Well, after 20 months or so with virtually no use of my hands thanks to a smorgasbord of repetitive strain injuries resulting from my former job as a computer programmer, I’m now pretty much back in action.
What finally did the trick for me was reading a book that my awesome physical therapist, Lisa Sattler, had recommended to me. The book is called Rapid Recovery from Back and Neck Pain by Fred Amir. It is based on the work of Dr. John Sarno, professor at NYU, on the mind-body connection as it relates to back pain. I don’t have back pain, but the general principles still apply. The book is really amazing, and if anyone knows someone with chronic inexplicable pain, this book is certainly worth a try. $14 for a paperback is slightly cheaper than a trip to the doctor’s office!
Being unable to do pretty much anything with my hands for 20 months had its moments of extreme frustration, especially since it didn’t seem to be improving until very recently. In fact I even seemed to be moving backwards at times. It’s extremely frustrating when you’re trying to make the best use of your time that you can, and then even those limited activities start setting off sharp stabbing pain in your wrists.
Music Theory
The bright side is that I was able to make huge headway in my knowledge of music theory and in my general musicianship skills (sight-singing, ear training, &c.). I kept up my music lessons with my teacher all throughout my injury, and I also spent thousands of hours doing anything I could to practice music in my head. I did everything except the playing of the keyboard:
- doing harmonic analysis in my head
- sight-singing my way through music from the library
- practicing counting rhythms
- practicing thinking in difficult keys (keys with 5 or more sharps or flats)
- drilling scale degrees (for example looking at a piece in g minor, and looking at every note on the page and saying what scale degree of the key it is, e.g. here is the V chord, D major, which is comprised of scale degrees 5, 7, and 2; now here is the ii6/5 chord, which is 4 in the bass, and 1, 2, and 6 in the upper voices, and so on)
- looking at the keyboard and picturing how the different scales and chords look on the keyboard and remembering how they feel under the hand
- practicing analyzing music by ear
The exciting thing is that, after 20 months without touching a keyboard, I lost almost nothing in my playing ability. In fact, my sight-reading actually improved and is much better than it was in college. All of my hands-free work didn’t have much in the way of tangible benefits at the time (at least that others could see, although I could feel the benefits all along), but I knew it would all pay off when I could finally start putting the pieces together. Throughout my life as a musician, the “muscle memory” part of playing was always much, much stronger for me than the cognitive processing of what I was playing. I would learn repertoire almost purely by muscle memory without understanding bigger patterns. By not having the use of my hands, I was forced to work exclusively on my weak area, which was the cognitive understanding of what I was playing.
To say I was concentrating on theoretical understanding may sound like impractical pie in the sky, but music theory is immensely practical. Spoken language is a useful analogy. Imagine if someone told you to memorize a speech in Russian. You would be forced to memorize syllable to syllable, focusing on particular things like “round your lips more here, put your tongue against the back of your top front teeth here and exhale quickly, make this vowel longer” and so on. That is how it is to play music without understanding what is happening in terms of music theory. Now imagine how much easier it would be to learn to recite Russian if you took 2 years and actually studied the language itself instead of this or that particular speech. With enough practice, you could even read Russian with no preparation! Is learning Russian grammar and vocabulary impractical pie in the sky then? Of course not. Neither is focusing effort on music theory.
Psychology
Another weak area in which I was able to make significant headway is in the psychological aspect of public performance. I have always had major difficulty with what athletes refer to as “choking.” If, when the moment of truth arrives and all eyes are on you, you blow it with a stupid mistake, that is choking. In fact, I remember thinking in college that I probably couldn’t even play a simple five note scale without screwing up if there was enough pressure.
Starting before my hand injury, I had become interested in sports psychology. This was spurred by two things: 1) my frustration with how my music career had turned out after college and trying to figure out what went wrong, and 2) my experiences playing the video game Halo. The former piqued my curiosity, and the latter pointed me in the right direction for some answers. Back in 2004 I had made friends online with two guys who were probably the two best players in the world for the PC version of Halo (chumpp and WerD). That was an eye opening experience for getting a glimpse inside the world of someone who is the best at what they do. I remember talking to chumpp on instant messenger one night and him telling me why he was so good. He said he always paid attention to why things were happening. If he was playing well, he thought about what it was he was doing that was causing him to be successful. And if he was doing poorly, he thought about why he was doing poorly. This may sound obvious in hindsight, but it was fundamentally different from my approach to life up to that point. I had always thought that the way to become successful was to just try really hard, and if you only got so far by trying as hard as you could, well, then I guess it just wasn’t going to happen! But after talking and playing with chumpp and WerD for a few months, I saw that people who are the best at what they do use their brains. It’s the difference between “If at first you don’t succeed, try harder” and “If at first you don’t succeed, change your approach to the problem.”
Another breakthrough in my dabbling in sports psychology came a couple of years later, when I took a few lessons with pro Halo player Tom Taylor (”Tsquared”). In my first lesson, he asked me how I felt about using the power weapons (items that are in short supply but give you a big advantage over your opponent, such as the rocket launcher). I told him I didn’t feel comfortable using them because whenever I would pick one up all I could think was, “Oh man, I’d better not screw this up. If I miss with the rocket launcher, then I’ll look stupid and put the rockets into the opponents’ possession.” He said, “You can’t think that way! If you do, you’ll almost guarantee that’s what’ll happen. When I get the rockets, I think to myself, ‘I’m just gonna blow right through this guy!’ You have to be confident or else you have no chance.” Then he recommended a book called Mind Gym by Gary Mack, which I immediately bought and read. That was one of the major “eureka” moments in my life. Of course blowing yourself up by accident with the rocket launcher in a video game doesn’t matter too much, but the parallels between that and choking during a recital are inescapable. The lessons I learned from Tsquared and Gary Mack will carry over into my professional career as an organist.
Around that time I was also discovering NLP. I read a few books on that and took a course in Ericksonian Hypnosis down at the NLP Center of New York. I also started listening to self-hypnosis CDs from people like Graham English and Paul McKenna on breaking up negative thought patterns (such as focusing on what could go wrong instead of visualizing what will go right) and developing confidence. Of course, hypnosis is something I could do without the use of my hands, so the last 20 months have been the perfect opportunity to work on that aspect. I’ve already been able to help others a little bit with it, and I’m confident it will be a major asset when I begin playing in public again.
So all in all, what could have been a total loss over the last year and a half was turned into a significant positive. I not only didn’t lose ground in my keyboard skills, but I actually made improvements to my sight reading, composing, and theoretical understanding of music. And I also made real progress in another weak area of my music making, performance psychology. You can practice till you’re blue in the face, but if you choke during public performance, it does no good. Being able to deal with performance anxiety is crucial to being able to function as a musician. Plus I’ll just be able to enjoy life more if I’m not dreading every time I have to play under pressure. 
