Intimate Entanglements and Acoustemological Pivots

I could not play. Had I not been so eager, I may not have been so careless as to play through the searing pain—that all-too-familiar, singeing sensation radiating back up from the piano keyboard through my fingertips. I already knew this throbbing pain when it reappeared after that first rehearsal in the Canary Islands. Pulsating from near my elbows, it would continually send out sharp jabs—back along my forearms to my hands and fingers, and up through my shoulders to my neck and temples—until the newly reinjured shreds of my tendons fused back together again. And then, back to the top.

I have been coping with that pain—the mark of chronic bilateral tendinosis— since my undergraduate days, when the tenuous balance of an ambitious practice routine, gig schedule, and multiple lessons per week was upset by a new instructor's approach that turned a few idiosyncratic elements of my posture and technique into a debilitating injury that has never completely healed. In the ten years between that injury and the rehearsal at saxophonist Enrique “Kike” Perdomo's home on the island of Tenerife, I had adapted, learned to ration my playing, to approach it more mindfully, and to practice self-care after more rigorous performances so that the injury would not flare up—or at least that minimal recovery time would be required for healing whatever damage I had done. (And then, back to the top.)

The reemergence of that injury, though, made it clear to me that the decade's worth of coping strategies was insufficient for this new challenge. I didn't know how to accommodate Perdomo's Petrof grand. That piano with a beautiful sound but impossibly hard action. Cramped into a small home studio with drum set, bass amp, and mic set up for the horn player. And a mixing board, computer desk, and photographer/friend up-for-the-hang. And the acoustics. As the sounds of my collaborators at their instruments reverberated around me—off the walls and up through the floorboards—I struggled to hear myself. I needed to hear myself. I kept pushing—down “through the keys,” my teachers used to say. But the other musicians were closer to the piano's soundboard.