With Softer and Softer Hands

Excerpted from Jack Liskin’s Moving Medicine: The Life and Work of Milton Trager, M.D.

In Manhattan, Trager practitioner Roger Tolle had been giving sessions almost weekly to Marge Rivingston, a noted voice teacher whose students have included singer Linda Ronstadt and actors Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, when she asked him to co-teach a class for her students. He describes his first day teaching.

Marge and I and the rest of the students listened as the first student got up to sing her song. Afterward Marge asked her how it felt. It felt tight and too high, she said. Marge looked at me, asked me what I saw. And I said 'I don't know. I need to feel what's going on.' 

I got up and went over to the student. Not knowing where to begin, I took hold of her head and began to set it in motion. I played with her shoulders, meeting the considerable resistance there with softer and softer hands. Then I asked her if she would begin her song again so I could feel what was going on as she sang. It was clear from her first breath that her method of getting sound out involved а tremendous amount of contained effort. So as she sang I stayed with her, feeling her breath with my hands on her lower ribs, resting my hands on her shoulders, looking for softness with my mind, holding her in Hook-Up. As the higher notes of the song came along, I supported her habitual lifting of her shoulders by lifting them for her so she could feel herself make the sound without the effort.

And what a sound it was! High, clear, focussed, on pitch. And easy! So easy she couldn't believe it. And tears started to roll down her cheeks. Whose voice was that? She wanted to know. What had I done? Why hadn't it been that easy before? Could it always be that easy? What had I loosened to allow that voice to emerge, to float free?"