Despite a Career-Threatening Injury, Harpist Resumes Playing Music of Her Soul

Some call the harp the instrument of the angels. It must be so, says Rita Linck, for it certainly wasn’t designed for those made of flesh and blood.

Consider that its 100-pound weight must be balanced precariously on one shoulder as it is played. Consider its steel strings, which bring constant calluses and biting blisters to the fingers of those who strive to pluck them to perfection. Consider the force needed to produce tone as rich as a piano’s without benefit of a massive wooden sounding board or mechanical keys.

Perhaps the only thing worse than the wear on the body from playing the harp is the damage to the soul from not playing.

On that, Linck, at 31, has become a reluctant expert. For more than eight years, because of a severe carpal tunnel injury aggravated by overuse, she was unable to perform on the instrument she had played professionally since the age of 12.

But now, Linck has taken up the harp again, to mend a life that felt incomplete.

“I spent so many years denying the harpist part of me. . . . I had to go back to it to be happy,” says Linck, who just recorded her first CD, “Out of Time.”

Linck’s story resembles that of an athlete sidelined by a chance injury in the prime of a career.

One spring day in 1990, while a college student, Linck decided to help her roommate load some boxes into a car. “I moved something in the wrong way and wrenched my right wrist,” she explains.

At the time, the injury didn’t seem serious. “I woke up with some swelling and some pain and thought it was a good sprain,” she says. “But I didn’t think much of it.”

Because the busy season for harpists was approaching--weddings and concert engagements--professional pride triumphed over good sense, and Linck continued to practice and play throughout the summer. “We’re not a dime a dozen,” she says of harpists. “You just can’t call up and say, ‘I can’t make it next week,’ because they can’t find anyone to fill the part.”

But by the fall, Linck was noticing numbness in her fingers. “I couldn’t do passages right,” she says. “It was like my fingers had gone dumb.”

Muscle memory, the ability to know a piece in your hands without having to look at them or consciously tell them to move, had evaporated.

Linck’s piano professor at Salem College in Winston-Salem, N.C., spotted her student’s frustration at her lack of control and found Linck a specialist. He diagnosed carpal tunnel before it was a household word, and recognized that Linck, who was barely out of her teens, had already done substantial nerve damage.

The two discussed surgery, but decided against it.

“It was decided that my problem, which was the nerve damage, could not be corrected,” Linck says. “The damage I did was to the nerves that run to your hand from your wrist. They were literally being pinched or cut off, and when deprived of oxygen they start to die off.”

Initially, Linck thought she could change her technique to compensate for the injury. For a while, she practiced using only her left hand. But the accommodations only brought on tension and bad habits that led to other physical problems. She tried to manage those with therapeutic massage, biofeedback, acupressure, acupuncture, and a posture system known as the Alexander technique.

And then there were the painkillers, which she stopped taking after realizing one day she had opened blisters on her fingers--only after she saw blood running down her harp’s strings.

“That was an eye-opening moment for me,” she says. “That was my own personal lesson that sometimes pain is better than no pain when the lack of pain is due to drugs.”

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By the end of her senior year, Linck understood she could no longer play at the level to which she was accustomed. She stopped short of playing her senior recital, and by 1992 ceased playing entirely. She even sold her concert harp.

And she had an identity crisis on her hands. She had begun playing the harp at the age of 7. She had performed with the Kentucky University Symphony when she was 12.

She had never thought of doing anything else.

Linck talked her way into a sales job in financial services.

But last year, she realized she was feeling stressed, and picked up a small Celtic harp she’d kept.

“I needed to do something creative again. The moment I started playing again, I realized I couldn’t do that job anymore,” she says. So she transferred to a different job in the company, a financial analyst position that enabled her to spend more time being a musician.

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Her return to music came when she was asked to contribute a rendition of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” to a Christmas CD. That led to a giddy onstage performance during a concert featuring all the disc’s artists.

The show came almost eight years to the day after she had given up the harp. And the experience was the beginning of a path that led Linck to call Clark Ferguson of Bearswamp Studio in Macungie, Pa., and ask if she could record a CD. When he reacted with excitement, a collaboration was born.

For “Out of Time,” Linck took out pieces she hadn’t played in years. She had to forgo recording some material that she loves, such as Mozart’s Concerto for Harp and Flute, she says, because she “can’t play fast, at that tremendous speed, for a sustained period of time.”

But other pieces, such as a pastorale she first played when she was 10, “just came back to life in my fingertips,” she says. “It’s just the sweetest little most beautiful piece, and I never outgrew it.”

The “culmination” of the CD, Linck says, became Malcolm Arnold’s “Fantasy,” a piece with emotional content she says she never could have mastered as a teenager. The piece is rarely performed in concerts, she notes, because conductors find it too disturbing for audiences.

Linck says she does not know what the future holds for her--maybe more performing, maybe teaching. But she’s willing to take those steps as they come.

“I have to be aware of my physical limits,” she says, adding that she can circumvent many of them with efficient technique, never using more finger and wrist force than necessary when playing.

But she also knows that no amount of extra practice will help her overcome some of her instrument’s physical demands.