After overcoming hardships, student musician and researcher draws insight from the experience

The youngest of three children, Leah Bratton's passion for music emerged early, when she was just 5 years old.

"My older siblings had started taking piano lessons," she recalled, "and I just could not keep my hands off the keyboard, so my mom said, 'You can take lessons, too,'" she recalled.

From that first spark, Bratton's enthusiasm only grew. Today, the Christiansburg, Virginia, native is a junior majoring in music therapy, and she also works as a pianist at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Roanoke, Virginia.

At the top of last year's fall semester, however, the young musician collided with a daunting obstacle.

Bratton started experiencing numbness and tingling in her left hand, as well as immense tendon pain while playing. She was diagnosed with cubital tunnel syndrome, a compression or irritation of the ulnar nerve within the elbow, and medial epicondylitis, which stems from injuries to the muscles and tendons that control the fingers and wrist.

She underwent medical treatment, recovered and resumed playing soon enough, but she said that mandatory sidelining had a profound effect on her.

"It was a very difficult time; I can't exaggerate that," she recalled. "Piano will always be the core of everything I do and who I am. Psychologically, it's like, 'If I'm not performing well, then I must not be a musician anymore… I'm not doing what I should be doing.' Having to take a break from it was probably good for me, but it was a very scary period."

Bratton recently drew from that hardship and channeled the experience into a project for Radford's Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF) program, which is coordinated by the Office of Undergraduate Research (OURS) and is designed to cultivate undergraduate research and scholarship. SURF participants and their faculty mentors undertake original, creative and intellectual contributions to a particular discipline.

Alongside her instructor and advisor, Associate Professor of Music Matt Cataldi, Bratton began work on her project, which she called "On the Other Hand: From Injury to Inspiration."

Through her 10-week SURF effort, Bratton delved into the musical realm of compositions specifically designed to be played with the left hand and studied the stories of famous piano composers who created such works themselves - Paul Wittgenstein, for example, an Austrian-American who lost his right arm during World War I, and Alexander Scriabin, who suffered injuries to his hand that arose from his playing. She also examined left-handed compositions by composers like Ravel, Chopin, Godowsky and Czerny, with the culmination of her studies resulting in her creation of an original left-handed arrangement of an existing piece, "The Lord's Prayer" by Albert Hay Malotte.

"There is a substantial repertoire [of compositions] for the left hand, but … it's infinitesimally smaller than the entire piano repertoire," said Cataldi, who also serves as Radford's director of piano studies. "So we thought it would be a really cool idea to contribute something original to that body of work, not only to study the composers of the past but to add on some thoughts in a more modern take.

"It's a huge challenge, of course, to compose or arrange anything from scratch, but taking that arrangement and arranging it for one hand alone is just a challenge on top of a challenge," Cataldi added. "I think Leah's done a really great job of not only making that work but also coming up with a really engaging and interesting piece of music."

The experience of playing with one hand, Bratton said, "is exactly like learning all over again … you have to approach the piano so differently," and it spawned for her a new awareness of performance factors like posture, fingerings and techniques from pianists of the past. But she said she hopes the project will help inspire other musicians who may be trying to manage their own playing-related injuries.

"I really have enjoyed it, it's been an amazing process," she said. "I think that definitely dips my toes into the water of what it's like to play with just one hand. And then with the original arrangement, I found some really, really fun things to add to that piece, so I'm very excited."

As with all SURF students, Bratton will conduct a public presentation about her work and research. Her lecture and piano performances will be held at the Covington Center's Davis Performance Hall at 11 a.m. on Oct. 14.