Leisner begs to differ, having healed himself over the past five years. He regained full use of his right hand just this summer. The Kronos problems were, by comparison, early and mild. Then, a decade older, they tried to prepare the full six-hour work, and two of them, they said, experienced significant back and shoulder pain. And although no enlightened practitioner in the suddenly booming field of performing-arts medicine would question the Kronos' valor, as many a boxing maven did Duran's, the sports analogy may indeed be apt.
Musical performance is, in part, a physical test.
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.