Pain

I kind of overdid it practicing viola over the past few days. After all the comfortable violin playing I have been doing over the summer, the reality of orchestral obligations has gotten me back into viola practice. And the most immediate chanllenges involve complicated passages that involve a lot of crossing between the C string and the G string.

This means that the repetitive lifting of my right arm at angles I am not used to has caused some muscle strain. So I have had to be careful, and I have had to be efficient in my practicing.

I came across this article today about how musicians feel pain differently from people who aren't musicians, and thought I would share it here.

I always thought that musicians are able to withstand a certain amount of pain because the pleasure of playing and the pleasure of the music produced endorphins. But this study involves the way the act of playing music reshapes our brains.