This approach worked wonders for Hanson, who can now play piano for up to eight hours at a time. After searching 25 years for a way to painlessly do his passion, Hanson is astounded by what the simple changes in technique have done for his playing. “It’s amazing!” he says. “I never thought I’d be able to play fast again. I just wanted to not hurt, and to my surprise after about 18 months of this new training, my speed had doubled and now I can do things that I never thought I could do.”
VOCAL AWARENESS
Vocalists are one class of performers that seems to be acutely aware of the importance of preventing injuries through consistent practice of proper habits. The voice is an incredibly fragile instrument, and the need to maintain one’s vocal health has a considerable influence on the lifestyles of serious singers. Camille L. Crossot ’16, who plans on pursuing a career as an opera singer (she recently performed the role of Despina in the Dunster House Opera Society’s production of “Così fan tutte”), knows what it means to always be alert about the impact of daily choices on one’s voice. Such surveillance is particularly important when one is in the rehearsal process for a show, or in the middle of a show’s run. “I know a lot of people’s voices really suffer here, just because it’s so much,” she says. Crossot is careful to rest her voice whenever she can, refraining from singing outside of rehearsal. She also carries a water bottle with her constantly, as even a simple dry throat can mean missing rehearsals.
Allison A. Ray ’14, who also hopes to become an opera singer in the future, performed as Dorabella alongside Crossot in “Così fan tutte.” Ray also played the female lead in the Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert & Sullivan Player’s fall production of “The Pirates of Penzance.” Ray says, “The biggest issue with vocal performance that most people have is usually too much strain or overuse of the vocal chords.” Opera and musical theater are especially wearying; performers tend to push themselves to sing louder and belt higher. “They’re trying to create a certain measure of volume or a certain amount of sound,” she explains. Often, this can cause calluses to develop on the vocal chords.
Protecting the voice against this does not only involve utilizing proper singing techniques but also modifying one’s everyday speech. “People have to go to speech therapists…because they’re speaking really low in their register, where their voice sounds like its cracking, which puts a lot of pressure on the vocal folds.” Ray says. “The goal of vocal rehabilitation is to teach people to speak and to sing without putting too much pressure on the vocal folds…which involves placing the voice higher in their register.”
AT THE FOREFRONT OF PREVENTION
When it comes to preventing further injury, the development of healthful performance habits is of paramount importance. Performance-related rehabilitation specialists work not only to help heal injured artists but also to prevent injury in the first place by helping them to develop the proper habits that are instrumental in safeguarding one’s ability to perform. This prevention-focused philosophy is a fitting response to the innocent lack of awareness that was at the root of the performance-related injuries incurred by Ruiz-Colon and Riveron.
At the forefront of this field, and heralding this philosophy, is the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. The teaching partner of the Harvard Medical School Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Spaulding is one of the nation’s leaders in performance rehabilitation. The Spaulding Hospital for Continuing Medical Care, an affiliate of the Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital Network, is located in Cambridge.
When one first enters this acute-care center, it feels like a standard hospital, sterile and quiet, but upon taking a right, left, and another right, a more unconventional wing of Spaulding is revealed: a music rehabilitation center. This wing of Spaulding boasts a grand piano, gym equipment, and “Easy Street,” a mock neighborhood complete with a bumpy terrain that prepares clients to navigate the cobblestone and uneven roads of Boston and a grocery store where stroke victims can regain their ability to grasp and reach.
Each of these fixtures is integral to the Healthy Performing Artists Program. Launched five years ago, the program has provided aid to numerous local musicians. The goal of the program is simple: to help ensure that a musician’s body never interferes with his or her passion.
“We developed it to be a two-tiered program,” says Catherine Wee, an occupational therapist and certified hand therapist at the center. “Number one, for people who are musicians who are already insured and need to recover from that injury…and go back to playing again—The second part is about prevention.”
To prevent injury, Wee takes her patients through an ergonomic assessment, observing clients as they play their instrument in order to monitor movement. Once Wee has determined what harmful habits a musician has developed, she works with them over several sessions to modify their movements. Modifications are normally small—adjustments to grip or placement of the instrument—but tiny changes such as these have a huge impact over time. “Musicians often develop some bad habits, which contribute to this ongoing pain, which musicians ignore a lot of times because they think they’re supposed to have it,” Wee says. “Everyone has the pain, so they just live with it, but they are not realizing that they can do something to change that.”
The program also aims to make musicians more mindful about the need to take care of their bodies. Unlike professional athletes with teams of personal trainers and coaches, musicians are often not trained to be mindful of their bodies. But the strain placed on professional musicians’ bodies is comparable to that placed on those of professional athletes. “These guys are playing above and beyond just practicing,” says the manager of the Spaulding Cambridge Outpatient Center Melanie Deveikas. “They’re athletes of music.”
In order to combat this lack of awareness, the Healthy Performance Artist Program has collaborated with the New England Conservatory and is currently working with Berklee School of Music to start injury prevention early into in budding musicians’ careers. At individual 30-minute appointments with students, representatives from the program attempt to instill the importance of healthful musicianship. “It’s not a treatment session. It’s an educational session,” Wee says. “We point them in the right direction before they develop bad habits.”
Wee and Deveikas have more than Spaulding in common—both are artists themselves. Wee played piano, and Deveikas played violin and flute. The doctors agree that having a background as an artist is an important asset for a performance rehabilitation specialist. When an artist is faced with the prospect of having to give up the activity that is at once their passion and their career, the emotional toll can be considerable. “It helps to have an understanding of what music really means to them—how passionate they are,” Wee says. “Because they love their art so much, they are very tied to that craft…. So we need to be able to empathize.”
Timothy Sullivan, head of communications at Spaulding, hopes that through prevention-focused programs more artists will be taught to prevent injury from a young age, and will consequently be able to avoid ever having to cope with injuries that can cause mental as well as physical trauma—heartbreak like Riveron’s. “The ideal is to work with our patients to develop the right habits to avoid injuries…to help people know how to live and perform well enough so that they don’t have to come see us.”
Clearly, the kind of awareness Sullivan hopes for is not unreasonable. Performers educated about how to avoid practicing their craft in potentially dangerous ways seem dedicated to maintaining salutary habits. Modern rehabilitation programs aim to offer increased opportunities for education that will allow more artists to learn this information at the outset of their careers, rather than as the result of painful experiences.
--Crimson staff writer Haley A. Rue can be reached at rue@college.harvard.edu.