Monday, July 19, 2010

Zeller to Hold Body Mapping Workshop at Spivey Hall, July 21 to July 23

Clayton State University Director of Opera and Vocal Studies Dr. Kurt-Alexander Zeller will be the instructor at a three-day body mapping workshop for teachers and performers, to be held in the University’s world-famous Spivey Hall from July 21 to July 23.

“What Every Musician Needs to Know About the Body” will run from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. each day. The registration fee is $300. Teachers and performers who would like to register for the course may download and complete the Body Mapping Workshop registration form at www.spiveyhall.org/education/pdt and submit same to Spivey Hall. Or, they can register by phone at (678) 466-4491.

Topics for the workshop include; cultivating an accurate and adequate body map, the core of the body and its places of balance, and mapping the structures and movement of breathing. For more information on Body Mapping, go to the Andover Educators website at www.bodymap.org.

Zeller is a natural for the workshop, since he is one of three co-authors of a book on Body Mapping, a book that illustrates how a singer uses more than the larynx. “What Every Singer Needs to Know About the Body” (ISBN10: 1-59756-324-2, ISBN13: 978-1-59756-324-6) is an illustrated, 232-page soft cover practical resource published last year by San Diego-based Plural Publishing (http://www.pluralpublishing.com/), and authored by Dr. Melissa Malde, MaryJean Allen and Zeller.

“What Every Singer Needs to Know About the Body” gives singers and their teachers a resource – from anatomy and physiology to body awareness – that helps them discover and correct misconceptions about the way their bodies are built and the way they function. The illustrated part of the book provides maps with detailed descriptions of the structures and movement used in breathing, phonation, resonance, articulation and gesture. And, the illustrations are supported by many exploratory exercises.

“Body Mapping is an approach to teaching music that works well with students of all ages, although the primary audience of this particular workshop is music teachers, rather than music students,” says Zeller. “It’s suitable for musicians of all instruments and styles, because what we’re exploring is the basis for technique, not playing technique itself. Technique concerns itself with the choice and execution of particular movements to make particular sounds, but without an accurate and adequate understanding body map, or, as the neuroscientists prefer to call it, internal self-representation, it is impossible to move freely and efficiently and no technique is going to be able to be optimally effective.

“Each participant will be encouraged to apply the work in his or her own medium — at the moment we have singers, keyboard and woodwind players, and conductors among the registrants.”

Zeller recently returned from presenting three sessions on Body Mapping to the 51st National Conference of the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) in Salt Lake City. (http://www.registration123.com/nats/2010CONFERENCE/Program-Sessions.cfm)

“They went pretty well,” he says of the NATS presentation. “My publisher was there among the exhibitors and sold out of the stock they’d brought of the book by the second day. By the last day, they’d run out of order forms and were taking orders on hotel stationery.”

For more information on “What Every Singer Needs to Know About the Body,” go to http://www.pluralpublishing.com/publication_wesntkatb.htm.

A unit of the University System of Georgia, Clayton State University is an outstanding comprehensive metropolitan university located 15 miles southeast of downtown Atlanta.
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