Stiff fingers cutting into your piano practice? Carpal tunnel syndrome keeping you from your tambourine? Next fall, the School of Music might have your fix.
The school will begin an initiative Fall Quarter that seeks to better treat and educate music students and faculty about injuries sustained while practicing and performing, said Toni-Marie Montgomery, dean of the School of Music.
The initiative — which will take a multi-pronged approach combining research, treatment and education — will be run jointly by faculty at the School of Music and NU’s Feinberg School of Medicine.
“Because players practice some eight hours a day — it’s repetitive motion — there are cases where musicians injure themselves,” Montgomery said. “It’s a way of looking at the whole student and making sure that, as we’re preparing them with the theory and the musicology and the lessons, we’re looking at their well-being as well.”
Alice Brandfonbrener, professor of medicine at Feinberg and medical director for performing artists at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, will head the initiative and will co-teach a seminar on the subject for graduate students with James Kjelland, professor of music studies at the School of Music.
Intensive music programs like those at NU can be extremely taxing — not only mentally and intellectually but physically as well, Brandfonbrener said.
With students practicing so many hours a day, students and faculty need to examine how they can better prevent pain in the practice room, she said.
One of the program’s highlights, she said, is that it will provide greater access to treatment for students who sustain injuries while practicing on the Evanston Campus.
Professional musicians with nagging injuries often develop them early in their careers, Brandfonbrener said.
“None of the incidents are life-threatening,” she said. “But some of them are career-threatening and virtually all of them are annoying to restricting.”
Music senior Yana Bourkova said she had to drop out of a music festival last summer after a bout of tendinitis nearly crippled her ability to play her violin.
“It started with the cold weather,” Bourkova said. “And from not warming up and not taking breaks. That’s very bad.”
Bourkova said between solo practicing and orchestra rehearsals, she plays her violin as many as eight hours a day.
She sought acupuncture treatment last November, which she said cured the injury. But had NU offered more treatment options, she said she would have sought them out.
“I was really hopeless then — I really didn’t know what to do,” Bourkova said.
The initiative this fall also will include research into more medically-sound practice methods and may include workshops for music faculty that encourage more medically-conscious teaching methods, Brandfonbrener said.
“Most people in the arts teach the way they were taught,” she said. “It’s passed down through the generations. It’s never looked at in a scientific or critical way.”
