Book Review: Alexander’s Way, By Alexander Murray
This is a somewhat unusual entry for my book review project. Generally when I choose books to review for this blog, I focus on books that prospective new students are likely to have come across in their initial search for information. How You Stand, How You Move…, for example, is one of the top hits when you search for “Alexander Technique” on Amazon. The purpose of my critique, then, is to assess their suitability as an introduction to the Technique. Today’s book is emphatically NOT that; to really get the most out of this one, it is necessary to already have a solid foundation of the principles and practice of the work. This is a special one for me, though, and I’m reviewing it as an exception. That’s because this book was written recently by one of my own teachers.
Alexander’s Way: Frederick Matthias Alexander In His Own Words and the Words of Those Who Knew Him is a journey through the development of Alexander’s method, focusing on the ways his physical techniques evolved over time and the various people who influenced him. The book strings together many disparate elements into a cohesive narrative, conveying a strong sense of the exact chronology of Alexander’s work. It is targeted towards those who are on their own journey through the work, and who are interested in seeing where FM’s influences came from and how they changed over time. However, it is not a book for the faint of heart, nor would I recommend it to new students until they have some of Alexander’s own writing under their belt.
Alexander’s Way illustrates clearly how FM’s language and word choice evolved over time, and how his methods changed accordingly. It accomplishes this through the use of long blockquotes from various sources, with important passages highlighted in boldface type. The passages are selected carefully and woven together with small bits of narration/explanation from Murray, creating the overall impression of Murray as editor or chronologer rather than author; he is a detective piecing together the puzzle and presenting it with his comments. The book begins with a timeline of Alexander’s life, highlighting the important years such as the releases of his four books and the beginning of the first training course. This allows the reader to get an overall sense of the direction of Alexander’s journey right from the start. The book itself is split into chapters that cover periods of several years each and is further subdivided into sections for the various sources drawn from, illustrating how his methods changed over that time period and which figures had an impact on those changes.
I was excited to find that Alexander’s Way focuses quite a bit on the early years of FM’s discovery process; most introductory books tend to gloss over the early years with a sentence or two. Murray spends a whole chapter on the period before 1904, compiling various pamphlets and booklets to give a cohesive picture of those formative early years in the technique’s history. I also appreciated how the chapters were split up by publication; it allows each new piece to be broken down and inspected for the various influences that contributed to it. By bolding phrases and vocabulary and then discussing them in context, Murray highlights how the minutia of the method itself changed over time and how those changes were prompted by the influence of others. It can be very tempting to see Alexander as a hero figure; to put him up on a pedestal as the ultimate genius who came up with all of this out of thin air. This book helps to highlight the other people in Alexander’s life whose acquaintance gave context and nuance to his own philosophy.
That context and nuance, however, means that this book is a dense, tough read. Long blockquotes mean lots of voices besides Murray’s, including Alexander himself, so the tone can shift dramatically from one section to the next. Because of this, and because some of those blockquotes are from Alexander’s books (almost an entire chapter is quoted verbatim at one point with comments added), I’d recommend that the reader have already read Alexander’s books before reading this one. It helps to have a strong foundation of understanding of the Technique going into this book, as the focus is not on the principles themselves so much as the fine detail of how the implementation of those principles changed over time. As such, I would not recommend this book to new students, but for experienced students and teachers it would be a welcome addition to their library.
The Nitty-Gritty
Title: Alexander’s Way: Frederick Matthias Alexander In His Own Words and the Words of Those Who Knew Him
Author: Alexander Murray
© belongs to the original authors of each quoted work; Murray’s comments are uncopyrighted and released to the public domain, published by Alexander Technique Center Urbana
ISBN-10: None
ISBN-13: None
Status: Available from the Seattle Book Company
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