Who was FM Alexander?

How did he come to develop his technique?

"After working for a lifetime in this new field I am conscious that the knowledge gained is but a beginning...."

Frederick Matthias Alexander was born in Tasmania, Australia in 1869. As a young man Alexander showed great promise as an actor and Shakespearean recitationist. However, young Mr. Alexander faced one great obstacle to his theatrical ambition. He tended to become hoarse, and even to lose his voice, during performances. These vocal problems eventually became so severe that they threatened his acting career. Alexander had observed, however, that his vocal difficulties only occurred when he was performing, not during everyday speech. He concluded that he was doing something different with his vocal apparatus when he performed and that this "something different" was causing his difficulties. With this hypothesis he began to experiment, observing himself speaking and reciting. He found that his hypothesis was only partly correct. First, it was not precisely "something different" that he did during performance that caused his vocal problems, but rather habitual interferences that were present in everything he did. He merely did more of it in performance. Second, it was not something he did specifically with his "vocal apparatus" but rather the way he was using himself as a whole that was at the root of the matter. Through persistent, systematic self-observation Alexander eventually discovered basic principles of human coordination and functioning, and developed a technique he could use anytime and anywhere that ensured his best quality of performance in any activity he chose, including but not limited to, his acting Performance.

Alexander gives his own account of how he came to make these discoveries in "Evolution of a Technique" which is the first chapter of his third book, The Use of The Self.