Michael Atkinson: Overuse and the Pitfalls of Going It Alone

Angela Bilger: We’ve known each other for a long time and I was never aware you were having any difficulties. When did this all start? 

Michael Atkinson: It started in 2001 when I was playing overseas in China. After winning the principal horn audition for the Shanghai Broadcasting Symphony Orchestra, I decided to take a year off from my MM studies at Juilliard to go over and play. The programming was very intense, and I never had an assistant horn, and rarely had the chance to split the principal duties. Because of this, I took care to pick and choose my moments. After a few months, I was called into the office of the music director and management and was told they wanted me to play big and loud all the time, or else I would be placed on “probationary status.” I didn’t want to find out what that meant, so I did. 

From then on, it didn’t feel great, but it felt manageable. Toward the end of the season, we performed Mahler’s 3rd. After the last concert of that series, I took the day off to rest, but when I came back to play, I couldn’t get a note to speak anywhere on the horn. I put it up to my face and nothing came out, just puffs of air. This had never happened before in my whole life. 

I freaked out because I was stuck over there with two more months to finish out a one-year contract. I knew Cindy Lewis from my time as a sub with the New Jersey Symphony, so I emailed with her and explained what was going on, and she said it sounded like I had an overuse injury. She said it didn’t sound like dystonia, and said it was good that I didn’t have shooting pains. I was beat up from too much work and things just were not happening. Sure enough, I took a look at the inside of my lips and saw deep purple bruising. She recommended taking time off, coming back very slowly, and possibly switching to a smaller mouthpiece. I thought back to moments during the Mahler week when my high register was slipping in a way that it never had before. In retrospect, that should have been a warning signal. Instead, I thought it was my fault for not being in better shape, and practiced even more on top of the rehearsal and concert schedule to try and get “strong” again. 

If I had taken Cindy’s advice to heart, I might have been fine, because after the Mahler performances, I had a whole month off. After a couple of weeks, I couldn’t resist the anxious urge to check on things, so I picked up the horn again, and it was still not right—it just felt like a fresher-feeling set of busted chops. Desperate for a way to make things work better, I made the decision to slightly change my mouthpiece placement to avoid some of the super-bruised areas. It worked well enough to get me through the last three weeks of the season somewhat respectably, but after the season was over, I crashed again—even harder than before. I went from not being able to get notes out, to not knowing where to put the mouthpiece on my face! 

I returned to Juilliard to finish my Master’s degree. I was studying with Bill Purvis, and he did a lot to bring me out of the woods by helping me focus on the basics of making a good sound and reminding me to be more musical. While there was some progress, I still felt very far from the player I was before the troubles. Every day in the practice room was a crapshoot, and it was hard to see an end to this, which constantly fed my anxiety and worry over what I had done to myself. Even though I was told overuse was the root cause of the problem, it felt like I didn’t understand the root cause, and if I didn’t understand it, then it would surely happen all over again. 

I was playing well enough to win a teaching job at Grand Valley State University after finishing my MM, and for a couple years, I was mainly playing in the faculty brass quintet and the occasional orchestra gig, so I had time and space to think, read, and learn more about fundamentals. Again, there were gains made, but I kept hitting a wall and couldn’t get any further. It kept going this way for a while.

AB: How long did this period last?

MA: About four years, which is an eternity when every day feels like starting from zero! I remember you and I did a Bargemusic concert during that time—some Mozart divertimenti—and I sheepishly asked if I could play first, not because I had any ego about it, but because that week I couldn’t play any notes below the staff. I just could not do it. I didn’t know how. It was like, high Cs—no problem! Middle C—no way! At other times, playing above the staff didn’t work and below the staff was fine. It was weird.

Another point of inflection occurred in 2011 at a festival in Arizona. I was playing fourth horn, and it was a busy schedule packed into one week. The first concert was Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, and it went really well. I was finally able to play with a big orchestral sound down there, and it was an enjoyable concert. For the first time in ages, my self-esteem had improved. The next morning, we rehearsed the slow movement of Beethoven 9 with the famous fourth horn solo. That morning when I went to warm up, my chops felt terrible, and when it came time for the solo, I crashed and burned. It was embarrassing—just horrible—in front of the whole orchestra. I was horrified and dejected, feeling like I had ended up re-injuring myself like I did in China. It was all too much and I went to the movies to try and escape for a few hours. I saw The King’s Speech, and when the movie was over, I ran back to my rental car and started crying, thinking oh my God, what the hell is going on with me? This is my life on the big screen! Like King George, I was having my own problems speaking, and pride and ego had made it worse. King George eventually got help, however grudgingly, from an expert. This is something I never did, and I finally realized that I needed to stop pretending that I could do this all by myself. It was a relief, and allowed me to understand my situation with more clarity than before. In the end, I was able to get it back together enough to do a good solo in the Beethoven 9th performance. A couple days of careful practicing helped with that, along with some very helpful and kind discussions with my section-mate Jeff Nelsen, but I didn’t think for a moment that was the end of it. 

When I got back to New York, I sought out Laurie Frink. At the first lesson, I dumped out my whole bag of problems, explaining everything from China up to that point. She took it all in and calmly explained the problem was a confusion of my muscle memory. Laurie took her notepad and wrote out some exercises, instructing me to do them first thing every day. After that, I could go on to whatever else I normally do. Many of these exercises were similar to the Caruso exercises which I first learned about years ago from Julie Landsman and Michelle Baker and their students. They never seemed to work for me when I tried them on my own, especially with my understanding of the rules of how to approach those exercises. But Laurie was very flexible and patient, taking care to undo my misconceptions. For example, when I wasn’t able to do proper breath attacks, she said, “well, if you can’t do a breath attack now, just do a regular attack until it’s stable, and you can switch over to breath attacks later.” 

The pragmatism of her approach made me feel better about taking on this kind of work, and I was very disciplined with the routine she laid out for me which she adjusted over the course of our lessons. I couldn’t believe it, but as soon as two weeks after doing these ten minutes of exercises, I could feel and hear things really start to come into focus. She was right—consistency was the missing factor. To this day, eight years later, I still do the same set of exercises, and the days of wondering what is going to happen when I take the horn out of the case are in the past. Aside from preparing the muscle memory for the task of playing with good form, it has also become a ritual—a daily reminder of what is the truth, which is (as Laurie explained) nobody can “force” themselves into improvement—one has to “let” it happen. 

AB: Did the exercises help you find that old muscle memory or did they train new memory? What was it about those exercises that helped, do you think?

MA: I think it’s two things. I think it helped to establish something new and something consistent. I can’t remember how I used to play, or where I used to put the mouthpiece. No memory at all. I think Arnold Jacobs said something to the effect of “Don’t fix old or bad habits. Replace them with new or better ones.” I tell my students that, with these kind of exercises—with any exercise, really, that is done on a daily basis—you create a self-propelling momentum of consistency for your muscle memory. That level of your brain learns through consistency. It’s like when they talk about neuroplasticity; that metaphor of walking over a field of grass in the same track of footsteps at the same time each day . . . Every time you do something, it creates an indentation in your brain of a habit, with the neurons wiring and firing together. So, just the idea of doing a basic set of exercises every day is extremely powerful. The more I did it, and the more I trained those neural pathways, the more reliably I could be ready to go. And the anxiety gave way to feelings of calm and confidence, knowing that I was letting my body create the conditions it needed to operate the horn reliably. How that manifests now is that if I take a couple days off, not touching the horn at all, when I play through the first of my Laurie exercises (Lips-Mouthpiece-Horn), I feel normal again almost instantly, whereas before, two days off meant I couldn’t play in public because I just wouldn’t know what would happen! 

Another aspect of these problems that made things worse was my falling down numerous rabbit holes of equipment tinkering. I must have tried every single mouthpiece combination imaginable, as well as other things like switching horns, bell flares, slides, even moving some braces around on one horn—all of which gave the proactive feeling like I was doing something systematic to move things along, but in reality I was just making the underlying cause worse. I did confess all of this to Laurie, and she instructed me to avoid making any equipment changes while I embarked on her exercises, as keeping the same setup would reinforce consistency for the muscle memory. It made me recall how some of the greatest, most consistent players I’ve known have been playing the same mouthpiece (or at least the same rim) since they were very young. 

Generally speaking, when it comes to equipment, if you’re advanced enough in your technique, you can know what you need. However, you’re not always going to be able to figure that out when going through an injury or problem because the anxiety/existential dread factor can reduce one to grasping for a solution—any solution—which is really only the feeling of a solution. In these scenarios, using a mouthpiece to fix an embouchure problem is like playing a scratch-off lotto ticket. One hopes for the big payoff, but the odds of winning are very, very low. 

AB: The only time when that kind of thing makes sense for me is . . . For instance, my rim was very thin and square, and going right over the point that hurt. So, I felt like I needed to make that change and distribute the pressure. I’ve tried to make as few changes as possible since then, although I have toyed with the composition of the metal because of my wanting to rule out a brass allergy. But any little change like that certainly makes a difference. 

MA: That is a great example of making an intelligent choice. You knew what the problem was and why you were making the change. I had been throwing so many Hail Mary passes that I didn’t know where the actual problem was anymore. 

And you actually touch on an important point that I didn’t realize until later on: for a long time, and during most of my problems in China, I was playing on a rim with worn plating that was bare brass in spots. The impact of this was lost on me until I tried a stainless steel rim for a while. I felt like my lips never got swollen, or at least not as much as they used to. In retrospect, the exposure to bare brass created swelling, and, in turn, a loss of definition inside the mouthpiece. The knee jerk response was adding pressure to try and isolate a more defined buzz, which led to a whole other set of problems relating to mouthpiece placement and, ultimately, muscle memory. Nowadays, I make sure to only play gold-plated mouthpieces or rims, and those abnormal swelling problems are a thing of the past. Everyone has their preferences about how silver, gold, stainless, titanium, etc. all feel on the face, but it might be worth it to try gold or stainless or acrylic if one feels like they are getting more swollen than usual during the normal course of playing.

Another thing I found helpful was Alexander Technique lessons, which I found really enlightening, and not necessarily because of what it did for my embouchure placement or anything like that, but more to focus on other areas of the physical setup as a way to understand how it’s all connected. Experiencing how powerful the concepts of Alexander are—that you can command yourself to relax in certain ways, that you can actually get to that level of sensitivity with not too much effort . . . With a good and experienced teacher, you can feel that right away, and there are a lot of really great teachers here in New York City. I found that the work I was doing with Laurie Frink nicely complimented the Alexander Technique lessons. Laurie and my AT teachers all took a broad view of the systems involved in playing, and it allowed me to let go of obsessing over things like equipment or what my lips happened to feel like that moment. 

AB: I agree with you about Alexander Technique. I think that one of the most important things that I’ve gotten through my own experience is working with my AT teacher here, Ariel Weiss. It has been revelatory for me. She doesn’t deal directly with horn technique, but the concepts do affect my technique. I never realized before taking lessons with her that so much of Alexander Technique is about state of mind coupled with the state of the body. I’m not sure I’m saying that in the best way possible, but it’s holistic and dynamic in a way that I never anticipated, and I think it’s something I’ll use from now on, in all parts of my life. 

Did you study with Lori Schiff? Who did you see?

MA: I had a few lessons with Lori Schiff, some with Phyllis Jo Kubey, and a few with Martin Webster, who used to be a horn player, though I don’t think I ever took my horn in with him. He just wanted to get me walking properly. Some teachers say “take a walk” just to see what your gait is and they can pull it apart from there. In my lessons, I was often shown detailed photos of skeletons and musculature, and there’s something really powerful in taking that all in and letting the subconscious mind make those deep connections. The hands-on work, especially working with the primary control aspect (alignment of head and neck) felt like magic. 

“All of the self-determination in the world can be useless, or, as it was in my case, detrimental, if you’re dealing with a playing injury, and the right people can help find the objectivity about how to navigate a crisis.”

Also through these teachers, I learned of some great books out there that introduce Alexander Technique. There’s the book by F.M. Alexander himself, The Use of the Self. There are also these books by Pedro de Alcantarra. There is one called Indirect Procedures and a newer one called Integrated Practice, and both are published by Oxford. He’s a cellist and did a really good musician-specific survey of Alexander Technique and how it can be integrated into your approach—really good stuff. 

AB: Did the process of going through this time of upheaval influence the amount of attention you gave to the other aspects of your musical life, like writing and arranging? Or had those things always been a part of your life? 

MA: Through late middle school and high school, I wrote music and played the horn in roughly equal amounts. But when I got to Juilliard, I let the writing go to focus on orchestral playing and auditions. But over the years I had a few opportunities to write and arrange, and found that I still enjoyed it. Also, there was a period where I wasn’t sure if I was going to get back to a level of playing that would support a career, so I wanted to have something in music to fall back on. Being able to do something musically that wasn’t playing the horn helped a lot in terms of finding respite from the chaos of my playing issues, which helped to maintain a connection to something that I loved, as well as foster some hope that I’d get better. Anyhow, I kept at it, and more writing opportunities followed to the point where I was able to make some money, which meant that I could say no to a gig here or there if I felt like it would be too much playing in a week, or if I’d rather just have time to stay in and practice fundamentals on the horn instead of playing garden-variety gigs. 

AB: If you were to have any advice for someone going through an injury or the rebuilding process, what advice would you have for them? 

MA: Don’t do too much too soon. The recovery needs to take as long as it takes. Don’t let your anxiety dictate the pace of your recovery. That’s the mistake I made a hundred times. I did it all wrong, I think. In the final edit of this, I made every mistake you can possibly make. I tried to do too much too soon, and I came back to professional life too soon which caused problems that made me feel worse about everything. It is difficult, but one has to be really OK with it taking as long as it takes. 

Another thing is to make sure to find help. Even though we all have to become our own teachers, it helps immensely to have the counsel of someone who knows you and your playing, and/or an expert in the field to help you understand where you are with things. This can be a former teacher or a friend, but preferably someone who is not involved with or dependent on your employment. I would also recommend the services of a trained and qualified psychotherapist. One cannot separate the existential problems of identity and meaning from the problem itself, and a good therapist will help you manage that, which will, in turn, make it easier to keep a clear head in figuring out the solutions to whatever the problem is. All of the self-determination in the world can be useless, or, as it was in my case, detrimental, if you’re dealing with a playing injury, and the right people can help find the objectivity about how to navigate a crisis. 

Also, somewhat related, I was very lucky that when I was thirteen years old, I had a lesson with Bill Purvis. He said, “You should write down everything you think about horn playing.” I started then and still do to this day. As a result, I have a large and growing pile of notebooks! Creating and maintaining a place to catalog whatever you notice—without judgement—is helpful. It’s about keeping track, not writing a book about technique or a novel or anything like that. Getting all of that stuff out of your head creates space to move forward, and later you can go back to what you wrote and put it in a better context. Often when we’re feeling anxious about problems, big or small, these little phrases and thoughts can swirl around and create a whole mess, but when you see them written down on a piece of paper, it’s easier to recognize the nonsense as nonsense, or to look at it again later on to find that there was a spark of wisdom in a particular thought, but it came about at the wrong moment for what was happening then. 

Lastly, know when to put the horn down. Common sense goes a long way. If things are going along fine and you start to feel something weird, just put it down and go for a walk or something. Many problems result from simply overplaying, and getting back to normal can prevent them from becoming something much worse. It doesn’t have to be dystonia, muscle damage, or overuse to create major problems, so the cultivation of good habits, good form, and healthy self-knowledge is essential.

Michael P. Atkinson is a New York City–based hornist, arranger/orchestrator, and composer. He is solo hornist of The Knights and performs regularly with many groups including the New York Philharmonic, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), and numerous Broadway shows. His orchestrations and arrangements have been performed in venues around the world by a wide range of ensembles including The Knights, A Far Cry, the New York City Ballet, the Orlando Philharmonic, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Vienna Opera Ballet, the Dutch National Ballet, the folk/Americana trio I’m With Her, and on American Public Media’s Live from Here with Chris Thile. Michael holds Bachelor of Music and Master of Music degrees from The Juilliard School where he studied with Jerome Ashby and William Purvis. Visit his website at www.michaelatkinsonmusic.com.