Musician overcomes injury, educates others

Which of the following does not belong? Basketball, track, swimming and violin; shooting hoops, sprinting meters, treading water and plucking the E string.

If you chose violin — ding, ding! — by most standards, you were right. Music isn’t generally associated with physical activity of any sort.

David Holter ’11, a pianist struggling with a strain injury that forced him to stop playing, challenged those assumptions in his Feb. 10 presentation, “Virtuosity’s Ease,” at the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center for the Arts. The presentation was the culmination of a Winter Term independent study spent with Artist-in-Residence Barbara Lister-Sink investigating musician injuries at North Carolina’s Salem College.

“You don’t go to the orchestra to watch the amazing human body in action,” Holter told the audience at his lecture. “People think of music as this spiritual, ethereal thing. They go to the symphony, they close their eyes; they’re looking for an out-of-body experience. But the same body that plays music bursts through defensive lines and contorts itself into incredible shapes in ballet.”

Every note played involves complex, if minute, movements of tendons and muscles, sometimes in very quick succession. Take Stravinsky’s “Rites of Spring,” a piece so demanding it was once attempted only by the most premier orchestras. It is today considered essential to professional repertoires. Holter described one passage that required violins to play 360 notes in 30 seconds, 12 notes a second.

Compare this with professional typists, who are required to type five letters a second.

Holter became familiar with the stress these demands can put on musicians in the run-up to his college auditions.

“I had some pain in my arms, but it really started increasing my senior year,” Holter said.

“Suddenly I was ramping up practice time. I started putting in two to three hours a day, where in high school I’d practice 30 minutes to an hour most days. It becomes about how much repertoire you can get done and how well you can play by the time you get to your senior [college] recital.”

The pressure to excel is obvious in the many musicians who face injuries at some point in their careers. Carpal tunnel syndrome, cubital tunnel syndrome, nerve entrapment and tendonitis have all been attributed to playing-related injuries. Even so, most musicians are not aware of the physical toll that practice regimens can take on the body.

"As a musician, it’s all about the music,” Holter said. “Technique is taught with the goal of making great music; as long as you feel you’re contributing to music, you don’t care. With football, if you lose a few guys to broken arms, it’s about sacrificing yourself for the game.”

Lister-Sink is trying to change this. Her 1996 video, “Freeing the Caged Bird: Developing Well-Coordinated, Injury-Preventive Piano Technique,” capitalizes on her own experience with playing-related injury. She has since expanded the program into a series of private lessons and workshops.

The key to Lister-Sink’s method lies in taking a more holistic approach to music. Members of her workshop, including Holter, start off playing one note over and over again, focusing on relaxing the wrist.

“Instead of telling your body, ‘Well, this is wrong; now do this,’ I’m learning to just watch my hand, and assume the body will fall in sync on its own,” David said. “There has to be a balance between mind, body and emotions. We have to start from scratch, teaching ourselves a whole new way of playing. We have to learn to trust the arch of our hands, so that before we even think of playing a piece we play one note, practicing it over and over again.”

In some cases, the danger of injury becomes a self-perpetuating cycle. The kid who bangs around on an old Yamaha becomes the teacher who instructs another would-be musician, and through both generations there remains a lack of awareness.

The workshop was attended by young beginner pianists as well as experienced musicians frustrated by their sudden inability to play and the potential loss of livelihood. In one extreme case, a man was unable to lift his arms enough to do his own laundry, let alone play the piano. After two years with Lister-Sink he has progressed to playing simple solos.

Looking forward, Holter hopes to complete a music major with a focus in composition before continuing his study with Lister-Sink and getting certified in teaching her method.

“Art is sort of a lifestyle,” he said. “It’s a kind of meditation, a daily awareness of the body. I’ve learned to enjoy the sound. When you’re playing one note, then two, with every step you start to appreciate music more from its foundation.”