Couples counseling
Manifesto part two.
There’s a weird thing happens when a musical duo contains a pianist. Everyone, the pianists included (the pianists especially?), gets concerned about what to call them. To be sure, any and all musical groups struggle with personality conflicts and argue about who’s in charge, sometimes bitterly. But it’s only when pianists are involved as one of a pair that the title discussion starts. You’ve had the talk, agonized and argued about it, learned what you believe is right and wrong -
*drum roll*
Accompanist or collaborative pianist?
(Yes, this is a real topic. Classical music, you send me).
But truly, it’s such a common and reflexive discussion that it’s what colleagues assume pianists are talking about, no matter what profession-related topic they raise.
But I thought ‘collaborative pianist’ was what you wanted to be called *sigh* Just tell me what term is right these days, I can’t keep up.
And I get it, especially in an age where we increasingly prefer the picture of the thing to the thing itself. Pianists’ titles are simulacra, an arena in which discussions of personal respect stand in for material issues of disrespect (inequality of workload and pay, the classics).
But there’s more to the weird trouble classical music has with its pianist-plus-ones.
When I was coming up as a pianist, I heard something from multiple mentors many times over the years, offered as a truism:
There are people you’ll accompany and people you’ll coach, and these two groups should never overlap.
Forgive me for cutting directly to the slightly overgeneralized chase: it’s all about the power relationship. Here come some sentences: they won’t be nearly nuanced enough, but they also won’t be wrong. I’ve already written about this some, so follow that link for more thoughts about power performance on and off stage.
An accompanist is supposed to leave the soloist in charge, make their partner’s ideas work, navigate their emotions and communication styles, and take the lion’s share of responsibility in making the relationship work. A coach, in contrast, tells the soloist what to do, critiquing and correcting. An accompanist should be expert so as not to require too much time or rehearsal, but not so active or interesting as to demand attention, or as is often said, to pull focus away from their partner (a criticism still regularly leveled at high-level accompanists in competitions and reviews). But a coach, positioned as an authority, can and is expected to lead with their expertise, and can also emphasize their link to decision makers in performing organizations or schools. It’s the partner in this case (usually a singer) who learns to perform deference to the coach’s musical authority. Indeed, coaches can come to demand that deference, often termed respect, in a reversal of the soloist/accompanist paradigm.
Simply put, an accompanist learns to perform one kind of deference, and a coach learns to perform one kind of authority. Traditional advice tells pianists to keep those two performances separate in order to avoid conflict or confusion.
But what if the whole model is a mess?
(Spoiler alert: it is)
What is it about pianist-plus-ones that gets so weirdly personal? Maybe what pianists and their partners actually need is couples counseling.
Let’s take a look at that model.
The years-long learning curve of musical training requires mentorship, advice, feedback, encouragement, and critique. Traditionally, this has been done largely within a close one-on-one relationship with a teacher. There’s a lot to recommend this approach. Any student desirous of a professional career will have to prioritize consistent hard work and learn to do that work under intense scrutiny, enduring constant evaluation - and all that needs to start when they are young. It makes sense to find a teacher you can trust, someone who can see your progress over time, who will have your back, whose advice you’ll want to take, who will help you get through doubt and frustration and teach you to incorporate feedback while still strengthening your independent artistic voice. Along with everything that musicians seek from their mentors - technical advice, artistic insight, career guidance - they also seek safety. But they’re seeking that safety from the teachers who will also give them a leg up into their careers, who will write their recommendations, advise on their recordings, and help them discern when to dare and when to hold back.
Individual studio training is an opportunity for mentor and student to know one another closely. But, as students leave the studio, mentors’ objectivity is required. The overlap between careful nurturing and career realism is massively tricky, and classical music mentors don’t receive much training in how to handle this, if any at all. Other professions whose interactions follow similar, highly personal models, such as therapy, involve an enormous amount of required training, oversight, and support. It’s no wonder our profession struggles with it. Many a play, musical, and opera have been written on the theme of Svengali, the teacher who takes over a fragile *almost always female* student’s mind and affections. There’s a lot to unpack about how attracted we still are to that story, a very specifically gendered one about domination and loss of self. The 21st century is tending toward a much less romanticized view of that bond, thank goodness, as light is shone into previously sequestered spaces. Even healthy student-teacher relationships, however, involve intense emotional navigation given the preponderance of time spent in the studio.
We often forget to mention a nearly invisible third party in those studios: the pianist.
As students, young pianists sitting in their peers’ lessons are privy to many delicate interactions. They see their fellow students in moments of frustration. They hear interactions between students and teachers that are a degree more personal than those in more public settings like studio classes and workshops. This is inevitable and not necessarily inappropriate. But again, navigating these interactions requires a high level of ethical and emotional facility, more than many students (both pianists and their colleagues) can manage as they face their own fears, ambitions, and musical challenges while angling for grades, opportunities, and advocacy. As their own careers evolve and pianists develop into (often unheralded) co-teachers of aspiring musicians, it isn’t surprising that pianists and their partners carry communication styles and power dynamics from their training studios into their later musical work.
I have been and still am part of great duos, and they are the best, most informative, most enjoyable parts of my musical life by far. I’ve heard many other musicians say the same. And yet, it’s true that there are endemic problems specific to duos that are driven by the way we train for our professions. Pianists get plenty of advice about how to be successful collaborators, but not much advice or backup for beginning this more delicate conversation. I mean to encourage us to try and talk about these things. The following paragraphs may or may not reflect any one reader’s experience. They are based on my own observations together with hundreds of comments said and sent to me since I started writing this newsletter.
In the vocal world, the extraordinary exposure and pressure of the solo singer’s career often drives how a duo operates. A singer’s instrument is not just their voice, but their whole body, and they are tasked with looking straight into their audience’s eyes and communicating with words. It’s an extraordinarily vulnerable way to be a soloist. Pianists who work with singers interact with them regularly in their training years, usually on a weekly basis. Since they have such a close view of singers’ progress, they often take on a burden of emotional support for their partners, which is often emphasized over their musical contributions in praise and evaluation. At a recent competition I participated in, the organization’s director thanked the accompanist cohort by saying, “more than anything, you make our singers feel good, you help them with their fears and insecurities…we know that they are lucky to have you there to lean on.” Even if that good feeling is rooted in pianists’ excellent musicianship, the language praising them tends to position emotional caretaking before musical performance, underlining singers’ emotional comfort as the most important end goal of the duo.
The instrumental world, preparing for the keep-your-head-down culture of life in an orchestra, can get very catty and superior about singers and their emotions. Young instrumentalists generally begin their professional studies at a more advanced musical level than young singers. They train towards a culture of rehearsing - and needing - as little as possible. This usually results in far less overlap between the personal and the professional when it comes to their accompanists, but also leads to a more detached approach to collaboration, marked by late notice and short windows of rehearsal. Pianists sometimes call this the “jukebox” approach: press a button and your sonata accompaniment cues up. Maybe it’s not surprising that musicians preparing for life as a cog in a well-oiled symphonic machine might approach a human collaborator like a fellow widget.
The bonds between pianists and their duo partners are often deep and significant beyond their musical impact. Even so, true equality of partnership is still a work in progress across our profession. As pianists advance, they’re expected to learn more and more about how their instrumental and vocal partners produce their sound: how they breathe and articulate, how they experience time, how they tune, what the performing traditions of their repertoire are. Instrumentalists and singers are not expected to learn about their accompanists’ needs. That lack of engagement and understanding has to be tied to the fact that most musicians are content to work in systems that routinely overwork and underpay pianists - musicians of equal training and expertise, upon which their partners depend. The closeness and trust pianists share with their duo partners has not yet, for the most part, resulted in those partners advocating for fairness to pianists in our shared musical systems - not financially, not in terms of workload or reputation, and not in terms of what pianists need to prepare their own performance.
These problems are hard to talk about because they are so personal, and often linked to trauma. Our training traditions often encourage musicians to examine their private trauma as part of their study, and the last years have seen deep exploration of shared wounds incurred in classical music spaces. In a recent interview, I was asked whether I thought musicians experienced more trauma than other people. That doesn’t seem likely. It might be true, however, that we’re still governed by some deep lore about music, or about talent: that it singles us out, and that our personal trauma elevates us further through music, making us more able to embody the depth of human expression. That’s Romantic with a capital R, Charlotte falling in love with Werther because she saw his emotional dysregulation as proof of a deep soul.
I think there’s another kind of trauma we bring into our most intimate musical partnerships. It stems from another bond we identify as romantic and frame as emotional, but which breaks down over issues of autonomy and equity.
A colleague commenting in Call Us By Our Names said:
A very important mentor of mine…said to me: don’t do this profession because you want to be in the spotlight — almost no one does. Do it because you don’t mind not being acknowledged, because you don’t mind your font smaller on the program, because you don’t mind being left out of the review.
In that essay, I called accompanists the moms of classical music, doing invisible labor behind the closed doors of academies and theaters. As one of a duo, though, expected to render service and emotional support without having many needs, graciously ceding the spotlight, are pianists not indeed more like wives?
“You may even find that you are more than a collaborative musician under various circumstances. For instance, a nervous vocalist may ask to run through a few sections ad nauseum before an audition, or an instrumentalist may feel the urge to tune his or her instrument more than is necessary. This is your way of knowing that they are anxious, and you are there to help calm them down. Some performers enjoy chatting to stay loose – others prefer silence. You are there to help support their frame of mind.” - from the London Piano Centre’s website.
“The pianist, I feel, has to be the rock…You have to be ready for anything — a singer’s personal health, their level of fatigue, their level of concentration.” - from “Revenge of the Collaborative Pianist,” www.steinway.com
Is it bad to be an emotionally supportive partner? Absolutely not. And yet: are non-pianists encouraged to be “ready for anything” when it comes to their pianist partners? To support their frame of mind?
We haven’t worked out equality in marriage, probably our culture’s most available example of a close partnership. We carry that model out into our lives along with so many lessons learned unconsciously: who should get recognition, who should be modest, who should go the extra mile and in what way, who should accommodate and whose autonomy takes precedence. To be sure, other factors specific to our industry have influence as well, like the cult of the soloist and the related need for “solo” piano students to stand apart from accompanists. Regardless, our art form and industry, which reached full flower in the Victorian Era, has carried the roles and rituals of that era almost two centuries hence.
It’s time for pianists to stop being the magic coffee tables of the music industry. No doubt, the level of our flawlessness will continue to determine our employability. That’s true for any musician. Our flawlessness, however, continues to be desired and expected within systems that work against our acquiring it. When the practice time pianists need is considered equally to that of their colleagues, when it’s standard for colleagues and students to take pianists’ learning curves and schedules into account, when pianists’ compensation and job security improves to reflect their level of education and their importance to their institutions, then we’ll be able to talk about fairness.
Let’s push and push hard toward that goal. It’s now or never.
Thanks for this one to everyone working to transform the way we pair up: spouses, partners, friends, colleagues, and every musician who really sees the human beings behind the keyboard.
So much good insight here! Thanks for articulating feelings and experiences I haven't been able to put words to.