The Healthy Instrument

Musicians of today are under tremendous pressure to excel. This is communicated to students, and later professionals, as spending more and more time in the practise room. The standards for all instruments are being raised higher and higher as time passes. While we are taught about how to prepare a piece for recital, learn an orchestral excerpt, or the art of improvising a jazz standard, we are not taught how to keep our instruemt healthy. Most musicians do not even realize that we are our instrument.

When we do as we are told, and practise, practise, practise, we do not think about what can happen until we start to feel a twinge or an ache that is not normally there. By the time we actually recognize that something is wrong, we are well on our way to a performance-related injury. Many times we think if we just `work through the pain`, it will go away. Unfortunately, this lack of training and information can derail a career for many months, or years, sometimes permanently.

In my session, I will introduce some of the more commonly seen injuries (and relate them to instrument families), explain how they occur, ways to recognize them, what we can do about them, and when to see a health care provider. Learning about the injuries can prevent them, and allows us to recognize what is happening on a personal level, and while we are teaching. I conclude the session with a simple stretching routine that can be done in a chair, and will serve as both as warm-up and cool-down exercise.

We are all musicians because we love music. Whether we are performing in a pit, an orchestra, or conducting a band, we all run the risk of developing a performance-related injury. Non of us should have to live in fear of losing our job because of an injury that could be prevented.