Jennifer Johnson
How Body Mapping Transforms the Way We Play and Live
This link brings you to the complete show notes for the episode as well as the podcast and video.
Jennifer Johnson:
And that was just absolutely, it was so revelatory for me that when she said that, I remember just sitting there and feeling the tears, just the heat come to my face and the tears just start streaming down because 20 something years, I'd been in pain trying to play a violin, and it was because I hadn't grasped that basic anatomical fact of the whole arm moving as a unit.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. This week’s episode is a personal one for me, since Jennifer Johnson has been helping me gain more ease and comfort in violin playing and living in general. An understanding of Body Mapping will help you whether you play an instrument, sing, or simply go about your daily life. Jennifer Johnson is a violinist, film maker, and the author of several books including “What Every Violnist Needs to Know About the Body”. She’s an internationally sought-after Master Teacher and Teacher Trainer in Body Mapping and is renowned for her expertise in helping musicians to move according to the design of their bodies to prevent playing injuries and promote ease.I also wanted to shine a light on Jennifer’s film Music, Movement & Transformation: The Body Mapping Story, which is partly a beautiful tribute to her inspiring mentor Barbara Conable; the link to rent the film is in the show notes. I’m sure you’ll find this conversation with Jennifer is full of actionable tips and insights to help you, including some of the best advice about dealing with stage fright that I’ve ever heard. Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on many podcast platforms, and I’ve also linked the transcript.It’s a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the show notes of this episode, where you’ll find all the links! Hey, Jennifer, thanks so much for joining me here today.
Jennifer Johnson:
Nice to see you, Leah. Happy to be here.
Leah Roseman:
It's really nice because just out of circumstances, I needed your help as a violinist, and so I've met with you separately from this project of interviewing you. So I feel like I have a lot more insight into Body Mapping. So we're really going to get into Body Mapping and how you got into it and the story of Barbara Conable. But I think before that people should get to know you as a musician and what led you to this point. And I think maybe even later in this conversation, it'd be nice to get into a string quartet career because a whole other strand of your life that you could speak to. But for now, maybe just how you got to be a member of the Atlantic String Quartet and what led you to find Body Mapping.
Jennifer Johnson:
Yeah, I was kind of injured from the time I was really young. I didn't actually ever have to stop playing until I was with the Atlantic String Quartet, which was in my late twenties. But I was having tensions and pains that we were seeking out chiropractors for probably as early as age 12. So it had kind of been a backdrop to my being a musician for almost as long as I could remember on a fairly low level. And then when I joined the quartet, which was in, let's see, 1993, I went to St. John's, Newfoundland to play with them and was supposed to just go for one year and ended up being there for 31 years. But I think I played for about two years before I had a really major injury and they brought somebody in to sub for me for about six months, and I took some time off and I worked with a physio, and I got well enough that I could go back to playing again, but it was still always just niggling there in the background.
And so finally, gosh, 10 years later, after having had several years of wonderful Alexander Technique lessons with the visiting teacher, I just decided, I remember the moment just lying on the floor doing some floor work, thinking to myself, I've got to take a sabbatical and I'm going to go study this and I'm going to figure this out once and for all. So that was 2004, and I got some funding. I took a sabbatical. I mostly was in Europe studying with Alexander technique teachers who solely worked with musicians and who were musicians themselves. And it helped tremendously. It was just an amazing experience to have at lessons almost every day for a straight six, seven months. But because we didn't have an Alexander teacher living in St. John's at the time, I was nearing the end of the sabbatical and thinking to myself, I feel great after lessons, but I go back to play the violin and I'm still doing something that's causing the old tensions, the old flare ups, and I just hadn't figured out what it was yet.
So somewhere in that period, nearing the end of the sabbatical, one of the teachers said to me, "you have to meet Barbara Conable. You haven't read any of her books yet?" And I said, "no, what's she doing?" And he said, "well, she's an Alexander teacher in the States, but she has started this thing called Body Mapping for musicians." And so he lent me his copy of her first book, and I just completely fell in love with it. And at the point I was just within the first few pages, I decided I needed to find her. So I changed my flight plans back home, and I ended up booking a week long workshop with her in New Jersey, and that was kind of life changing. So that's how I initially met her and just saw how clearly she had thought out, basically taken everything that Alexander had discovered and made it very instrument specific for musicians and also injury specific. So every injury that she had seen in the last 20 years working with musicians as an AT teacher, she had fleshed out and written down and said, this is what it looks like. This is what it feels like. This is what the movement is that people are usually doing when they feel these things. And this is how you're going to retrain your movement so that it is more closely aligned with your anatomical design.
Leah Roseman:
Certainly my experience of Alexander, so to be fair, it was many years ago. It was 23 years ago, but I did a year of pretty much weekly lessons. So I took it very seriously. I read tons of books. It did help me a lot, but there was a vagueness to it. And what I feel with Body Mapping is perhaps it came from Alexander, but it doesn't feel to me anything like Alexander technique.
Jennifer Johnson:
Yeah, I mean, the major difference is that we don't, as Body Mapping educators, we don't use our hands very much. Barbara used to kind of joke and say, well, Body Mapping can work without it. You just work socratically with the student. You ask them lots of questions about what they're feeling and you get their kinesthetic feedback and you use anatomical models to show people what their design is, and you don't really need to use your hands. But then she would kind of joke and say, but you could use your hands in that music teachery sort of way if that's what you're used to doing as a music instructor. So many of us still do. We will guide an arm, but it's not the same kind of that three year training that Alexander teachers have to really, really sense what's going on under their hands. We don't do that because we feel we don't need to with this great information.
But I think that's part of the vagueness that you're describing about Alexander technique that many people report. You're not alone on that is just that you feel great after something's working. Your teachers knows what they're talking about and they're really helping you. But it's that independence that we kind of hunger for back in the practice room again with the violin. And I don't really know, I mean, I can give those directions that Alexander talked about, the neck free, the head forward and up, and it does help, especially if I'm practicing that every day on the floor. But in my case, it was an issue with the right shoulder that had come from a kind of not very good pedagogy about getting my shoulder down. So I was just yanking down on it and then trying to do all of this up stuff, trying to get to the frog and getting to the G-string, and I was fighting within my own, and I couldn't really figure out what part of that Alexander technique lesson that made me feel so good would directly help that when I was playing the violin.
So it did feel like I needed to get deeper and I needed to get more specific into actual joints, and I needed to understand it from an anatomical point of view, just I think to feel motivated to keep at it when it was too vague. I sometimes would shirk what I was supposed to be doing. I wouldn't do the at work on the floor every day, and I wouldn't really know if it was working or not. So those are two of the differences. It's not in any way to rain on the Alexander parade because man, oh man, did it ever save my bacon. And it has helped just thousands of people. It's a wonderful technique, but some of us, I think, who are more literal in our thinking, really need that extra boost of information.
Leah Roseman:
So when you were playing a lot in the quartet and also in the orchestra there, it wasn't just pain, right? Jennifer? You felt a sense of limitation?
Jennifer Johnson:
Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah. I mean, I could give you a list a mile long of the technical limitations that I felt. I mean, obviously I was playing at a professional level, sounded pretty good. It's just that I had learned how to sound pretty good, but I didn't feel very good. So things were tight. I'd found workarounds for things like vibrato, and spiccato, but I would always get quite nervous in a concert if my big spiccato moment was coming up in the second violin part, because it didn't feel free and easy. And so it becomes very distracting. It takes away from your musical intention and your nonverbal communication with your quartet mates when your brain is consumed with the fact that this passage is coming up and it never has actually felt easy, even in a practice room.
Leah Roseman:
So if we can get into Body Mapping, so one thing you write is that "the muscles will release to allow this new length", which is something I've been feeling. And a couple things I've been thinking about, which are maybe some common mismappings is the length of the collarbone, how long it is, and I've really been thinking about that one. And also the structure of the thumb. It's been literally feeling longer since I've been thinking about this stuff.
Jennifer Johnson:
Good. Wonderful. Yes. The brain, as we all know, is an amazing thing. And when people have a misconception about the size, the shape, the function of a particular bone in their body, the brain kind of weirdly, we'll try to make it so. So it's a little bit, I mean, Barbara used to have this term, a fantasy joint, meaning that if we think that we're, well, you use the example of that third skin crease down the finger, that if everybody counts down from the tip of their finger, they've got 1, 2, 3 skin creases. And the first upper two skin creases are definitely joints, but the third skin crease is just a skin crease. It's in the middle of a bone and the actual joint, isn't it, for another inch down into the top of the palm. So that third skin crease Barbara would call a fantasy joint, and if you believe it for whatever reason, maybe somebody told you that's where it was or that's where you should bend from. Maybe it's just because you've been looking at it for all of these years and assuming that it's like the other two, the brain will try to find a way to make it look as if you're moving from there.
And because it's in the middle of the bone, boy oh boy, it means that you're going to have a lot of unnecessary muscular work going on and fighting each other, trying to make something happen that just isn't true.
Leah Roseman:
For me, the fourth finger, it literally feels so much longer now that I'm feeling it from where it truly is. So what are the most common mismappings you run across?
Jennifer Johnson:
Yeah. Well, it depends on what instrument you're dealing with. They're kind of groupings of common mismappings for each. Now everybody, even if you're not a musician, shares a lot of them. So maybe I'll start with those that are just universal, but certainly singers, for instance, a really common mismapping for them would be from this kind of strange pedagogy about breathing into the belly or like Barbara used to joke. I mean, if you had air in your belly, you would die. That is also a fantasy. Yes, there's movement there, but it's actually the diaphragmatic movement, et cetera, et cetera. So that's a common mismapping the singers deal with, whereas the one that I just outlined about the hand is a really good example of a common mismapping for upper string players because they are looking down at the palm of their left hand all the time.
So having said that, it depends a little bit on your instrument. Probably the most common mismapping that everybody in our world today is where the top of the spine is because we live our lives with computers in front of us, and if we're a musician, music stands in front of us and an instrument in front of us, I mean, very few people are playing their instrument behind them. I can only think of a few instances where a drummer, a drum kit might have to reach behind to. So almost everything is in front, and that really tends to lead the head into poking forward, which then makes us feel as if the fantasy joint is somewhere here as if the top of the spine is ending here, or sometimes ending right under where the jawline is instead of ending, where it actually is, where the very top of it is, is right between the ear lobes.
So those top seven cervical, the neck vertebrae, they come very, very, very high in order to meet where the true base of the skull is, which is not the bottom of the jaw. The jaw's a separate bone, the base of the skull is where the upper teeth come around. And if you take fingers and come from the upper teeth and trace a line and come right behind the ear lobes and then carry on, you will find out that that is indeed the base of your skull at the back. Understanding that in order to move ahead to look down at something, the primary moving joint is up there between the ears and major joints of the body are much better designed to have repetitive long-term movement coming from them than tiny, tiny little joints like what we have that comprise a spine. And so the result of chronically moving your head from much lower down than where the major joint is, is that the neck muscles have to grip like crazy in order to hang on to a head that is no longer balanced up on top of a spine, but is now being dragged forward in space because they're trying, the individual is trying to move from someplace that is too low, and the head is extremely heavy, the head is 10 to 15 pounds.
And so if you are hanging onto something that is not balanced, then you can bet that those neck and upper trapped muscles are going to be chronically overworked and complaining. And that was actually part of, that was my very first injury when I was 12. That's what we were seeking help for because I played that violin with that head poked so far forward.
Leah Roseman:
And most people in society have a phone addiction.
Jennifer Johnson:
That's right.
Leah Roseman:
And it really causes their head to be poked forward a lot of the day,
Jennifer Johnson:
A lot of the day. And there are ways to learn how to do that just by rotating from the top of the spine. And the head is still balanced, is still being supported by the bony structure instead of by just all that muscle.
Leah Roseman:
So do you have any stories you could share when you're obviously hiding any personal identifying information about any transformations you've observed?
Jennifer Johnson:
Yes. So there was a violist I worked with who really springs to mind because she came to me to have some lessons about a year after she had already completely independently fixed her injury. Just from reading my book, "What Every Violinist Needs to know about the Body", it's really rare that you get somebody who just from reading is able to completely transform. We write it all down because we want the information to be there. But it was so exciting to me to meet her and have her come and work with me on other things, but for her to share the story with me that "I read your book, I read this chapter about how I needed to rotate my arm, and within a few days, it completely freed up my whole left arm and this injury that I'd had for over 20 years was suddenly much better". So yes, that one really springs to mind. She was very, very quick.
Other ones that spring to mind, a pianist I worked with who had, she was just a fabulous pianist. It was studying at one of the great schools in the world, but had terrible, terrible performance anxiety before going to do, she was doing a lot of competition work. And so she came to me to deal with this, and there was definitely tension in her body that we addressed. But one of the things that I love about what Barbara has given us is that we also work with not just freeing the body, but also freeing the quality of awareness because one can't live without the other. If we're a real concentrator, I was for instance, the more you narrow your awareness down, the more the muscles in the body start to contract and shorten. And so that working with this pianist was really, really, it was remarkable to watch how quickly also she was able to go from somebody who played just completely kind of hunched over the keys, really played beautifully, but there was tension there, and she was concentrating solely on her hands and then to work with her and be able to kind of open up the world at round her so that she only was looking at her hands when she needed information from them and for her to be able to discern when she didn't need information from them and she could rely on maybe just her tactile sense and then was able to open her visual sense up and have that freedom of moving ahead and free her neck muscles.
And so this dance, this choreography of how we're going to use our awareness for our musical intention, and boy, a year, it was about a year of working with her and a year later, the footage that we had taken of the before and after it was unrecognizable. She was just such a different player and her tone deepened, and as it often does when people stop concentrating hard,
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, the open focus is something I'm always working on. And certainly from my Alexander work, that peripheral awareness and inviting the audience in really helped me a lot.
Jennifer Johnson:
Yeah. Yes. That was also something for me, it was just essential working with Barbara, she wrote a really wonderful article about this called "What to Do About Performance Anxiety". But one of the main things that I took away from her teaching and from that article is that not only do we lose out, but the audience also loses out if we're concentrating because they basically feel shut out in ways almost as if there's a glass wall between us and the audience. We were taught some things like that. Some of us were told in music school to, if we were nervous, then either pretend the audience wasn't there or I don't pretend all sorts of things to try to alleviate it. And none of that worked for me anyway. So what I really needed to do was to learn how to allow them to be in the space and welcome them into the space, but not make them the primary focus of my attention.
I had to learn how to prioritize my attention so that I could feel like I was in control of where I was going to let my attention float to next. It wasn't always just going to be on my spiccato or my vibrato or on this hard passage coming up, or that the cello was rushing in the quartet. It was going to be this nicely floating awareness that had this much, much wider periphery. And somewhere at the very, very outside of that periphery, the audience was there and welcome to be there. And since I learned this from a performer's perspective, now when I sit in an audience as an audience member, it is remarkable what a difference it makes if you go looking for it. You can really tell if the performers are mentally welcoming you in and are aware of you and want you to be there, or if they're trying to shut down so that they can just do their job and not get too nervous.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, yeah. Now we're going to talk about your film "Music, Movement and Transformation". In that film you talked about, you actually had anger around the teaching you'd received, you felt like misled. You allude to this in the film. I'm wondering if you'd be willing to go into a little more detail about your feelings around that.
Jennifer Johnson:
Sure. I'm not sure actually that the anger came out until I started the Body Mapping work and started realizing that it could feel so much easier. And then I've heard this from many people who, many students who've come to me in the Body Mapping work too, once you realize it could have felt that way for the last 25 years than the anger surfaces because you feel like, oh, why did I slog so hard and why wasn't anybody able to tell me this sooner? You spend as a string player, I mean, most of us start when we're very young and we spend our entire lives practicing every day for the most part, and we're dedicated because we love it and we want to be better, and we pay people a lot of money to teach us. And it just seems like, why didn't they teach me this for all of those years and all of that money? Why couldn't somebody tell me the information I needed for this to feel easy and good? And I mean, the answer is that the information just wasn't there yet. I mean, really, Barbara was such a pioneer in providing that specifically into music pedagogy. It is useful for everybody on the planet, whether you're a musician or not, but getting it into music pedagogy and into instrument specific writings about it has been just huge, and it has alleviated a lot of, I think the next generation won't be carrying so much anger about being misled.
Leah Roseman:
I wonder if it's connected to kind of a grieving you were sad for yourself.
Jennifer Johnson:
Yes. Yep. It was absolutely that you feel like you missed 25 years of joy.
Leah Roseman:
So just I think we've worked together maybe three or four times on my playing and just it opened things up that have stayed open. It's been like magic for certain elements of my left hand and arm that I've been struggling with and I've been compensating for, and I've been a professional musician for, I dunno, 35 years or something, and playing violin for over 50 and certain things never felt easy, and I had a very famous teacher and did a lot of great things for me. But it's true. Some things it would be every lesson. It would be like, "get your shoulder down", this sort of thing. That wasn't even what you were helping me with so much, but that is an element of what I certainly heard.
Let's get into the film, which I was able to preview because at the point that we're recording this, it hasn't yet been premiered in Canada, although you had a very exciting premiere in New York. Do you want to tell us about that premiere experience?
Jennifer Johnson:
Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Well, the whole process has been exciting. I'll just preface it by saying that because I am a first time filmmaker, and it was three years of a really steep learning curve. So yes, the culmination of all of that kind of new learning and just seeing this project come to fruition that I never dreamed I'd be able to actually do until I did the culmination of that in New York. That was on, let's see, April 3rd of this year, of 2025, and we were at the National Opera Center and in just a beautiful small room and the screening and the room was full, we had a complete full audience, and many of my colleagues came, many of my Body Mapping colleagues were there, and certainly all the people who had supported the film project financially and every other way, they were all there. And it was the first, I mean, I'd seen the film probably over 150 times at that point through all the editing process, but just be able to stand at the back of the hall and just see an audience and watch them respond. I was thrilled that everybody laughed in the right places and everybody felt sad in the right places, and I think we achieved what we set out to do by telling this story about Barbara and about Body Mapping.
Leah Roseman:
And you had a discussion with the moderator?
Jennifer Johnson:
Yes, yes. I had invited Noa Kageyama to come and moderate a panel, so the panel included myself and a few other people. There was a Julliard faculty member who came on and talked about how body mapping had helped her, and we had a colleague of mine from the Association for Body Mapping Education come on and just kind of talk about how we're going to disseminate it, what the vision for that is. So Noa was, since he has this wonderful Bulletproof Musician podcast, he's very used to kind of doing this kind of thing. And so he was really wonderful and magical and kind of bringing the evening together at the very end. And then the audience, he opened the floor for audience questions, and we were kind of planning on maybe nobody, everybody being shy, but it just opened up. Everybody had questions. In fact, we had to cut them off in order to wrap up. So that was exciting that there was that much interest generated by the film.
Leah Roseman:
And one of the prominent musicians featured in the film is actually Nathan Cole, who a lot of people in the classical world will know who he is.
Jennifer Johnson:
He's been a marvelous support of Body Mapping. The, I think that began during COVID, one of the online teaching platforms that he runs, he'd invited me on, and then I just became a regular teaching guest three or four times a year. I would go and work with his online students, and he would often come, and if he couldn't be there, then he would watch the videos after. And yeah, he was quite excited because he could see things changing. Even he was playing at this unbelievably high beautiful level. I mean, what a player, but he was feeling things free up. And we had one particular moment right before he did the Boston Concertmaster audition, which he won. And yeah, I won't go into private details about him, but certainly he had a moment where something really clicked for him, and he felt more freedom, and he felt more confidence about not fatiguing during that long audition process. And so he was quite hooked at that point and agreed to be in the film.
Leah Roseman:
Now, in terms of the film itself, so Murat worked with you. Do you want to talk about him and
Jennifer Johnson:
Yes. Yeah, Murat did just an enormous amount of work. He is a friend that went back, I dunno, 30 something years. We knew each other a little bit through mutual friends. And then I think right before I did my European sabbatical, I think in 2003, I flew to New York, which is where Murat lives. I flew to New York to see one of the teachers that I was wanting to study with in Paris while I was on this European sabbatical. And I didn't have any other friends living in New York at that point. I knew Murat was living in Manhattan. And so I got his number from our mutual friend. And so I think that was the last time I'd seen him. He let me stay there a couple of nights while I was having lessons with Pedro de Alcantara.
And so fast forward to whatever that was. Let's see, 2020, 22, when I decided to make this film, he was the first person I called, so I picked up the phone, and because he was a filmmaker, then when I knew him, he was actually just teaching music history at Columbia University. But he had kind of gone back to his first love, which was photography and filmmaking by this point. And I knew that I had to have somebody to do the filming of Barbara. She's in New Haven, Connecticut. So just a bit over an hour away from Manhattan. And I knew I was not going to have a budget to bring my Newfoundland filmmakers down, a whole crew. So this was my workaround, and it just turned out to be an amazing workaround because Murat not only came and filmed those interviews with Barbara, he then the next year filmed kind of a tribute lunch we did for Barbara in New Haven.
And then he just continued to help me right up to the night, the night of the premiere in New York. He was backstage actually running the screening of the film while I was out in the hall. So yeah, he was a tremendous support. There were a couple of people like that who just, the project would not have happened without them. The other one is Duane Andrews, who shows up in the film. He's a guitarist, but he also wrote the entire original score. And he was the first person who said to me during a lesson in St. John's over three years ago, he said to me, oh, yeah, you want to make a film? I can help you do that.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. And Murat, how do you pronounce his last name?
Jennifer Johnson:
Eyuboglu
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Jennifer Johnson:
I always have to think twice about that. Murat Eyuboglu
Leah Roseman:
Okay. Yeah, yeah. Duane's music is really good, and I'd certainly heard of him. And so he had worked with you to help with his own playing as well?
Jennifer Johnson:
Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, Duane had been injured and just ate the information up. I mean, sometimes you get people who'd come for lessons once a week for a couple of years, and they make progress. But then there's people like Duane who just really only need a few lessons, and he was just reading the books left and center and just gobbling them up and coming back and reporting what new mis mappings he'd uncovered since the previous week. And so he was really, really keen and supportive. And he was one of those people who I think the moment before I told him about my film idea, Duane had said to me, "gosh, why don't they teach this in music school?" And I said, yeah, I know. I really want to make a film about this. So just so we can get the word out a little bit more so that music schools know more about it and maybe they can play this film in music schools at the beginning of the year for all the students so they know what the resources are.
And that's how that conversation began. And at that point, I had only known Duane as a jazz guitarist, and I knew he composed, he'd written some pieces for the Newfoundland Symphony Orchestra and the quartet we'd played. But when he said to me, oh, I can help you make a film. And I looked at him, I said, how can you help me do that? And he said, oh, I'm a film score composer. That's what I do. That's my main bread and butter. So at that point, he immediately came on instantly as my score composer, but also my sound engineer and just the person who introduced me to the entire film industry, the whole community in St. John's, which I needed partly for funding, partly for getting consulting, partly for finding the right filmmakers and the right editors. So Duane was absolutely instrumental in getting this project off the ground.
Leah Roseman:
So working with Duane for the music that was used in the film, can you just describe that process?
Jennifer Johnson:
Oh, yeah. That was just so incredibly fun. It was one of the most fun parts of making the whole film. It was only an hour and a half or two hours, and we had all of the rest of the score fleshed out with music, the Beethoven Quartet, and the Debussy is in there, but the bits that had no music yet, we would sit together and he would say, okay, just give me some words. Just tell me what kind of words, the emotion that you want evoked here. Just lobbed words at me. And so I would throw a bunch of words at him, and then he would throw some more back with kind of a question mark, and I'd go, oh, yeah, maybe that is a little closer to what I mean. And we would just refine this thing until he had some notes made about the words that we thought best described, the emotion, the intent of that little clip. And he would go home and he would write this music, and he's just so good at it. He's so good at taking a verbal description and turning it into beautiful sound. And the other thing that Duane was able to do was to kind of say, is there another piece of music that you, if we'd got the rights to it, what would you have wanted to use here? And I could say, I woke up one morning and I was thinking of a particular clip that we didn't have music for yet, and I had the Moonlight Sonata running through my head with it. And so I just quickly shot him an email and said, yeah, I'm thinking like Moonlight Sonata here. And within a day he had something written that was, nobody else would know that that's where the inspiration came from, but the emotional content of that he was able to capture in original music, it was so fun. It was so fun to see him work that way. Really educational for me.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful. Let's talk a little bit about the worldwide community of Body Mapping.
Jennifer Johnson:
Yes, absolutely.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a really quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes I’ve linked directly to this one, which I think may interest you, with Madeline Bruser, Julie Lyonn Lieberman, Jennifer Roig Francoli, and Hillary Simms. In the show notes you’ll also find a link to sign up for my newsletter, where you’ll get exclusive information about upcoming guests, a link for my Ko-fi page to support this project directly, where you can buy me one coffee, or every month, and my podcast merchandise store with a design commissioned from artist Steffi Kelly. You can also review this podcast, share it with your friends, and follow on your podcast app, YouTube, and social media. All this helps spread the word! Thanks. Now back to my conversation with Jennifer!
Jennifer Johnson:
It began, let's see, Barbara really started teaching it. She was in Columbus, Ohio when she started teaching it. And she and her then husband Bill Conable were, I'm trying to think. I think when she wrote her first book, it was the early nineties, so they were already developing it through the eighties. And from about that point when she started it to when I joined in 2004, and then I licensed in 2005, it was almost entirely US citizens. It had spread not as quickly as she wanted, but it had spread certainly. And she had formed an organization, and it was already an official group, but I think there were only maybe 40 people in the world who were licensed at that point. And that included a handful of people in Japan, because before Barbara retired in 2005, she had trained a couple of people in Japan and they were passing it on.
So it was basically Japan and the US. And then I, I think there had been a Canadian who had trained before me, but I'm not sure that she had licensed and she had since retired and wasn't teaching anymore. So when I came along, I was kind of really the first Canadian to take it and to start developing it in Canada. So that was 2005. And then I have to say, not much happened. I mean, there were several other Canadians. I think there's 11 of us now who are licensed in Canada, but not much happened until COVID. And then of course, during COVID, when musicians had very little to do and were looking to do other things besides baking sourdough bread, they started hopping online. And because I had been hired by a few different online platforms early on in COVID, one of them being The Exhale, a wonderful musicians platform that was run out of Switzerland, that had a lot to do with musicians health.
It was other things too, but musicians health had a high priority on it. So I taught regularly there for at least three years, I don't know, four or five times a year. And because it was based out of Switzerland, I guess her audience was mostly Europeans. And so at that point, Europe just opened up for Body Mapping. We ended up, there's a huge hub now in Dublin, and there's a hub starting in Glasgow, pre COVID. There were two that I know of two people trained in London. Let's see where else. We've got people in France. We've got people in Italy and Switzerland and Germany. So just in a matter of the last five years, it's kind of exploded. We also have a really good hub starting in Australia and also South Africa, and I think China as well, although I think we only have one person trained there so far. So it is starting, and as I said, my hope is that the film will take it farther again.
Leah Roseman:
And in terms of your day-to-day life, you do a lot of one-on-one online teaching with people around the world.
Jennifer Johnson:
That's right,
Leah Roseman:
Yes.
Jennifer Johnson:
I recently moved to Ottawa from Newfoundland, and that's part of the reason why I could do that. I'm portable. I can take my studio with me for the most part because yes, at this point, I would say probably 80% of my teaching is online with people around the world.
Leah Roseman:
So I have on hand, I have three of your books here. So I have "Musician Heal Thyself" for your shoulder region, and I have the teaching Body Mapping to children, which is very interesting to read. And I also have What Every Violinist Needs to Know book. I think there's a fourth book though, isn't there?
Jennifer Johnson:
There's a fourth book that I'm presently writing, but it hasn't been published yet. Yeah, I'm doing a breathing for string players book.
Leah Roseman:
Oh, okay. Yeah. The little bit of work we did together on breathing where you alerted me to the fact that our lungs actually and above our collarbone.
Jennifer Johnson:
Collarbones. Yeah,
Leah Roseman:
That really was very interesting. I've been thinking about that a lot.
Jennifer Johnson:
Yeah, and it's interesting, isn't it, as string players how little was said to us in music school about breathing. We tend to think, oh, well, that's for singers and win players. We don't need to know about that. But as you say, as soon as we understand something like that, something structural, that the lung comes up above the collarbone, which means that's going to change how I use my arms and how I use my collarbone, and therefore where the violin rests and just this, you can't separate them out. Breathing is equally important to us. And I think in some ways, what this book is about really is about how we need to be able to use our breath to phrase just as much as a singer needs to know how to use their breath to phrase.
Leah Roseman:
And in terms of wider applications, like we talked a little bit about phone and computer, and I think stage fright, I mean, a lot of people struggle with public speaking and all kinds of jobs. Something you talk about is backward walking, which I ran into on a really popular podcast with, I forget the guy's name, but he's somebody who works with athletes at the highest level. And this is his big thing is that you do backward walking.
Jennifer Johnson:
Oh, good. I'm glad to hear that. I'm actually thrilled to hear that I been doing that. I mean, that was an Alexander teacher who showed me that many, many years ago. And it wasn't until I kind of married it together with some information that I got from Pedro de Alcantara, another at teacher, the fellow I went to Paris to study with, kind of brought together those two, and it suddenly really made sense what was going on. And then of course, Barbara's input about the spine. So all of those things percolated and I realized how powerful it was. And then about, I don't know, five or six years after I'd been teaching backwards walking as a way to release some of the lower back muscles. That's the primary way we use it. I read this fabulous book about a friendship between George Bernard Shaw and the most unlikely kind of company that you might imagine during Victorian times that he might've been keeping was the Gene Tunney was, I think it was the 1926 heavyweight boxing champion of the world. So it was a story written by Gene Tunney's son about his father's career, but also how he became very close with Shaw. And in the early chapters, it tells this story about Gene Tunney, poor Irishman from New York while he was a New Yorker, but Irish descent, no money, no money to hire a coach or a gym. So he was training in this friend's hut up in the mountains in Maine, I think it was. And he would run five miles through the woods every day, but he ran it backwards through the woods. So it kind of tells you that it's not a new discovery, this idea that we tend to be so front oriented that everything is in front of us, we're always moving forwards, but I don't know anybody who moves backwards through space in the same imbalanced way that many people move forwards through space. So it's, this cancels out a lot of the habits that we tend to take into shoving ourselves forward and arching in the lower spine. Nobody will walk backwards that way. It feels dangerous. So the brain just kind of undoes some of that holding first and brings the bones more naturally on balance, and then we move backwards. So that's really exciting to hear that you're hearing this now that elite athletes are starting to use it,
Leah Roseman:
Some of the top triathletes in the world. Yeah. Would it be useful to talk briefly about the six places of balance for people?
Jennifer Johnson:
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I can definitely do a rundown on those. One of the first things that Barbara developed before we kind of started talking about going into movement at the major joints of the body and then going into movement at a musical instrument at those joints, she really wanted to establish where resting places are at the major joints of the body that just hold us up. How do we stay upright with the least amount of muscular effort? And of course, that comes from her training as an Alexander teacher, the sense of it in a person's body. But she elucidated very clearly what was actually happening at those major joints. So she kind of gave us this figure. I should mention that early on, the anatomical drawings were being done by her son, Ben Conable. So she had access to an artist in the family, which was very useful. So he drew this profile a figure of a human with the bare bones, so to speak, drawn in. And she went on to identify that we had six major places where we balance the weight of the entire body, one over top of the other. So the first place of balance is where something I alluded to earlier where the base of the skull sits on the top of the spine, and we usually start from the top up because of course, if that 15 pound head is off balance, none of the other five places of balance underneath it have hope.
Leah Roseman:
It occurs to me that although most people are listening to the audio format, that certainly the reels I put out to promote the episode are visual. A lot people see those. So maybe if you want to grab your.
Jennifer Johnson:
Okay, super. I'll do it with some models then. So that very first place of balance is where the base of the skull is sitting on top of the spine, and this little piece of bone here is meant to represent the back of the base of the skull. So of course, the front nose would be over here where my knuckle is on my hand. And so point of balance or place of balance, number one is right there where that skull is sitting way up, there's the ear hole and there's the AO joint. And then the second place of balance is where the arm structure, this guy is missing a collarbone, but he will do where the arm structure balances over the torso. And then the third place of balance is where all of that weight, including all of your viscera and your innards, are going to be balancing over the third place of balance, which is we call the lumbar core.
So where the weight comes down and delivers into the front half of the spine. So I'll just, before I number all six of them, I'll just take a little segue here. Excuse me. My cat has just come into the room. And so before I carry on to the bottom three places of balance, I'll just say something a little bit more about this amazing structure I have here in my hands, because if we're going to balance our weight through it and be supported by a spine, we need to understand that there is a back half, which is the pokey bit that we feel when we reach behind to look for our spine back there. The front part we forget about because we can't feel it very often. There is an area up here where you can feel a little bit of bone up in this region, but this half has these beautiful little squishy cushions between every single bone, whereas the back half, if I pull that apart in the back half, there is no cushion between the back half of the spine. So the front half is this wonderful area of cushioned pillowed support that we can send weight down through. Whereas if we're arching or trying to sit up straight or have good posture, something where there's a big arch in the lower spine, we end up having no cushions between the bones there and possibly risk damaging the spinal cord, which lives in that back half.
So the reason that we call the third place of balance the lumbar core is that we really want to get all of the weight of the head, the ribs, the arms, the internals balancing above, not the back half, but the front half of the spine. And that is what backwards walking does for us. When we backwards walk, we end up having weight delivering down in the back half of the spine. We take a step backwards and everything shifts in order to get it into that front half. So to carry on in numbering the places of balance. The fourth place of balance is the hip joint and understanding exactly where that is because many people have it mapped as the top of the pelvis. People say, put your hands on your hips. And so people often think of this as being their hip, but the hip is actually the hip joint, which is much, much many, many inches lower.
And I don't have a full leg here, but the next fifth place of balance is the knee joint, which as we know, many musicians end up either locking back or bending into a locked kind of bent place because they were told not to lock their knees back. So that's another kind of lack of balance. And then the fifth place of balance is the ankle joint where people frequently get mapped with which of the two lower leg bones they should be delivering through. People who get really sore heels when they stand, or really tired calf muscles when they stand, it's often because the weight is coming down the back of the leg. If they're doing that arching and the lower spine and that holding, it's very likely the weight is going to go down the back and into the floor through the heel bone, and then it becomes bruised or tender.
And so understanding that the weight is actually delivering into the top of the foot through the shin bone at the front is incredibly helpful. And not just helpful, but essential before we can start talking about moving and moving the arms and having a free bow stroke. If we don't have some of that foundation working, there will be compensations that will be yanking down on the arms or restricting our breath in our breathing. So in all of her incredible innate wisdom, Barbara figured out that was the first thing we had to deal with was just getting people standing and sitting in more balanced ways. We're not looking for a position because that would put us back into holding and trying to hang on to something. But we are looking for these places where the bones can just be poised over the next one down, which means that the muscles can let go. I can say more about muscles later if you want to get into it. There's more detail there about the superficial muscles and the deep support muscles. But for now, that's a pretty good outline of the six places of balance.
Leah Roseman:
And in the film, I believe he's a physiologist who's an amateur musician who had helped her stress the importance of the humero-scapular rhythm.
Jennifer Johnson:
Yes. Yep, that's right. And then if you look at it in medical textbooks, you will see it called other things. You will probably see it called scapulo humeral rhythm. But again, Barbara, as an amazing pedagogue realized because the way it was explained to her by Dr. Richard Nichols, who you're remembering from the film, they had been studying this in animals and cats, and he had taken Barbara into the lab to look at how the cats were moving, and she drew the parallels. At any rate, the idea being that if we're going to move an arm, we have to include, obviously there's a ball and a socket involved in an arm, but many, many people have this notion that the socket is something like this fantasy claw at the side of the body instead of understanding that it's actually built right into the scapula itself. So the shoulder blade is the socket and anybody who has ever been told that they need to hold their shoulder down or get their shoulder down, and then they're trying to take the rest of the arm up and forward, well, that was my original injury, that's where you're going to be straining, and those two bones are going to be yanked away from each other. So the humero-scapular rhythm was huge for my healing to understand that if I had to go to the G-string at the frog, I had to do a lot as a second violinist. That whole socket was going to have to be able to allow it to be followed the ball. And for it to follow the ball, it means that there has to be movement from the actual collarbone in the front because the whole thing is a part of the arm. And that was just absolutely, it was so revelatory for me that when she said that, I remember just sitting there and feeling the tears, just the heat come to my face and the tears just starts streaming down because 20 something years, I'd been in pain trying to play a violin, and it was because I hadn't grasped that basic anatomical fact of the whole arm moving as a unit. So back to the terminology, humero-scapular movement means that the humorus goes first. We call it name it first humerus, of course, being your upper arm bone. And if it has to go somewhere, then we want like a train leading a caboose. We want the shoulder blade to just simply follow. And of course, the problem with teaching this sometimes is that there's a confusion between having it moving in a following movement, and then some people immediately try to go to initiate from up here and they start pushing or shoving or lifting or hunching. So we're not advocating that. We're just saying, don't hold it down and don't hold it back. Don't hold it at all. Just let it be a part of the arm and let it almost passively. Of course, there are muscles helping to guide it, but there's a sense that it's following.
Leah Roseman:
On the website for Body Mapping, which will be linked in the description. There was a quote from a biology student saying, I knew where my muscles and tendons were, but not how to properly use them. And I'm curious if you or your colleagues have worked with doctors or physiotherapists or people in those fields who know a lot about physiology but still had mismappings for themselves.
Jennifer Johnson:
Yes. The story that comes to mind immediately is, I think in Barbara's first book, she tells this story. She had a professor of anatomy come to her with just terrible, terrible, searing lower back pain for Alexander lessons. And it was right near the beginning as she was developing Body Mapping, and she worked with this person, and they were both amazed to find out that even though the anatomist knew probably way more than Barbara knew about the individual bits of the body and what all the tendons were called and where they were and what they did, that it's a stored in a very, very different part of the brain, the kinesthetic part of the brain, which is where we have to get it to if we want to move well and be using that information in a practical way in our daily life. So that's what Barbara helped her do, was to be able to transfer the information from her intellectual understanding and make it reality in her own body so that she could do the gardening that she loved to do and sit at a desk and not end up with this debilitating back pain. And she was doing the same thing that almost everybody does back to the spine again, was that trying to sit up straight at a desk and squishing all those lower vertebrae, crushing them together because the lower back muscles were so overtight because when we were little, the idea of sitting up straight meant that people demonstrated it like that with the shoulders got thrust back and the belly button got thrust forward. And that's what's happening, is that arching in the spine. So it's not a neutral curve anymore. It's a really held over exaggerated curve. Yeah. Anyway, that's the story that comes to mind of people having to translate it.
Leah Roseman:
That's great. Yeah. In your film, which I have to ask, when will it be widely available? Do you have a plan at this point?
Jennifer Johnson:
I do, yeah. Yeah. The Canadian premiere is coming up in September, September 5th, and then by October 15th, I think the European premiere is happening in Paris in early October. It will become available on its, I have a website designed for it, bodymappingdoc.com. And my genuine hope, because I made it specifically to be under 50 minutes long, I mean, I could have made a two hour Body Mapping film. There was enough material, but it's 46 minutes long because I'm really hoping that music educators will take it into a university classroom and be able to show it in that very first class at the beginning of the year, especially to the new people coming in like, well, I wait until they're in fourth year and they're already injured. Let's get this information out as soon as possible. That's my hope.
Leah Roseman:
In the film, you have some wonderful Barbara Conable quotes, but I didn't write them down as I was watching, but then I thought, I bet there's lots of great quotes. So I went to the Body Mapping website, and then I was writing down some of these quotes that you didn't quote. So one of them I really loved is she said, "when musicians conceive the sound they want to make, they must also simultaneously conceive the movement that makes it."
Jennifer Johnson:
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And eventually, obviously like anything that we practice, once those two things have been married together neuronally, then that conception becomes one conception. But you're absolutely right. If we're mismapped in particular, they start off as very, very different conceptions. So the first step is correcting the mismapping, just so you know what it could feel like to move your arm in a certain way. And then you apply that to your violin technique or your trombone technique, and then you realize you can come at it from either a movement perspective and say, oh my gosh, that immediately sounds better. Why does that sound better? And then your conception of your sound is automatically linked to the conception of your movement. Sometimes people come at it from the other way. They have such a strong sense of how they want something to sound or to be phrased that it informs their movement, and you can come at it in that direction as well.
But I will say somebody like myself who was so physically bunged up from carrying so many mismappings for so long, I really needed to unlock the body to have any level of confidence that I could ever link it to my musical intention. I had very, very strong musical ideas, which interestingly, I was always able to convey as a young pianist. I, like many people, had both instruments going dropped piano when I entered university, but I was a much freer player at the piano than I was at the violin. And it was very frustrating for those next 10 years from about 20 to 30 to figure out why does this feel so much harder for me to make music than it used to when I was a pianist. And so those were the reasons my mismappings were very specifically related to playing the violin. Yeah, I love that quote of Barbara's too.
Leah Roseman:
She said, yeah, I mean, "remember the whole, as you explore the parts", and certainly we've been talking about the parts a lot today,
Jennifer Johnson:
Yeah. And that balance mascot, the six places of balance that we were talking about earlier, that fellow that was drawn from the profile from the side, I call him the balance mascot. That is the best visual of that quote that you just found of Barbara's. Yes. Like yes, we're going to talk about where the head is balanced, but then we're going to put it back and see if we can get that head weight delivering right into the floor through your feet. Yes, we're going to talk about where the leg joint, where the leg joins into the hip socket, but then let's make sure that we haven't forgotten about the upper three places. So she was constantly going in depth into a tiny part and then integrating again. And it is important to keep it in context.
Leah Roseman:
And many of your colleagues have written instrument specific books, right?
Jennifer Johnson:
Yes. Yep. We have most of them written now. The cello book has been in the works for years. It's been passed now onto its third cello author. People either retired or something else happened in their lives. But we do have a wonderful woman in California right now working on the cello book. So I don't know when that will be out, but I'm hoping within the next year or so.
Leah Roseman:
But there's resources for flute and singers and piano and many things.
Jennifer Johnson:
Yep. Clarinet, obo horn. There's no viola one written. Most violists are just reading my book on violin, but there's certainly room there. If a violist wanted to write something with more viola specific information, there's, what else am I missing? There's a whole series of just breathing books that are published by a different publisher, but they're all Body Mapping based, breathing for flute, trumpet, singer. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Another one of her quotes, which I'm not sure I understand, is "Claim your space".
Jennifer Johnson:
I love that one. Yeah. That goes back to this article that I mentioned that she wrote about performance anxiety. I was contemplating whether I would go down, I'll do the shortcut, the short version of this, I guess. Yeah. Claiming your space means that when you're ready to walk onto the stage. Well, I'll start with what I used to do. It'll be more clear when I was very nervous and I suffered from performance anxiety and I was a real concentrator, and my muscles were tight already. I would walk on stage. I knew how to put on the smile and do the gracious bow and all of that, but I would sit down and I felt like when that spotlight was on me or the quartet as a whole, it felt like I had just walked into the audience's space. They were there before I was, they were sitting out there and then I walked into their space. And that she taught me is just so completely backwards that we have had to have claimed it many, many times ahead of time. And by claiming it, we mean this is coming back to quality of awareness. It means we know where the ceiling is kinesthetically, we know how far away the walls are kinesthetically, and by kinesthetically I simply mean I have a sense of how far I would have to reach my arms out in order to find it physically. It's not measuring it in feet and inches, it's just knowing in relation to where our body is in space, claiming it is also standing backstage before you walk on and casting your eyes across the audience from the backstage door and looking at the backstage entrance and seeing where the bright sparkly red dress is and where the top hat might be, or the umbrella, or maybe the baby or maybe the lady that's coughing who might have the cough candy wrapper, that has to be unwrapped. You get to know an audience in those very general ways. And then when you walk on to bow to them, even if the lights are blinding you a little bit, you still know where the sparkly red dress is. You've memorized the landscape and that's claiming it. That makes you feel like the space as well as you know your own living room. And you could close your eyes and walk around your living room and probably not bump into anything. So you've claimed exactly where the edge of the stage is. So you're not going to fall off if you take a step forward, you know, still have four more steps before you're there where the piano is in relation behind you. That sense of just kinesthetically memorizing a space is what we call claiming, and it just brings the nervous system down probably because there's this sense of familiarity that we are comfortable now because it isn't foreign, and there's something about our very primal reptilian brain that really, really loves having memorized the context in which we find ourselves.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I find that interesting because it gives you something positive to do. So when we talk about trying to clear your mind, well, we always have thoughts, but the question is, I think Noa Kageyama talked when in his early stuff that I did was like, you need the right thoughts that are going to help you rather than the destructive thoughts. And you've met my dog who's kind of high strung, and when you're working with animals, she needs a job. You can't just say, don't do this. She needs something else to do. And I think it's kind of the same, right?
Jennifer Johnson:
Yeah, exactly. It can't just be this void of don't do that, don't do that, because of course, if you name something you're not supposed to do, that's what your mind is still going to be on is that thing. Yeah. But by giving it, and that leads to another wise thing that Barbara said, which was that "you need to give your fear good company, and the fear will only overwhelm you if it's all that's in your awareness." So by giving it this good company, this sensory information about, I mean, I tend to be a very visual person, so I love this idea of the colors in the audience, not, there's my old boyfriend and there's my former teacher that will make you nervous because it becomes personal. But green dress, red dress, blue bow tie, it's impersonal, but it's still welcoming the audience in and acknowledging them at the same time as it's providing you with this beautiful, colorful canvas where they're just as important as you are up on stage. They're the other half, and you get to look out at them, and they're providing you with visual color stimulation.
So I'll give you a personal example. I was playing a Brahms Sonata, one of the last recitals I did in St. John's, and I had claimed the space. I got really good at practicing this, and it was in a church, and in the very front, pew was this little 8-year-old boy and his mom. And I thought, oh, that's interesting. It's always cool when there's kids, especially when they're close up. I wonder what his reaction is going to be. So I knew he was there already. I was aware of him. And when we got to the rocking final movement of the Sonata, and he started actually rocking out in his seat with me with Brahms, I was just thrilled because then because I was aware of him and I could feel the energy coming off of him, I was giving him the energy. Brahms and I were giving the energy. He was giving me this energy back because he was living it and moving to it. We were feeding off of each other. And that's the thing that you get as a performer when you don't shut out and when you have claimed an entire space, including all the potential things that could happen in that space with the people sitting there, it's an incredibly dynamic partnership that happens. Then of course, I was a little sad when his mother started trying to calm him down and hush him because it wasn't polite to be moving that much. But luckily it didn't stop him. We had a duet right till the end of the sonata.
Leah Roseman:
That's a beautiful story.
Jennifer Johnson:
It was fun.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Well, I'll just close with, I did really enjoy reading your book about teaching Body mapping to Children in terms of you have charts about language changing the language you use. So maybe do you want to end with that? Would that be a good place to end?
Jennifer Johnson:
Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. I love teaching. I love teaching children. I have all my life, I am a trained Suzuki teacher, but I have really, really worked the Body Mapping principles into Suzuki teaching so that the physicality part of it is really looked after. Early on, I guess it was probably when my own child was about seven or eight that I decided, boy, this should really write down some of these ideas that I've developed, because there is a lot of language that is misleading from a very, very early age, and I wanted that chart that you're referring to. I really wanted to give some suggestions, some very, very specific suggestions about not just what private Suzuki teachers or private teachers of children, but also of adults, but also classroom music educators. Just some terms that could just roll off the tongue that are an improvement over some of the traditional stuff that we hear. So for instance, the idea that common adage of get the shoulders down, get your shoulder down, pull them down. Instead, we talk about a floating arm structure, a buoyant collarbone and shoulder blade, and then of course, we talk about how the upper arm structure has to follow the rest of the arm. And I tried in that book as much as possible to synopsize so that they were fairly succinct little clips and bits of verbiage that a teacher could just reel off. And also, the chapters are much, much shorter than in my first book. I mean, it's much less detailed. I picked the 10 most common mismappings that we see in all musicians and tried to just give three or four pages to each one so that that busy classroom teacher who has still has a stack of papers to write, but has a kid who complained about lower back pain today, that he or she could read three pages about lower back pain and how to help a kid with it and go back the next day and have some useful information. So that's kind of where that book came from. Sure.
Leah Roseman:
Was there anything else you want to talk about that I didn't ask you about?
Jennifer Johnson:
Maybe I'll just mention one of the most amazing things about Barbara Conable is that she's not a musician herself, and yet she has saved thousands of musicians' careers. When I first learned that, I was just completely blown away because her ability to read what a musician was doing in their body and link it to the quality of their sound was so sophisticated. I had never seen anybody be able to teach like that before and have the results. And so when I asked her about that, it turns out that she had gone to theater school. So she had a fairly high level of movement training and kind of applying it to an art on stage, a stage presence. And then when she and Bill got married, of course, she learned a lot about music making from her years living with a cellist. So she's just such a smart lady. She just kind of put it all together and just became this amazing music educator without ever having a single music lesson in her life.
Leah Roseman:
Well, thanks so much for this today.
Jennifer Johnson:
Very, very happy to be here. Thanks for having me on Leah.
Leah Roseman:
I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at LeahRoseman.com If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. Keep in mind, I've also linked directly several episodes you'll find interesting in the show notes of this one. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
