Growing Healthy String Players:
Strategies for Orchestra and String Class
by: Judy Palac, DMA
Associate Professor, Music Education, Michigan State University

Most of us have experienced aches and pains from playing at some time or another. Research by Fishbein and others published in 1988 showed that 75% or so of professional orchestra musicians have experienced some kind of musculoskeletal injury- nearly as high an incidence as that of athletes. Luckily, we almost never have to be carried off the stage and the only person known to die of a musical injury was Lully (who stomped his toe with his conducting cane and got gangrene)!

Even among middle school through college students the injury rate is someplace between 35 and 60%. Fortunately, the younger the player, usually the less severe and the less disruptive the injury. However, there is enough concern among health professionals, music educators and policy makers that the National Association of Schools of Music, the accrediting body for degree-granting music programs in the United States, now strongly suggests that all music students be informed of performance health issues by qualified professionals.

Of course, you may have guessed that string players comprise the group most often injured among musicians. I have suspected for years that some of our attrition comes from our students just being uncomfortable with these wonderful but awkward instruments. So what’s a string teacher to do, without injury prevention becoming “just one more thing” we need to teach? Fortunately for us, a lot of strategies for musical health are music-compatible and even music-enhancing and are quickly and easily implemented.

Overall Rehearsal Strategies

Musicians should always warm-up before they play - physically. This means getting moving in order to raise internal body temperature and increase blood flow, not just playing scales. Although students are often running to class, I have found that two or three minutes of warm-up makes them more alert and comfortable and they sound better right off the bat. Any activity that gets the core of the body moving or arms up over the head works. I have used the “Hokey Pokey”, had kids pantomime their favorite sports, done “The Wave” to recorded music or tailored the activity to the group (my college students love the “Hokey Pokey”!).

Players need to take breaks during rehearsals, during which they at least put instruments down or stretch in the opposite direction from that in which they usually go. During rests, it’s good for students to reach clasped hands behind their backs or simply to shake out. A one-minute general break for every thirty minutes of playing can help students to build healthy habits in their own practice as well as rejuvenating them for the next portion of the rehearsal.

A corollary to taking breaks is varying intensity of rehearsal and of performance programs. It’s probably better to program the Dello Joio “Air” with Grieg’s “Holberg Suite”, for example, than the Grieg and Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade”. And students should not play the taxing opening motive of the Holberg for long continuous portions of one rehearsal but might do the slower sustained movements as well.

String players should have the best ergonomic equipment available to them. This means that chair seats should be flat if not sloped a bit forward, so that knees are slightly lower than hips, to preserve the curve of the lower spine. Of course the seat should be high enough that feet are firmly on the floor! For chin players, the chinrest should fit the curve of the jaw well and the shoulder pad should allow the instrument to rest on the collar-bone. Height should be built up with the chinrest more than with the shoulder pad to preserve this contact. Cello and bass endpins need to be long enough. In sizing instruments, borderline students should play the smaller size to avoid overloading young shoulders or to avoid too large a reach to the fingerboard or bow contact point.

Particulars for String Pedagogy

One of the best injury prevention strategies for all musicians is maintaining good posture. Lengthening our spinal columns and maintaining our natural spinal curves - concave at the necks and lower back and convex in the chest region - provides good support for breathing and for the work that our limbs must do when we play. When we sit, it’s good to feel our weight centered over our “sitz bones”, central to our pelvises, rather than over our thigh bones or our tailbones. Although we often tell students to sit on the front of their chairs to avoid slumping, the back of the chair can be very useful in a long rehearsal, as long as other postural parameters are maintained. For upper body, I’ve taught my students to think of their shoulder blades sliding down the back, which keeps the shoulders balanced on the rib cage instead of rolling forward (I learned this exercise in a Pilates class I’ve found to be extremely helpful for good body use, along with body work techniques such as Alexander and Feldenkrais).

Concerning string technique, we can help students to, “Do as much as necessary and as little as possible,” as Ed Sprunger, renowned Michigan Suzuki teacher, puts it. It’s desirable to stay in the middle of the range of motion of the limbs, going to extremes only when necessary and coming back as soon as we can. For example, some players need to bend their wrists backwards (hyperextend) to reach the tip of the bow. A good idea for younger students might be to mark a temporary tip an inch down the bow to avoid this extreme, or to use the tip only under certain conditions. As well, violinists should turn their heads as little to the left as possible for their normal instrument posture. More requires them to be at the limit of their range of motion most of the time, thus becoming muscularly unbalanced.

Applying this principal to tone production, it’s desirable to use as much released body weight and as little muscular force as possible for bowing. However, according to Paul Rolland’s research, pronating the bow arm (rotating in) on a down-bow is an efficient use of leverage because our arms don’t weigh as much as the force needed for tone at the tip.

Whatever technique we’re teaching, it is healthy musically and physically to establish a mental “picture” for students by modeling - aurally, visually, and verbally. Some researchers have attributed the success of Suzuki more to the ever-present aural model of the recordings than to any other factor in the method. From physical education, we know that students need to “get the idea of a movement” before they can refine it - and they usually get it from a model. In string teaching, using verbal imagery to unlock familiar postures and movements can be more efficient and healthy in establishing new patterns (getting the idea) than can direct instructions. For example, telling a student to, “sit on the edge of your chair like an elegant “horseback rider,” can give them the idea of cello posture more quickly and comfortably than giving them a direction for each foot.

I know that many of the strategies above are just good common sense and that many of us already use them. If we can use them on a consistent basis, helping ourselves and our students to develop healthy playing habits, it is my hope and belief that we’ll have more players with greater comfort levels and fewer injuries in the years to come.

Judy Palac is Associate Professor of Music Education at the Michigan State University School of Music. She received a Bachelor of Music and a Master of Music from the University of Michigan and a Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Texas. Palac is a specialist in string education and performing arts medicine. She has taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Texas and the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. Palac is a former member of the Collegium String Quartet. She is published in the fields of performing arts medicine, string teacher education, and the Suzuki method in such journals as “American String Teacher” and “Medical Problems of Performing Artists.”