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Schedule for David Nesmith

David Nesmith, is a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique (ATI) and a professional musician. He has studied the Alexander Technique since 1995 with several master teachers including Barbara Conable, Tommy Thompson, Anne Waxman and Don Zuckerman (breathing facilitation).

David has a private teaching practice and is on the faculty at Denison University. As a teacher of the Alexander Technique and Body Mapping, he works with a diversity of students including actors, athletes, computer users, dancers, musicians, visual artists and women in pregnancy.

Additionally, he is a certified Andover Educator presenting the course What Every Musician Needs to Know about the Body© to musicians around the country.

As a musician, David performs with the Catheral Brass Ensemble, the Columbus Broadway Series, the New Hampshire Music Festival, the Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival and the West Virginia Symphony. He served for 10 years as Principal horn of the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, an ensemble specializing in the presentation and recording of new American music.

He is an alumnus of Capital University (Columbus, Ohio) and Indiana University. His primary horn teachers have been Nicholas Perrini, Philip Farkas and Frøydis Ree Wekre.

Read David's articles:
- Ease Performance Anxiety Naturally
- How Body Mapping and the Alexander Technique Will Improve your Playing
- What Every Musician Needs to Know About the Body

Most Productive "Still really enjoying the Body Mapping info. My students seem to be as energized by the little bits I have shared as well. Still think it was some of the most productive hours of my musical training . . ." -Emily Roos, Flutist Boston Course

Exceptional Teacher "David is a horn player but has a great sense of the issues which affect singers and players of other instruments -- and especially the issues specific to flute players -- Taking this course at this time has been a real inspiration for me -- that despite serious trouble with my back and repetitive strain injury on my right side due to an accident several years ago, that I can continue to play -- and use my playing as a way to undo the RSI rather than worsen it. I am not a professional musician -- and am using my flute playing almost as a kind of music therapy -- I work with both a flute teacher who is integrating Alexander Technique and Body Mapping with her playing and teaching and an Alexander Teacher -- and the Body Mapping course -- I think -- is yet another piece to the puzzle of how to get myself out of pain - increase the amount of day to day activities I can perform - and with a little luck develop my own sound with lots of flexibility in tone and a little finesse. David is an exceptional teacher -- not only because he explains the material with great clarity but perhaps more so because he makes himself fully available to the group: he uses himself to demonstrate and illustrate advantageous ways of using the body and at a few points during the course, he encouraged us to put our hands on him so that we could feel the difference, say, between free and constricted breathing; he also fostered a sense of safety in the room -- tapping into everyone's perceptiveness and sensitivity so that in a mini masterclass which concluded the day, we could address how performance anxiety (or habits in how we hold or relate to our instruments) may lead us into tense patterns and how we might find our own way out of those patterns. I highly recommend this course to players and teachers at all levels." -Stephanie Gaynor Arlington, MA