I. Introduction: listening with Feldenkrais's touch

In the first of the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge's chapters on the somatic educationalist Moshe Feldenkrais (1904–84), he recounts the story of when the Feldenkrais practitioner Avraham Baniel visited the ailing Feldenkrais in 1984:

Feldenkrais's response to Baniel attests to questions that animate this study: what is the nature of listening between thinking and doing, and what are its ramifications for musical practice? He listens here to his own sensorium as he does to others through his somatic practice.Footnote ² Musical practice (playing an instrument, for example) requires a similar self-listening; to listen to music is also to listen to the quality of another's sensorium. Feldenkrais articulates modalities of waiting and sensing without desire, effort, intention or expectation that he associates with the space between thinking and doing. This type of internal self-listening therefore illustrates a fulcrum or a between-space in which change, learning and improvement through awareness can occur in therapeutic and musical contexts discussed in this study.

Listening is an aspect of Feldenkrais's teaching that is almost omnipresent but rarely discussed or elaborated in the literature on this thinker.Footnote ³ It has somewhat ironically been absent from the burgeoning discourse on Feldenkrais and the performing arts, an arena of human activity with which he was increasingly involved in later life.Footnote ⁴ Feldenkrais's thought has been used to help people with muscoloskeletal problems (through injury, for example) and neurological problems (such as cerebral palsy, autism, strokes and brain injuries), but Feldenkrais understood his method as a tool that could be used by any person to improve the quality of their nervous system and therefore their being and functioning in the world. This improvement is, in his thought, facilitated by awareness or a listening to the self.

Through his background in physics, engineering, biomechanics and judo, Feldenkrais developed a way of using the brain and the nervous system's inherently plastic abilities to improve his students' sense of themselves.Footnote ⁵ He defines the self-image, understood as part of the uniqueness of each individual, through the body.Footnote ⁶ He believed that this self-image is formed by the unique identification of oneself in gravity and in proprioceptive space, but most importantly it is to be understood through the sense in which we feel that our own particular way of doing something – walking, speaking, thinking or playing a musical instrument, for example – is sensed as uniquely our own and therefore seemingly unchangeable.Footnote ⁷ Feldenkrais's method addresses the gap between our sense of ourselves in action and a somewhat utopian ideal of the self: there can, therefore, always be improvement.Footnote ⁸

To change and improve the self-image, he developed what became known as the Feldenkrais Method, which can be taught through individual lessons called Functional Integration (FI) or group lessons known as Awareness Through Movement (ATM).Footnote ⁹ Both modes of engagement between teacher and student(s) provide forms of somatic intervention and an environment to construct and enact modes of learning that are designed to challenge habitual perceptions and patterns of movement and to instantiate improved function and performance. The ways in which the method engages learning through experiment, through the development of curiosity and the finding of new possibilities for movement, through an internal listening to small movement differentiations and through the development of choice, flexibility and stability of action, are all essential to performing-arts training.

Listening is, of course, essential both to the method and to musical practice. In many of his ATM lessons, Feldenkrais uses the concepts of listening and sensing interchangeably. For instance, in the first volume of his monumental series of 550 Alexander Yanai ATM lessons, he provides this description of listening, which is particularly germane to musical practice:

Performing any movement slowly (lifting an arm, for instance) with acute awareness and without effort is as essential to the method as it is to the development of fluent musical practice.Footnote ¹¹ In the first volume of his biography, the Feldenkrais practitioner Mark Reese confirms the use of listening in Feldenkrais's teaching:

This aspect of articulating in language another person's intimate experience is an issue that haunts discussions of how something is done through or imparted by the Feldenkrais Method. It is also germane to instrumental pedagogy and especially, for example, vocal teaching, where suggestive metaphor is often employed because the ‘instrument’ (the larynx), unlike the fingers, is inaccessible in most non-clinical conditions. The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker calls the problem of articulating transference, in a linguistic context, the ‘curse of knowledge: a difficulty in imagining what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know’.Footnote ¹³

This ability to reach into another person's body through one-to-one personal lessons in Feldenkrais's method, and to describe for others, perhaps sometimes better than they could describe for themselves, what was happening to them was, on the evidence of the many films and recordings available of his work, one of Feldenkrais's talents. One of the reasons for this, I suggest, is that Pinker's ‘curse’ is reversed if not obviated in FI: the toucher has the same capacity to be surprised by new sensations and knowledge (understood as something integrated into the sensorium) as those who are touched.

Feldenkrais's ability to concretize experiential knowledge is exquisitely demonstrated in two recorded lessons with Ephram, a young Canadian boy with cerebral palsy.Footnote ¹⁴ One of Ephram's problems is that his knees are seemingly stuck together in walking. He therefore has difficulty connecting the underside of his feet to the ground and allowing his full weight to rest through his feet. He walks in a pigeon-toed fashion with the aid of a walker. Feldenkrais's oral commentary during the lessons, filmed at a workshop in Toronto, is essentially addressed to an assembled group of his students present in the background of the film, and is not given for Ephram. He notes for the camera at the start of the lesson that Ephram has seen specialist doctors and that they ‘want to cut the adductors […] the muscles that keep the knees together’.Footnote ¹⁵ This would then allow Ephram to open and close his legs freely and so allow him to sense the ground through his feet.Footnote ¹⁶

Feldenkrais stops several times in the middle of both FI lessons with Ephram to explain to his audience what is happening. He makes wordless suggestions or interventions through his hands touching Ephram's body, helping him to find patterns of movement unfamiliar to him that are nevertheless available in his sensorium. The cognitive philosopher Shaun Gallagher notes that ‘an intervention that changes the causal relations in a dynamic system will also change the system as a whole’.Footnote ¹⁷ This is an important observation for Ephram (and for musicians) and supports Feldenkrais's thought; changing one small thing in an interrelated corporeal system can have profound implications for larger-scale changes.

So Feldenkrais waits after each intervention to see what changes have been made. One of Ephram's ‘disabilities' at these stopping points is that he cannot communicate with language, and cannot therefore comment on the progress (or lack of progress) of the ‘treatment’. He hears the timbre of Feldenkrais's voice, but his eyes do not focus on the location of the voice (in Feldenkrais's face): ‘He listens internally; he doesn't even hear what I say,’ states Feldenkrais at one point.Footnote ¹⁸

Despite these issues, Ephram communicates through his body, the expressions on his face, the sounds he makes (his laughter especially) and a subtle physical dialogue with Feldenkrais. As such, Ephram could therefore be understood as a paradigm of the performing subject (mute–listening–learning) and as a subject undergoing an ‘embodied’ experience through Feldenkrais's agency.Footnote ¹⁹ But that Ephram's engagement with the outside world is limited is in some ways a blessing; his ‘disability’ arguably enables him to be a better prosthesis of Feldenkrais's touch.Footnote ²⁰ So well does he respond to this touch, in fact, that Feldenkrais stops at one point and says: ‘You see how he listens … so intelligent … so intelligent,’ and in so doing Feldenkrais shows that, like musical performance, intelligence can be displayed often better through wordless action than through language.Footnote ²¹

Ephram's intelligence listens and he learns by integrating into his own body the new suggestions for improved flexibility and movement evoked by Feldenkrais. Integration in an orthodox sense could be understood as the point in a Feldenkrais lesson (or in a person's life) when what was a new or an unusual action/function has ceased to be new and has become part of that person's being-in-the-world. The points at which a person (child or adult) has learnt to ride a bicycle, or at which a piece of music has been assimilated (‘from memory’) are good examples of this.Footnote ²² The issue for Feldenkrais then becomes one of finding or refinding the key to movement patterns.Footnote ²³ Through Feldenkrais's touch, Ephram is able to find aspects of movements within himself not just for his legs but for his entire motor organization. To deal with Ephram is not just to deal with his legs or his disability but to engage with the whole person; this philosophy is important to Feldenkrais's method. Ephram is enabled therefore to experience a different self-image from that dictated by his disability and his habitual self-image.

Feldenkrais's suggestions are not mimetic; he does not ask Ephram to imitate what he does, a procedure that is fundamental to instrumental teaching.Footnote ²⁴ Instead, he explores playfully what Ephram can do and where patterns of movement that lead to a function are unfamiliar to him.Footnote ²⁵ He makes a connection to Ephram's sensorium by finding what is easy and pleasurable for him, because in Feldenkrais's thinking this physical pleasure is essential for learning.

Their connection therefore is intimate; it is the connection of one being to another ‘resonating from self to self’, as the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy puts it in the context of musical listening.Footnote ²⁶ It is clear that the boy is able to do most things that Feldenkrais suggests wordlessly through his touch. Feldenkrais routinely stops working with Ephram when a movement is clear or is too difficult. The stopping is an important part of the process in the method; this allows the brain to assimilate what has just happened and to learn from the experience. These are the moments in the film when Feldenkrais speaks of listening. The theorist David Wills, writing of musical listening, comes inadvertently very close to envisioning something fundamental about the process of FI when he writes:

Stopping is a strategy that allows time for cognitive processing, for sensing the resonance of touch. FI therefore demonstrates a dance of touch as listening between two protagonists that then allows each person to listen to the differences within themselves in the space that follows action.

In the case of Ephram, the fact that the child's vision seems to lack focus emphasizes the image for the viewer that Ephram is listening inwardly to Feldenkrais's suggestions. Ephram listens to himself on a fulcrum between what has happened and an unknown future, a vantage point that implies a certain stability and the possibility of an instability inherent in learning a new skill. Like Feldenkrais on his deathbed (quoted at the outset of this study), he listens partly in expectation, in attendance, waiting, groping for sense.

This study addresses this fulcrum through the phenomenon of listening as a hinge between a therapeutic and a musical context. The educational theorist Kimberly Powell has noted with respect to education that:

Feldenkrais's engagement with Ephram obviates Cartesian dualism and creates an exemplar of listening and learning as a form of embodied knowledge. Feldenkrais has argued against the limiting ideal of ‘disability’. Some disabilities, as he has shown, are no barrier to embodied learning and improvement; according to Feldenkrais, we are all awaiting enablement at some level.Footnote ²⁹ Feldenkrais's interest in Ephram is as a listening and learning subject; his work and this study can therefore be understood as a contribution to what I would like to call ability studies.Footnote ³⁰ The negotiation and development of a latent capacity to be enabled is as essential to musical practice as it is to Feldenkrais's method, which attempts, in his words, ‘to make the impossible possible, the possible easy and the easy aesthetically pleasurable’.Footnote ³¹

My interest in Ephram, therefore, is not that he is disabled, but that he has a distinctive ability to learn, and this is also why the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (like Ephram, born and raised in Toronto) features in this study. The quality of Ephram's condition allows Feldenkrais to make a visible differentiation or improvement to his self-image, and it is what happens after the intervention of touch in Ephram's listening (or in Gould's case, the listening that happens away from the instrument after he has stopped touching it and before he touches it again) that is essential here. Feldenkrais, Ephram and Gould demonstrate different nuances of self-listening and learning in this space. This study integrates for the first time the phenomenological exploration of listening with therapy and musical praxis.Footnote ³² Listening is not, however, conflated with either of these contexts, but is examined as a means of improving function. In Part II of this study, I examine the productive confluence of Nancy's and Feldenkrais's thought through the therapeutic lens of Ephram. I address the way in which the subject is configured as embodied and use this to explore a locus for listening as a response to Feldenkrais's interventions, with particular attention to the learning that arrives when action has stopped. This stopping, I argue, places the listening subject (Ephram, and later Gould) on a fulcrum where change in the self-image can happen. The psychoanalytic philosopher Jacques Lacan's thought, which has profound resonances with both Feldenkrais's and Nancy's work, is employed to enhance the discussion of Ephram and his response to Feldenkrais's touch.

Nancy's concern with ‘sense’ can be deepened through Feldenkrais's somatic thought, in which listening is a function of intelligence and awareness, not just (pace Nancy) of presence to the world or the self. Feldenkrais's idea of listening can be thought of as a somatic aid in the process of overcoming ‘resistance’, a term borrowed from Freudian psychoanalysis. This discourse shows how his understanding of listening is premissed on overcoming what he calls habitual or ‘parasitic’ movement to permit correct action, to ‘know what you are doing so that you can do what you want’, as Feldenkrais said.Footnote ³³

In Part III of this article, I transfer Feldenkrais's ideal of listening to musical practice. While studies have explored motion-capture of the hands on the piano keyboard, I theorize what listening/thinking signifies when the hands come off the keyboard. To illustrate and elaborate this point, I discuss Gould's working methods because these demonstrate what can be achieved away from the piano to inform, shape and refine both his image of a musical work and his own self-image through this work in ways that elaborate Feldenkrais's thought.Footnote ³⁴

Gould provides an exemplar of ‘spontaneity and compulsion’ as Feldenkrais conceives it, as he skilfully negotiates effort and will through self-listening and the process of learning music.Footnote ³⁵ I show how Gould uses ‘resistance’, discussed in the first section, and how his practice invokes and enacts certain strategies of Feldenkraisian embodied awareness to facilitate his extraordinary ability to learn.Footnote ³⁶ Through the example of Gould, I interpret listening not merely phenomenologically as a form of knowledge or sense/signification (as Nancy does), but as a form of intersensorial self-negotiation. Listening can be understood, therefore, as a fulcrum of sensing the resonance of past action and waiting for the serendipity of what new action formed by attention without effort will bring.

Finally, this study briefly addresses a form of self-listening as awareness and sensing before doing as a strategy for learning in musical training. What cannot be heard in music cannot be defined, shaped and controlled. Through a discussion and extension of the Weber–Fechner law, a fundamental background principle of the Feldenkrais Method, I contend that other possibilities for listening and musical practice are possible and that reflective practice and somatically grounded ways of teaching and learning need to be more clearly embedded in the educational curriculum.

II. Listening with Ephram's laughter

The study of listening has become a definable arena of musicological study at least since the publication of Nancy's book. I will not attempt to summarize this rich and elusive work here. Rather, I wish to concentrate on a few issues that remain unexplored behind his gustatory style of philosophy and explore how these have ‘resonance’, an important word for Nancy, with Feldenkrais's listening subject Ephram.

One of the distinctive aspects of Nancy's thought is the way in which his writing imparts a sense of internal dialogue. To read Nancy's philosophy is not merely to know what he knows (pace Pinker), but to sense and imagine the conditions that inform the internal tensions of the subject.Footnote ³⁷ Although he does not put it this way, Nancy's ideal of the subject is informed by the Kantian ideal of the subject that observes ‘the world from a point of view on its perimeter, pursuing not what is but what ought to be, and enjoying the privileged knowledge of its own mental states’, as the philosopher Roger Scruton describes it. That we see ourselves dualistically ‘is presupposed in language, in self-consciousness, and in the “practical reason” that is the source of all human action and moral worth’.Footnote ³⁸ It is precisely this dualistic ideal that Nancy's philosophy and indeed the Feldenkrais Method seeks to reshape through what Powell calls ‘embodied knowledge in which body–mind dualism becomes bodymind unity’ (see above, n. 28).

Fundamental to Nancy's discourse is a sense of self-consciousness and an ontology that is never stable, but always aware of itself forming and re-forming. In his book, Nancy mostly discusses sound rather than music, which is not really discussed perhaps because reference to specific pieces of music might compromise his underlying phenomenological message. In particular, he focuses on timbre as a way of partially dissolving the sense of difference between inside and outside the body.Footnote ³⁹ This concern with a physical and phenomenological topology is particularly potent in some of his other work, which discusses the mediation of the body through touch, religious iconography and sleep.Footnote ⁴⁰

The musicologist Lawrence M. Zbikowski has commented:

This reading of Nancy has some veracity, but it ignores certain precepts of his ideal of listening.

For Nancy, listening is done by a self that is positioned as an involuntary receiver. Sound comes to the self as timbre and forms the subject in the wake of this resonance; the self gropes to make sense of sound and of itself through an internal re-sounding.Footnote ⁴² Through an imaginative reading of Nancy it is possible to think of the self as a fulcrum between what has already been heard and new timbres from without clamouring for their place in the listener's consciousness and being.

To impose the apparatus of cognitive musicology on Nancy is useful, but to critique him through this lens (as Zbikowski does) is to create a straw man. Nancy himself states that one of the three ‘demands' of his analysis are to ‘treat the body, before any distinction of places and function of resonance, as being, wholly (and “without organs”), a resonance chamber or column of [that which is] beyond meaning’.Footnote ⁴³

The musicologist Anthony Gritten has sagely argued that ‘the ontology of the subject is auditory: that the subject is constituted as listening’, and, following Nancy, that ‘listening is rhythmic and is a matter of resonance before it becomes a matter of intentionality and thence signification and identity […] [Resonance] engages the subject before they are even a subject: they are subject to timbre’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Listening therefore forms the ‘bodymind unity’ of the subject and is prima facie embodied.Footnote ⁴⁵ Embodiment is not something added by sound, a surplus pay-off, or merely something that brings awareness or ‘sense’ to the body through the inception of sound. Rather, although Nancy does not put it so acutely, it is part of our essential ‘subjectness’.

This ideal of the subject can be further understood by differentiating cognitivist accounts of embodiment which, as the educational theorist Wayne Bowman explains, ‘construe mind as an activity emergent from, structured by, and never wholly separable from the material facts of bodily experience’, from an ‘enactive version of the embodiment paradigm’, in which ‘human conceptual, sensory, and motor processes have co-evolved with each other, and are indissolubly linked in each of us’. ‘Cognitive capacity’, states Bowman with reference to this enactivist paradigm, ‘emerges from reinforced neural connections between one's sense and motor system.’Footnote ⁴⁶ So when Nancy states that ‘the listener […] is straining to end in sense (rather than straining toward, intentionally) or he is offered, exposed to sense’, he does so because listening is both transcendental in a Kantian sense (that is, it is a figment of an a priori human ability to have cognition) and enactivist (that is, it is made – even before birth – and can be refined and improved).Footnote ⁴⁷

The implication here is that to improve our listening is also to improve our being-in-the-world and our ‘subjectness’. For Feldenkrais, this human ‘subjectness' is found in the inherent capacity to learn and to make choices. If the mind is, as Bowman states, ‘a profoundly distributed entity’ through the body, then it can also be accessed through any part of the body, and this is what Feldenkrais shows in his lessons with Ephram.Footnote ⁴⁸ In this case, then, it is not just, as Wills opines, that sound acts in a process of ‘technologizing the listener’, but that the listener also has the power to technologize (through sound and himself), just as Ephram and Feldenkrais enactively technologize or mutually construct each other's actions and reactions in a therapeutic sense.Footnote ⁴⁹

In a Lacanian vein (and Lacan's thought is subdermal in Nancy's book), the listening subject is placed in the register of the Real, understood as an unsymbolizable, ‘unassimilable’ zone of jouissance, of excess and of painful pleasure.Footnote ⁵⁰ In this study, I understand this domain of the Real as the locus where substantive and even traumatic change can occur in the self-image and in the motor cortex of the brain through the intervention of the Feldenkrais Method. Lacan configures the Real with regard to the prelinguistic child who does not yet identify its own image (in a mirror) with itself. Instead, the child's understanding of the world is initially figured through the Mother, and through symbolic appendages (breasts in particular).Footnote ⁵¹

Music could easily have been targeted by Nancy (all too crudely) as a similar symbolic prosthetic appendage, one that is given, constructed, but that we do not fully understand. Music entrains the desire of listening, a desire that can be understood, in the Lacanian sense, as that which seeks a wholeness that cannot be fulfilled.Footnote ⁵² This desire, then, might account for the function of enabling and disabling that informs so much musical activity (especially composing, practice, performance and listening). This in turn, I would argue, feeds a greater desire to listen into the essence of music itself that escapes us.Footnote ⁵³ This is also why listening and desire can be regarded as synonymous; there is no definable end point to either function. Each performance or recording requires and even demands another.Footnote ⁵⁴ But Nancy's focus in his book is not on music, specific pieces of music or ‘musical behavior’ (as Zbikowski has it), but on timbre. In an extension of Nancy's thought, timbre can be thought of as being in a mutually active relationship with desire (for Lacan, a cause of our subjectness) and also as a means of communicating with the unsymbolizable and ‘unassimilable’ zone of the Real through creaturely flesh.Footnote ⁵⁵

Sigmund Freud's idea of drives (death, love) and partial objects (breast, faeces, penis) is augmented by Lacan to include the scopic and vocative drive, with the voice and gaze as partial objects or symbolic appendages that feed and nurture the drives.Footnote ⁵⁶ The Slovene philosopher Slavoj Žižek has suggested that we should also augment Lacan's list of drives with the olfactory drive.Footnote ⁵⁷ What I would suggest is that this list should be further augmented with the gustatory and – most importantly for the present discussion – the lidless auricular (listening) drive. Drive enacts a perpetual listening and desire to listen. The ear, then, could be conceived of as a partial object. But if – as the neurophysiologist Vernon Mountcastle discovered (and as Doidge comments) – ‘the visual, auditory, and sensory cortices all have a similar six-layering process structure’Footnote ⁵⁸ of electrical impulses to the brain, then the ear should be augmented by the hands as partial objects of the auricular drive, or even perhaps (considering the high proportion of water that constitutes a human being) by the entire body.

The subject (Ephram or a performing musician) is therefore framed by the drives, which are in turn framed in gravity; the subject is caught in the gestation of timbre, resonance and touch in a pre-symbolic world and exposed to the traumatic possibility of change embodied in the Real, understood again as the locus where alteration of the self-image can take place. Feldenkrais does not touch Ephram as a ‘disabled’ boy, but he uses touch to communicate with the child's motor cortex and change his self-image. Ephram is not really disabled in Feldenkrais's thought, but merely waiting for the traumatic possibility of being enabled; he is open to suggestion, prepped as Feldenkrais's subject or (in a more proper Kantian way) open to a reason, just as (reciprocally) Feldenkrais is himself.Footnote ⁵⁹

This fulcrum of possibility is beautifully revealed at one moment in the lesson with Ephram. Again, action has stopped. Feldenkrais says:

This description is marvellous because it captures the effect of integration through listening.Footnote ⁶¹ Through listening, something happens that Ephram does not ‘know’. He is given a taste of the pre-symbolic Real for a moment. He does not speak, but instead acknowledges this internal, placeless ‘finding’ (between visible activity) with chirruping laughter; this giddy delight and uncertainty reflect the trauma of the Real and the way in which the senses are unified in this domain. Nancy attempts to come to grips with the way in which laughter mediates the senses. He states that,

Ephram's laughter is like a cloudburst. Feldenkrais touches something deeper than just Ephram's sensorium through touch and listening, and Ephram responds with laughter: he touches Ephram's uniqueness.Footnote ⁶³ Feldenkrais states: ‘You know what that laughter is worth? That is Eureka!’ Later, when Ephram laughs again, he observes: ‘You see that laughter is priceless; you can't buy it for all the money that you have in the world.’ Feldenkrais tacitly acknowledges that in this release, Ephram as a listening being has also withdrawn from him.Footnote ⁶⁴ Nancy might say that essential to listening is a ‘withdrawal and turning inward’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Laughter provides evidence of an essential independence that signals and derives from integration.Footnote ⁶⁶

But Ephram does not hear. Feldenkrais does not really speak to him, but mostly to himself and for the benefit of his students and the camera – he is already turned inward.Footnote ⁶⁷ Ephram does not hear in Nancy's sense of entendre, which, as the musicologist Michael Gallope states, ‘implies closure of understanding and truth’, but rather in Nancy's sense of écouter, which ‘implies the openness of negotiation, uncertainty, and exposure’.Footnote ⁶⁸

Through Ephram's laughter, the external listeners assembled are exposed to a moment when Ephram is on a fulcrum of listening. It is not just that in Nancy's terms he has become present to (him)self, but that he registers the trauma of the Real; Ephram's laughter registers the possibility of change in his self-image. In Nancy's terms this is the ‘reference’ (renvoi) of sound, ‘from a sign to a thing’.Footnote ⁶⁹

But what is this ‘thing’? The making of ‘sense’ within Ephram's sensorium is the jouissance of precisely that which does not make sense to him, a new self-image which cannot be immediately rationalized or assimilated.Footnote ⁷⁰ So when Nancy states that ‘a self is nothing other than a form or function of referral, a self is made of a relationship to self, or of a presence to self’, this can be considered only part of the story.Footnote ⁷¹

One of the functions of FI is to bring the subject into an encounter with what is unknown, moving from the self that is known, founded in gravity and their own body image in the world, to a new image of the self.Footnote ⁷² Ephram's laughter bubbles up; it escapes what is presented to the world as a disabled boy. It is the resonance of an encounter with another self. His listening is an ongoing process of (re-)formation in the irreducible, intimate and non-linear temporal paradigm of ‘making the impossible possible’, as Feldenkrais has stated,Footnote ⁷³ and it is precisely this which is inscribed in the Lacanian Real.Footnote ⁷⁴ His outburst of laughter creates a symbolic cut in the Real that through its differentiation signals the Real: it is like the tip of an iceberg that appears above the water, but in doing so it also signifies that below the water (apart from the rest of the iceberg, which is already integrated with the symbolic register) is the ocean's void.Footnote ⁷⁵

In Nancy's terms, Ephram is a paradigm of a ‘subject of listening [that] is always still yet to come’.Footnote ⁷⁶ With regard to Feldenkrais's ‘listening for his next breath’, Nancy's question is germane here: ‘What does it mean for a being to be immersed entirely in listening, formed by listening or in listening, listening with all its being?’ – and one might add here: ‘listening to all his being’.Footnote ⁷⁷ In this spirit of enquiry we might listen with Feldenkrais and ask: ‘Is it indeed possible (or desirable) to listen to all of another person's being?’

This is a crucial question, and one fundamental to FI, because listening for Feldenkrais is a sensing through his hands of where someone else is stuck; where, through habit or injury, for example, the mind/body entity is momentarily incapable of utilizing a deeper intelligence to improve a function or action. Helping a person to find this intelligence within themselves is one of the primary functions of instrumental lessons and indeed of the Feldenkrais Method. Listening, then, as is shown in Feldenkrais's work with Ephram, is an enactivist engagement with intelligence and awareness, not just with presence to the world or the self (pace Nancy).

Feldenkrais's ideal of listening is intimately connected to overcoming ‘resistance’, a term borrowed from Freud. In their book The Language of Psychoanalysis, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis define this concept: ‘In psycho-analytic treatment the name “resistance” is given to everything in the words and actions of the analysand that obstructs his gaining access to his un-conscious.’Footnote ⁷⁸ Laplanche and Pontalis point out that while Freud first discovered that resistance was ‘an obstacle to the elucidation of the symptoms and to the progress of the treatment’, he realized that ‘resistance was itself a means of reaching the repressed and unveiling the secret of neurosis' and that ‘the interpretation of resistance, along with that of the transference, constituted the specific characteristics of his technique’ that was part and parcel of the possibility of a cure.Footnote ⁷⁹

Feldenkrais extends this in profound ways elaborated through the examples given in this study. Resistance is understood not merely as that which obstructs the change in the self-image; Feldenkrais ‘interprets' this resistance as an active means of gaining access to Ephram's motor cortex, rather than the psychoanalytic ‘un-conscious’.Footnote ⁸⁰ In his lesson with Ephram, Feldenkrais first explores and clarifies Ephram's habitual movement (that is, the clenching of the adductors) from different perspectives, so that Ephram can listen to and become aware of what he is doing before he ‘reverses the experience of his life’, as Feldenkrais states.Footnote ⁸¹ Feldenkrais therefore uses listening/awareness of Ephram's habitual movement to soften the tonus of his adductors and so allow him to open his legs (the muscular tonus of the adductors affects the tonus of the abductors).

The work with Ephram provides a demonstration of Feldenkrais's maxim: ‘When you know what you are doing, you can do what you want.’Footnote ⁸² The story of Gould's practice, as we shall see, is a different way to understand this thought; Gould does not merely economize his desire and drive to play, but uses a number of strategies in which listening, tone and technique are approached from a number of different ways to promote awareness. Like Gould, Feldenkrais does not approach his subject through language, which itself might be a form of resistance, but by touching and non-touching.Footnote ⁸³ By wordlessly joining one body to another, Feldenkrais obviates Pinker's ‘curse’. Through FI, he addresses what he calls the ‘parasitic’, the cross-motivation or ‘repressed instinctual process’, as Freud puts it, that prevents correct, efficient action.Footnote ⁸⁴ For Feldenkrais, the parasitic is manifested in effort and willpower that are the outward signs of impotence.Footnote ⁸⁵ The idea of movement as polymotivational runs counter to Feldenkrais's ideal of movement as essentially monomotivational (without resistance and parasitism), an idea supported by much recent work in neuroscience.Footnote ⁸⁶

Musical practice can in fact be thought of as a procedure through which polymotivational impulses and activity can be folded into monomotivational activity. The different facets of instrumental playing need to be folded into one action; this is an essential process of musical practice. The ideal of monomotivational movement is one of the reasons work done in the imagination was a fundamental precept of the method.Footnote ⁸⁷ As Gould demonstrates, work in the imagination minimizes resistance and the parasitic, and there is much empirical evidence that supports mental musical rehearsal as a technique, which includes the heightening of ‘sensory awareness’.Footnote ⁸⁸

In The Potent Self, Feldenkrais describes the ideal quality of movement as that of ‘reversibility’: ‘At every instant or stage of a correct act it can be stopped, withheld from continuing, or reversed without a preliminary change of attitude and without effort.’Footnote ⁸⁹ The developmental psychologist Esther Thelen develops this ideal when she states that the hallmark of skill is both its stability or reliability and its ‘adaptive flexibility’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Thelen and Linda B. Smith remark that ‘organisms are also active, as an open system, they live in a kind of disequilibrium (what we will call dynamic stability) and actively seek stimulation’,Footnote ⁹¹ which can be read as a function of the Lacanian ideal of desire articulated above. Listening requires the kind of dynamic stability, and the ‘adaptive flexibility’, that Thelen and Smith identify as a basis for development.

Listening, like practice, performance and recordings, is not reversible in the sense of movement, but rather revisits itself: Nancy identifies this as ‘return and encounter’, an internal resounding.Footnote ⁹² This position is an inherently contingent fulcrum, searching for stability through flexibility. To be on a fulcrum, therefore, is to be in a position of both balance and potential imbalance.

Placed on this fulcrum of listening through FI, Ephram's normative presence to himself and his self-image has been displaced for a while, opening a space that allows change to happen. When action stops, it resounds in his imagination. He listens to his own body as if for the first time. He listens to himself for himself (to his self-image) without the distractions of the outside world. In this, he is an almost ideal listener, ‘immersed entirely in listening, formed by listening’, as Nancy states.Footnote ⁹³ In asking him to pay attention, Feldenkrais places Ephram on this fulcrum, and asks him to listen to new possibilities within himself. Through his listening he is attached like a hose to a tap, to a latent reservoir within himself, waiting to feel what will happen.

III. Listening with Gould's sensorium: between thinking and doing in musical practice

What, therefore, does it mean for a performer – a pianist, for example – to be placed on this fulcrum, and where might this position be located? In an obvious sense, any performer places the sword of Damocles over their head when they place themselves on stage. But the a priori question remains of how best to minimize the risk of instability in Thelen's sense.

In his book Thinking and Doing, Feldenkrais discusses the nature of right action. He first details through practical, combative and sporting examples how the unconscious records information to show that willpower or effort is useless in action. Instead, Feldenkrais advocates self- or autosuggestion in which singular (that is, not ‘parasitic’) thoughts occur, and in which action is always completed without will or effort.Footnote ⁹⁴

For Feldenkrais, this is no substitute for ‘systematic training’.Footnote ⁹⁵ But Feldenkrais (in a Freudian vein) describes his interest in the ‘person who knows how to actualise thoughts embedded in his unconscious mind instantly, without hesitating or doubting himself, without the resistance of obstructing associations’.Footnote ⁹⁶ He advocates creating ‘the image of the movement exclusively in the brain’.Footnote ⁹⁷ The object goal of autosuggestion as he reads it is to reduce the time between thinking about correct action and performing an action correctly.Footnote ⁹⁸ Thinking and doing are not the same thing, but correct action is predicated on prior correct thinking.Footnote ⁹⁹

A clear example of this differentiation can be found in the work of Gould, who provides a model of Feldenkraisian ‘spontaneity and compulsion’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In what would be his final interview, with the pianist David Dubal, he states that he is ‘at a loss to understand the compulsiveness that accompanies the notion of practice’ which becomes obsessive for many others so that ‘the relationship to the instrument remains secure’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ This implies, in Feldenkraisian terms, that Gould has reached a level of ‘maturity’ that obviates the need to act compulsively in this aspect of his life.Footnote ¹⁰² For Gould, fingering (for many pianists a necessity) is unimportant because ‘a fingering is something which springs spontaneously to mind when one looks at a score’.Footnote ¹⁰³ For Gould there is a direct link in his sensorium, built into himself through his practice, between his imagination and touch founded in an internal listening with a minimal sense of resistance.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

This listening was developed through systematic technical training, through a shedding of resistance and the parasitic. As Kevin Bazzana states in his biography of the pianist,

Bazzana describes all sorts of preparatory exercises that Guerrero created in order to mould Gould's technique.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In a Feldenkraisian sense of FI or ATM, some of these exercises provided different ways of addressing certain pianistic functions.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ One of the most time-consuming was ‘tapping’, which focused on an awareness of the muscular effort after the key had been depressed. This position of the key represents a point, after a sound has been made, when the pianist can listen not only to the sound produced but internally to the muscular effort used to produce it.

In his conversations with the journalist Jonathan Cott, Gould gives further examples of internal listening.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ He describes a way of surmounting a mental block concerning bars 135–6 in the third movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata op. 109 (Variation 5).Footnote ¹⁰⁹ To overcome this block, Gould placed beside the piano ‘a couple of radios, or possibly one radio and one television’, and turned them up ‘full blast’. He says: ‘[I] turn[ed] them up so loudly that, while I could feel what I was doing, I was primarily hearing what was coming off the radio speaker or, better still, both. I was separating at this point my areas of concentration.’Footnote ¹¹⁰

There are three Feldenkraisian ramifications of this story that pertain to listening and that are not addressed in performance-practice literature.Footnote ¹¹¹ First, in the Feldenkrais Method, one technique of improving the quality of a movement or function is to make a constraint, and then take the constraint away. The constraint creates a form of artificial resistance that, as also with Freud, becomes intrinsically part of the solution (cure). This strategy creates a remarkable effect of allowing greater flexibility, and it is used by Feldenkrais in his lesson with Ephram. Secondly, Gould seems to be forcing himself – through this constraint – to resist polymotivational listening and to focus on a form of monomotivational listening. Thirdly, the constraint enables Gould to listen to the movement separately from the sound itself.Footnote ¹¹² By disrupting his habitual pattern of listening and playing, Gould's strategies correlate with Feldenkrais's statement: ‘Performance is improved by the separation of the aim from the means.’Footnote ¹¹³

Gould then speaks to Cott of an ‘analytical completeness' that is ‘theoretically possible as long as you stay away from the piano. The moment you go to it you're going to diminish that completeness by tactile compromise.’Footnote ¹¹⁴ This process of building up an image of a piece through internal listening is described in the interview with Dubal when Gould explains his preparation in the weeks leading up to his recording of Brahms's Four Ballades, op. 10. Gould states that he started work on these pieces two months before the recording, and that ‘for approximately the next six weeks I studied the score from time to time, and developed a very clear conception of how I wanted to approach the Ballades’. Two weeks before the recording, he started playing them on the piano and worked mostly for one hour a day. Prior to this, and in the absence of the piano, he speaks of ‘running the Ballades through in my head many dozens of times when driving along in the car or conducting them in my studio’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Gould's approach to performance preparation is supported by scientific studies which show that, ‘Mental imagery of movements when musicians are imagining themselves playing their musical instrument activates the same cortical networks as are active during the actual performance.’Footnote ¹¹⁶

Dubal then asks what it is like to come back to the piano after such a break. Gould's response complements and validates Feldenkrais's precepts of correct thought that leads to correct action:

Here Gould (following the thought of Freud and Feldenkrais) describes the way in which not playing provides a constraint that obviates both resistance and the parasitic and facilitates correct action. Gould goes on to confirm this when he states that his first [recorded] ‘take’ is often the best, ‘because the mental image is at that point the strongest and least subject to contradiction by the reality of an improperly adjusted instrument or whatever’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ For Gould, the work done in the imagination balanced on a fulcrum of listening is more valuable artistically and pianistically than that which is polluted with action and tempered by the sound of the piano, the studio or the desire for results. To work in such a way is not to subsume the parasitic, therefore, but to cut it off at its source (in the mind).

Wills has conjectured, following contemporary science ‘which increasingly treats sound as a form of mechanosensation’, that ‘the same logic of touch, whether occurring on the skin or as vibration in the ear’ occurs as a form of ‘sensorial indistinction’ at ‘the molecular level’ as ‘types of force’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In this sense, then, Gould's contact with the music through listening can be thought of as a form of intimate touching, as a form of touching oneself or as an attachment to a reservoir, like Ephram, waiting to see what will happen. His sensorium is so developed that he is placed on a listening fulcrum which can be understood as a point where the perpetual undoing of his self is a form of self-negotiation: rethinking and rehearing Brahms's ballades.

This example provides evidence of a listening that is an extremely rich vein of thought for any kind of creative or performing artist. To listen clearly with such minimal ‘resistance’ implies a hearing that is not parasitic, without thought of failure, without necessary thought to the predicates of performance history, and in fact without deference to the potential listener. For the performer, balanced on a fulcrum, the potential for correct action is already present in the correct thinking of that action.

For investigating this fulcrum further, the study of piano playing by the music-performance scientists Jennifer MacRitchie and Andrew P. McPherson is instructive. They have examined finger movement in piano playing to establish a ‘clearer relationship between the continuous motion of the body and the specific touch events it produces’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Rather than focusing on velocity of the fingers, force, arm movement or surface-touch location, one of their particular focuses (using two of Brahms's 51 Exercises (Übungen) for piano, WoO 6) is found in Section 3.4.3 of their study, which is entitled ‘Finger Movements: Transitions between Notes’. Here they state:

For Brahms's Exercise no. 13, they note that ‘the majority of movement takes place between the finger key-contact events’, and that,

In their conclusion, MacRitchie and McPherson state that, ‘These comparisons have the potential to yield insight on motor planning in complex passages.’Footnote ¹²¹

This scientific study affirms that movement is continual. What MacRitchie and McPherson describe as ‘intention to move toward the next keypress' shows that in the activity happening on and above the keyboard, thought is very closely aligned to if not within action. Listening occurs continually from before the note is pressed through to the end of the note and then on to an anticipation of the next note. The pianist is continually on a fulcrum of listening, forgetting what has been played and remembering (through ‘bodymind unity’) what is about to be played.

What interests me here is whether there is a point, not discussed in scientific studies, when action can be reversed, stopped or altered. Is there, between one note and the next, a fulcrum, a point that is neither that which came before nor that which comes afterwards? Would this be a point in which listening can occur (as in Feldenkrais's therapeutic practice) between actions? From a scientific, motor-capture perspective, I am not certain whether it would be possible to see this, and from a practical perspective, would this position be possible or even desirable? If it were, it might reveal a position which is not imbued (a priori) with compulsion, even as part of a correctly thought act, as Feldenkrais has it.Footnote ¹²² It would be a position pregnant with potential but with the possibility of not-playing, an issue that is signalled by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben with reference to Gould's decision to leave the concert platform.Footnote ¹²³ While Gould made a decision not to play in public, of course he still played. Through the prosthesis of recording he came to listen to the sounds and the habits made by his own body and mind. But Gould arguably transferred (or sublimated) one compulsion to another; through the recording process, arguably, he gave himself more control over when the spontaneity and compulsion could be released into action.

What I have shown is that while Ephram needed Feldenkrais to awaken a locus where substantive changes to the self-image could take place (which I have connected to the ideal of the Lacanian Real), Gould found ways to do this for himself. Gould's practice, for instance, shows that there is a difference between the listening that happens while playing, on the one hand, and listening to oneself in the recording studio, on the other. The recording process was particularly useful to Gould: it allowed him to hear whether there was a gap between the way in which he heard himself (that is, his musical self-image) and the way in which he might be heard externally or by others; but it also afforded him a means to change and manufacture his self-image through sound.Footnote ¹²⁴ The process of recording became a means of shaping an interpretation which can be understood as a form of presenting his self-image or musical persona to the world.Footnote ¹²⁵

Through the process of recording, Gould uses himself and his listening to himself to facilitate improved practice and performance. On the evidence of Gould mimetically singing along to himself when playing, or conducting his own recording during the post-production process of recording Scriabin's Désir, op. 57 no. 1, he was certainly not always free from compulsion and parasitic action.Footnote ¹²⁶ Perhaps following Feldenkrais, the spontaneity of his work arises not despite but out of such compulsion.Footnote ¹²⁷ This ability to control the parasitic is, in Feldenkrais's terms, a maturity founded in choice and a point of self-awareness that he associates with human freedom.Footnote ¹²⁸

IV. Conclusion

This article has sought to show how Nancy's work has a psychoanalytic and embodied quality that is brought out and reorientated by Feldenkrais's awareness-based therapeutic listening. The discussion has centred on what happens at ontological, embodied, psychoanalytical and critical levels to the self-image of particular subjects (Ephram and Gould) between thinking and doing. The soundings from the therapeutic context in the first half of the study are concretized in the work of Gould as a fascinating case of what can be achieved away from an instrument. In conclusion, I wish to comment on some ramifications of Feldenkrais's thought for musical practice and the current culture of musical performance and performer training in education.

Anyone who walks along a practice corridor in a music conservatoire will be struck by the sound of incessant doing. Look through one of the usually small windows in each door, and you might see a student practice a short passage (perhaps something technically and artistically complex), lift their hands off the keyboard and immediately repeat it (practice time in a conservatoire is at a premium). So what happens in between instances of playing, when not touching the keyboard? What type of change in listening and sensing can happen at this point? Does the intention change between lifting, or does the desire – a groping towards an inchoate ideal of perfection – only increase? Stopping at this point on a fulcrum of non-doing, of negotiation between undoing, critically reflecting on the past and beginning again, might halt the incessant desire to do, or to work out a solution (a cure) through doing (an idea at the heart of Gould's critique of pianists who need to touch the keyboard). It allows a space for the observance of small somatosensory and musical changes, the perception of different possibilities of action and the space for something to happen in the motor cortex that has the potential to change the self-image.Footnote ¹²⁹

To think of listening in this way would be to modify the Weber–Fechner law, according to which any decreased effort concomitantly facilitates a greater sensitivity.Footnote ¹³⁰ I contend that this can be reconceived: a decreased physical ‘effort’ can also facilitate an increased sensitivity in listening and the imagination, an idea that is also reversible.Footnote ¹³¹ I would also like to add, in a somewhat speculative vein, that when a space is created in the motor cortex which is taken up not with the desire and drive to do, but with decreased effort and without the resistance of the instrument or the presence of parasitic movement, this listening space might allow room for the brain to do other things, such as to reconceive or refine interpretation, to refine motor coordination and even perhaps to memorize music more easily.Footnote ¹³² These perspectives allow us to understand something of what Gould was trying to achieve in his work on the Brahms ballades away from the piano.

Ephram demonstrates another ramification of what can be learnt from Feldenkrais's thought on listening: doing and effort occur in relationship with gravity. One of Feldenkrais's great discoveries in this regard was that by taking the weight of a limb – by picking up Ephram's leg while he lies on a table, for instance – Feldenkrais could take over the function of gravity. This allows Ephram to let go of the unconscious effort involved in the movement of his leg, which is intimately connected to his self-image. The removal of gravity allows Ephram a space of possibility to change his habitual movement patterns when restored to standing; at the end of the lesson his heels are clearly able to touch the floor in walking. By removing gravity, Feldenkrais diminishes Ephram's conscious responsibility for himself: his disability is significantly disabled as his listening to himself is allowed through Feldenkrais to be almost weightless.Footnote ¹³³ To stop and to be aware of and resist the motivation to do (to touch the piano rather than sense, feel or mentally prepare correct action) in musical practice might have a similar function to the removal of gravity.Footnote ¹³⁴ A controlled or entrained ‘weightlessness' of thought might allow the freedom to listen more fully, and to create a space for something else – ‘the impossible made possible’Footnote ¹³⁵ – serendipitously to arrive.

Feldenkrais's perception that correct, monomotivational thought entails a vision of a completed (correct) action without willpower or effort implies a refined listening as a form of awareness that can act as a powerful way to engage the unconscious in the learning process.Footnote ¹³⁶ The examples I have taken – Feldenkrais, Ephram and Gould – all wait on this fulcrum of non-doing, searching for a completed action in their thinking bodies. By rethinking the context of the Weber–Fechner law in the way I have suggested, I propose that listening is not merely something that is done in music practice, but something that should be employed as a distinct strategy. A performer can listen to themselves in order to assess the correct relationship between completion of an action in thought and the effort used to accomplish the task. This dialogue, I would argue, can have a profound impact on instrumental virtuosity, which in Feldenkraisian terms can be understood as knowing what you are doing so that ‘you can do what you want’.

Such an internal listening might also go some way towards changing the gladiatorial shadow-boxing and the culture of stress and strain that dominates the continual proving-ground of modern conservatoire training.Footnote ¹³⁷ There is much pressure on today's conservatoire student to be (already) a professional musician; this is particularly the case when they see student colleagues obtaining jobs in orchestras or enjoying success in competitions. Students can all too easily find themselves caught between the internal demands of their institution and external pressures; the time to experiment and to find one's voice or individuality is being eclipsed.Footnote ¹³⁸ Another example of the demands placed on students is found in competitions that often ask them to prepare hours of repertoire (for several rounds) in advance, in what is an unrealistic simulacrum of contemporary concert life. The (non-)thinking here appears to be a quasi-masochistic, contractual sense of ‘what won't kill you might make you stronger’. Arguably, even so-called elite institutions, with or without departments of scientific-performance research or music psychology, struggle to integrate themselves with the contractual and quasi-masochistic obligations of the profession. What Bowman and Powell call the ‘notion of music education as aesthetic education’ in such institutions seemingly lags behind other schools concerned with drama and theatre, where reflective practice and somatically grounded ways of teaching and learning are arguably more clearly embedded in the curriculum.Footnote ¹³⁹ The enhancement of ‘aesthetic sensitivity’ should be understood as cooperative with technical skill.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Indeed, both should ideally be subsumed under the ideal of techē: they are part of the craft of making, knowing (practical knowledge) and applying knowledge through artistic creation.Footnote ¹⁴¹

The kind of activity shown in the paradigm between Ephram and Feldenkrais shows a listening that is embodied, enactivist, but – crucially for musical education – patient and without concrete expectations. Both participate in a listening without defined goals and without measuring sticks of success and failure. Such a listening applied to musical practice might even allow a space in which musical practice is allowed to become more sensitive – more ‘potent’ in Feldenkrais's thought, and possibly more ‘transcendental’ in both the philosophical and physical senses of the word. Feldenkrais thought of his method as a means whereby each individual could gain awareness and potency in their actions and could then be in a position, in a somewhat utopian vein, to transform the society in which they operate.Footnote ¹⁴²

To listen to oneself, to the quality of one's own sensorium, is to listen to the quality of movement in the body: the tonus of the area between the eyes, and the connections between the jaw, neck, spine, ribs, hands, pelvis and feet, and the ways in which these parts of the body work in action. It is to listen to how parasitic and polymotivational activity can be transformed into monomotivational activity. But to listen to the sensorium most clearly requires stopping to allow a listening to the possibility of change. Sometime in the future, while walking along a corridor at a conservatoire, it may even be possible to listen to the sound of not doing, and to listen to oneself think.