Amy Likar

“Finally a book that details a simple but profound and complete way of breathing for a flutist! Amy Likar, through her studies of Alexander Technique and Body Mapping, offers us a way to understand the breathing mechanisms that are the real ‘engine’ of our art. The book illustrates simple but effective exercises to improve and make natural an act that involves our whole life. Improving breathing is the fastest way to improve our sound, and this is even more true for the piccolo! Surely I will adopt this text for my lessons and I will recommend it to my piccolo students.”

“Being completely involved for over 60 years with the joys and tasks of breathing both for ‘life’ and for wind playing, I found Amy Likar’s highly informative book a boon! I appreciate her thoroughness in discussing the breathing process by including invaluable exercises for our own ‘instrument’ as well as our external ones. I am comforted to know that something that is so illusive as the breath process is explained coherently and enthusiastically. Having been blessed myself to study with the pupils of FM Alexander, the founder of the Alexander Technique, I will use this book as a perfect reference and self help guide. As the slogan taped atop my own flute case reads (courtesy YOGI TEAS), ‘The voice of your soul is breath,’ I will carry forth with my own research and experience now supported by this wonderful new book. I salute Amy Likar for affirming all of this and so much more.”

In her group teaching, Amy Likar balances thoughtfulness and innovation with practical application and immediate results. Every performer (individuals from music, dance, and theater) she taught in a workshop at my university walked away with multiple ideas/exercises to expand upon in their own performing. Her teaching is inclusive and inspirational.

Artist Review:
San Francisco Chronicle, March 19, 2016

Rokeach’s concerto was the centerpiece of Friday’s concert by the Oakland Symphony under Music Director Michael Morgan at the Paramount Theatre. It featured a dazzling solo turn by Amy Likar, who sounded entirely in sympathy with the work’s fundamental premises.

In particular, Likar was clearly intent on bringing out the more expressive vein in Rokeach’s writing, and outlining a dramatic relationship between soloist and orchestra that was not quite antagonistic — in the manner of traditional Classical and Romantic concertos — and yet not quite collaborative either.

And in the long-breathed melodies of the slow movement, which Likar delivered with winning tonal beauty and eloquence, you can hear a new kind of character being forged for the piccolo. It’s the kind of thing that instrumentalists all over might undertake.