music = athletics

I've been taking a vacation from vacation, so to speak, so I've neglected you a little bit *pats imaginary blog mascot on head*.  But being home and hanging with family isn't exactly the most exhilarating, blog-worthy stuff, especially when I don't have to make food for myself. (Thanks, Mommy!)

But I have been dealing with some occupational injuries, so I thought I would write a couple words about that today.  Remember my last post about cramming for that last-minute recital?  Well, those stress-induced knots haven't dissolved themselves yet.  They've pretty much stayed there, lurking and staying low-profile enough that they don't impair everyday activity, but hurting enough that I know they're there.  I haven't done much besides having my brother work on them a little and icing them once.  

Right before dinner today, I tripped on my purse and fell.  As I fell, I felt a jerk of impact in my shoulder and knew I had aggravated the stress knots big time.  Throbbing pain coursed through my upper back every time I moved my left arm in the slightest.  I suffered through dinner, trying to stretch it out at intervals.  No dice.  Further steps needed to be taken.  A massage would have been best, but no one in my family is good enough or patient enough.  Sad but true.  I thought about ice or a hot pad, but suddenly remembered SalonPas.  It's a slightly medicated pad that sticks like a bandage and feels like IcyHot.  As I sit here typing I've got a couple pads stuck on my back and it feels like a fresh shot of ice.  It's got a distinctive scent; my high school piano teacher used to joke that she was wearing a new perfume whenever she used them.  

I'm telling you, music is just as physical as athletics.  There are soooo many injuries you can get because of practicing bad habits, whether while you're actually doing music or even when you're just doing everyday things.  Like sitting.  Sitting with bad posture has a huge effect on your physical health and therefore how you play your instrument.  

Over the years I've struggled with wrist and arm pain, partly due to a snowboarding accident when I was fifteen, and partly because of faulty technique.  I've also had pretty bad tension issues in my upper back since entering college.  Some things I've tried to cure these ills include:

1. Icing: a pretty basic preventative measure that is relatively harmless to employ.  I ice when I over-practice, when things feel like they might start hurting, etc.  I always warm up before playing again, though.

2. SalonPas: again, a preventative measure.  SalonPas is my favorite because it's easy and not messy and works really well.

3. IcyHot: not super helpful and also pretty messy and pungent.  The super cooling feeling is nice though.

4. Hot pads: I don't use these very often.

5. Feldenkrais: a body-awareness method that seeks to correct your body alignment.  This is one of the more helpful things I've done.  I took a class that taught some basic relaxation and awareness techniques, and I found that throughout that semester I had less tension in my body and was able to play more freely.  However, it's something that's pretty hard to keep up on your own, unless you're trained in it.  I might look into taking some more classes.

6. Finally, the most important and helpful thing to do is to build good habits!  It's also the hardest . . .  Good habits including always having good posture, which is a result of knowing your best alignment and keeping everything that way, practicing healthy technique, and not playing through pain.  I'm definitely working on these . . . so I'll keep you posted on how it goes.  

For now . . . I'm gonna go get some more SalonPas for my shoulder, whew!

Thanks for reading.

cheers,

Serfy

how to learn lots of music in very little time

I reached the major accompanist leagues this past weekend.  At least, it felt like I was nearing true collaborative pianist status.  It started with a call on Friday morning from a CSA teacher whom I barely knew.  She had a student, (or did she say former student?) who was playing a recital this Sunday.  He thought he had an accompanist but it turned out he didn't (wait . . . how does that work?  The accompanist was a hoax??)  He was playing a Brahms viola sonata (did she say viola or violin?), she wasn't sure which one, and the Walton.  Did I know those pieces (maybe I've played the Brahms before, if you could tell me which one . . . )?

She kept talking a mile a minute and before I knew it I'd agreed to the gig.  What?  It wasn't like I had anything else going on, since I had finished teaching the week before.  So I ended up learning a whole Brahms sonata (turns out it was the f minor viola, originally for clarinet) and two movements of the Walton viola concerto in about five hours.  We rehearsed on Saturday for two hours, after I had rehearsed a Brahms duo sonata for two hours, so I was dead beat by 2:00 pm.  I knew I'd be in bad shape if I pushed myself too hard after months of low stress semi-playing, so I spent a couple hours icing . . . everything and watching Billy Elliot.*  Then I slow-practiced for another two hours, hoping that slow-practice would cement some of the harder passages.

Go-time was Sunday at 11 am, which was unfortunate because that meant I had to miss church.  I'm still trying to figure out that whole work-on-Sunday thing since it has a different angle for musicians.  The recital did not bomb and I did not collapse from exhaustion.  We won't talk about the number of wrong notes I played, but I just tried to focus on making the experience something worthwhile for the audience and I think we succeeded.  I had been warned that the audience would not be very classical-music-savvy and would therefore be less judgmental, which is one reason I agreed to the gig.  Always a nice change to play for people who are simply appreciative and not critical.  (Though honest critique is the best way to improve!)

I honestly enjoyed this experience a bit more than the usual way of spending months working on an hour's program.  I've always worked well under pressure, and with my short attention span sometimes the quicker something is over the better.  Funny then that I'm a musician, because musicians often spend hundreds of hours over the course of years working towards sixty minutes of performance.

A couple things that I learned or that were reinforced from this experience.
- It's better to learn music slowly and well than to learn it quickly and sloppily.
- S - L - O - W practice is always always helpful.
- must. take. things. in. chunks.
- Doing music is just like doing sports: you need to take good care of your body so you can perform well.  For me that meant taking breaks every half hour, spacing out my practice sessions, icing things in between sessions, resting well the night before.
- Towards the end of Saturday night, I started to get really tense, so I took a quiet half hour to do some Feldenkrais relaxation exercises.  They really helped!
- I develop tension really quickly.  And it is always stress-related and bad posture-related.
- Phrasing covers a multitude of technical sins, in a pinch.  ;)  Of course in the long run I don't want to do that, but for quick turnarounds like this, it really helped to focus on making musical sense rather than getting all the notes in a run perfect.

And now I've basically got two staples of the viola repertoire under my belt!  Anyone want to perform them again?  :)

Thanks for reading!

cheers,
Serfy

*Funny story about Billy Elliot: I first watched it when I was about thirteen, when I was, let's say, a little more innocent.  That is, I didn't know what the F word was.  Plus, the thick Irish brogues masked half of what they were saying anyway.  So I watched that movie that has a TON of profanity in it without realizing it.  Now I know.  And yes, there's a lot of swearing.  So don't watch it if you can't handle that type of thing.  But it is a seriously inspirational movie, so if you can handle it, it is totally worth it.