Welcome to Our Practice
Joni Clare teaches music and Alexander Technique and offers a variety of services in creativity and wellness. She is also a songwriter and recording artist presenting a strong, eclectic sound mixing original soul-singing with classical and experimental training. Through her skills and music, she shares a message of unity, authenticity and connection.
About Joni
Joni Clare graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in music from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Alexander Technique certification through Oregon Center of the Alexander Technique. Her early collegiate training included classical, jazz, musical theater, and gospel repertoires while performing in the University Choir, Women’s Choir, and Jazz Ensemble. She later specialized in extended vocal techniques, experimental improvisation, composition, and vocal pedagogy with performances in the Contemporary Music Ensemble and Experimental Improvisation Ensemble.
Resident Artist at The Wormfarm Institute
Clare’s early singing and performances took place in church, home and school. She developed a meaning for music singing with her mom and dad in many loving communities that she remains grateful for today. She took every opportunity to sing solos and leads in show choir, musicals, class choir, and Solo and Ensemble competitions. It is very clear that Clare early on carried a strong passion and very little fear to sing, dance, and play instruments and these observations are carried through her performances and teaching services today.
Joni Clare with Fable and the World Flat
In young adulthood, Clare began to plug her voice into Milwaukee’s music scene back-up singing with local groups like Soup and Fable and the World Flat. Her life was studying classical pieces and the Alexander Technique by day and performing music by Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Grateful Dead by night. Through this dynamic training she quickly advanced her voice for writing original music and cultivated something eclectic that struck a balance between her collegiate work, reflective writing, and collaborations with other Milwaukee musicians.
She has visited the Wormfarm Institute twice as an artist-in-residence and recorded many freely improvised albums, one being The Waking Hour (2015). Her most recent album Memory Strings (2020) was released with her band, The City Pines out in Portland, Oregon. It is clear that Clare’s studies, projects and musical output carries variety, stepping into many types of expressions with people of all backgrounds and artistic drives.
Voice
Studying voice helps improve your sense of self and open a special expression to others. Joni helps you discover and deepen your authentic creative vibration through traditional and nontraditional music education and methods. She holds space for your intentions plus invites you tap into your confidence, whole-self presence, listening attention, and creative consciousness.
Alexander Technique Table Work
Joni is also an Alexander Technique teacher and this is a fantastic sub-skill for music. The Alexander Technique is the study of motor control, which is the regulation of movement and general ability of a person to initiate and direct muscle function and voluntary movements. The overall framework is to unlearn harmful habits and retrain specific muscle patterns that are associated with stress. The gentle manual guidance that she provides essentially helps bring your alignment into a different state that better sets up muscle use, respiration and vocalization. And you eventually learn to bring these changes about yourself.
It’s often a question of how much and what kind of work it takes to move efficiently and avoid tension and injury during singing and playing. And it’s easy to adopt unhealthy patterns because they often give us a desired result or make us feel right in what we are doing. Joni listens to your sound and looks at your whole self to see how you are functioning. She helps you see what you can undo instead of muscling or straining your way through. A developing skill in the technique sets you up with a more conscious process through music and can help you create a healthy, happy experience while alert and calm.
Piano
The Alexander technique aids health and well-being for all activities of life and it stimulates coordination to support the demands of piano technique. It helps you unlearn harmful habits and prevent stress and injury through a subtle approach.
The gentle manual guidance that Joni provides plus a student’s developing conscious thought-process essentially helps bring alignment into a different state that better sets up muscle use, respiration and vocalization.
These changes can improve how we “perform” activities such as singing, playing piano, or making the bed by influencing how we communicate and regulate our motor control functioning.
You will start off with a full first Alexander Technique lesson to acquire the fundamentals. All lessons following then start with 15 minutes of Alexander Technique to help the student build skill and awareness in themselves. This time includes work at the chair, lying down and other various activities that involved movement through space.
Alexander Technique
The first thing people notice about you when you enter a room is posture, eye contact, gestures, and voice.
Discover the secrets many professional musicians, actors and athletes use to produce fluid performances. The Alexander Technique will teach you how to communicate with your whole self and achieve peak performance. It is utilized in professions of the business industry, education services, customer service industry and even parenting. You will:
- improve posture and spinal alignment.
- relieve and prevent pain.
- reduce strain and muscular tension.
- find better ways to manage stress.
- become more present, open and emotionally available.
- increase range of motion, breathing capacity, and overall energy.
- improve balance and coordination.
- emanate more radiant facial expressions and projection of voice.
The Alexander Technique has proven extremely effective for business executives, salespeople, and lawyers wanting to improve their public speaking skills. With this extraordinary educational approach to movement, you’ll learn how to carry yourself with poise, grace, and confidence.
Success in the Alexander Technique.
Celebrities like Hugh Jackman, Hilary Swank, Paul McCartney and Margot Robbie have used the Alexander Technique as a secret weapon for delivering award-winning performances.
Actors, dancers, singers, and musicians use the Alexander Technique worldwide. It is requisite at many prestigious schools such as Juilliard School in New York, Yale School of Drama, UCLA School of Theater, and countless others. It’s also used to train members of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra to achieve flawless performances.
What is the Alexander Technique?
The Alexander Technique falls into health, wellness and prevention. It helps you unlearn harmful muscular patterns and retrain new and healthy ones that will set you up with high levels of awareness with how you use and move. You receive gentle muscle manipulation plus learn a set of practical activities that help you build the skill of ‘thinking in activity’.
Rates & Location
Rates:
Music lessons:$60/60 minutes and payment goes month-to-month.
Alexander Technique Packages:
Introduction – 1 lesson $60/50 minutes
Digging Deeper – 6 lessons $330 (5% discount)
Total transformation – 12 lessons $650 (10% discount)
Cancellation Policy:
You are required to pay for all regularly scheduled lessons regardless of cancellations. There are no refunds. If you do cancel with a 24-hour notice, lessons can be made up within the same month of payment. She will always make up a paid lesson that she cancels or will apply the payment to the next month’s payment.
Get in Touch
Performing at the House of a Million Lights
Call Joni
(971) 303-9507
Office Location
Creston-Kenilworth Portland OR
Email The Studio
music.alexandertechnique@gmail.com
To inquire about Music or Alexander Technique lessons with Joni Clare, or to book Joni to perform at an event email her at music.alexandertechnique@gmail.com or call her at (971) 303-9507 to set up a consultation.
News
Joyce DiDonato’s master class at Carnegie Hall
Studying music and performance offers us so many ways to growth and reach our full potential. Joyce DiDonato describes it wonderfully:
Joni Clare strikes a balance in music, spirituality, life
A lovely interview of Joni Clare from 2014. It's fascinating to read about her personal life and also identify the growth and change through her musical sound. Milwaukee's Joni Clare was waiting for the right time to start a new endeavor. She had been studying a...