This manual gives musicians and other performers practical insights on every aspect of performance. Through real life examples and pre-performance exercises, Gordon also offers detailed and workable suggestions for solving the issues and problems associated with live performance.
Swimming improves your flexibility, tones your body and can help to boost your self-esteem and produce a sense of well being. It is the nation's most popular sporting activity with 11.9 million people swimming regularly. However, most people don't know how to swim properly. This book is based on a 35-year voyage of discovery into the art of swimming. Steven Shaw's method takes the Alexander Technique into the swimming pool – focusing on releasing tension from the head, neck and back. Steven has evolved a unique way of breaking down strokes into a series of therapeutic movements, which can be practised individually or with a partner, in a pool or on dry land. These provide the building blocks, which combine to make it possible for anyone to recraft their own strokes in a way that promote good body use and avoid injuries. Instead of performing physical actions in an automatic way, you begin to learn body awareness. This way of swimming not only feels freer and more open, it is graceful and has a sense of flow, often absent from the way many people swim. Shaw looks at the most popular strokes – front crawl, back stroke, breast stroke and butterfly – focusing on maximum efficiency and minimum strain.
Now available in Bloomsbury Revelations series, Brecht on Performance: Messingkauf and Modelbooks presents a selection of Brecht's principal writings about the craft of acting and realising texts for the stage. It crystallises and makes concrete many of the more theoretical aspects of his other writing and illuminates the practice of this hugely influential director and dramatist. The volume is in two parts. The first features an entirely new commentated edition of Brecht's dialogues and essays about the practice of theatre, known as the Messingkauf, or Buying Brass, including the 'Practice Pieces' for actors (rehearsal scenes for classics by Shakespeare and Schiller). The second contains rehearsal and production records from Brecht's work on productions of Life of Galileo, Antigone, Mother Courage and others. Edited by an international team of Brecht scholars and including an essay by director and teacher Di Trevis examining the practical application of these texts for theatres and actors today, Brecht on Performance is a wonderfully rich resource. The text is illustrated with over 30 photographs from the Modelbooks.
Your body is a highly complex machine and you are in control - or should be. How you manage your body, how you take care of it, and how well you know it will determine how well and how long you survive. Peak Performance draws from the fields of kinetics, biomechanics and physiology. The authors present a highly systematic approach to life that will bring you to a much higher level of comfort, satisfaction and accomplishment. You'll actually experience a sense of exhilaration as you learn to eat walk and breathe in ways that can avoid negative environmental impact.
Measure, optimize, and improve the performance of your Python code with this easy-to-follow guide About This Book Master the do's and don'ts of Python performance programming Learn how to use exiting new tools that will help you improve your scripts A step-by-step, conceptual guide to teach you how to optimize and fine-tune your critical pieces of code Who This Book Is For If you're a Python developer looking to improve the speed of your scripts or simply wanting to take your skills to the next level, then this book is perfect for you. What You Will Learn Master code optimization step-by-step and learn how to use different tools Understand what a profiler is and how to read its output Interpret visual output from profiling tools and improve the performance of your script Use Cython to create fast applications using Python and C Take advantage of PyPy to improve performance of Python code Optimize number-crunching code with NumPy, Numba, Parakeet, and Pandas In Detail Simply knowing how to code is not enough; on mission-critical pieces of code, every bit of memory and every CPU cycle counts, and knowing how to squish every bit of processing power out of your code is a crucial and sought-after skill. Nowadays, Python is used for many scientific projects, and sometimes the calculations done in those projects require some serious fine-tuning. Profilers are tools designed to help you measure the performance of your code and help you during the optimization process, so knowing how to use them and read their output is very handy. This book starts from the basics and progressively moves on to more advanced topics. You'll learn everything from profiling all the way up to writing a real-life application and applying a full set of tools designed to improve it in different ways. In the middle, you'll stop to learn about the major profilers used in Python and about some graphic tools to help you make sense of their output. You'll then move from generic optimization techniques onto Python-specific ones, going over the main constructs of the language that will help you improve your speed without much of a change. Finally, the book covers some number-crunching-specific libraries and how to use them properly to get the best speed out of them. After reading this book, you will know how to take any Python code, profile it, find out where the bottlenecks are, and apply different techniques to remove them. Style and approach This easy-to-follow, practical guide will help you enhance your optimization skills by improving real-world code.
Piano Pedagogy: A Research and Information Guide provides a detailed outline of resources available for research and/or training in piano pedagogy. Like its companion volumes in the Routledge Music Bibliographies series, it serves beginning and advanced students and scholars as a basic guide to current research in the field. The book will includes bibliographies, research guides, encyclopedias, works from other disciplines that are related to piano pedagogy, current sources spanning all formats, including books, journals, audio and video recordings, and electronic sources.