Photo credits: A. Englert / L. Kirchner

Do you see yourself as left-handed or right-handed? 

As long as I can remember I've been left-handed. You can already see it in childhood pictures where I'm about three quarters of a year old and playing with toys. My parents took great care to encourage me and bought me left-handed scissors and all sorts of things because my father had been brutally retrained to the right hand at school. They did everything they could to ensure that I remained left-handed and learned to write that way. So it was a matter of course for me. Once at Waldorf school, a dominant teacher asked me: "Why don't you try writing with your right hand?" I took the pen in my right hand, scribbled a few letters and said: "I can't!" That was it.

But I also saw children at school who were really brutally retrained: "Yes, nice picture! Did you draw that with the left?" - torn up - "Again on the right!" These were dreadful and scary situations... When I contacted the girl from back then as an adult, because it had really bothered me for a long time and I was interested in how she had dealt with it, she described herself as ambidextrous and that she is allright. She tried to come to terms with it. Many people do that, they call themselves ambidextrous. 

 

I actually do allmost everything with my left hand, but I've got into the habit of alternating hands when cleaning, for example, so that I can simply hold out longer. Or when playing badminton, I used to switch hands to confuse the other person...
In sports class, I often had difficulties adapting and, for example, when throwing, I decided to throw with my right hand, to do it like the others. I'm not good at throwing at all: I have no strength with the right and I can't aim well with the left. Somehow, an inner pressure to conform led me to do something the wrong way round against my intuition and to do it badly.
And of course I learned to play the cello the right-handed way.

 

 

Was left-handed cello playing on the agenda when you started?

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Yes, my father wanted me to learn to play the cello left-handed back in 1991 in Berlin. Unfortunately, the teacher at the district music school was still young and only knew left-handed playing from injured musicians. She didn't have the confidence to teach me that way. So I had to learn to bow on the right after all. I probably would have had the same experience with any other teacher at the time. I didn't know this as a child and actually struggled with learning to bow for four years. My right hand was consistently weaker and it was more difficult to learn with it. 
Even during my studies, I had a very poor connection to my right hand, both in terms of strength and speed as well as emotionally. I simply didn't notice it. It was like an appendage on my body and I couldn't get my consciousness into it. As a result, I was never able to understand and implement what the teachers were really telling me or what they meant, according to the bowing and shaping the sound. 
A teacher, Wolfgang Sellner from the Bochum Symphony Orchestra, who taught me during my Waldorf education studies, once made the suggestion: "Why don't you try bowing with your left hand? You're left-handed." I tried it out briefly and thought it was totally weird. I didn't want to do that. 

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It wasn't until we had a lecture on left-handedness with Prof. Dr. Silke Lehmann in Osnabrück as part of our bachelor's degree in instrumental pedagogy that the scales fell from my eyes. I immediately bought Walter Mengler's book ["Musizieren mit links" (= Making music with the left)] and ordered a left-handed cello. That was the topic of my bachelor thesis.

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Then I tried playing a little left-handed on my right-handed cello: A simple song, a scale and so on... I thought: "That works quite well". But when I wanted to continue practising on the right again, suddenly nothing worked anymore: I couldn't assign the strings correctly, switched to the wrong direction, read notes backwards and could no longer orientate myself safely on the instrument. I had a real cognitive overload reaction after this short left-hand playing session. I panicked and thought: "Oh God, now I've got myself such an instrument and planned this project for my Bachelor's thesis, but I also have to finish my degree."

Because I had already completed a degree, I was able to shorten my bachelor's degree from four to two years. I stuck to it and worked a lot on the side. I thought: "I can't afford to have such a slump in my playing - now I'm doing an experiment like this on the side, which is also a brain experiment..." But that was totally put into perspective with the left-handed cello and the more frequent playing. Because I had two apartments in different cities, I couldn't always take both cellos with me and had to practise left-handed on the right-handed cello. As a result, I got used to being able to play both ways on each cello. Even after a year of playing exclusively right-handed, I can sit down at the left-handed cello and just start playing because my head is now used to mirroring and reversing sides. It's nothing new or overwhelming anymore.

 

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In your Bachelor's thesis, you document your re-learning in detail and state, for example, how much time you spent practising which piece on the left-handed cello. I think it's pretty amazing that you were already playing demanding solo concertos etc. so soon. Did it go so well with the re-learning?

 

It was really difficult at the beginning - I had to retrain my motor skills. 
I taught myself the violin and viola, so I had already learned several stringed instruments on the right. When I started sitar lessons in India before my studies, I briefly considered learning this instrument on the left, but then decided to play on the right as usual. My teacher Ustad Rafique Khan told me much later: "Yes, of course left-handers play the sitar left-handed." - I didn't know that at the time and didn't have the self-confidence to communicate it clearly. As a result, I was always right-handed on my instruments. Swapping the usual tasks of both hands was extremely challenging. At the beginning I thought: "It will take me forever to get out of the children's song phase".

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Playing on the right always stressed me out subliminally and was usually exhausting. The longer I played, the more exhausted I was. When I got better at playing on the left, I noticed that I sometimes felt like I had just practiced for two hours and got an enormous increase in strength. I didn't always have this flow experience, but I often did. In order to maintain this, to keep left-hand playing free from pressure and expectations, I decided not to completely switch to left-hand playing, but simply to continue doing it on the side without stress, without anything negative coming into it again, and so it's not so existential for me now that I have to completely relearn and that it has to work, but is quite a relaxed affair.

 

 

And motor skills went well with the coordination of the two hands?

 

At the very beginning I played with both hands separately: either bow or fingers. Fingering with the right hand proved to be particularly difficult. The hand wasn't stretched enough and I always gripped too tightly. That's why I practised a lot of things "in parallel": I placed my cello in the middle in front of me and did fingering exercises with both hands at the same time in order to be able to release the fingers at all. As I said, it was a complete relearning process. In theory, I knew how it should go and sound, but the two hands had to learn completely new movements and combine them with each other. Although I had a clear goal and was ambitious to make progress, I found it very difficult and boring at first. The new combination of tasks felt strange and unfamiliar for a while, but became more and more normal with time and the number of pieces.

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Now, after almost 10 years, it feels quite familiar. I would say that because I now play relatively little the lefty way and have simply played much more right-handed, shifting with my right hand is not as smooth and not as practiced as with the left. Of course, it's still a question of practising and the more you practise, the smoother and more fluent it becomes. But the accuracy and the idea of being able to fall back on an existing representation, as I said, came about immediately. And it's still the case that I can sometimes play pieces better by heart on my left-handed cello than on the right-handed. But the most important retraining method for me was actually the parallel exercises with both hands. That's also how I practised vibrato.

 

 

I found that interesting in your bachelor thesis, that the vibrato works for you. It doesn't work for me with the right hand...

 

At first it didn't work for me either. The left bow hand went into action so that the bow vibrated and nothing happened at all with the right hand. Because I was also studying the neurological basics, I simply said to myself: "Ok, there are connections between the motor centers and I can try to learn with one hand from the other". I did dry exercises for my gripping hand everywhere - on the bus on some poles or with a blue plastic thing - when I couldn't play. And lots of parallel exercises. That way I was able to shift the vibrato from the left arm to the right.

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I also changed hands more often when bowing. This has helped me both to retrain and to get a better feel for the bow in the right hand. I now know very well what a bow hand feels like and how to get the feeling into it. I could never play some of the faster bow strokes with my right hand before, without losing control and the bow falling out of my hand. If I play them briefly with my left hand, I can now play them quite well with my right hand.

 

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Has the vibrato now become automatic, so that you no longer have to actively tell the right hand: "Do this now"?

I don't play everything with vibrato and it's still a conscious process, but it works motorically without my left hand reacting as well. The two hands can now perform their tasks independently of each other according to the respective playing style.
Another fascinating thing is reading music. I have always had great difficulties with this, i.e. the notes are somehow blurred, even though I don't have any eye problems. I was quickly overwhelmed in terms of concentration. I don't have that at all with normal reading. Playing left-handed has made reading music much better and I now also find it much easier when playing right-handed. With hindsight, I would say that the problems could have been a side effect of this whole process of overstraining myself by playing right-handed for years, because I am simply so left-handed. And playing left-handed has now loosened that up.

 

 

Did you have other lefty players or retrainees with whom you could exchange ideas?

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No one apart from Walter Mengler. I spoke to him on the phone once and also wrote to him a bit. The initial phone call in particular, in which he recommended that I should only paint a little at a time and in small portions with my left hand, was very decisive for my approach. That was the only exchange I had.
I later spoke to Johanna Barbara Sattler on the phone. She is very strongly of the opinion that you should choose a handedness. However, I realized that this wasn't possible for me at the point I was at and that it didn't feel necessary. I didn't want to give up either way of playing and felt comfortable with both.

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The neurobiologist Prof. Dr. Gerald Hüther wrote to me that I shouldn't let myself be unsettled by expert opinions, but should follow my feelings. He said he also found it interesting not to lateralize himself so much and could understand how I dealt with it. That helped me a lot to accept it and not to judge it from someone else's perspective and classify it as damaging. As I came across the pianists Géza Losó and Christopher Seed during my exploration of the subject, I was naturally curious to play on an inverted piano. I was given the oppo

rtunity by the left-handed consultant and pianist Lioba Thiel in Münster, who has an electric piano with a keyboard mirror. At that point, mirroring was no longer a problem for me at all because I was used to it from the cello. As you press the keys on the piano with both hands, i.e. you're actually doing the same thing, I didn't have to learn any new movements. So I was able to play Bach ad hoc, which was a fascinating experience. I now have my own interface, which my husband, who is a computer scientist, programmed for me. Theoretically, I could play inverted regularly, but I only do it occasionally during the vacations because it really confuses me and I regularly accompany my students on the right-handed piano. It's also always a question of time management, because I do play quite a lot of instruments.

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Another instrument stood on my shelf for years before I decided to learn it as part of a master's degree with a focus on composition: in my case, the tabla tarang consists of 14 drums of different sizes, which are tuned in a scale and placed around me. At first, I arranged the notes conventionally like on the piano, with the low notes on the left and the high notes on the right. But I always got depressed when I played and I didn't feel well with it. I blamed it on the sound until my father encouraged me to arrange the drums the other way round, and since then it has felt totally right. It is therefore the first instrument that I have consistently played left-handed.

I generally play the tabla tarang with both hands. I found that the statement that you are about 10% faster with the dominant hand than with the non-dominant hand is actually true for me. In other words, I can simply perform repetitive drum movements faster with my left hand. The tabla tarang is a very rare instrument that is hardly ever played in India. As a result, there is no school for it, no technique and hardly any sources of information. During the technical development, I developed hand movements that I set up according to my handedness so that everything is fast and easy to play and I don't exhaust my right hand. I also have to be able to reach everything easily. The fact that I play with my hands almost 360° around me makes it an extremely challenging instrument in terms of coordination. This has taught me a lot more about my dexterity.