The melody is the dance; the irresistible attraction to the tonal center is the gravity. Steven Hancoff (from From Tragedy to Transcendence)
Note from Lynn Cohen: I spoke with Steven Hancoff by phone. He was in Sandwich, New Hampshire, towards the beginning of a three-month tour of New England and the Canadian Maritimes with his show From Tragedy to Transcendence, a multimedia presentation about the life of J.S. Bach and the improbable journey of Bach’s music from near oblivion to prominence.
A guitar player since childhood, Steven had recorded six solo guitar albums before devoting the past several years to his all-consuming Bach project, which involved the creation of his three-CD recording of the Bach Cello Suites for acoustic guitar, a four-volume iBook (Bach, Casals and the Six Suites for Cello Solo), fourteen YouTube videos, and the arrangement/transcription of all six solo cello suites for guitar (see resource list at the end of the article). More than an arrangement, Steven has taken Bach’s iconic cello suites and filled them in with harmonies that clarify for us what Bach might have heard in his own mind. Steven continues to practice and to receive Rolfing® Structural Integration (SI), as he has done for over thirty-five years.

Steven Hancoff
Photograph by Jiayi Lu.

Lynn Cohen

Lynn Cohen: Let’s start with a question that can ground us. When and how were you drawn to guitar and to Rolfing SI?

Steven Hancoff: Well, I’ve played guitar all my life – since I was thirteen years old. But I first heard about Rolfing SI when I was about twenty-five years old, in the late ‘70s. I had just gotten a masters degree in social work from an absurdly inadequate psychotherapy course. I knew it was idiotic, but I wanted the license, so I stuck with it. I met somebody at a six-week Arica training, and he was living a life I envied. So, I asked him how he was able to do that, and he said, “I don’t know, but I get Rolfing sessions once a week.” I had no idea what he was talking about. All I’d heard about Rolfing SI was that it hurt like the devil, that they ripped your muscles off of the bone and then when they heal everything’s better. Back then there may have been some truth to it!

Now, I come from a fairly tragic and traumatized life. And I had suppressed as much feeling about my traumas as I could. At the time before I got Rolfing work I barely knew what a feeling was. In other words, I did not know that I was angry, or sad, or resentful, or envious, or any of the dark side. I could not have told you I felt that way. In the six weeks of the Arica training, I started to learn how to feel emotion. You could say I started to experience my actual self. It was very powerful. And when this person told me about Rolfing SI, my inner ‘angels’ told me that this is a good process for me, opening this stuff up – as threatening and dangerous a feeling as it is, it has real value. I didn’t know what that was, but I wanted to try it. I was dead broke, living in my car, and was in California. I decided I was going to leave the country and drove to the East Coast, where I’m originally from, and I landed near [Washington] DC. There were exactly two Rolfers there, one of whom left the area and left Rolfing work, the other of whom I ended up marrying! [laughs] But not before I got a lot of Rolfing SI from her. In the course of my ten sessions, I remember, after the fourth session, I went home and the next morning a song came out of me and I wrote it down. I’d written a song! I’d always played guitar, and I wanted to be a folk singer, and now here I was, twenty-five or twenty-six, and after the fifth session, another song just popped out of me.

I did not feel the ten sessions from the point of view of structural physical work; for me it was all about awakening creativity, emotional release, recovering hidden memories, and the like. In fact, when I took my first class in 1977, I was shocked: I had no idea Rolfers were thinking about structure in terms of muscular attachments and fascial and segmental relationships, or even about gravity. I thought it was entirely about discovering and releasing emotion. Deepening a person’s experience of self. That was my experience of it. I didn’t notice, for instance, that I could move my arms more easily. What I noticed was that I was getting more creative, more energetic, and had deeper access to what had been hidden and to playing music. I have come to think those are all good qualities! Rolfing SI was a miracle to me, which got this side of myself liberated. I was entirely stunned that anyone was paying attention to things like muscular attachments. I just didn’t know that’s what it was about.

LC: How did that influence your training?

SH: I flunked! I took the course in Berkeley with Michael Salveson, and he told me I had to spend a year working on bodies before I could go on. In the meantime, I met Ida Rolf. My Rolfer/partner was Sharon Wheeler. She was taking the very last advanced class that Dr. Rolf taught. Sharon and I were living together, and it wasn’t a secret – Dr. Rolf knew all about it. She was almost blind and in a wheelchair by that time. I had recorded my first album, having won a contest at the very first annual Scott Joplin Ragtime festival. Eubie Blake, William Bolcom were the judges! I don’t remember how Dr. Rolf got her hands on my LP – I guess Sharon must have given it to her – but when Sharon introduced us, she got up out of her wheelchair and said, “Ah yes, young man, I hope you make a million dollars with your music!” Those are the first words I ever heard her say. At Dr. Rolf’s funeral, Joy Belluzzi, who was her secretary at the time, told me that Dr. Rolf used to listen to my first album every day. I can’t tell you how that filled me with pleasure, that really mattered to me!

To me, being a Rolfer and getting Rolfing sessions are inseparable. I am as much a ‘Rolfee’ as a Rolfer. Getting Rolfing sessions and being a Rolfer is my path to and through my art . . . not merely art, but through my life, to the experience and articulation and expression of my intellect, and my feelings, and my heart, my spirit, and my will. The reason that is so is because it works for me. I think it works for me because Dr. Rolf got it right. Hers is not the only work I studied intensively. I was also a colleague on the faculty of John Pierrakos’ The Institute of Core Energetics . . . he invented Bioenergetic Analysis [with Alexander Lowen], for goodness sake. But in my estimation and experience, it was Dr. Rolf who got it right.

Rolfing SI helped liberate the musician/ artist in me by liberating the ‘emoter’ and ‘thinker’ in me. So, I get Rolfing work all the time. During the course of doing this Bach project, I made sure to get Rolfing work plenty. I don’t separate out the experience of living life from the experience of doing Rolfing SI or getting Rolfing work. I recently performed in a tiny little hamlet called Bethlehem (in New Hampshire). We stayed at a quaint bed and breakfast. Friday night we did a show, and Saturday morning I gave a Rolfing session to the lady who ran the bed and breakfast; she’d broken her arm and it had been immobilized for over three months. She complained at the lack of range of movement. Of course, her humerus was entirely jammed up into her axilla, and her ribs, clavicles, and scapulae were a mess. It took about twenty minutes for the humerus to drop out of there, is all. Yet she is thinking, “It’s a miracle,” while I’m thinking, “It’s so obvious!” So I don’t see a difference between the guy who’s articulated my impression of the life of Bach and the guy who got the lady’s humerus to drop out of the axilla. There’s no distinction between those two people.

LC: You’re talking about integration of the different aspects of being, you as guitar player/Rolfer/emoter of music, whether it’s Bach or ragtime. It’s artificial to delineate those aspects of who you are for the purposes of compartmentalization.

SH: I would say that’s true but go further: all those distinctions in any field of endeavor or thought are artificial. Knowledge is knowledge. Curiosity is curiosity. We set up our culture so some people study math, some people study physics, some people study history, etc. We pretend that those are different things. They’re not. It’s all one thing. Aristotle said, “All men want to know what is so.” I presume he meant women too! All people want to know what is so. It’s just inherent in being a human being. In order to not live according to that, you have to be like I was, hunkered down in an unwillingness to know because of the fear of what you might find out . . . that you’re not good enough, that you’re evil, you’re ashamed, and that you might have to do something about it that you’re afraid to do . . . whatever it is. In order to live according to a determination to not know, you are living a very, very distorted life. And a body responds to that accordingly. In order to receive Rolfing work successfully, you have to be interested in letting go of what was a ‘holding’, a contraction pattern, of which you hitherto were unaware.

LC: When you say the Bach project is your life work, what I understand now is that it’s not just the excavation of information for information’s sake; it’s a journey you’re invested in following because you don’t know where it’s going.

SH: It’s definitely a journey. I’d say an archetypal journey. And it was also an accident. I had decided I wanted to transcribe the Suites for guitar. Cello is a one-line instrument. With guitar, you can harmonize. A guitar is idiomatically suited to play chords and bass lines and such . . . to harmonize. I knew the music was profound, and wanted to serve that profundity, so I felt I needed to learn more about the man. Nobody knew much about him. I discovered that by the time he was thirtyfive (when he composed the Suites), Bach had experienced a tremendous amount of tragedy in his life: both parents died when he was nine, three siblings had died, and three of his own children died. Now he’s married to the love of his life, and three kids of theirs have died. But now he has a family. He and his wife have four surviving kids. And for the first time, he finally has a satisfying gig. He comes back from a brief time away, returns home to find his wife, the love of his life and the only person who has ever actually cared about him, has just been buried. It was at that point he starts writing his masterpieces, the Violin Sonatas and Partitas and Cello Suites.

Photograph by Jiayi Lu.

I told you before that I had a lot of tragedy in my life. I did not know when I started down this path of self-discovery that I was sad or angry or etc. How in the world, I wondered, did this man transcend his tragedies that were far grander than mine? I’ve seen a lot of the world: I’ve performed in fifty countries. One thing I see is that everyone’s bitching and moaning and competing to see who can be the bigger victim. That’s what kept me moving on this project. I wanted to find out how did Bach not hate God? Life? Not rail against the fates? Everything in his music is exaltation and upliftedness. Every note is always the right note. Giants like Bach – they worked at it, had to figure it out step by step like everyone else; they had wives and bills and bratty kids and selfinterested bosses, they had regular lives. Johann Sebastian had to turn himself into the Bach that we think of as Bach. This is what drove my project. I didn’t intend any of this. In order to transcribe for guitar, I had to learn about the guy, and the more I learned, the more I asked, “How did he do it?” That’s what the iBook ended up being about. Let me also brag that I also turned it into a great art book as well. It turned out to encompass the largest collection of Bach-inspired visual art ever amassed in the world . . . and how that happened is yet another story!

I think of Bach as a kind of bodhisattva. He showed us how to endure our destiny and embrace our own greatness. This might serve Rolfers really well. We’re all trying to do this amazing thing for ourselves and the people we work with. It boils down to this: you’re nothing – you’re one cell in the organism of all that is. That’s on the one hand. On the other hand, you are the magnitude of your spirit; the universe was created just so that you can experience it. It was created for you. It’s incumbent on you to be exploring and expressing that magnitude. John Pierrakos used to say that a person’s greatest sin was in not embracing and expressing his greatness. Dr. Rolf figured out and intelligibly articulated something that took humanity 200,000 years of human history to figure out, and it’s been handed to us on a platter as a silver gift. It’s not just that we give it to our clients; we have to be the ones to embody it.

LC: You’ve chosen, or have been chosen perhaps, to explore and honor the work of these two giant people who have transformed the world in their different ways. We, as interpreters or executors of their work, have a disadvantage because we’re not them.

SH: Bach showed us how to recognize how infinite you are and how insignificant you are. They’re both true. The whole universe was created for you to explore.

LC: That’s an idea that is so elusive when we’re going through the minutiae of our day, trying to please people, dealing with our psychological baggage, our identities . . .

SH: . . . And our feelings of both arrogance and being not good enough, and being victims ourselves. I’m sixty-eight now, and I don’t feel the tugs of the neurotic patterns and limitations that I had when I started down this path. That’s for sure. But there are plenty ways to go, and I get an awful lot of help as a client of Rolfing SI, because something that I didn’t know I was holding suddenly releases. I don’t think Rolfing SI stresses this so much, but I find that when I can make conscious that which I let go of, that helps me a lot more than just feeling my leg working better.

LC: That’s sort of the secret to it, isn’t it?

SH: Is it a secret? It’s not a secret to me! I guess you’re probably right. What I tell my clients when I give Rolfing sessions is, “Stay with, pay attention to, the sensation.” I find that when I do that as I get Rolfing work, that’s when the insight comes to me.

LC: How do you take that principle into your exploration of how you filled in the harmonies for the Suites? The harmonies are implied in the one-line melodies of the Suites. Your explicit renderings of the harmonies were, to my ears, delightful, arresting, surprising, even shocking sometimes. You had so many choices. I wonder, how fixed are these transcriptions? Because there are so many choices, so many different chord voicings you might have used on any given beat – the way, after someone receives Rolfing SI and stands, his or her options for movement have increased. How do you relate that freedom of having received Rolfing SI to the harmonic choices you made in trying to fulfill Bach’s intentions?

SH: Yes, the harmonies are implied in Bach’s melodies. Bach’s written a melody. And for those who don’t understand this language, we’re talking about chord structure. Well, let me tell you that one of the things I say in the show (From Tragedy to Transcendence):

. . . the musician is compelled to stand with his feet solidly planted, steadfast and confident, committed to his tonal and harmonic choices, even though experience informs him that his conviction about the rightness of his musical choices can evanesce to who-knows-where because of whoknows-why. Life choices are tricky and uncertain.

So, maybe that speaks to your question.

I feel it best to not screw with Bach’s intentions. When I put in a bass note or bass line, or play parallel thirds, or decide the melody note is really the flatted ninth of the dominant, I’m announcing that I think Bach’s intention was this chord and not a different chord. I’m trying to articulate a path that Bach took, that I also believe is an archetypal path that we all take, or can take. It’s a path that starts with innocence, optimism, and desire. There’s an innocence, a not-knowing about what life is, to childhood, to early life. I call it disappointment waiting to happen! What drives a human towards introspection is pain, tragedy, sorrow, loss. We each have a minotaur – the hidden negativity – smack dab in the middle of the labyrinth of our psyches. We are each a Theseus who must at least identify, if not actually slay, that monster. The act of profound introspection will eventually give rise to extrospection. You begin looking outward from a point of view of more secure groundedness in who you are, in reality. To answer your musical question, the ground can be very slippery. I might think I know that this is Bach’s intention, and then get to it the next day and think, “What the hell was I thinking? That doesn’t work!” But at some point, I felt I had to say, because it’s recorded and written down and I’m not going to keep revisiting it for the rest of my life, “This my statement.” I allow myself to express some of my own intention. Bach is the only composer, in my experience, whose every single note is the right note, a meaningful note. By a meaningful note, I mean he’s never trying to evade where the thing itself goes, the thing that’s inherent in the melody he’s written.

I think that, in dealing with clients and with ourselves, the emotional distortion that we’re reaching for is something that started being a distortion when the person distorted it, when the person said, “No, I’m not facing that; no, I’m not going there; no, I’m not feeling that; no, that’s not true” (when in fact it was true), etc. Maybe there’s a need in civilized people to appear to themselves to be ‘good’. And these matters tend to be things that have long been driven into the subconscious . . . which of course is why they are hard toget hold of. Whatever the motivation, the beginning of the distortion is always conscious, even if it’s for a fleeting instant. That means we (as Rolfers) are getting our hands on a statement that says “No!” We’re getting our hands in the person’s negativity, in other words. We are explorers, hopefully, of our own negativity, and I think those of us who last doing Rolfing SI and turn it into a life path are people who, in spite of being afraid of it or resistant to it, keep doing it anyway. Or, they’re not afraid of it. So I’m hoping I live a long life and keep getting Rolfing sessions every week. There doesn’t seem to be an end to what internal stuff there is to explore.

The more a person forthrightly and successfully explores, the more true things he discovers. And this process must give rise to disillusionment . . . acknowledging your inner mistakes and misapprehensions, and stopping believing them and acting as though they’re true. Disillusionment is a necessary step, because it dissolves illusion, and the moment of disillusionment gives rise to cathartic release, and it is that release that eventually allows for the capacity of actual wonder to rise, without which transcendence is impossible. That’s the path.

As for the connection between Bach’s Cello Suites and the Rolfing process, you’d have to know about the structure of the Suites, like we seek to know about the structure of the body, or of a person. There are six suites, and within each suite there are six movements. It shouldn’t surprise you that the number six held significant metaphysical meaning for Bach. But that’s another story. Anyway, each individual piece of music has its specific structural purpose. It is entirely coherent standing alone as a piece of music, but it also is a piece of the structure and meaning of the suite; and then each suite has its specific structural purpose within the structure and meaning of the whole, if you can expand your vision to experience the Cello Suites as one very intimate piece of music.

I’d suggest that we can say the same holds true for each session of Rolfing SI, and for each group of sessions of Rolfing SI, not to mention the whole of the genius series that is Dr. Rolf’s gift to humanity. Liberating the functions that are addressed in each session has specific functional, structural purpose to that session. But the work of each session also has deeper purpose in relation to the entire process. Lynn, as we discuss this, Ihave no doubt that a person could write an entire thesis about it. But let’s let this suffice for what is, after all, a friendly telephone conversation between two colleagues.

In the end, I have concluded that the cello music is Sebastian Bach’s baritone voice undefendedly revealing himself as profoundly and deeply as he could, and as my presentation title forthrightly says, moving From Tragedy to Transcendence. And there’s plenty more to say about the music, not to mention the man himself; but let’s let this suffice.

I’ll probably get in trouble for saying this, but I think that why Rolfing SI hasn’t grown the way it ought to have, and why we are so split, is because, as an organization, we are made of people who didn’t do that forthright exploring work I spoke of before. What you’re really doing when you get the hamstrings opened up, or mobilize the ribs, etc., what you’re really doing is releasing a big ‘no’. And as an organization, we didn’t do that on ourselves.

LC: Now, of course, I want to know about the way, technically speaking, playing guitar and Rolfing SI inform each other for you.

SH: They don’t. I mean, they might, but my first impulse is to say they don’t. My biggest albatross as a Rolfer is that I’m always concerned that I’m going to hurt my hands on someone’s body. Jim Asher once told me my joints are hypermobile. And when I figured out what he meant, I realized that’s not a great thing for either a Rolfer or a guitarist. You want some sort of solidity. Injuring myself, or stiffening my hands, have always been my greatest ambivalences as a Rolfer. Reviewers have written about my “incredible dexterity,” meaning I can play fast and move up and down the fingerboard. Well, I don’t know about that, but that presumed dexterity depends on not being injured or stiff.

LC: What about the element of touch?

SH: Rosemary Feitis once said to me that in order to be a Rolfer you have to really like the feel of human tissue. I think that’s probably true. There’s nothing to like about the feel of a steel string pressing into your fingertips! However, what is comparable is the specificity of touch. Playing a melodic line or chords, you have to play the note right. And the right hand – people don’t realize that the right hand is far more difficult than the left, fingering hand. Where you play in relationship to the sound hole effects everything. Is it like that on the cello? [Editor’s note: Lynn Cohen is a cellist, see next article.]

LC: Yes. The bow [in the right hand] is like the breath, and the left hand acts as the teeth and the tongue. The articulateness of the left hand is very important, but it’s the bow that draws the voice out of the instrument.

SH: That’s the same on the guitar. The right hand of the guitar is so much harder than the left hand! If you play near the bridge it’s more metallic. If you play over the sound hole, it’s sweeter. And those strings are close to one another. So, striking the right string at the right time is a difficult mission. You know Bach once said, “It’s easy to play a musical instrument. There’s nothing to it: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time, and the instrument will play itself.” Maybe it was easy for him, but for the rest of us . . .

LC: Indeed! As we end, I want to give you the opportunity to speak to anything that I haven’t asked you.

SH: Okay, so the name of my performance is “From Tragedy to Transcendence.” I was recently asked for an explanation. This is what I came up with, and this is a description that could apply to the work we do as Rolfers too: “What began as an exploration of the life of J.S. Bach has become an exploration of life itself.” Because, in a way, if Rolfing SI and receiving Rolfing sessions isn’t a mutual exploration of life itself, then what the hell is it? That’s what I’m doing when I’m on stage and when I’m giving a Rolfing session and when I’m receiving Rolfing work.

Let’s end with a quote from another of the grand geniuses, Felix Mendelssohn. I think it fits for anybody for whom Rolfing SI is a life path. In a letter to his mother, he wrote: “. . . I endeavor to make progress without any ulterior views beyond my own improvement.” I’d say that’s an excellent point of view both for an individual, being a musician, and for a movement whose purpose is the work of Ida Rolf.

Steven Hancoff “is an interpretive master who plays with fluidity, grace and passion” (Jazz Review Magazine). Steven is a Certified Advanced Rolfer. For fifteen years he served as an Artistic Ambassador representing the United States, concertizing in about fifty countries throughout the world. He is a grateful graduate of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, esteemed for its singular “One Hundred Great Books of the Western World” program, and a proud member of the Grand Canyon River Guides Association

Lynn Cohen is a Certified Advanced Rolfer, cellist, writer, and dog-worshipper who practices all her passions in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Resources

“The Bach Project” consists of these elements.

• The three-CD set The Six Suites for Cello Solo by J. Sebastian Bach for Acoustic Guitar by Steven Hancoff is available at CDBaby, Amazon, Apple iTunes, and wherever CDs are for sale.

• The four-volume iBook (not ‘e-book’) Bach, Casals and the Six Suites for Cello Solo (available for Apple computers, iPads, and iPhones, from Apple’s iTunes; go to http://tinyurl.com/stevenhancoffi t ue s ) . T hv o l u ms ic l u dabout 1,000 historical images and the largest collation of Bach-inspired contemporary art ever collected.

• A series of fourteen videos at Steven Hancoff’s YouTube channel (http:// tinyurl.com/stevenhancoff-youtube).

• The written transcriptions for guitarists – or for people who like to read along while listening (available for free at StevenHancoff.com; go to the Contact page and click to download).
• Two full-length multimedia theatre pieces: From Tragedy to Transcendence and From Obscurity to Pre-Eminence (The Almost Unknown Saga of How the Extraordinary Interactions between the Bach and Mendelssohn Families Saved the Music of J.S. Bach for All of Us). According to Steven, “These are not classical music concerts. The audience does not need ‘to endure culture’ – as Mark Twain once famously put it. These are the preeminent, grand and the most profoundly serendipitous legends of Western culture itself and include storytelling, virtuosic guitar playing, music, video, historical images, and contemporary art. A third presentation is in the works: Johann Sebastian Bach and The Six Suites for Cello Solo, A Fanciful and Extravagant Allegory. (If you wish to be informed of Steven’s performance schedule or book one of these performances, please contact Steven through his website www.stevenhancoff.com.)

How Suite It Is[:]