You Are Your Instrument by Julie Lyonn Lieberman

What is You Are Your Instrument about? What inspired you to write this book?

In the 1970s, I began to feel as though I was losing my hearing. I was in college, and I went to an ear doctor who said there was nothing wrong with my hearing. It turned out the way I was holding my violin was building so much tension in my neck and shoulders that the muscles were pushing against my eardrums, which was the true root cause. Because of this experience, I became indignant over the lack of information for injured musicians.

Back then—and even now—there’s been a lack of training designed to address the musicians’ need to understand natural muscle and joint function. I studied dance for many years and there was a plethora of information for dancers. As well as athletes, but little for musicians. We are just as athletic, and we put in up to 12 hours a day on our instrument. So, in the early 1980s, I took my grandmother’s advice, “When you want to get something done, do it yourself.” I began to do research with the intent of writing a book.

I interviewed doctors and read every book I could find about the brain. I studied anatomy. I did all this research on my own. As I developed the book, a new private student began studies with me in my New York City music studio whose husband was a doctor, and he was able to print out a lot of studies for me that the average person would not have access to. He gave me a pile of printouts and later wrote the preface for the book.

I began to realize that a primary care doctor, the kind you would go to for a check-up, doesn’t know anything about how musicians use their bodies or what to do for them other than painkillers if they’re injured. Back then—and even in many cases now—the occupational or physical therapists dole out exercises from books that were primarily designed for jobs involving hard labor or traumatic injury. Musicians tend to suffer from repetitive overuse.

After close to a decade of work, when I completed what I thought was the final draft of You Are Your Instrument, the book was turned down by 45 publishers. They weren't interested in the topic or didn’t think it was important or didn’t even bother to provide a reason. I was determined to make this information available. I kept working on the book… and working on the book… and working on the book. After such a long line of rejections, I began to realize as a young musician that for every 100 inquiries I sent out for anything I wanted to achieve in my life, I’d be lucky to hear “yes” from one. And that sometimes I might not hear back at all.

I became a member of the Musicians Union in New York City because I’d been hired to play the Broadway show, “M. Butterfly,” and decided to contact the President of the union. He really believed in what I was doing because he’d suffered from injury and had not been able to receive adequate help. I was very lucky because I didn't have two cents to rub together. He said he could give me a loan to print the book myself if I had collateral. I turned to a musician friend of mine, whose husband was a lawyer. They really believed in the project so they sent me a check with the agreement that I would put it into a CD the union would hold in their safe. The agreement was, that as soon as the book went up for sale, I'd be able to pay them back.

After numerous attempts to find a distributor, I hung up a quote on the wall in front of my desk from the South African playwright, Athol Fugard, “When I hear a knock at the door, if I don't answer it, I know that my soul is in trouble.” Unlike today’s companies, like “Bookbaby,” it was extremely challenging to find a distributor since I wasn’t a major publishing company, but I finally found one. The problem? They wanted the entire first printing and already had started to put the book up for sale before it even came back from the printer, so I had to order a second printing, for which I borrowed from 12 friends and family members. But now I felt confident I’d be able to pay back all the loans in a matter of months.

Many of us are not taught how to live a creative life, meaning how to build the skills we need to create what's important to us in our lives. Naysayers who are close to us, often want to protect us from rejection, or never dared pursue their dreams. But this early experience taught me that if you do ‘hear the knock at your door,” trust yourself and pursue your dreams.

The beautiful thing about this book is it took off like crazy and is now in its 7th printing with 11,000 copies sold. It’s true that these numbers sound like chump change to the major publishing houses, but for an independent publisher of a topic no one had touched up until that point in time, this number is amazing.

Why should this topic be more well-informed?

The important step of putting two and two together when we're injured has been left out of our education in general. Most people don't have a clue what to do for themselves when they're hurt or sick and of course, they turn to doctors.

Have I ever been invited to a music medicine conference? Only the doctors participate. After all, what right do I have to know anything about the body and brain and write about it without a “Dr.”, before my name? But that’s the whole point of my book. We do have a right to know about natural muscle and joint function, about which parts of the brain do what, and how that affects how we live in our bodies.

The first doctor to specialize in music medicine was in either Maryland or Washington D.C.. I received a call from a drummer who was injured, and I referred him to this doctor. I figured this doctor understood the importance of the field. What did he do? What any doctor would do. He did a nerve test. The famous first music medicine doctor said to the drummer, “There is nothing wrong. You're not injured.” Meanwhile, the drummer was in constant pain and out of work. He had lost his apartment, and as an adult, had moved back in with his parents. He couldn't take on any job. And he had to pay three hundred dollars for a nerve test.

He contacted me in tears, a grown man. I told him I was going to be playing for an Off-Broadway show in Maryland that had been booked for a 30-night run. It was an easy drive for him to make. I advised him not to bring his whole drum set, just a drum pad. He met with me at my hotel, and I just watched him play for a few minutes. From there I was able to tell him what he had done that caused the injury. Then I coached him on which adjustments he needed to make. Within a week the pain was gone, and he healed quickly enough to go back to work.

I'm not trying to be disrespectful of the long education that individuals take on huge loans to cover to become a doctor. That said, I want to be honest about what they're trained in and what they're not. My approach to diagnosing injuries is entirely different and extremely comprehensive when I meet one-on-one with a client because I’m looking at the whole individual, not just a body part, and I never advise drugs or surgery—which can cause harm in other ways—but rather, what I refer to as “technical rehabilitation.”

You Are Your Instrument is now in its seventh printing. I updated the entire book for the first time since its debut in 1991. I wanted to integrate what I’ve learned after working with thousands of injured musicians one-on-one and presenting “Playing Healthy” workshops to music students as well as teachers internationally. I'm quite proud of this new edition.

Why is position/placement and proper motor function important for a musician?

Any instrument you play on, if you don't have proper support for your body type and haven’t learned how to practice mentally just as much as physically, can lead to pain or even injury. I've been teaching workshops all over the world and I’ve learned the vital importance of teaching with principles, NOT rules, to address the differences in body types and brain skills.

When you teach with a rule, it’s based on how you've learned and what you're forcing on your students. When you teach with a principle, you're learning to pay attention to that individual’s needs. Sadly, many teachers say things like “Just keep practicing. Ignore the pain”. I’ve heard this from many individuals. For instance, a prodigy’s parents approached me for help. Her teacher was quite prominent and a major pedagogue in the world. He was unable to offer her any advice for her pain other than to tell her to keep practicing and ignore the pain. I worked with her during her winter break on Skype, to try and help her. After winter break, he asked, “How are you doing?” When she said I’m fine now, he asked, “What did you do?”. She responded that she’d met with me several times and we changed her setup and support system. He hired me to do some healthy playing sessions at Juilliard. He never came to any of them, and I even noticed that he wasn’t teaching when I was. I purposely went to watch him teach and perform, just to see how he played. I couldn't even look at him, his body was so warped, and he had accepted that this is how you’re supposed to feel and play.

My biggest advice to anyone reading this is to ask questions, do your own research, and don't believe everything you read. This doesn't just apply to injury; this can apply to anything. We’re seeing less and less people in all walks of life who’ve been trained to think for themselves, to do research, and to ask questions. It takes a lot of time, patience, and the ability to cross-compare from a wide range of opinions and research.

People accept what's shared on social media, they don't examine who said the statement or what their background is. The best thing I think any individual can do is to learn to trust themselves, trust their intuition, and do their own research in conjunction with whomever they're getting the source information from.

Have you seen an improvement in our medical system for musicians?

I really haven't seen much of an improvement. I think some doctors have gotten better at recommending Physical Therapy, but I've worked one-on-one with clients who are in physical therapy, and I've had to change their PT exercises because the physical therapist doesn't understand what a musician does all day long and may prescribe exercises that exacerbates his or her injury.  

When I first work with an injured client, I don't ask them to tell me what's wrong. I ask them to mime how they play because the motor cortices will remember everything and exaggerate it. For example, a person may be clenching their biceps while they're playing. You may not see it when they're on their instrument, but when they mime, suddenly they overcompensate for the lack of an instrument. I often learn more from watching an injured musician mime, than while playing their instrument in front of me.

The path that led them there while learning to play, was devoid of everything they’d need to know to protect themselves from injury. For instance, I just taught a Playing Healthy workshop in Wales, for European string teachers. The first question I always ask during this workshop is, “Point to where your finger muscles are.” Their response was typical of everywhere I’ve taught this workshop. Two out of a hundred musicians will present the correct response. They'll point to the tendons in their hands. For musicians, the muscles we use and how we use them are not as obvious. You know how to use your legs for jumping, leaping, and running. Musicians—and everyone—deserve to learn what I refer to as “functional anatomy.” Not academic memorization, but through an understanding of how specifics apply to movement of each primary region of the engaged areas of the body for that activity.

I'm making a guess that a large percentage of well-trained physical therapists don't ask the injured musicians to play their instruments at the session or don't ask them to mine. They're just looking in a book, “Oh, they’re having a problem with their left shoulder,” and they use the exercises listed in that PT book for shoulder problems. Even if the exercise helps, sending them home to repeat the same activity that injured them in the first place doesn’t make sense! I help injured players amend what they did to injure themselves in the first place, while strengthening the opposing and surrounding muscle groups to provide greater support.

I have always said to injured musicians that the learning curve to heal themselves will change them as people, change how they think, change how they live in their bodies, and change how they make music. It’s not a waste of time. It’s an incredible journey that they go on, and I like to encourage them to think this way rather than, “Oh poor, unfortunate me, look what happened to me.”

Does your book cover all instruments and related injuries from those instruments?

You Are Your Instrument is geared toward all instrumentalists, and I move through each area of the body. When I have workshops or sessions, I call it a walking tour. What do you need to know about? Where are your finger muscles? How does your rotator cuff work? What muscles do we have in the hand and how does that pertain to how we use our hands?  

I have an area in the back of the book called “muscle balance.” When you do something repetitively a certain way, you need to counterbalance that motion. For example, if your shoulders are always forward, those anterior muscles become very strong and therefore shorten. The posterior muscles lengthen in response, which weakens them. These “muscle balance” exercises strengthen the opposing muscle group, so the musician achieves balance and support.

I also address postural issues, diet, and what to carry with you when you're on the road. I even have a chapter on beta blockers and why they should be avoided. The book offers a glossary of healing modalities as well. I’ve endeavored to make the book as comprehensive as possible.