Safely Grazing Again

Is your playing on par with what it was before dystonia hit?

Well, I'm 75. I don't play the way I used to. Maybe I bring compensating aspects.

You have said that the old ways of teaching music may be effective in passing knowledge from generation to generation, but that they don't really work. Can you explain that?

You have to question. It's been kind of the popular conception over the years to teach little children to play with fingers curved, fingers like little hammers. To play with a curved finger is a very complex activity because you have to contract the flexor, you have to let the extensor stretch and then on top of that you have to pull another extensor to pull the whole damn thing up before then whap [onto the keys]. That's unhealthy. It's what you might call "Russian School." A lot of people can do it and a lot of people can't. If you look at two of the greatest pianists of the 20th century on film, Vladimir Horowitz and Glenn Gould, they play with long, flat fingers. Not exclusively; I'm not recommending anything exclusively. If you want to get a thousand different sounds in music, then you need a thousand different ways of playing the piano. But you don't find any piano teachers that teach their kids to play with flat fingers.

Are you still getting Botox injections?

Yup. Every six to eight months. I get it in here [points to the inside of his forearm, just below where it bends]; that's where the nerve meets the muscle that tells these fingers to curl up. The botox erects a wall so that message from the nerve doesn't get through.