Sitting at the piano is its own exercise, as it is the base for proper technique. You must sit with your weight distributed evenly, neither to the left nor the right, your feet resting, also equally weighted, on the floor. Your spine should be elongated, as though there is a string attached to the very top of your head, toward the back of your skull, pulling you slightly upward. Your shoulders are down, relaxed. Your arms are at your sides, relaxed. When you bring your arms up, when you bring your hands to the keys, your shoulders should remain down and relaxed, which is the tricky part. But a relaxed shoulder is crucial: Your relaxed, elongated spine and your relaxed shoulders and arms are the conduits for all the energy and tension that should end up in your fingertips, not stuck in a slumped back or hunched shoulders or tense wrists. Your arms are like wings, joined at the center point between your shoulder blades, emanating outward, your fingertips light as feathers.
The center point between my shoulder blades is, of course, where my leak was. And so sitting in a way most beneficial to my dura is especially crucial as I bring my arms to the keys and attempt to play. Every sound I make at the piano has its physical starting place in the muscles and nerves around the site where I was torn, and though there is something satisfying, even poetic about the thought of this, the thought of music emanating from a broken place, there is also an element of danger: I don’t want to stress the still-healing area too much, I don’t want to strain the sensitive spot. And so I sit, upright yet relaxed, and bring my hands to the keyboard imagining a line of energy that flows from the leak spot, energy leaking out toward my shoulders, down my upper arms, past the potential stopping places of my elbows, of my wrists, and all the way to my fingertips, unimpeded.
I don’t start with one note, but I do start small. I think about what I learned in my reading about patients recovering from traumatic brain injury, the importance of those small, focused, repetitive practical-life tasks in their healing process. It was the smallness of them, the level of concentration required, the repetition of them, that seemed to help the brain find new ways of thinking, of rewiring itself, of making new connections in places where the old connections were broken seemingly beyond repair.
And so I start with a book of Pischna technique drills, a set of sixty progressive exercises that are purported to help with finger independence—the ability to control each finger independently, without tension or interference from nearby fingers. (This sounds like an easy task, fingers working independently; but place your hand on a flat surface in front of you and try to lift each finger one by one, without the other fingers moving. The thumb and index finger should be relatively easy, perhaps even the third and pinkie fingers, too. But that fourth finger: lifting it up without your other fingers joining in for moral support is tricky, and even if you can do it a little bit, it’s almost impossible to lift it as high as you did your index finger, for example. This is due to the ways in which the muscles tangle in the back of your hand, and depend upon each other. As a pianist, it’s important to work against that codependence and try, as much as possible, to untangle that knot.) These exercises require concentration, relaxation, coordination, and repetition. In other words, they seem to be a perfect fit for what I’m hoping to accomplish with this homegrown brain-rehab therapy.
Even something small, like this, is a challenge for the brain. Playing these exercises requires the use of both hands, which involves coordination between and cooperation by both hemispheres of the brain. Looking at the score while playing the music requires eye-hand coordination, and also involves the mental task of translating marks on a page representing tones into their proper embodiment of sound via the correct keys on the keyboard. To know whether or not I have succeeded in the effective translation of these printed notes into their corresponding audible notes, I have to be able to listen and hear and evaluate and, if necessary, correct and respond. There is auditory feedback, visual feedback, physical, muscular feedback, left-brain/right-brain feedback: so many levels of engagement required of the brain, just to perform the simplest, most basic exercise in the book.
I begin with just ten or fifteen minutes per day, starting with these Pischna exercises. The early ones are basically short phrases built off a pattern of one or two notes of a chord being sustained while an upper melody vacillates between two notes, first moving back and forth from one note to the note above it, then between the top note and a note just a half-step above that. Then the pattern is repeated a
