Tag: instruments

Fighting the Pain

Julia Leave a comment

My junior recital is coming up in about a month.

In this recital I am going to play three solo works for unaccompanied viola and a string quartet with my current chamber group. That’s about an hour and ten minutes of playing in total which is what I can easily do in an orchestra concert, but solo playing is much different than ensemble playing. It takes way more focus because the music is more challenging. It’s a lot more physically challenging because you don’t get any chances to rest. Endurance, physical and mental, is one of the most important parts of being a musician, just like it’s important for an athlete. Both require practice in preparation for a performance. You can’t expect to do your best in the performance if you didn’t prepare yourself well enough. And since adrenaline is only present during a performance and not practice, it takes even more energy to keep the mind’s attention and the body in peak performing condition.

At this point, I definitely don’t have the endurance to play an hour and ten minutes of solo music. I am slowly trying to up my practice time every day, but my body is fighting back. I have dealt with overuse injuries since before my senior year of high school and I know that I am prone to getting injured. Every time I finish a run-through of a piece I have an aching feeling in my right wrist that doesn’t go away, and I can feel that my body is too exhausted to continue.

What am I supposed to do in this situation?

Because of my past experience with instrument-related pain, I know the basics of self-care when it comes to practicing. Warming up the body before playing, icing the muscles after, and doing arm and wrist strengthening exercises should be a part of one’s daily routine. Trips to the physical therapist include KT tape, finger splints, and ultrasounds to break up muscle tension. I know the drill, but after awhile when I start to feel better, I stop doing the exercises because I don’t see them as necessary anymore. I basically just get lazy.

Fresh from a trip to the physical therapist today, I am determined to get through the next month of recital preparation with a clean bill of health. I am going to incorporate exercise into my everyday life as well as practice finger strengthening exercises. I am going to work up my practice time until I am able to do 2 full run-throughs of my recital program in 1 practice session. I am going to ice my arms after I practice and wear KT tape every day. I am going to remind myself that I am an athlete and need to take care of my body as such. 

The Singing Ringing Tree

Natalie Minor 1 Comment

There is a tree in a little town in Lancashire, England, but unlike the trees outside my window, this tree does not shed its leaves or sway with the breeze. This tree is made out of galvanized steel pipes that hum when wind flows through them. It is my new favorite piece of sculpture/experimental music and I constantly find myself captivated by its haunting sounds in videos like this:

What an absolutely incredible silhouette, and an amazing way to see the sun rise. As part of a project to rejuvenate the landscape of the area, artists Mike Tonkin and Anna Liu completed the Singing Ringing Tree in 2006, adding to a series of sculptures built along the countryside.

What I love about this sculpture is how it harnesses the natural energy of wind and translates it into sound. So many of the forces and phenomena of our world can be expressed creatively through sound, and in many cases these types of translations provide us with a new way to understand and experience the world. For instance, here is a talk by artist Robert Alexander in which he uses sound to represent data collected from space:

#socool

What he touches on that I find fascinating is how digital data sets translated into frequencies often sound like organically produced sound. How cool is it that all of the music that we listen to when we’re walking to and from class, when we’re trying to cram for an exam, or when we’re busting moves at a party, is a string of code that is translated into sound? I think that everything in the world can probably be sonified, and I think this would be such a cool way to experience the world. Who needs commodification….why should we monetarily quantify things when we can sonitize them?