Dr. Kyle Pruett called musicians at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival in Connecticut last month, as large-muscle Olympians were toppling records in Atlanta. Pruett, a clinical professor of child psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, was speaking at the festival's second annual conference on music and medicine, sponsored by the school's section on sports medicine and the Yale Summer School of Music. The conference provided musicians with valuable counsel on physical matters from a battery of Yale doctors of various specialties. But it was also intended to familiarize doctors trying to extend their expertise from sports medicine to the performing arts with musicians' specific problems and concerns. Pruett provided fascinating insight on the relationship between the seemingly disparate psychologies of classical music and sports.
Athletes have it relatively easy.
This psychological drive toward perfection undoubtedly lies close behind many a musician's physical problem. Take Goebel, who directs the splendid period-instrument group Musica Antiqua Koln, in Cologne, Germany, and has a reputation for practicing long and hard, even manically. The trait has served him well over the past five years, as, with fierce determination, he has retrained himself to play the violin with hands reversed, an almost unheard-of feat in midcareer. One has to hope that even Goebel, at 43, cannot wear out two hands in a lifetime, although there were probably other factors involved in his injury. Several months ago, he suggested that unevenness or inconsistency in the string tension of his antique violin may have caused him to compensate with his fingers.