norwegian Academy of Music (NMH). It is offered at the NMH as an elective subject between October and February, involving five group sessions each lasting one hour as well as seven 30-minute individual sessions for each student.

AT provision can be organised in a number of ways. As far as music academies are concerned, it would be pertinent to ask whether the benefits of teaching AT to students would increase if it is somehow linked to teaching on their principal instruments. In autumn 2014 plans got underway for a project involving teaching AT to a select number of students and their teachers. The aim of the course was to establish a collaboration between the AT teacher, the students and their principal instrument teachers. The idea was that such teamwork would enhance the transfer of learning between AT teaching, instrumental lessons and individual practice.

The project ran from early January to mid-May 2015.

AT is a method for changing bad habits in mind and movement in order to prevent tensions that restrict functionality. AT aims to equip us with methods for replacing automised physical habits that affect the flow, quality and expression of our playing with conscious, controlled behaviours. These habits range from the way we stand or sit to how we hold the instrument and control our breathing.

Awareness is a key concept of AT, and two of its main principles are inhibition and direction. “Inhibition” means preventing undesirable behaviour from manifesting itself, e.g. a horn player tensing her throat muscles in a way that restricts the sound quality, or a harpist tensing his neck and shoulder muscles, thus stopping himself from making full use of the body and causing injury to himself. The first step is to stop the habit from being set in motion in the first place before replacing it with functional thinking and movement. “Direction” concerns how we approach the stretching and contraction of the body, how we think “upwards”, “downwards” and “outwards” as well as “extension” and “compression” and how to achieve stability and mobility. With these thought patterns in mind, the aim is to achieve an economical use of energy and balanced distribution of tensions in the body.

For the students the aim of the course is to help them take control of their practice and music making in order to improve the quality of their playing. They will do this by:

• Adopting the thinking and main principles behind AT,
• Being able to identify habits that impede the co-ordination of awareness and body while practising and playing (bad habits),
• Being able to limit or eliminate the effects of bad habits while practising and playing by applying solutions based on AT.

For the institution the goal is to try out a model for AT teaching based on collaboration between the AT teacher, student and principal instrument teacher in an attempt to maximise the benefit to the student.