Touching Music: Zero Balancing Principles and Skills for Performing Musicians
Touching Music
Michele Doucette DC with Seth Knopp and Jessica Bodner
The language of touch and the language of music are quiet cousins. Both speak in structural and energetic engagement and set free waves of information, intention, and inspiration from the very soul of nature. (See the performance link below!)
Recently, I had the honor of developing an Artist Residency with Seth Knopp, Artistic Director of Yellow Barn (www.yellowbarn.org), an international center for chamber music, in Putney, Vermont.
Yellow Barn encourages discovery in the studio, classroom, and concert hall; explores the craft of musical interpretation; and illuminates our world through the unique experience of music. Twice awarded the ASCAP/Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming, Yellow Barn’s approach to lifelong education for musicians and audiences, commitment to quality and a unique philosophy and programs that focus listeners in new ways, set it apart from any other chamber music center in this country. - www.yellowbarn.org
This Artist Residency brings principles from the field of Zero Balancing to the field of chamber music. Zero Balancing (www.zerobalancing.com) is a leading-edge transformative touch therapy that employs skilled and conscious touch principles and practices to bring a person closer to living their true nature, their essential self, their highest expression of embodied wellbeing.
“Embodying Balance for Inspired Connection,” a 4-day course for performing musicians, explores the benefits of skilled, conscious touch as a catalyst for innocent perception, emergent insight, and tangibly heightened presence. The aim is to cultivate, clarify, and strengthen the felt sense of our own essential being, and thereby optimize our ability to be with others in collaborative and creative relationship. The desired outcome is that embodied connection kindles the original spark of inspiration within the language of music. Included are individual bodywork sessions, theory and discussion, group exercises and interpersonal touch skills. The hope is that these experiences serve as fulcrums for expanded awareness within self, in relations to each other, and in connection to the original intention of the composer.
Seth describes his inspired perspective for this Artist Residency:
“As a patient of Dr. Michele Doucette receiving Zero Balancing therapy since 2015, I have been the beneficiary of her ability to listen, to observe, and to answer with her craft. I am a professional musician, and although those qualities are also essential in communicating through music, a shared connection was not what drew me to the idea of asking Dr. Doucette to spend 4 days in-residence at Yellow Barn (www.yellowbarn.org), working intensely with the Parker Quartet, Harvard University's faculty resident string quartet.
Musicians who view the world through music’s lens live with a peripheral awareness that is naturally alert, always searching for ways to connect other perspectives to their art. Without a language able to adequately express the personal and powerful emotions unique to music, drawing inspiration from varied and diverse disciplines is vitally important to artistic growth. Their search is a dance between what can be defined (the craft of “touch”), and what cannot be (what we call “inspiration”). The moments when these meet are rare and affirm the mystery we all search for in our lives.
What drew me to the idea of asking Michele to be a part of this residency, one that proposed applying one practice to another, is the place in her that strives always to understand the next path to take. Rather than in her accomplishment, the true power of her work lies in its potential. The closer that work comes to speaking its truth, the further we can feel its reach.”
Seth’s deep regard and respect for the Parker Quartet (www.parkerquartet.com) drew him to invite them to this special residency. The Parker Quartet (Daniel Chong, violin, Ken Hamao, violin, Jessica Bodner, viola, Kee-Hyun Kim, cello) as described on their website:
“Internationally recognized for their “fearless, yet probingly beautiful” (The Strad) performances, the Grammy Award-winning Parker Quartet has distinguished itself as one of the preeminent ensembles of its generation, dedicated purely to the sound and depth of their music. They are renowned for their fresh and unique approach to the great classics while being passionate ambassadors for music of our time. Inspired performances and exceptional musicianship are hallmarks of the Quartet, having appeared at the world’s most illustrious venues since its founding in 2002.
The members of the Parker Quartet serve as Professors of the Practice and Blodgett Artists-in-Residence at Harvard University’s Department of Music. The Quartet also holds visiting residencies at the University of South Carolina and Walnut Hill School for the Arts.
Founded and currently based in Boston, the Parker Quartet’s numerous honors include winning the Concert Artists Guild Competition, the Grand Prix and Mozart Prize at France’s Bordeaux International String Quartet Competition, and Chamber Music America’s prestigious Cleveland Quartet”.
Jessica Bodner, Parker Quartet violist, shares her experience:
”Yellow Barn has been a special place for our quartet for over twenty years, one that has always symbolized inspiration, growth, and community. We are so thankful to not only have had formative experiences in our early years as young chamber musicians, but to now have chances to return to this special environment as adults. The most recent residency, focused on Zero Balancing with Michele Doucette, was a transformative experience, one that opened up new dimensions of thinking about personal capacity and connection. We are inspired to work with and live with these ideas in everything we do from performing to teaching and to simply connecting with the world around us.
There have been so many times that the principles of Zero Balancing have inspired the way I think about a situation or interact with a person or situation. These times have been linked to teaching, performing, feeling the connection with the audience, and feeling a connection inside the quartet.”
At the end of our time together, the Parker Quartet recorded a performance of Beethoven’s opus 135 string quartet, 3rd movement which is here for your enjoyment:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG2d5jGSPOM
The quartet felt their performance at the end of residency was indeed inspired by our time together and that they had reached something new in the piece. Yellow Barn Artistic Director, Seth Knopp, shares the following after listening to the recording:
“On their final day together, Dr. Doucette was present in the studio as the Parker Quartet performed and recorded the last complete work Beethoven would compose, his string quartet opus 135, the same work they had recorded on their first day together. Although I have known and heard the Parkers perform for more than 2 decades, I was not prepared for what I felt as I listened to the performance they shared with me, one given after 4 days of exploring the principles and practices of Zero Balancing. They had not rehearsed as a quartet during those days, and listening I felt I had not heard quartet playing like this from any group. I found myself not measuring in judgement but rather listening as if hearing something for the first time. It seemed that the quartet was speaking something in a way that it had not been spoken before, its four players “showing” less, but reaching so deeply that they feel connected at the roots, somewhere beyond communication: simply a way of being.
Ian McEwen's beautiful passage from his novel, Saturday comes to mind:
There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they've ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything to others but lose nothing of yourself”.
Michele Doucette (www.drmicheledoucette.com ) is a chiropractor and Zero Balancing practitioner and teacher form Wilmington VT. She teaches introductory and advanced Zero Balancing curriculum to healthcare professionals. She currently serves as the chair of the Zero Balancing Health Association Board of Directors. She is the author of the Zero Balancing related memoir, Waking to Eden ( Waking to Eden )
Seth Knopp is Artistic Director of Yello Barn. He was a founding member of the Peabody Trio, recipient of the 1989 Naumburg Award, and has been the Artistic Director of Yellow Barn since 1998. During his tenure Yellow Barn has twice received the ASCAP/Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming. He is also the Artistic Director of Soundings: New Music at the Nasher, a critically acclaimed series of concerts at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas. His solo and chamber music performances can be heard on the Artek, Koch, and New World Records labels.
Jessica Bodner (Jessica Bodner) is violist with the Parker Quartet and is currently a faculty member of Harvard University’s Department of Music as Professor of the Practice in conjunction with the Parker Quartet’s appointment as Blodgett Quartet-in-Residence.