Thoughts on Music as Therapy
The last few weeks I’ve writing notes about my practices in a diary, mostly to see if I could discern some kind of pattern or at least put my poor 2020 diary to some positive use (spoiler alert: writing in a dedicated journal about your feelings, I’ve decided, is for the wizards).
Here is a summarised (and less sweary) version of my post-practice notes:
9-15 November (practiced 3 times this week)
- Felt a bit anxious at start, warm up was a struggle
- Tension in right arm
- Digging into bow, tried working on ‘light bowing’
- Felt and sounded great after a while!
16-20 November (practiced 4 times this week)
- Felt anxious/bored in warm up, sped through reels too much
- So I tried to focus on ‘smooth rhythm’
- Achy in right hand
- Noticed ornamentation added more easily than usual
- Sounded great after playing reels slowly and jigs moderate fast
What this has told me is a) I’m stressed AF and b) fiddle makes me less stressed AF.
On the days that I didn’t play, I also noted I didn’t sleep well that night. I also found it harder to convince myself that I did, in fact, have enough energy by the time I got home from work to play a couple of tunes if I’d gone a few days in a row without playing- hence the first comments of ‘found it hard to practice’ and then after a while, ‘felt great!’ This rollercoaster of fiddle playing emotion suggests that if I always just pushed myself through that initial discomfort of ‘But I don’t wanna!’, it’d be worth it.
From these strange notes scribbled in 4-5 lines in a tiny little box allocated to a whole entire day, I’ve found that playing fiddle and practicing music, is a great therapy for me.
Being a non-runner, I’ve never really known what the ‘runner’s high’ was all about, and just put it down to people pretending they liked to exercise to look like they had their shit together: “Well I only run a marathon every morning because that runner’s high is SO addictive!” No, Jake. Sweating and moving at a quick pace in the hot sun is not that great, you’re not fooling ANYONE.
However, now I realised that there may the Fiddler’s High version (although I can’t see mid-twenties in muscle shirts seeking this kind of high), where music somehow fixes whatever’s going on in your head. If you just stick with it and keep at it, after a while in your practice session your brain calms down and zones out everything else about the rest of your day- your ratbag boss and that passive aggressive bitch on the bus- and you just sit back and float for a while in a reel or piece in E major (side note: E major has 4 sharps – the F#, C# G# and D#) that you worked so hard on a few months ago and thought you’d never actually get, but look! That’s you playing that!
One tune I haven’t played in a while is Donald Blue, a reel in D major. It starts off a lot like another tune I learnt more recently, Ramnee Ceilidh, (goes from D to B) and it ALWAYS takes me a few frustrated goes to remember not to play that one. After playing for about 35 minutes one day, with my fingers primed and closer to the board, I got it without thinking. I was halfway through the B Part and realised ‘I’m not playing that other one!’ and thought ‘yeah, this is great fun.’ Played for a further 20 minutes that day and it gave me a clear stop in my work day and briefly pressed pause on on the loud chatter in my own head.
I think this is actually why people run (although I still don’t fully understand that kind of madness) – to get a bit of peace from their own head. An all consuming focus on something else.
I’ll keep up with the practice notes and see if I can find out any more about this Fiddler’s High, or if I should take up running instead. Or maybe I should just go for an actual high and take up cocaine? Ah, better stick to the folk music, eh?
Kate's Endless Notation 