Review of Alexandra Pierce, Deepening Musical Performance through Movement (Indiana University Press, 2007)

[1] I first met Alexandra Pierce in 1970 when I arrived as a freshman at the University of Redlands' experimental arm, Johnston College, at the beginning of its second year of existence. The University, a once-Baptist school in a small, Southern California town fragrant with a multitude of orange groves, would not have appeared to the outside eye to be a hotbed of innovative thinking. But it most definitely was.[2] These were heady times, times of exciting cultural change, of looking to models from the East, to models long underground, and to brand new paradigms for learning about everything. In the decades since, much of this has become so well incorporated into our common culture that we easily forget the sense of excitement and the euphoria of the search for new ways of understanding that were so much a part of the fabric of those days-indeed, how revolutionary these things were.[3] I arrived eager to learn from Johnston's distinctly humanistic-psychological bent and to partake in the school's offerings in various personal growth endeavors, and it was thrilling to be surrounded by people seeking experiential change. It was a remarkably visionary place, a place that encouraged imagination and social compassion, but also demanded commitment to and rigor in one's studies. Since I was also a serious musician-a flutist and someone who had written music all of his life, though I hesitated to call myself a composer at that time-I was happy to be in such a stimulating environment.[4] Thus, the perfect person to feed both my New Age hunger and my desire to excel at music was Alexandra Pierce, a wonderful pianist and freshman theory teacher at the University's more traditional college, who was herself on a journey to see, hear, and learn differently. All of this is my way of saying that I am not a disinterested party to this book, rather I am someone who really grew up as a musician-a performer, composer, teacher, and entrepreneur-with Pierce's work and, to a certain extent, witnessed its evolution.[5] Although my own freshman theory class with Pierce preceded the days when she incorporated movement into her classes, I much later participated in a number of workshops in movement for musicians, both as a student and assistant to Pierce and her husband, Roger Pierce, who were the teachers. I myself have taught a class at UCLA called Movement for Musicians and have incorporated movement processes into my own theory classes at UCLA. I have worked one-on-one with many musicians and dancers, using Pierce's movement techniques to help them find ways of performing that are easier on the body and, most importantly, more expressive.[6] An ardent scholar, Pierce has studied in detail virtually everything having to do with movement, including, at a most basic level, anatomy. Most significantly, she has extensive experience with a variety of movement disciplines, including those of Ida P. Rolf, F. M. Alexander, Rudolf Steiner, Charlotte Selver, Moshe Feldenkreis, and Emile Jaques-Dalcroze. She has practiced Aikido and T'ai Chi, and she has learned much from watching those who seem to come by these things quite naturally, like Sammy Davis, Jr., Carlos Kleiber, Anna Markarova, and Gidon Kremer. And though, of course, she owes a great deal to those various roots of her work, she has created something new and revolutionary in its applications to the world of performing and listening to music.[7] Early in the book, in the chapter Mobilizing Balance, Pierce sets forth each of the basic elements for exploring balance in movement, and movement in balance, and simultaneously begins describing how to explore those elements-being grounded, or footed; resting balance while sitting and while standing; activated balance; spinal flexibility; core support; weight-throwing into action-describing in detail various movement processes done to "teach" the body how to move more fluidly, more generously, apart from their direct applications to performance. …