Sunday, July 24, 2016

How to Breathe

How to Breathe
Tip
By MALIA WOLLAN JULY 22, 2016
“You don’t need special lungs or special techniques,” says Giora Feidman, 80, an Argentine-born Israeli clarinet player and klezmer musician who first blew into his father’s clarinet as a toddler. Feidman reckons the problem arises when people unlearn what they innately know. When you emerged from the womb, it’s very likely you instinctively drew oxygen deep into your lungs. You probably did not hunch over, draw your shoulders up to your ears or otherwise restrict your airflow.

Breathing is a powerful involuntary mechanism. Still, you can breathe better by acting purposefully and observing some basic rules. Don’t smoke. (“It really kills me to see that,” Feidman says.) Take as much as you want. (“Air doesn’t cost money. There is no tax!”) Go to the swimming pool or the sea: In water, you have to calculate how much to inhale to swim or dive underwater. Similarly, if you’re playing a particularly complex musical composition, like, say, the bass-clarinet part in Richard Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” you might have to take in an enormous quantity of air to make it to the end of a phrase.
Relax. Inhale deeply. Sit up straight. Appreciate your lungs. “When you know how to breathe, the word ‘stress’ is not in the dictionary,” Feidman says. This sentiment is, in fact, borne out in scientific studies showing that focused breathing exercises can reduce the symptoms of such things as stress, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, schizophrenia, insomnia and attention-deficit disorder. Playing a wind instrument is itself restorative. After enrolling in a wind-instrument program called Bronchial Boogie, asthmatic British children exhibited a 70 percent decrease in nighttime symptoms and a 58 percent decrease in daytime ones.

Breathing allows you to sing, and for Feidman the human body is, at its core, “an instrument of song.” (Children, he says, are born wordlessly imploring their mothers to sing to them.) To find the song inside you requires trusting and believing in yourself. “My clarinet teacher once said to me, ‘I cannot teach you, you must learn,’ ” Feidman says. “It is that way with breathing too.”

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