Playing (less) Hurt: An Injury Prevention Guide For Musicians

How can musicians express themselves and recreate the great masterworks with ease and expressivity and yet avoid injury in the process? Musicians face many challenges: a highly competitive environment, performance anxiety, demanding repertoire, years of solitary practice, and awkward postures. The hectic pace of rehearsals and performances when added to the mix often results in the very real risk of physical pain and injury.

Playing (less) Hurt is a readable and comprehensive guide and reference for all concerned with pain in musical work: professional and amateur musicians, teachers and students, doctors and therapists. This book is essential for all musicians. String, keyboard, percussion, harp, brass and wind players will play better and feel better.

Janet Horvath, Assosiate Principal Cello of the Minnesota Orchestra for over two decades, is a soloist, chamber musician, writer and advocate for injury prevention. A trail-blazer in speaking and writing openly about the physical stresses experienced by musicians, Horvath has contributed importantly to improvements in working conditions and in awareness for musicians' work-related ailments and their prevention. Ms. Horvath received the American String Teachers Association Service Award in1992 in recognition of her outstanding efforts on behlaf of musicians' health, and in 2001 she was selected to deliver the Richard J. Lederman keynote lecture at the Preforming Arts Medicine Association's nineteenth Annual Symposium on Medical Problems of Musicians and Dancers. She has conducted seminars called "Playing (less) Hurt" all over the nation. The Injury Prevention Guide For Musicians is the culmination of 20 years of lecturing and teaching in the field of Performing Arts Medicine.