ABOUT
About
Shawn L. Copeland
There is something I have known how to do for twenty years that I only recently learned to name.
It began in a choir room at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro sometime in the early 2000s. I was teaching. Not clarinet, not technique, not the things I had been trained to transmit. Something else. I was creating conditions. Slowing things down. Watching what happened in bodies before sound was made. Responding to what I saw rather than to what I had planned to say.
I did not know why I was doing it. I only knew it worked.
It would take two more decades, a career, an injury, and a forced stillness I did not choose before I understood what I had been doing in that room. Before I had language for the thing the body already knew.
THE ENCOUNTERS
I did not arrive at this work through certainty. I arrived through a long series of encounters with people who could see me more clearly than I could see myself.
The first was in the summer of 1997 at the Brevard Music Center. I was already deep into a performing career, already carrying a question I could not fully form: why does this work cost this much. An Alexander Technique teacher put his hands on me and something shifted that I had no framework to explain. I only knew that something had been seen that had never been seen before.
In November 1998, the clarinet professor at Florida State University, Frank Kowalsky, worked with me in a lesson and accurately diagnosed a visual processing disorder I had been living inside my entire life without knowing it. My brain does not synthesize the information from both eyes into a single image. Depth perception is nearly absent. I also have dyslexia. Together these meant that tracking music was genuinely difficult in ways that were invisible to everyone around me.
For years I had been told the problem was effort. That I needed to work harder. I was practicing six to ten hours a day and doing everything I had been asked to do. The corrections addressed what I was producing. The actual structure of how I was perceiving had never been seen.
By the time I graduated I had put the clarinet down. The cost of picking it up had become too high.
In 2001 Frank Kowalsky said something I have carried ever since.
I had gone to Tallahassee to work with him on playing and on the vision disorder since he had identified it. And in that lesson, he said: “I know what you have been through. And I also know that this is where you belong. We will do what it takes to get you there.”
Those words did something physiological. Not inspirational. Not motivational. Something structural. A prediction the body had been living inside began to loosen.
I picked up the clarinet again. I returned to graduate school and began studying with Kelly Burke, clarinet professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and one of the clearest teachers I have known. My audition with her was unlike anything I had experienced. She welcomed me and gave me direction without judgment. My belonging in her studio was never conditional. It did not depend on performance or proof. I existed, I wanted to be there, and that was enough.
Kelly also connected me to Marsha Paludan.
THE LINEAGE
Marsha was a direct student of Marjorie Barstow, the first graduate of F.M. Alexander's teacher training course in 1934. What is less commonly known, and what matters deeply to the lineage of this work, is that Barstow spent approximately eight years working closely with A.R. Alexander, FM's brother, from around 1934 to 1942. By many accounts A.R. was the more penetrating teacher. Barstow herself said that FM was the one who discovered the work, but A.R. was the teacher who knew how to teach.
This distinction matters. There are those who teach what FM Alexander taught, and those who teach what FM actually did. A.R., Barstow, and the lineage that flows through them belongs to the second tradition. The discovery over the procedure. The observation over the protocol. The application in context over the lesson in a neutral room.
Marsha integrated this tradition alongside Release Technique, somatic movement education, and Ideokinesis. She taught in context, with people doing their actual work. She was brilliant and improvisational in a way that was not performance but craft.
I trained with Marsha as an apprentice. On the first day she had me teach, I walked into a theatre movement class and she said: Shawn, you are teaching about the spine today. I said I hadn't prepared that. She said: I know you. And I know you would have studied and over-prepared. You have a spine. That's all you need. That's enough. Now go teach.
My belonging in her studio, like Kelly's, was never conditional. She recognized something in me in our first lesson together and offered to train me before I had thought to ask.
Marsha also used to describe the moment before performance as an invitation. Before you do anything, she would say, pause in the beautiful moment of movement and potential, and then inhale, and allow your creative intention to meet the world. She called it the moment of inspiration. The pun was intentional.
I carried that image for years before I understood what was actually happening inside the pause she was pointing to. What I found there became the foundation of this work.
Glenna Batson, a pioneer in dance neuroscience and somatic education, recognized that my Alexander Technique training was complete before I had officially finished it. I had over 2500 hours of training and apprenticeship by that point. In her words: your next stage in learning will come from teaching. She moved me into professional teaching before my certification was formally complete, because she could see that the formation had already happened.
William Conable, who co-developed Body Mapping for musicians alongside Barbara Conable and whose lineage connects through Frank Pierce Jones back to A.R. Alexander himself, has been my active mentor for years. His endorsement of this work is the continuation of a conversation about what the work is actually for.
IDAHO
I spent seven years as an adjunct faculty member doing the work of a tenure-track professor before I had the position. When I arrived at my tenure-track appointment, the job was easy. I already knew how to do it. The boulder had crested the hill, and work flowed toward me at a pace I had not anticipated.
What I had not been prepared for was what followed.
No one had told me that institutional belonging is often conditional on staying within a circumference that does not threaten the people around you. That excellence, at a certain brightness, makes people uncomfortable. I learned this the way most people learn it, through the slow withdrawal of collegiality, through the way a room reorganizes itself around someone it has decided to contain.
I made myself smaller. Stayed in my office. Stayed in my studio. Contained the somatic work within the role of clarinet teacher. The professional cost was real. But the deeper cost was what I now understand as a betrayal of self-belonging. I had learned to belong to the institution by making myself less present to myself.
A pharyngocele, a performance-related injury to my esophagus, made continued clarinet playing medically inadvisable. My final recital was March 2, 2024. I had less than twenty-four hours notice that it would be my last.
The applause rose around me afterward. People congratulated me. Everything I had been conditioned to value was present in that room.
And my first thought was:
I made it. No one will ever find out that I could never play the clarinet and have been faking it the whole time.
I have said this in public before because it needs to be said publicly.
That thought, at that moment, after that career, is not a confession of fraud.
It is a precise description of what happens when a lifetime of genuine excellence is organized not around belonging to yourself but around not being found out.
The applause felt empty. Almost like grief.
The body had achieved the highest version of fitting in and still was not home.
What followed was a renaissance I did not plan.
The creative energy that had only been able to move through the clarinet was suddenly available for the somatic work. The work began developing faster than I could track it. Frameworks I had been building for years suddenly had names. Connections I had sensed but never articulated became visible.
And then the recognition that stopped me.
I have been doing the same work for twenty years. From that choir room at UNCG to here. Creating conditions. Watching what happens in bodies before anything is asked of them. Responding to the organizing context rather than to the products it produces.
I never knew why. I only knew it worked.
Now I know why. And the knowing has made it possible to teach others to do it too.
LINEAGE AND PUBLICATIONS
This work stands on a convergence of intellectual traditions that is genuinely rare.
FM Alexander trained Marjorie Barstow, the first graduate of his teacher training course.
Barstow spent eight years working closely with A.R. Alexander, FM's brother, whose emphasis on observation, thinking, and pragmatic application over procedure shaped her teaching profoundly.
Barstow trained Marsha Paludan, who integrated the Barstow tradition alongside Release Technique, somatic movement education, and the Ideokinesis lineage of Mabel Elsworth Todd and Barbara Clark.
Paludan trained me. I am in direct lineage from the first graduate of Alexander's training course, through the teachers who preserved what FM did rather than what FM taught, into work that extends that tradition into territory it pointed toward but did not fully enter.
William Conable co-developed Body Mapping alongside Barbara Conable, also out of the Barstow tradition, and connects through Frank Pierce Jones back to A.R. Alexander himself.
He is my active mentor. I have published Body Mapping for Clarinetists through GIA Publications, co-authored with Jackie McIlwain, as a direct contribution to this lineage.
Glenna Batson, whose work bridged somatics, dance neuroscience, and neurorehabilitation, brought the movement science layer into my framework through years of direct collaboration.
The predictive processing neuroscience of Karl Friston, Andy Clark, and Jakob Hohwy provides the contemporary scientific frame for what Alexander observed empirically a century ago.
Attachment theory and the work of Staci Haines in The Politics of Trauma provide the clinical ground.