Slow down

All the other times I felt like I was getting better, I would be so fired up to play again, I'd gun it. I'd sightread as much as I wanted and turn off the telephone line between my brain and my body. It was too delicious to stumble through Chopin etudes and short Brahms pieces, maybe even play some of the Beethoven concerto I did a couple years ago. Come morning, I would never fail to plummet back where I was, or worse.

Now I've started doing a couple things differently. I spend more time warming up, legitimately paying attention to how my fingers feel. I use one hand to cradle the other as it plays, helping simulate the correct motion and basically playing the fingers forcefully the right way so I can stay relaxed and really learn how that feels (and note that it IS possible to play without tension). Also, I don't put so much pressure on myself. I'm not afraid of having a bad day, because I know it won't stay this way forever, and that it's going to be an extremely slow process. I know when it's best to just stop for the day even if things aren't going the way I'd like. There's no easy fix for this, and after a year I have HAD to accept that. But it's exciting to make small strides each day. I've still got a lot of work to do, but at the very least, I'm doing fewer things wrong.

And the cool thing is, when I force myself to go slower, I improve faster. When it hit the 2-weeks-before-my-audition mark, I got a little scared, but SO much good stuff has happened just since then (and it's been, what, only 5 days, and I've got almost 9 left). And you might think when I say "go slower" I'm speaking metaphorically, and being all tortoise/hare preachy. To some degree, yes, but also, I'm literally talking about tempo. The metronome, with its sometimes gentle, sometimes insistent, sometimes maddening little ticks, is my best friend.

Small things

A few days ago I was able to play like I used to play, without any tension or pain, for the first time in a LONG time. I kept it up for a few days, and it was great--that constant dull throbbing that kept my attention on my arms all day whether I was driving or turning on a faucet or brushing my teeth was gone. I was almost able to forget that I have been suffering for an entire year (that's a long time). It was strange how effortlessly it happened in the practice room. I realized if I sort of held my arms differently and used my weight and gravity rather than my muscles, it felt great, and I just kept doing things that felt good and avoiding motions that didn't and that was that. It might be nice to think it was a miracle happening just in time for my audition on the 27th, but really I think it was a lot of tiny subtle corrections I made which made it possible to use my body efficiently. All year my teachers couldn't see anything but tiny subtle things wrong with my playing. It took a Taubman lesson to notice a number of small but hugely significant things I was doing--clenching my fingers, curling my fingers beyond their natural curve, breaking the natural straight line that runs from the elbow through the wrist to the fingers by twisting, and letting my wrist collapse, to name a few. I couldn't correct them all right away. Muscle memory is a powerful thing. But I think some conscious and subconscious work (just realizing what the problems are, for starters) has gone a long way and I have HOPE again. It's weird to say that I lost it, because I don't think it ever got that bad, but for sure I couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel and now I can, and now that I'm permitting myself to freely imagine how great it could be to be in grad school next year studying piano all the time, I'm much happier about my current situation, i.e., its non-permanence.

All right, enough stream of consciousness and mile-long sentences. But I'm interested in the notion of lots of tiny things contributing to a much larger effect. How a person can become consumed by blinding rage over getting cut off at a stop light after a day that consisted of stepping in a puddle of roommate's dog's piss and being yelled at by a belligerent boss. Or a kid who gets 15 minutes more sleep every day for a week and does better on a test, or a person who drinks tea every day and doesn't get sick as often. I know I've wanted to cry and say the world is a cruel cruel place over a flat tire, what seems like one tiny thing but really is just the last straw that reveals a swarming mass of other tiny things that have been bothering me and been left unconfronted, adding up to a meltdown of sorts. But if I just keep my eyes and ears peeled for the small things as they come, I can work on accumulating more of the tea-drinking kind and less of the meltdown/tendonitis kind.

Remember La Bouche? Finding this was a real throwback (and trippy).