Developing the Fundamental Skill: healthful, injury preventive technique
Imagine feelings of yours when your performance has gone well and you have really connected with the audience. Successful at projecting your excitement and love of a composition to the audience, your face is flushed, your heart is beating fast and every inch of you feels alive. Those same emotions also can result from giving an exhilarating lesson. We teach music because it has transformed our lives.
We wish all our students a lifetime of joyous music making, yet, in spite of our best efforts, countless students suffer injuries that prevent them from reaching this goal. A medical subspecialty has risen recent years to help performers in all disciplines regain the ability to practice their craft. Performing arts medicine is a growing field with sadly, more than enough injured performers to fill the practice.
Although medical professionals can be very helpful, there is even better news. Musicians also are getting onboard, taking control of their destiny by becoming better educated about ergonomics and injury preventive techniques.
The National association of school of music now is mandating the inclusion of wellness information into the music curriculum. Music schools have developed to help music students to learn how to maintain their physical and psychological well- being.
In technique, as in most things, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. For music teachers, this means teaching ergonomically correct, pain free movement techniques from the beginning of study.
Music as sustained us through the worst and the best of times, since the dawn of humankind. Members of a global community, musicians have always been citizens of the world, peace makers, bridge builders and healers. Techniques are the absolute foundation upon which our music making resets. Lacking that essential foundation, one risk losing the ability to make music freely and to serve humanity effectively. Survey consistently reveals that 50 to 75 percent of musicians have suffered playing related discomfort, pain, injury or dysfunction at some point in their musical lives. That rate of music is equaled only by misconceptions, ignorance misinformation regarding technique.
As a result, numerous talented and dedicated musicians collide with a wall of pain, injury and dysfunction. Many who never will suffer injury may diminish their potential as fully expressive musicians for lack of healthful technique.
The good news is that information and knowledge needed to build a healthful technique, and even eradicate injuries, is available. The fields of music medicine and technology have added scientific validation to successful pedagogical approaches, past and present. However, it is a daunting task to shift through and organize this information for one’s own teaching and to discover commonalities among so many sources.
Someday soon, this formidable challenge may be met, I believe, through a collective national effort to define the principles of healthful techniques, to develop reliable technique for producing replicable, consistent technical results and to disseminate this information in an understandable appropriate manner to all musicians.
About the Author
Holden Hinkle is a musician, composer and music teacher. For more information on various music lessons he recommends you to visit http://www.encoremusiclessons.com/
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