best/practice
That article about pianists, here for a limited time
This is the original version of the report that VAN published under the title BENCHED.
BEST/PRACTICE
Collaborative piano in the academy is essential - and undervalued. How can we make things better?
Collaborative pianists power the machinery of our musical institutions. Every weekly voice lesson, many instrumental lessons, and most music theater, opera and choral rehearsals need a pianist. We’re everywhere: from the very first steps of learning music to its crowning performances. No music department could function for a single day without a small army of “collabs,” as they’re called.
But by and large, U.S. conservatories and music departments have not supported sustainable jobs for these pianists. There is precious little uniformity to the structure of individual collab jobs. Staff and faculty positions for collabs almost always involve inequitable workloads and compensation relative to that of similarly qualified colleagues. Freelancers and short-term contractors pick up the slack from an even more financially precarious position. This piecemeal approach makes it difficult for collabs to find community with each other, much less organize.
How can such essential positions be so consistently precarious, although every institution requires its students to perform with a pianist in order to graduate?
The challenges in structuring collab work within any school are daunting. Consider first the sheer number of pianists required to play daily lessons, rehearsals, and concerts. Schools hire professionals but have to rely on freelancers and even other students to cover the workload.
Now consider the range of skills required. Collab duties include everything from giving pitches to a choir to playing graduate degree recitals or accompanying invited guest artists.
Now imagine trying to match up people and duties in a way that makes every process from private instruction to public performance run as smoothly as possible, while also caring for student pianists’ learning trajectories and keeping the professionals’ workloads reasonable.
And now consider significant questions of access and fairness: some students will be matched with student accompanying majors or staff pianists, while others will be paying out of pocket for freelancers.
It’s wild. “And getting wilder,” says Dr. Brock Tjosvold, a vocal coach at the Eastman School of Music. “The more schools are having money and personnel issues coming out of COVID, the more job descriptions keep on expanding.”
Eastman is an outlier among American conservatories in the way it organizes coverage of piano needs. In addition to the graduate collaborative piano majors and staff and faculty pianists, every undergraduate piano major there is required to play for a couple of fellow students each year. Faculty collectively supervise these efforts, so student pianists are not left to their own devices. But this structure is surprisingly rare, given its practicality. A powerful hierarchy is still at play among pianists in the academy, and many teachers of aspiring soloists discourage those students from spending too much time as accompanists.
“I think that hierarchy still exists,” says Dr. Casey Robards, a pianist, conductor, and assistant professor of vocal coaching at the University of Illinois, calling it “one of the barriers to having reasonable workloads, recognition, and respect in the field. It’s changing, but there’s still this idea that you should be on call to help everyone else.”
Robards helps to administer the school’s vast system of pianist supply, in which money from the college goes directly to individual teachers based on number of students and other studio needs. This covers some of the needed pianists; freelancers fill in the rest. Their rates are controlled by the university. “Certainly, I think that we can pat ourselves on the back a little bit for our intentions,” says Robards. “What does it mean for the actual work being done? I think this is where we meet many of the challenges that are present in any institution…with the vast range of ability and experience as it relates to collaborative piano, we cannot guarantee a streamlined experience for every student and every faculty member.”
Jeremy Johnson, managing director of programs at the University of Houston’s Moores School of Music, has presided over a similar shift. “We cover collaborative pianists with music major academic fees,” he said. “We’re increasing that allocation heading into next year so that we can cover all applied lessons and recitals for all students. If we’re going to provide collaborative pianists for some students, we really need to do it for all students.”
However, Dr. Taylor Hutchinson of Oklahoma City University notes that the resulting outcomes are not so equitable for pianists: “Schools leaving a lot of this work to freelancers will sometimes then cap freelance fees in an attempt to equalize things for the students that need to hire pianists. In other words, they create a market because they won’t fully bear the cost, but then they will also control the market.”
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Complicating the economics of collaborative piano are broader questions about these musicians’ roles in the academy. Are these pianists primarily service providers, with students as their customers? Or are they primarily artists, skilled musical craftspeople who are collaborating with colleagues?
In systems that cap freelance pianists’ fees, for example, “you have freshmen and advanced players making the same money,” says Hutchinson. “So there, the job is definitely viewed as service.” In other words, those pianists are being paid for their presence on the bench, not for their experience or expertise. But ultimately, as students advance, experience and expertise matter. Faculty want expert pianists because they have such a positive effect on student outcomes.
This brings us back to the question of hierarchy. The term “collaborative pianist” arose in the U.S. out of a concern with status and is considered to convey appropriate respect, occupying some middle ground between “soloist” and “accompanist.” Within American academic institutions, however, a more powerful hierarchy is at play: faculty versus staff.
The National Association of Schools of Music (NASM) sets workload policies for applied music teachers. It considers “18 clock hours” to be a full studio teaching load because each hour of lessons is calculated as requiring an hour of preparation. It also stipulates, “All faculty should have sufficient time for artistic, scholarly, and professional activity in order to maintain excellence and growth in their respective areas of expertise… the teaching loads of those having administrative and/or consultative duties are appropriately reduced.”
Faculty members working under such rubrics are not required to keep records or report on the specifics of their preparation time or service. Staff members receive hourly compensation and are expected to record and report their hours. But while staff collab positions across the country use a wide variety of formulas to account for preparation time as well as time for scheduling, none of the staff pianists I talked to said their contracts reflected the one-to-one relationship between contact hours and preparation time that NASM recommends for studio teachers.
Consider that staff pianists, like their applied teacher colleagues, are more often than not required (or preferred) to have a terminal degree at application. Staff pianists are very often preparing more individual pieces of music, and more music new to them, than any of their faculty colleagues. This is the case for Dr. Liz Ames, an acclaimed pianist and the University of Michigan’s only full-time staff collab. “I think my latest contract assumes 12 minutes of practice time per hour of contact,” she laughs. Trying to fit her work into a 450-hours-per-semester model (40 hours per week, 15 weeks per semester, subtracting time for breaks in the academic calendar) has been an exercise in absurdity. Last semester, she played for 17 degree recitals, three studio recitals, two separate concerto competitions, and 15 juries, and even with this workload—crushing by any standards—was still nowhere near fulfilling full-time hours under the 450-hours model. I talked to another pianist (who asked not to be named) whose department chair told him that, since an undergraduate degree recital “counted” as six contact hours, he would have to play a hundred recitals in a semester before he could be considered for overtime.
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The hourly model is clearly poorly adapted to the work of a collab, especially absent informed engagement from others in the system. And when colleagues in whose offices staff pianists play are taking home more money for fewer hours worked, less required practice, and less time playing in front of peers and students—while counting on the collabs to come through brilliantly in support of their students’ work—the inequity can become very difficult to navigate.
”What is our identity in an academic setting? Who are we?” asks Ames. “Do we belong alongside professors, or are we simply staff? Faculty and students don’t see me as someone who is hired to walk in, play the right notes, and leave. We’re collaborating on chamber music. I try to help younger students with practice techniques and older students with ideas about interpretation, as long as it’s in line with what their teachers are asking. I would assume a vocal coach is similar: they deal with languages and poetry, I work with air support and fine motor choreography.”
Hutchinson agrees. “We got into this because we love living in the moment with other musicians in performance. Other applied musicians will get a [Doctor of Musical Arts] and become teachers, but not everybody with a DMA in collaborative piano is going to run a collaborative program, teaching other pianists,” she says. “So we end up with this huge saturated market of people who are qualified to teach by playing… Where do we get the recognition that that is what we are doing? Can we be considered teachers of people who don’t play the same instrument as we do?”
It’s a monumental pedagogical puzzle. Voice students need a pianist in every weekly lesson who sightreads well and has a sophisticated understanding of poetry in multiple languages. Instrumentalists need pianists to practice concerti and solo repertoire. Student pianists need a chance to learn their craft, and collaborative relationships that develop between students should be supported. Finally, more advanced singers and instrumentalists benefit greatly from collabs who know their repertoire: Those, in other words, who can teach by playing.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle in the collab’s path is a proprietary approach to studio teaching. If a student “belongs” to their applied teacher, where does the required, highly trained collaborative pianist fit in? Current U.S. academic budget models can exacerbate this conflict, making it difficult to hire and retain highly skilled artists who do not individually “produce” students or generate student credit hours.
Yet there are many staff pianists who have their positions because of the advocacy of their colleagues, who want to improve outcomes in their own studios. “Sometimes you’ve just got to be the squeaky wheel,” says Dr. Sonya Baker, a professor of voice at James Madison University. “Putting this all together is administratively overwhelming, so we are forced to advocate for our students’ needs.”
Pianist Cory Battey’s short-term contract position at the University of Louisville is the result of such an effort between himself, voice faculty member Chad Sloan, and university administration. They drew from two separate funding sources, worked with Battey to determine a fair load, and got him some help with scheduling from a graduate student. Even with his commute from Ohio, Battey makes significantly more money there than he does at a larger institution closer to home.
Ames’s position in Michigan increased to full time because her colleagues on the wind faculty advocated for her. But she still runs into problems with administration when seeking time away for outside concert engagements. Coming to her defense, a colleague pointed out to an administrator that faculty regularly travel to play concerts. “Yes,” responded the administrator, “but that constitutes creative activity as part of your job.”
“I ask myself almost every day,” says Ames, “does the university see me more as an artist, or a copy machine?”
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In 2020, Dr. Elvia Puccinelli founded the International Keyboard Collaborative Arts Society (IKCAS) at the University of North Texas, including a pre-existing annual October meeting known as Collabfest. The formation of this organization during the pandemic supported a sharp increase in discussions of all kinds between collaborative pianists.
One Collabfest attendee will be Dr. Ana Maria Otamendi, co-founder (with her partner, pianist Elena Lacheva) of the Collaborative Piano Institute. "If there was one thing I could change about our profession,” she says, “I would want more stable jobs that offer a good, living wage, that are sustainable in terms of hours, and that offer full benefits. In order to achieve this, I believe staff pianists should instead be classified as faculty, otherwise we will continue pursuing a dead-end road where ‘staff’ is never working enough hours in order to be considered full-time."
Taylor Hutchinson notes that a more equitable structure for collabs “can’t be a one size fits all solution. I know many people who enjoy being staff pianists. They want flexibility, they don’t want to serve on committees” like faculty members do. “But NASM has standards for workloads in the academy that don’t follow a traditional classroom model, like those of applied teachers. There should be standards and guidelines for collaborative pianists too.”
Casey Robards wishes for a “flattening of the hierarchy, reducing the mystery of what we do, training toward the artistry and not just the service of it. We need to start with a clearer demarcation between hiring professionals versus training students. That’s the problem I see with our Illinois system right now. It doesn’t help anyone have the right attitudes toward music making. Mentoring for collaborative pianists has to extend beyond the applied studio, and there has to be a component of it in all the studios.”
“I think we would all benefit from zooming out from our immediate needs and concerns and try to envision best practices,” she continues. “The nature of our work causes us to accommodate a lot of compromise, but if we can work together to feel that we’re actually able to freely contribute what we can and not just be of service, we’ll be of even greater service in the end.”
I would like to thank everyone referenced here for their brilliance, candor, commitment, and generosity: Liz Ames, Sonya Baker, Cory Battey, Taylor Hutchinson, Jeremy Johnson, Elena Lacheva, Ana Maria Otamendi, Elvia Puccinelli, Casey Robards, Chad Sloan, and Brock Tjosvold. Additional thanks to those whose words I do not quote here but whose ideas fueled this essay: Cynthia Clayton, Tracy Cowden, Amy Johnson, Kristin Roach, and Dr. Chanda Vanderhart.