March 2001: It all began while I was working on the Manuel de Falla Seven Spanish songs for voice and guitar for a concert, a very challenging set of pieces that require a fast, strong arpeggio. I noticed something was seriously wrong – a significant decline in my abilities. I just couldn’t play a “pia” arpeggio at speed or evenly.
The problem probably became noticeable to me at least three months earlier. At that time I had a regular weekly three-hour gig at a wine bar and was really enjoying it. I found I had reached a kind of plateau in my playing where I was able to learn pieces more quickly and because I had a weekly venue I was able to get them up to performance level fairly rapidly. That year was the most fun playing and performing I’d ever had. And then I started to notice a slight change – small inconsistancies and irregularities in my playing. Mistakes. Missed strings. I decided to quit the wine bar gig, but kept other less regular engagements (parties, weddings, etc). I thought perhaps the type of practicing I had been doing had become non-productive. I was burning through a lot of new music and getting away from slow technical practice. So I returned to the slow practice of everything, especially the tremolo, which before had been one of my most shining techniques and now had become uneven. In fact, I couldn’t maintain it at all. In all my playing I was missing strings because once a finger played it stayed curled under, after which I worked hard to force it back into its basic position. After noticing and trying to solve the problems of inaccuracy and lack of control, I started to lose speed, as well.
Not aware of any improvement I cut out practice of all music except those pieces which I had intended for a CD planned almost a year before (if only I had made that CD six months earlier — but that sounds too much like the big one that got away!) I focused on scales, arpeggios and tremolo, convinced that if I could conquer those, everything else would fall into place. I was making every mistake in the book to insure that my technique would continue to decline rapidly.
I know now that the main problem with my hand lies with the ‘m’ finger, but at that stage I was trying so hard to enforce a good position that the whole hand cramped up: the thumb under, the ring and middle finger curling towards the palm, forcing the index and pinky to stick out further. A complete and unholy mess!
This is when I started my own crazy experimental therapies. I still had no idea what was going on with my right hand and I was beyond frustrated. However, I didn’t realize the consequences of continued repetition. As a professional musician one becomes so well-trained that giving up or slowing down when there are problems is unthinkable. The tendency is to hunker down and work harder. After all, that’s what has yielded results before.
In the next post, I’ll discuss my invented experiments to try to improve technique (if nothing else, you’ll see at least I was not lacking in creativity!), and finally discovering that I had Focal Dystonia.
