Lessons of the Hand

This past winter I had surgery on my left hand. Arthritis was causing a progressive deformity of my large thumb joint, so the repair procedure was fairly substantial. I was five weeks in a cast and am now in a splint—removable, so that I can soak and swab and stretch and such in between visits to the physical therapist.

My adventure with disability has brought with it some obvious and predictable conditions, which, however well anticipated, have offered their own surprises in the actual working out, and it has also occasioned some thinking about handedness in particular and kinesthesia (also called proprioception—see Nicole Brockmann’s article in [the American Dalcroze Journal 25, no. 3])—in general, and their relation to what we teach.

Quick—if you had to move bodies around the eurhythmics room and could use only one hand at the piano, which one would you choose? I had no choice, of course, but it didn’t take me long to conclude that I was having to make do with the wrong one. Since I’m strongly right-handed, I’ve been constantly grateful, in all of life away from the piano during these weeks, that it’s my left that’s sidelined. But, oh, at the keyboard, it’s a different story. The right hand (mine, anyhow) knows what it knows, melody and harmony and phrase and shape and so on, but it really doesn’t know the territory down there. Oh, it knows—that is, the ear knows, and the ear speaks to the hand, but the hand is a stranger in that land. Imagine—you’re playing for a eurhythmics class and your eyes are glued to the keyboard! And you’re hitting plenty of clinkers anyway.

During private lessons with students, my right hand can play from the page in either clef—fingerings and leaps idiomatic to the left hand are awkward but negotiable. It’s in improvising that the wrench comes. The right doesn’t want to take left hand dictation from the ear. Perhaps the left hand as soloist would feel equally—but for its own reasons—inadequate. In my imagination it does better than the right, but imagination in my current condition is not very objective; my theory that the left hand knows the right hand’s moves better than vice versa may be wrong. When I am two-handed again, I plan to try to find out.

Why, incidentally, is there such a large literature for the left hand alone and so little for the right? Do pianists injure their right hands only? Or is there something about our left hands…?

And furthermore, incidentally, does hand dominance influence fluency at the keyboard? Or any other instrument?

Away from the piano, one-handed living is not only halting and clumsy, it produces a burden of self-consciousness that is most unwelcome. Ordinarily, thoughtless maneuvers—putting on a shirt, opening a jar, flossing(!)—become tests of ingenuity that one frequently fails; playing the piano is just one of many activities that, if they must be done, must be done poorly. So much unaccustomed attention to the behaving self—How shall I do this? How well am I doing this? How well did I ever do this?—hamstrings the outlook. One longs for that pleasant, productive state of alert attention directed outward, the taken-for-granted self, engaged and disregarded, all thought centered on the task at hand. Instead, one endures a pervasive self-scrutiny that laps easily over into self-evaluation, which in turn seamlessly expands from knife-and-fork dexterity to life review. This unwholesome excitation of the useful faculty of self-judgment clouds the mind and tires the spirit.

There have been, thankfully, more interesting aspects to this state of body/mind than incessant self-assessment. Becoming one-handed has made me aware not only of how much of life is unconsciously two-handed, but aware also of how efficiently the body tends to business without bothering or consulting the person upstairs. This discovery, of course, depended on a disturbance of the system—consciousness getting down into the physical act to deal with exactly what the freshly disabled body could and couldn’t do.

I was unexpectedly confronted with what my freshly disabled body could and couldn’t tell me shortly after I awoke from surgery. I was lying in bed on my back, looking at the morphine drip in my right arm, wondering if I felt bad enough to activate it, when I realized that although my left arm was hurting, I didn’t know where it was. That is, I had no idea what position it was in, whether it was close to my side, up or down, straight or bent. I had to look at it to find out, and when I did, the arm didn’t feel connected to me. In fact, it felt—or seemed—like an intruder in the bed, some sort of alien limb in the place where my real arm was supposed to be. And somehow this alien limb was sending me a strong—yet undifferentiated—sensation of pain.

(Readers of Oliver Sacks’s A Leg to Stand On will recall his account of a similar experience during his recuperation from surgery on his leg. And the epiphany granted him by the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto. Anyone with the least interest in legs, arms, Mendelssohn, music, and miracles of connection will relish this remarkable book.)

The cast extended from my knuckles to my elbow; elbow to shoulder was exposed and free but unable to send me any information about its position. I could move the arm at will, but I had to look at it to see where it was moving. It had sensation—a touch from my right hand could be felt on the free ends of my fingers and on my upper arm. It registered pain, though without precision. What the arm couldn’t do was report on its shape. It had lost its own image in space. During the next few days, this kinesthetic disconnection came and went, and eventually it disappeared entirely, restoring to me a real, if wounded, limb, and renewing my curiosity about this sixth sense that plays so vital a role in our lives, not to mention in our work.

I had begun to marvel at the things my body could do while “I” was elsewhere. How is it that when I step up to the curb from the street, my stride is exactly the right length to land my foot comfortably just past the edge of the pavement? Are my feet figuring out how to do this all the way across the street? Clearly some sort of mechanism is putting that outcome in place, and clearly it isn’t my conscious mind.

And there is more to marvel at. In addition to tending to present business on its own (but letting me in on its operations when my attention can be helpful—as in avoiding the spilled Chinese takeout at the curb’s edge), the kinesthetic sense also somehow stores physical experience in some anteroom of consciousness, letting the image of movement up into awareness as needed. In the eurhythmics class, for example.

In the study of eurhythmics, our acquisition of movement skills depends on the capacity of our inborn kinesthetic sense to be trained, and that vital aspect of the work we call “internalization” depends on the phenomenon of kinesthetic memory. Beginning with simple, natural movement responses to music, we build coordinations of varying complexity as well as expressive gestural representations, all of which, once internalized, lodge down in the realm of non-consciously monitored facility. From this “storehouse of aural and kinesthetic imagery” (Fran Aronoff), these skills and representations permit us to relive our movement experience without moving.

For the performer, this means being free to address all physical activity to the requirements of the instrument, while still experiencing, through the stored imagery, the rhythmic and expressive essentials of the music.

Kathy McLane, pianist, certified Dalcroze teacher, and DMA candidate, who lives in Minneapolis, wrote to me recently about a discovery she made while practicing for her lecture recital on music and dance. She says, “I want to make listeners feel the gavotte while I play it. I have been trying to internalize the beats, the accents, the feeling of anacrusis, the leaps and hops. While I’ve been playing, my body has been engaged in all of this. But I’ve found that the more I try to feel the beat somewhere in my torso, the less the music dances. Now paydirt: disengage the  body. Sit absolutely still, quiet, relaxed. Completely disengage the torso from ‘feeling’ the music. Keep the torso in this perfectly relaxed, disengaged state regardless of the musical intensity. After all, muscular tension doesn’t create volume, increased hammer speed does. Whether I’m playing loud and fast or slowly and quietly, my body (that is, torso, head, neck, shoulders, face) feels the same all the time. This is the ultimate goal of Dalcroze as I recall—do the movement, fully engage the body so these pathways can be created in the brain; develop a vast warehouse of music/movement connections so that, in absolute stillness, the brain can give us back the movement. When I completely disengage my torso while playing, the movement is all in the music. It feels like heaven.”

Makes you want to sprint to the piano and try it out yourself, doesn’t it? I might add here that I don’t consider “stillness” to require a willed suppression of the involuntary expressive gestures that arise from a performer’s participation in the music. I think Kathy is speaking of her original deliberate attempt to keep the physical impulse reduced but literally present, and her surprising liberation from that need.

But what about the listeners? Free of the demands of an instrument, shouldn’t they enliven their experience of the music by some sort of physical activity, like stepping, tapping, swinging, gesturing, etc.? “If you’re not moving, you’re not listening,” a teacher I know tells her students. It’s a popular notion, much acted upon and endorsed by many Dalcroze teachers. Not by me. In my view, not moving is just as vital for the listener as for the performer. When we move to a piece, we enact one, or two, or maybe three aspects at a time. There’s much more going on, even in the simplest music, than we can possibly embody at once. So, while we explore some things, of necessity, we bypass others. When we listen in stillness, drawing on our storehouse of imagery, our kinesthetic memory, undistracted by present movement, is free to flower into what I call the kinesthetic imagination.

The role of kinesthesia in our perception of music turns out to be threefold: the kinesthetic sense gives us a present image of present physical experience, the kinesthetic memory gives us a present image of past physical experience, and the kinesthetic imagination gives us a present experience of a musical reality beyond our physical powers to enact.

Our bodies operate in physical space, ruled by the laws of Newton. Music operates in musical space, ruled by different laws, and while these two spatial realms intersect, they are not identical. The whole of a piece of music eludes enactment by our bodies not only because of its inherent multiplicity, but because tones move in ways that we cannot. Elements of music’s formal and rhythmic structures lend themselves directly to realization in physical space, but our gestural enactment of tones is a translation. (This is not a reason to forgo such gesturing; it is a reason to be mindful of the limitations of our enactment.) Musical space is not the space our bodies live in, and when the music—rhythm and tone together—soars over the cliff of physical possibility, our spirits soar with it, carried by our kinesthetic imagination into realms where our bodies cannot go. Any gesture we make in an attempt to represent or express this musical reality both trivializes the music and diminishes our capacity to experience it. This is a rapture to be endured in a suspension of movement (and sometimes of breath!).

This is not to say there isn’t a world of music that invites—often compels—our rhythmic participation, music to which we can tap and clap and prance and dance and commit eurhythmics with pleasure and profit, without violating its nature or our own sensibilities.

This is to say, however, that there are works that resist eurhythmic intervention, works whose particular qualities are obscured rather than illuminated by physical representation. Certainly they, too, have a place in the eurhythmics class. After or before moving, we can sit quietly and give the whole of ourselves to listening. In my weeks of hand confinement, I have taken much pleasure and consolation in just this activity. Even when I wasn’t sure where my arm was, my ear could tell me where the tones were, and carried by my kinesthetic imagination, I could join them there in that unique space to which only this precious sense gives me access.