Daily routine of a musician
with cellist and musiMentor Fulvia Mancini
What is the interaction between the practice of the musical instrument and the techniques of yoga and visual and vocal techniques? How can it help you develop more confidence in your skills and in your daily practice? We spoke to musiMentor Fulvia Mancini about her passion and vision of using these techniques to improve playing.
What was your motivation to create this course?
"My motivation to use my time, knowledge, technique in the creation of this tutorial is a motivation based on the self-observation, as a student myself, and in observing of many of my colleagues and students in attitude and music life. It is not primarily a motivation aimed at necessarily creating something «anti-convex», but it is mainly given by the possibility (thanks to our online world), to put my spirit of “serving” YOU. It's a desire to create “daily beauty” at the service of those who have not yet found a balance, who have stopped in the middle, who are looking for help from an external source that they do not yet know.
My favorite phrase is the first verse of the Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
“Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”
I like very much to mention it because it is the loss, that gives us the possibility to create new things, to reach new worlds and to believe, that everything is possible and that the right path will found again."
What is the main goal of the course?
"My passion is to bring a combination of all my interests in one direction. I love to explore other worlds like yoga, meditation and other techniques that allow me to perform better, and to give the best of me without being prisoner of old mental schemas. I want to help a cellists, that are struggling with old practising methods. Some are not conscious of their capacity, their talent, the possibility to evolve integrating some practical and straightforward tips.
Illness, for example, is always the expression of a subconscious discomfort, of unhealthy thoughts and of a bad diet. To follow a daily plan (in this tutorial only destined to physicality) of practice with positive thoughts that are "WRITTEN AND REPEATED" constantly, beside the instrumental awareness of not running into errors of position, posture and method, is an effective elixir of protection and prevention of diseases( also the psychological!).
So as when we follow a new diet to purify ourselves, or lose weight, or to cure a disease, we follow a daily recipe, even for the effective study of the instrument we must follow a very precise timing, which gives us regularity and above all, we have the feeling in the evening, of having done everything in the timeline in the best possible way.
Many of the exercises described in the tutorial are not only aimed at cellists, but are intended for all musicians who aim to get the maximum daily. There are many studies about exorbitant and statistical numbers on how many muscle diseases are common among students, orchestra professors, etc.“
Connection with the universe
"Nowadays, it is by now an inevitable fact that everything in the universe is in the perfect connection between itself and our lives. Thoughts, although they cannot yet be "seen" and objectively analysed, travel like the magnetic waves of our phones and reach unthinkable destinations — thoughts of strength and calm and thoughts of defeat.
If we think that long ago violinmakers could have imagined, with the power of thought, that from pieces of maple wood one could obtain parts to be assembled to create perfect instruments in sound and beauty, one can also believes that this force of nature, can create even more, or even realise that it could also severely destroy our work.
The discipline that studies the awareness of thought is the millennial Indian discipline of yoga. It is not a question of taking this discipline with fanaticism, but of exploiting all its characteristics and beauty, exactly as the violin makers did with the wood of the trees in 1570, to use them to create magnificent cellos and violins. We can effectively use Yoga not only to calm the mind and silence the thoughts of disillusionment, fear, feelings of defeat but also using breathing exercises, stretching, muscle strengthening, putting them all at the service of the daily study.
This is the only way to get the feeling of being "a victorious warrior".(Even in Yoga we have the warrior position, not surprisingly!). In the long run, and even more so, this feeling sticks to us as a "status" becoming part of our personality, forging our character."
In Fulvia's course you’ll learn
- Some basic yoga techniques.
- Developping the power of your imagination through the workbook.
- Making your thoughts material by visualizing and writing them.
- Some of the secrets concerning the conduction of the bow, the search for sound quality in the initial part of the bow and the same conduction of the sound to the tip.
-The use and function of each finger on the bow.