CREATIVE HEALTH FOR MUSICIANS

THE MINDFUL HANDS

Pedro de Alcantara considers a playful yet philosophical approach to boosting health for the curious musician, and suggests some novel arm, wrist, hand and finger exercises for string players

Health is a broad concept. Biological markers such as weight, blood pressure and lung capacity are important, but so are habits of speech and sleep, family dynamics, environmental conditions and your ways of handling stress. Another important dimension is creative health, or the inventive choices and decisions that make your life more comfortable, more fun and also more meaningful.

Here are four concepts that can be used in the cultivation of your creative health. Although everyone can benefit from practising these concepts, including children, beginners, amateurs and concert artists, they are particularly suited to curious and light-hearted individuals who enjoy exploration for the sake of exploration.

1. The play of opposing forces Exploring tensional balance in body and mind.

2. Object wisdom Developing your hands’ intelligence through the manipulation of everyday objects.

3. The dance Treating the hands as choreographic partners, moving playfully in response to rhythm.

4. Expressive gesticulation Using the hands to tell stories, convey emotions and respond to the linguistic qualities of music.

1. THE PLAY OF OPPOSING FORCES

Take your bow and loosen it completely. Loosened, the bow is a troubling picture of powerlessness. Now tighten it little by little back to playing tautness. In a state of tensional balance, where the stick and the hair act upon each other, the bow becomes a different entity altogether.

Strings work to the same principle. Completely loosened, they are virtually useless. If we replace a string, we tune it up and up, gradually tightening it from a starting point of total looseness until we reach the desired pitch, which demands a certain string tautness. Then the string, the bridge, the soundpost and the entire instrument are all in a state of tensional balance involving pressure and resistance, and we’re ready to make music.

The American architect and visionary R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) gave a lot of thought to tensional balance. Among other things, he became interested in geodesic domes: hemispherical structures constructed with lattices of rigid triangular elements. Many such domes have been built around the world as auditoriums, greenhouses and public art. Geodesic domes are surprisingly strong structures, and they can withstand heavy loads relative to their size. Fuller coined a term to describe their strength: tensegrity, or an integrity of tensions born of opposing forces. The concept appealed to many people and propagated across multiple endeavours. The doctor Stephen M. Levin (1941–2012) is credited with developing biotensegrity as a new understanding of human functioning.