When I was eleven my piano teacher moved to America, and that was the end of my piano lessons. It would be another three years until I would get lessons again, and with no guidance at such a young age I began to play less and less. Three years without my special interest was not good for me. In that time, my already low self-esteem dropped to the lowest point it has ever reached. Between the ages of eleven and fourteen was when I fully realised how different I felt from everyone around me. I couldn’t fit in. I was terrified of making eye-contact. I couldn’t make friends easily. The few friends I had managed to make turned against me for a solid year, bullying me every day at school.

I went on to secondary school and I soon felt lost and lonely, as everybody else around me spent their lunch breaks in deep conversation with their new groups of friends. I hopped from one group of people to another, uncertain who to hang out with. I became depressed and started to withdraw. It was then I began to mess around on the two old, battered pianos that stood in the ground floor hallway of the school. People heard the music and started crowding around and asking me to play some more. I was intimidated by the attention, still extremely shy at the time, but the company was also heartwarming, and so my new hangout became the old pianos in the hallway. My older sister noticed me playing more music and introduced me to a classmate of hers, who was very good at music and taught piano. My mother agreed to take me to lessons, and from then on my life changed.

My new teacher was full of enthusiasm and ideas, and was just a few years older than I was; a perfect match for me at the time. She taught me all kinds of pieces from different genres. I practiced obsessively every day, just like old times, and my playing ability improved rapidly. I had my special interest back at last, and I began to recover from my depression. That spring I got a cello and taught myself to play it. After six months my teacher could no longer teach me anything new. I had to go to a music school in town to find a more advanced teacher. I continued to practice obsessively, and my playing continued to improve rapidly. Two years later, I gave my first solo concert to an audience of eighty people, at the age of seventeen.

The following year I graduated from secondary school and started studying a degree in music. I was looking forward to finally being immersed completely in my obsession with music. I took up organ lessons in addition to the degree itself. However, things didn’t work out as I thought. I quickly found myself struggling to manage a very irregular timetable, a variety of different types of assignments, keeping up with note-taking and paying attention in class along with doing all of my own housework and grocery shopping. I fell apart. I began to panic at how little practice I was getting done compared with how much I used to have time for before. I was constantly exhausted by my efforts to keep up with all of my responsibilities. My confidence plummeted all over again and I fell back into depression. By the end of my first year, I was losing marks for handing in my work too late, I was falling asleep every time I sat down, and my health was deteriorating. The following year I went to counseling and eventually saw a psychologist, who diagnosed me with Asperger’s Syndrome and ADD. I decided to take a year out of college to focus on treatment and rehabilitation.

I am now reaching the end of my gap year from college. I have a fantastic Occupational Therapist who is teaching me how to manage my daily life, and an excellent counselor who has helped me to learn how to take care of myself emotionally. I have begun to relax and thoroughly enjoy playing music once again. I understand myself and my lifelong difficulties in a way I never did before. My confidence is higher than it’s ever been, while my anxiety is barely there any more. I am very hopeful about my future and am truly looking forward to returning to college in September.

Piano has been an amazing and essential part of my life. It gave me a special interest to absorb myself in and let off steam. Later, it gave me self-esteem that I urgently needed, and now, it tempts me with a dream. I dream of being a concert pianist. I long to share music I love to play with an audience that loves to listen. And there is no way that I would have performed my first concert already without my autism.

There are two types of tendonitis, called chronic tendonitis and acute tendonitis. Acute tendonitis comes from a sudden blow or injury, and usually doesn’t take very long to heal. Chronic tendonitis is an injury caused gradually by repeated strain on the tendon, and usually takes a very long time to heal. RSI is very common among musicians, including chronic tendonitis. Here is an outline of how I got it and how I recovered. For anyone who has it, remember that you can actually recover, even though there are times that it feels like it’ll never go away! Here is a list of all the steps I took daily over several months in order to recover.

Cause of injury:

• heaps of written homework from school teachers (Junior Cert.)
• practicing piano in a cold room, hands always cold
• switching from an old piano to a much newer one with heavier keys, and practicing just as much as before
• not warming up before practice

Onset & symptoms:

• right hand gradually stiffening throughout the day at school
• tried to play piano that evening, fingers couldn’t move
• hand almost closed into a fist
• struggled to do everyday things, e.g. writing, holding things, typing, opening doors
• had to transfer all activity to left hand, including writing
• left hand also developed tendonitis shortly after
• felt pain in various parts of the hands and forearms, including elbows
• could not play music for more than a few seconds before hands would stop moving

Treatment & recovery:

• went to GP, diagnosed tendonitis and prescribed ibuprofen (ibuprofen is an anti-inflammatory, tendonitis is inflammation of the tendons)
  • relieved pain and helped with mobility but was only a temporary solution
  • can be hazardous to digestive system, could only take it every second week
• rest
  • did literally nothing with right arm for a full day, then only very light tasks with lots of rest between
  • did same thing with left arm when symptoms started
  • avoided piano completely until mobility had improved significantly

• hot and cold baths
  • filled two basins with water, one as hot as tolerable, one cold
  • placed arms up to elbows into hot water for 30 seconds, then transferred to cold water for 30 seconds repeated 3 times, twice daily
  • hot water increased blood flow, aiding the breakdown of scar tissue around the injuries
  • cold water slowed down blood flow, reducing inflammation

• tennis ball massage
  • rolled the tennis ball gently in small circles around the sore parts of my arms
  • very effective pain relief and helped with mobility

• physiotherapy
  • registered professional, massaged arms from shoulder down, finding lumps of scar tissue and breaking them down
  • aided and observed healing process

• gentle stretches
  • did stretching exercises from shoulders down
  • was vital to stretch slowly and gently
  • 3 times daily and before practice (when I was able to start playing again)

• gentle dumbell exercises
  • bought beginner’s dumbells
  • followed accompanying instructions for basic exercises
  • used to regain muscle strength and mobility
  • was essential to start with few exercises, increasing gradually over several weeks

• Alexander Technique
  • technique devised by F.M. Alexander, teaching the student to move freely without straining the body
  • aided healing
  • prevented further injury

• gradual re-introduction of normal activity
  • started with simple activities, i.g. lifting/holding objects
  • remained closely observant, ceasing activity at any sign of pain or strain
  • gradually added more complex activities over several months, leaving writing and music until last
  • after 8 months was beginning to write and play music again
  • kept practice sessions short and continued to divide general activities incl. writing between both hands until both arms felt normal
  • had piano moved to a warmer room

This is the page where I found the shoulder stretches and arm baths and some of the other tips. I cannot recommend it highly enough:

http://www.handfootcare.com/hands_musicians.htm

I had no Alexander Technique teacher at the time, but I went to Ebay and bought a little handbook explaining the basics. I’m now attending weekly lessons and it is proving tremendously helpful in all aspects of my life.

If you’re currently recovering from an RSI, it’s important to remain patient even though it’s very difficult to do so. Good luck and don’t give up!

Now I’ve identified another problem. I was, quite simply, doing it the wrong way. I was looking at the notes printed on the page and trying to translate them into keys on a keyboard. This doesn’t work! Translating a visual presentation of music into another visual presentation of music is not the purpose of reading and it presents a tremendous amount of work to the brain. Imagine how completely impossible it would be to sing a tune at sight if that was the way to do it! We can’t see our vocal chords, after all. This method of reading music would only suit a deaf person, and that obviously makes no sense at all.

So what did I need to change? My interpretation of written music. Now I look at a piece of music and I translate it into sound in my mind first, i.e. hear it with my “internal ear”, as many teachers put it. Once I’ve done that, I simply use my familiarity with the keyboard to quickly find and play out those sounds.

The way I was trying to read music before just made no sense. I now realize that a skilled sight-reader is actually someone who first imagines what each bar sounds like and then allows their well-developed navigation of the keyboard (or whatever instrument he/she plays) to do the rest. This may have been an even more important realization than the previous one, so I guess my career and my enjoyment of music have both just received another boost!

I had arrived at my parents’ house for the Christmas holidays the day before, and in my room I found two drawers full of sheet music. It was a mixture of music I had learned two or more years previously, and music I had bought but never played. Feeling somewhat nostalgic in the spirit of the season, I grabbed the two paper piles and started playing through them. Having a well-developed memory for music, I had little trouble reading through the pieces I had learned before. But when I opened up an organ voluntary that I had neither played nor heard before, the last thing I expected was to be able to play through it just as smoothly. Yet, that’s exactly what happened! Feeling sudden confidence, I went on to read though the slow movement of a concerto I had been working on and, combined with my ability to memorize, I had almost finished learning it by the fourth read-through.

My sight-reading improved instantly because I simply changed my approach. Last night, reading music was not a test to be passed, and mistakes were not to be punished by starting over again. Reading is now, for me, the first step to enjoying new music and revising old favourites. It’s just taking that sheet music and translating it into the sounds that the composer imagined, as is the purpose of reading a novel. Within a couple of minutes, sight-reading has become my new hobby, and it’s improving dramatically. My career has just had a boost, and I now have a new way of enjoying music. Onwards and upwards!