Rita Linck

Harpist

LEHIGH VALLEY MORNING CALL 6/23/00

FOR HARPIST RITA LINCK, A TIME TO HEAL BODY AND SPIRIT  Byline: Rosa Salter

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 while one is playing.  Consider its steel strings, which bring constant callouses and biting blisters to the fingers of those who strive to pluck those strings to perfection.   Consider the force needed to produce a 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 of not playing.

On that, Linck, at 31, has become a reluctant expert.  For more than eight years, because of a carpal tunnel injury aggravated by overuse, the Allentown resident 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," and will perform selections tonight at Open Space Gallery in Allentown.

Linck's story resembles nothing so much as 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 coming up - weddings and concert engagements - professional pride triumphed over good sense, and Linck continued to practice and play throughout the summer so as not to dissappoint.  "We're not a dime a dozen," she says of harpists.  "You can't just 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.

"I had to keep an eye on my fingers and where they were," Linck says. "It was kind of like being tipsy in your muscles."

Linck's piano professor at Salem College in Winston-Salem, NC, spotted her student's frustration at her lack of control and got her to 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 and blood flow 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 accomodations 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 being unaware one day that she hadm opened blisters on her fingers - until 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."

By the end of her senior year, Linck understood she could no longer play at the level to which she was accustomed or aspired.  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 crisi on her hands.  She had begun playing the harp at the age of 7.  She had performed with the University of Kentucky Symphony when she was 12, her mother driving her to orchestra rehearsals.  The night of Linck's high school junior prom, she recalls, was spent driving to a harp competition in Indiana.

She had never thought of doing anything else.

"When you grow up as....a child with a talent, well, there was never any question of what I was going to do with the rest of my life," she relates.  "I was a harpist.  At that point, I realized that I needed to face the fact that I needed to make a living.

With a degree in music and French, Linck talked her way into a job in sales in the financial services arena, a job which led her to the Lehigh Valley as an employee of Dun and Bradstreet in the mid-1990s.

But last year, she realized she was feeling stressed, and picked up a small Celtic harp she'd hung onto.

"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 allowed her to spend more time being a musician.

Her first foray back to the musical arena came when she was asked to contribute a rendition of 'O Come, O Come Emmanuel' to the "Lehigh Valley Christmas '99" cd produced by Mike Krisukas and Miriam Huertes, both of Allentown.  That led to a giddy onstage performance during a concert featuring the disc's artists at Allentown's 19th Street Theatre.

"Contrary fo my expectations, I did not fall apart until after I finished playing," Linck says.  "I'm a terrified performer at best.  I love to perform, but my nerves get shot."

The show came almost eight years to the day that she had given up the harp.  And the experience was the beginning of a path that led Linck to call Clark Ferguson of Bearswamp Studios in Macungie 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 10 or 15 years.   She had to forego 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 virtuosic speed, for a sustained period of time."

But other pieces, such as a Pastorale she first played shen she was 10, "just came back to life in my fingertips," she says.  "It's just the sweetest little 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 their audiences.

"It's not a comfortable piece.  It was his reaction to his experience as a Holocaust survivor," Linck explains.  "It was very cathartic for him, and in many ways it was a very cathartic experience for me.

"It was one of my first experiences of the harp being an instrument of power," she continues.  "It's a beautiful instrument, but it has much more than that.  It can evoke emotions, and some of those are not comfortable emotions.

"It's important as a harpist to know that you are playing more than a pretty little music box piece."

Linck ways she does not know what the future holds for her - maybe more performing, maybe teaching the right students.  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.

"I can only play to a certain limit, but that limit is very good," she says. "By freeing me of that need for virtuosity....it's like I can take the time to explore the emotions of these pieces.

"UI think that the emotional depth I have been able to achieve would not have been possible without the past eight years," Linck adds.

And that, she says, "is it's own blessing, and curse."

Harpist Rita Linck will perform tonight at Open Space Gallery, 931 Hamilton Street, Allentown, during a party to mark the release of her new disc, "Out of Time."   The event will begin at 7pm.  Admission is free.  610-433-8712.

LEHIGH VALLEY MORNING CALL 12/17/99

LEHIGH VALLEY CHRISTMAS: SONGS CATCH THE SPIRIT Byline: Geoff Gehman

Tom Watson, Cambiata and others, A Lehigh Valley Christmas '99 (Bummer Tent): Spirited spirituals and spirit songs stand out on this fourth holiday recording produced by the Allentown team of Miriam Huertas and Mike Krisukas.

Blackwater contributes a spry medley featuring the Gloucester Wassail. With a snowflake's delicacy, harpist Rita Linck removes the anthemic muffler from Veni Veni Emmanuel. Deb Gaber and Darlene Finelli guest with Dave Fry on a snappy, warm Mary Had a Baby and star on a gutsy, swinging Go Where I Send Thee. Malarky offers a bounding, lords-a-leaping version of Mrs. Hooligan's Christmas Cake, a litany of ailments caused by a seasonal nuisance (You kill a man twice, ah, for eatin' a slice).

The CD is marred by tepid playing, hollow production and missed humor. Yet it's the most intimate, resonant edition of a series that's always welcome.