Excursions in orchestra

With the blog I send you, I want to share the experiences I have, the challenges I face, and the things that have special meaning for me.
Recently, I had one of these experiences that I would like to tell you about.

I was fortunate enough to meet and be warmly welcomed by the Xenia Ensemble Association. 
Xenia is a Turin-based organization that organizes chamber music concerts and brings together musicians of the highest international caliber. Every year, it also organizes courses for musicians of all ages who want to perfect their skills in a stimulating environment, with daily training and lessons with international teachers.

Playing, communicating with a musical instrument and with others, paying attention to oneself and to the whole ensemble requires such deep concentration and physical involvement that there is no longer any separation: one does not play an instrument, one becomes music.
Music has a profound effect on us and, fortunately, this has not been overlooked in the Xenia course curriculum.

Furthermore, high-level musicians focus heavily on technique and perfecting their positions and, as many of us do in our everyday lives, they forget about their bodies and ignore the warnings and symptoms they send us.
I had the opportunity to hold bodywork courses during the training week organized by Xenia in the mountains of Pracatinat with young talents from different countries around the world, and we worked together on paying attention to the body, breathing, and how performance anxiety and the constant tension to perform at our best create rigidity and tension that accumulate and become pain and fear so strong that it is sometimes experienced as panic.

I must admit that working with a group that was to come together in an orchestra of forty or more members or in ensembles of four people was really interesting.
Of course, working with groups is something I normally do when I teach my classes in Turin and when I teach professional training. But doing so with people who are already required to work together, to find a rapport in the dynamics, to blend their part with that of others, meant that the stimuli were greater, especially in the relationship between them.

Thanks to this, the connections that were created were useful for them as an orchestra, not just as individual musicians.

Through working with their bodies, they created new tools to listen to each other better, tools that can help them manage what happens in the dynamics of the group itself in a more direct and instinctive (less mental) way. 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank those who created the Xenia project, including Ms. Eilis Cranitch and Ms. Elizabeth Wilson, whom I had the honor of meeting personally in Pracatinat.

I would like to thank Mr. Daniel Llewellyn Roberts, artistic director, who invited me, supported me, and welcomed me in a wonderful way. He encouraged the musicians to expand their focus by including the body in music.

I would like to thank Clara Ruberti, musician, cellist, and person of great talent and heart, who put me in touch with Mr. Daniel Llewellyn Roberts and the Xenia project.

I would like to thank the teaching staff, internationally renowned musicians who, with the humility typical of people of value, put themselves on the line, participating in a workshop that I taught specifically for them, consulting me, asking me questions, and giving me valuable feedback on how they had used what they had learned to teach others.
Last but not least, I would like to thank Adeline de Bettignies, project manager at Xenia, and Giorgia Delorenzi, a key member of the Xenia staff, who looked after me and welcomed me in such a wonderful way.

To find out more: Founded in 1998 by Christine Anderson, Eilis Cranitch, Elizabeth Wilson, and in collaboration with Hugh and Tricia Maguire, Adrian Petcu, and Macha Yanouchevsky, the XENIA CHAMBER MUSIC COURSE...
www.xeniacourse.com