Frederick Matthias Alexander Frederick Matthias Alexander ("F.M.") was born on January 20, 1869, in the rural outpost of Wynyard, on the coast of northwest Tasmania. He was the eldest of eight children, in an extended family of farmers and tradesmen. Wynyard was situated in wonderful natural surroundings with large areas of unspoiled country and coastline, with forests, estuarine rivers and rich farmland. Until he was eight or nine, F.M. was frail and sickly, but he grew into an active outdoor life. His father was a blacksmith, an excellent judge of horses, an expert rider and the self-taught veterinary expert of the community. His mother was the kind of exemplar of practical life that sustained such large frontier families: she could ride, build, farm, was an excellent cook, an effective nurse, designed and sewed all the family clothes, etc. Growing up in this environment imbued F.M with a deeply practical intelligence that is readily discernible in his work. He was good with his hands, valued common sense and sound reasoning, and was doggedly persistent in solving a problem. Perhaps above all he was acutely observant. He was a close observer of animals with a particular love of horses. Pleasure and expertise in equine training and management remained with him throughout his life. He enjoyed looking sharply into things that are mainly overlooked or taken for granted as obvious. He was fond of saying, "we rarely see what is at our feet." F.M. spent a lifetime examining the way we breathe, move, speak, and think in our everyday lives - essential things that few people consider. As he was sickly in his first years, F.M. was often out of school, and when he did attend it appears that he asked so many questions that he disrupted the class. When he was ten, a new schoolmaster, Mr. Robert Robertson, was to prove invaluable to his development. Mr. Robertson decided to remove F.M. from the classroom, but recognized in him marked abilities and a highly energetic nature. He began to tutor him privately, and in this one-on-one interaction, F.M. flourished. Among other things, Mr. Robertson introduced him to poetry and Shakespeare, which became the great inspirations of his early life. F.M. became fascinated with dramatic performance, and began organizing amateur theatricals. When he was 17, he started work as a clerk for a tin mining company. On his own time, he taught himself to play the violin and continued to engage in amateur dramatic performances. He had considerable talent as a performer, and by the time he was twenty, he had decided to train himself for a professional career as a "Reciter" of dramatic texts. He studied acting and elocution, and began to build up "small repertoire of dramatic and humorous pieces." He moved to Melbourne for more serious study, and to take in the artistic and cultural life of the city. Once there, he formed an amateur theatrical company, produced recitals, private engagements and concerts, and performed. Before he was twenty-five, he undertook recital tours of Tasmania and New Zealand. It was in this period that F.M. underwent the crisis that led him to discover and develop the ideas and practices that became the Alexander Technique. In performance, he began to grow hoarse and then to lose his voice almost entirely. He tried various treatments and remedies prescribed by doctors and voice trainers, but his condition only worsened in reciting. He began to fear that his vocal organs were defective. In anticipation of a particularly important engagement, he went once again to a physician, who assured him that there was nothing wrong with his vocal organs, and instructed him to abstain completely from reciting. He was to use his voice as little as possible altogether for the two weeks remaining before the engagement, and his voice would then be completely normal. F.M. followed the physician's advice, and his voice rapidly improved until he was "quite free from hoarseness," and "assured that the doctor's promise would be fulfilled." However, before he was halfway through his programme in the recital, his "voice was in the most distressing condition again, and by the end of the evening the hoarseness was so acute," that he could hardly speak. It is informative to hear F.M.'s own account of this critical juncture in his life: "My disappointment was greater than I can express, for it now seemed to me that I could never look forward to more than a temporary relief, and that I should thus be forced to give up a career in which I had become deeply interested and believed I could be successful." "I saw my doctor the next day and we talked the matter over, and at the end of the talk I asked him what he thought we had better do about it. 'We must go on with the treatment,' he said. I told him I could not do that, and when he asked me why, I pointed out to him that although I had faithfully carried out his instruction not to use my voice in public during his treatment, the old condition of hoarseness had returned within an hour after I started to use my voice again on the night of my recital. 'Is it not fair, then,' I asked him, 'to conclude that it was something I was doing that evening in using my voice that was the cause of the trouble?' He thought a moment and said, 'Yes, that must be so.' 'Can you tell me then,' I asked him, 'what it was that I did that caused the trouble?' He frankly admitted that he could not. 'Very well,' I replied, 'if that is so, I must try and find out for myself.'" F.M. set up mirrors, and began a remarkable period of self-observation that he continued over eight or nine years. During this time he greatly developed his powers of observation, and through rigorous experimentation established a set of principles that enabled him to completely overcome his vocal troubles. He also began to realize that his principles were widely applicable to human function and learning. F.M. began to teach lessons in voice production and breathing while still on tour in New Zealand, and within weeks was booked to capacity. He later observed that it was in Auckland that he "got the idea" of what his work really was, and what it could be. He returned to Melbourne, rented teaching rooms, and began to teach singers and other performers. Within weeks, a doctor sent him a boy with tuberculosis, followed by a woman patient with adhesions of the lungs. The improvements in these people led other doctors to send him students, and medical referrals soon outnumbered his theatrical pupils. After two years, F.M.'s practice was well established. After three more years, he moved to the larger city of Sydney, with his reputation preceding him, so that he was soon well-established there. His brother A.R. Alexander first joined him as a teacher in Sydney. His success in Sydney, and the increasing encouragement that he received from highly regarded members of the medical profession, in particular a well-known surgeon, Dr. J. W. Steward McKay, confirmed F.M.'s belief that he had discovered something of a universal nature, of great value to mankind. He decided that he would take his work to London, to better develop and promulgate it. F.M. left Australia with a flourish characteristic of his energy and his continuing passion for the theater. He produced and starred in Hamlet and The Merchant of Venice at one of Sydney's largest theaters, with a company composed of his pupils. He then took the shows on a limited tour, giving thirty performances of each play, to good reviews, before leaving for London. He sailed to London in April, 1904, with the good wishes of many of Australia's most prominent citizens. He carried with him numerous letters of introduction to British society, particularly in the medical and theatrical professions. In his early years in London, F.M. worked with a number of doctors, and received numerous referrals from them. But it was in the theatrical world that he made his name. His pupils included many people whose names remain familiar today: Lily Brayton, Harry (H.B.) and Sir Henry Irving, Oscar Asche, Lady Tree, Viola Tree, Beerbohm Tree, and Matheson Lang. These pupils, with many others, reflect the rapid success and the high reputation Alexander enjoyed in London. By 1910, partly to forestall plagiarism of his work, he published his first book, Man's Supreme Inheritance, which was to remain in print for the rest of his life. World War I caused an immediate drop in the number of F.M.'s pupils. Determined not to lose the sensitivity of his hands, nor to abate in the general development of his skills, he decided to go to America. Between 1914 and 1924 (excepting 1921), he sailed to America for several months of every year. With his brother A.R., and assistant-teachers Ethel Webb and Irene Tasker, he built a thriving practice in the U.S., and fostered the dissemination of his work there. The American philosopher and educator John Dewey became a devoted student of the Technique, and a life-long collaborator and friend of F.M.'s. Professor Dewey lent him editorial assistance with his second book, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual (1923), and wrote the introduction to the book. He felt that the principles Alexander had discovered were essential to human learning and to any effective process of education. In 1924, F.M. and Irene Tasker founded a school for children in London. This was a long held desire of F.M.'s, derived from his belief that his Technique could be used in a preventive way, to maintain that much better use of the self that is apparent in children, which the adolescent and adult lose. Children were taught a normal preparatory school curriculum, but first emphasis was placed on how the children used themselves while learning. The experiment was successful, and the school continued into the 1940's. In the 1930's F.M's work continued to thrive. In 1932 he published his third and most successful book, The Use of the Self, with John Dewey again writing the Introduction. There was a surge of interest in the Alexander Technique within the medical community in England, and there were discussions, debates, lectures and correspondence about it in the medical press. F.M. enjoyed an enormous practice, and counted many distinguished people among his pupils and friends. It is worth noting that Aldous Huxley, Sir Stafford Cripps, the Earl of Lytton, and George Bernard Shaw actively promoted his work. In 1930 F.M. established the first training course for teachers. Students who completed the three-year course were certified to teach the Alexander Technique. The school ran successfully from 1930 to 1955, except during World War II, and ensured the continuation of the Technique. In 1940, the outbreak of World War II again put a stop to the flow of Alexander's pupils, however. Now seventy-one, F.M. moved his school for children, its staff, assistant teachers, and pupils to Stowe, Massachusetts, and again took up his practice in the U.S. His brother A.R. had been in continuous practice in Boston since 1934, so there were many people anxious to meet and work with the founder of the Technique. It was also during this stay in the U.S. that F.M. completed and published his last book, The Universal Constant in Living (1943). F.M. returned to London in 1943. During the last two years of the war, and in 1946-7, he re-established his practice and the teacher-training course. The school for children, to his regret, could not be re-opened. At the end of 1947 he had a fall that displaced a rib and bruised several others. Within a week of this accident he suffered a severe stroke, losing the use of his left hand and leg, and with paralysis of that side of his face. It is not often that a man of seventy-nine recovers from such a stroke, and the three doctors who attended him had little hope for F.M. Yet using his technique, he was again giving lessons by March, 1948. In January 1949, F.M.'s eightieth birthday was celebrated with a public dinner given in his honour. Sir Stafford Cripps, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, chaired the evening. From then on F.M. continued to work daily, taking private pupils and supervising the work of his assistant teachers until 1955, when after a chill and a brief illness, he died suddenly on October 10th, in his eighty-seventh year. There are now dozens of Alexander Technique teacher-training schools around the world, and hundreds of certified Alexander Technique teachers in affiliated professional societies in thirteen countries. The Technique is widely studied by actors, musicians, singers, dancers, athletes, physical therapists, teachers, and a very broad spectrum of the general populace. As Niko Tinbergen, the Nobel Prize Winner for Physiology/Medicine in 1973 and a student of the Technique, said of F.M.'s achievement: "This story of perceptiveness, of intelligence and of persistence, shown by a man without medical training, is one of the true epics of medical research and practice." This biographical outline of F.M. Alexander is largely condensed or excerpted from: "F.Matthias Alexander, 1869-1955: A Biographical Outline," The Constructive Teaching Centre Limited, The Shieldrake Press, London, 1979. Also used as a reference, was the full-length biography of Alexander: Evans, J.A., Frederick Matthias Alexander, A Family History, Phillimore & Co. Ltd., West Sussex, 2001. Beret Arcaya was born in New York in 1942. In 1955 she was accepted into the Juilliard School of Music, where she studied music for four years. In 1958 she also began studying acting with Uta Hagen and began to work as an actress. She appeared in professional summer theatres, had a film contract with Paramount Pictures, and played leading roles in soap operas. However, she resisted committing fully to an acting or film career, and in 1968 she returned to singing. Working with the method of Manuel Garcia (1804-1906), her voice began to emerge much more fully than previously, and the self-discovery and freedom she experienced in process set her on the creative path to which she remains dedicated. In 1971 she began to appear in public concerts and orchestra tours in Europe. In 1974 she won the first prize in the Puccini foundation vocal competition and made her debut at Avery Fisher Hall. In the same year, she began to teach singing. In January of 1975, Ms. Arcaya began studying the Alexander Technique and was immediately inspired by the experience. She studied intensively and continuously until 1978, when she joined the ACAT-New York teacher-training program under the auspices of Judith Liebowitz. She received her Teaching Certificate in 1981. From 1981 until 1987, while continuing to sing and to teach singing, she built a large teaching practice. She was an ACAT board member from 1982-1985 and a founding member of the North American Society of Teachers of the Alexander Technique (NASTAT), now known as the American Society for the Alexander Technique (AmSAT). In her singing during this period, Ms. Arcaya concentrated on chamber music. In 1993-1994 she sang with the Alte Oper in Essen, Germany in a piece written for her by the composer, Anthony Madigan, in the World Premiere of Fleur de Mal, a ballet with chamber orchestra and soprano. In 1988 she began giving master classes in Europe combining voice and the Alexander Technique. She has taught and performed in Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Austria, Italy and Venezuela. From 1992 until 1999 she gave an annual two-week intensive workshop in the Alexander Technique for musicians at the Salzburg Easter festival, under the auspices of the Kominsky Foundation. She taught Alexander part-time in Madrid from 1988 to 2001. In 1996 she began a re examination of the Alexander Technique with Walter and Dilys Carrington in London (The Constructive Teaching Center) and finished her retraining with them completing 8 graduate semesters in 2001. Ms. Arcaya is a member of the Swiss (SVLAT), Spanish (APTAE), English (STAT) and American (AmSAT) Societies for the Alexander Technique. << Back to Previous Page Top of Page Continue to Next Page >>