I've been in pain for about 15 years.
I grew up playing the piano, and was pretty serious about it. I practiced every day, played in lots of bands, worked weddings and cocktail hours playing lounge stuff, studied with two teachers (one jazz and one classical) and even considered leaving high school to go to a performing arts school.
And then sometime in high school, my arms started to hurt. I was playing the third movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and was working on the broken octave section (:13 of the link), and I started having pain in my upper forearm. I chalked it up to tiredness, took a break and came back, and found it was worse. And just kept getting worse.
From then on, it never really went away. I continued to play, did lots of accompanying through college and played gigs here and there, but I could never play regularly without the pain coming back. Every few years, I'd decide to get serious about playing again and start a regular practice schedule, and within a few days, I'd be unable to play at all (and usually unable to type too).
I tried doctors, massage, hot wax baths, electro-stimulation, Advil, wrist braces, and anything else I could think of, but nothing helped.
So piano stayed a hobby, and I never got any better (since I couldn't practice), and eventually, playing stopped being fun because I was so shitty at it.
And then about a year ago, I decided it was time to give it one last shot. I spent a day pouring through web articles and books about piano playing and pain, and learned a few things. First, there's surprisingly little writing on the subject. Despite there being an astounding number of pianists (and musicians more generally) with injuries, very few people have researched or written about the issue. Second, among those who have, there's very little consensus. Some say curved fingers, some say not; some suggest finger isolation exercises, some warn against them; some point you to Hanon, and some say to avoid it.
However, there was one name that kept popping up in all the articles: Taubman. No one really explained what it was or what it meant, but article after article kept mentioning the Taubman technique as somehow being associated with piano pain.
So I sent an email, and a few days later found myself in the studio of Edna Golandsky, the pre-eminent Taubman teacher in the world (who luckily lives in Manhattan). She had me play a single note with my third finger. Then she corrected how I was sitting, and had me play again. Then she corrected the shape of my hand and finger, and had me play again. And again, and again, while she made simple corrections and talked to me about what it means to "drop" onto a note, about connecting from the elbow to the finger, about balancing on the fingertip, about the difference between dropping and pushing.
And sometime in the middle of 30 minutes of playing the same note over and over, the playing changed. I felt a different connection to the instrument than I ever had before; I felt a different connection between my arm and hand and finger than I ever had before; the note sounded rounder and fuller than it had before.
Fast forward a full year of studying Taubman. Three weeks ago, I made it through a full week practicing 90 minutes a day every day, for the first time since high school. I can't say it was 100% pain-free, but it was pretty close, and I'm getting gradually better at identifying what's causing any pain and fixing it.
My New Year's commitment this year is to practice daily, and end the year proud of my piano playing again. In this blog, I'll talk about my last year of Taubman retraining, an incredibly frustrating but amazing journey of relearning every aspect of what it means to play the piano. And I'll talk about this year as I try to apply what I've learned to get back in pianistic shape, get my jazz chops back and, with a little luck, hopefully become a pianist again.
Fantastic Dave - I am very happy for you and continue to be impressed by you commitment and dedication in the pursuit of your passion.
Posted by: Ken | 01/22/2011 at 02:54 AM