I’ve been playing a lot of viola lately. And even as I write it, I realize how ridiculous that sounds, since I’ve pretty much always been playing a lot of viola lately. But the last few months have been even heavier than usual, thanks to chamber music commitments, Kinder Konzerts, a truly challenging batch of music in this last quarter of the orchestra’s regular season, and assorted other assignments that have added up to me having my instrument in my hand for something like 8-10 hours a day most days, as opposed to the 4-5 that I consider my norm.

Again, that might not seem like all that many hours, since many of you probably work shifts at least that long at your jobs, and are even now wondering how you can score a job that averages 4-5 hours a day of work. (Hint: Start by giving up most of your childhood to practice scales, beginning around age 4…) But one of the realities of what we do for a living is that it’s an essentially physical activity, and an extremely repetitive one at that, and since the human body experiences as much stress from small muscle movements as it does from large ones, doubling your daily workload can put you at serious risk for injury.

This is not to say I’ve gone and injured myself – I’m pretty careful about being aware of tension, stress, and muscle fatigue, and I had great teachers who made a point of teaching me how to lessen my chances of ever having to suffer the humiliation of explaining to a doctor that I’ve been seriously injured by a viola. But I’ll admit that I’ve been feeling more than the usual amount of twinges, tweaks, and general soreness in my back, shoulders, and arms over the last few weeks.

My viola’s been feeling the impact of the added workload as well, which might surprise non-musicians who think of our instruments as inanimate objects that we, the great artistes, bring to life. In reality, our instruments are as highly personal to us as a relative or a friend; they each have distinct personalities (and flaws) of their own, and we have to become highly sensitized to when they might be trying to send us a signal that they’re in pain.

For instance, I have a big string quartet performance (tickets still available!) coming up in a little over a week, so a while back, I made a mental note to be sure to change my strings late this week, and possibly look into getting my bow rehaired and my soundpost adjusted as well – routine maintenance, just to insure that my oh-so-finicky instrument sounds its best on an important day. The string changing got pushed up a few days when I actually snapped one of them while practicing on Tuesday – I changed all four at once, just to keep it simple – and that’s where the trouble started.

I use a brand of strings that are pretty famous for having a quick “break-in” period. (Whenever you first put on a new set, they’ll sound metallic and raw until they’re played on a bit, and “a bit” can vary from half an hour to a week, depending on the construction.) But after two full days of heavy use, my new set still sounded awful, and I started to have a bit of trouble controlling my sound in passages that were particularly loud or soft. And then on Thursday afternoon, I finished up a concert and a quartet rehearsal, headed home to practice, and discovered that my viola had somehow, in the three-mile trip between Orchestra Hall and my house, become possessed by demons.

I’m serious, you guys. Demonic possession. It was the only possible explanation. I couldn’t get a single note out without a squawk, and pieces that I’d ripped through with no trouble the day before suddenly became Bataan Death March-like slogs, during which I’d have to stop every three or four bars to pick up and reassemble the various detritus I’d left lying around on the previous phrase. My viola sounded like some $150 outfit from your junior high orchestra, and I started to panic a little, partly because it all seemed so sudden, but mostly because I’m a neurotic freak who tends to assume that everything that goes wrong with my playing is, in fact, an ominous sign that I’m finally about to be exposed as a complete fraud who should never have been given a job in a professional orchestra in the first place.

Any professional string player reading that description already knows what was actually wrong, of course: open seams. (English translation: when some of the glue holding the top and back of your instrument to the “ribs” of the soundbox fails, those seams can open ever so slightly, which throws off the whole vibration of the box and leads to minor demons and occasional poltergeists sneaking in through the previously sealed gaps.) When I made an emergency stop at my local luthier the next day, it took Frank about five minutes to find the two open corners and one seam that had reduced me to a quivering mess. And because I had a lesson to teach and a concert to play later that evening, it took him only 3-1/2 hours to glue ‘em all back up, clamp ‘em down, and get the now-exorcised thing back to me in perfect working order.

So all’s well that ends well, right? Not quite yet, actually – all those small muscle groups that are so susceptible to damage have been working overtime for the last few days compensating for the viola demons, which means that my personal setup is a little out of whack now that I actually have a demon-free instrument again. So today’s assignment is to put everything back where it was a week ago, before any of this foolishness started.

It can feel awfully cyclical, this sort of practicing; you’re always either trying desperately to perfect a new skill set, or going back and trying to fix whatever old skill the new skill put a kink in. But hey, that kind of mind-numbing, repetitive practice is what Saturday afternoon baseball was invented to supplement. There’s nothing like watching the Twins battle their Yankee Stadium demons while celebrating the defeat of mine…