Just play

Rebooting the amateur practice

A couple of nights ago, we went to the holiday band concert at the small local high school where Paul substitute teaches. In one of those auditoriums designed for anything, under an interrogation-worthy light, the jazz band gathered first: cool kids in everything from baggy pants to prim headbands, they added a couple of Santa hats for good measure. They swung their way confidently through a robust list of holiday fare before they were joined by the rest of the band program for the last four selections. The combined musicians crowded onto the stage looked like about ten percent of the total student body. The self-effacing band directors mumbled into the mic their hope that we would enjoy each selection in turn, and a remarkably tall young woman bounded across the front of the stage to play the slapstick in “Sleighride” while leaping into the air like deer clearing a fence.

The parade of recognizable personas took us out, former high school music geeks that we are. Do our instruments form us or are we inextricably drawn to our instruments? However it works, the same people seem to show up in slightly different guises in every band, everywhere, in every generation. The super alert first chair flute player with the cute outfit and straight long hair, never missing a trick (she also played all the baritone sax solos in the jazz band and was last seen hauling all three of her instruments, which seemed to outweigh her, out to the family car). The trombone soloist with hair sweeping over his eyes, who shrugged and slouched like it was all no big deal but stood tall to play a solo sweet and true. The keyboard player who scrambled between the synthesizer and the occasional trumpet solo with harried delight, publicly busy as only the king of the music department can be. The principal clarinet with neither glam nor fuss, stealthily nailing her solos and leading her section almost under the radar, total IYKYK energy already at sixteen. The tiny alto sax player with the big, clean sound whose fellows openly adore him.

When the head director paused before the final number to recognize the students who had auditioned for All-Region band, you could see those kids get ready to stand. Half of the ten who auditioned had made it, and the director explained how they get a chance to audition for All-State, and everybody applauded. The director went on to thank all the students who had auditioned, regardless of outcome, because the very effort that went into preparing the audition made the whole band better. He said he was proud of everyone in the band because all of their contributions together made something special, and they each made one another stronger musicians.

I thought he handled this dance between acknowledging all the band members while highlighting the standouts in the revered Texas competition circuit with notable grace. Some of the brass players cheered him in a way that was both mocking and sincere, which is another thing that brass players have always done in every band, everywhere, in every generation.

We counted seven cowboy hats in the crowd, all of which stayed on heads as did the numerous caps. There were a few self-conscious city dressers, evidence of the growing crowd of WFH transplants. There were a ton of younger siblings, from the few toddlers who had trouble hanging until the end of the concert to the awkward middle schoolers who vacillated between acting bored and trying to impress the older kids. When the students came down from the stage, there were hugs and cheers and pictures. We worked our way through the crowd, everyone exchanging holiday greetings and good wishes for the new year, and walked out into a cold, misty night.

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We started playing piano duets back during the shutdown.

Paul is a professional musician with competency on six instruments to my one, seven if you count keyboard (and I kind of think you shouldn’t even though he’s been paid by several rock bands and the Christian Scientists to play it). Pre-vaccine, stuck in our apartment, he scrounged up some four-hand classics from IMSLP, Debussy and Rachmaninov and set about learning a couple of movements.

The first time we sat down to play was a fun disaster. When you play the piano alone, you generally sit at the bench with your body centered in the middle of the eighty-eights. When you sit with someone else to play a duet, you’re off center in one direction or the other, which changes your relationship to the keys. He’d never experienced that before and was almost completely discombobulated, unable to find the intervals he’d worked to routine. But we practiced, at first slowly and with lots of repetition, figuring it out. After a while, we started to be able to shape phrases and play with dynamics. And it was a fun way to spend time, making our execution of the music a little bit smoother, a little bit prettier, and enjoying the mutual flow of our breath, our hands at the keyboard.

Just playing.

Here’s the thing: I didn’t expect to enjoy it so much.

When he came up with the duet idea, I didn’t hate it, and I thought it would be a sweet activity in our isolation, a sort of nineteenth century snowed-in-for-the-winter thing, me and Mr. Darcy. Hot, but nevertheless I had doubts. I had played duets with nieces and nephews at family gatherings before, which was always adorable and fun and full of connection, but I wasn’t sure what it would be like with a pro musician digging into his seventh-best instrument. Also, that musician was my spouse. So I had to show up for this project - I wanted to - but I truly wasn’t sure that I would like it.

I lost connection with the middle ground a long time ago. In high school, I was the publicly busy music kid, running between orchestra and choir and rehearsals for the musical with harried delight. By senior year I wasn’t really practicing the violin anymore; inspired by a new piano teacher and working up my college auditions, I was starting to imagine life as a musician. I left orchestra behind in college but continued to sing, unable to imagine existing outside of an alto section. But when opera entered the picture, that changed. My voice was trashed from barking out other people’s parts in the wrong octave in coachings and rehearsals. The theater schedule made it impossible to commit to any regular outside rehearsals, even those of a church choir. By the time I found a work situation that permitted some amateur choral fun, I had been out of the groove for years, and it was hard to face the deterioration of my skills. I didn’t join the choir.

In 2020, I had long stopped making any music that I wasn’t good at. The shutdown changed everything. Suddenly, no musician could make any music “perfectly,” that is, within the circumstances to which we’d grown accustomed. No gathering in theaters with lovely acoustics, no tuned pianos, no in-person partnerships: all bets were off. So even scared judgy musicians like me started trying stuff, throwing musical spaghetti at all kinds of invisible walls, wondering whatever might stick.

My first forays were in the professional realm, since that was the only one I had kept. A couple of professional projects got me using my voice again, which was wonderful and terrifying. My singing in the opera Interstate and the song Bonfire Opera wasn’t very good, but it also wasn’t amateur. Those works were written for me as a pianist, requiring me also to speak and sing in a very specific context, and I performed them as my professional self, with other professionals. These experiences were incredibly important in challenging me to get the old vocal folds out, and man were they fun - but they weren’t just for fun.

Then my husband downloaded the duets. We sat down every couple of nights to try them out, no concert, audience, or adjudication on the horizon. There was no flawless, polished execution on the horizon either, just the two of us on our old Kawai, finding the music that was possible between us. And I started to remember that once, my life had been filled with that kind of music-making, church choirs and graduate chorales and holiday pickup orchestras, groups with wide ranges of gift and skill. The hours spent blending in as a competent alto or average second violinist were still there somewhere down in my bones, along with memories of music made for utility or joy with whatever and whoever was at hand.

I thought I would help my beloved learn to play the piano a bit better. But what really happened is that my beloved helped me remember how to play.

For Christmas, I asked for a violin.

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At first I was diligent about trying to get my skills back. I got some Suzuki books and dove in. It was cool, after forty years, to find some muscle memory still unlockable, to experience fingers and bow strokes slowly coming together again.

Then life started to resume, with constant challenges: returns and retreats in school and on stage, cancellations, reschedulings, stress. We moved: new work, new colleagues, new schedules. Eventually, professional piano life roared back, thankfully, miraculously. The violin stayed in its case, but something had shifted; I started writing Overcoached as a way to find a name for it. Again and again, I found myself returning to the middle ground of music, the space between childhood study and the rarefied pro career where most musicians can flourish but where there’s little support.

I even wrote that we should do something about it.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting at a local fundraiser at a table filled with neighbors. A local orchestra was playing carol medleys. My friend Gail asked what I thought of them, a twinkle in her eye that let me know she was expecting snark (she’s met me) and that she’d both welcome and forgive it. But what I said was that I thought maybe I could handle playing second violin in the group.

Pro tip: always say what you mean around Gail. As we got ready to leave, she marched me over to the principal violist who said that they needed another second violin, and that I’d be welcome to come read the same concert with them in a few weeks.

So yesterday, I did that. I took my average violin and my inability to get out of first position and my inconsistent vibrato and woeful flat key tuning right up to a new group of welcoming people, delightful and harried, running to rehearsal between family obligations and holiday tasks. I was the weakest violinist by a mile. I never got lost, and I skipped some things I knew I couldn’t play. I felt the rise of panic when I realized that the second violins had the melody and so it had to be in tune. I messed up the bowing. By the end of the concert, my shoulder ached, and the strings had worn grooves into the fingers of my left hand. I realized I needed to unclench my teeth.

But I also leaned into my stand partner’s phrasing a couple of times and felt like I was really in it. I stopped playing loud enough to hear myself and remembered what it was like to blend into a group sound. I hit a couple of things I didn’t think I would because I wasn’t trying too hard.

I had fun.

I thanked my incredibly gracious stand partner and section leader, and met a few dozen people with vastly different stories: career professionals playing on their second or third instrument, people returning to music after decades away, really good players in it for a friend or a spouse.

Were we good?

Well, the venue was packed, and the audience loved it. So yes.

Did I add anything?

Yes. Me.

Next time, I hope to bring slightly better violin playing, because I do like that sort of thing.

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What a week! I began it remembering high school musician life, when I wanted to work every day to leave amateur hour behind and join the best ranks imagineable. I ended it rediscovering the freedom and pleasure available in a group where I’ll never be the best. I can lean into the skill of other people. I don’t have to achieve or lead. I don’t need skill to earn grace.

I can just play.

And best of all, maybe, I can support the musical life and health of my community, as the weakest violinist of the bunch.

Let’s hear it for amateur hour.

Thanks to Jenny Cresswell, Kamal Sankaram, and Felix Jarrar for daring me. Thanks Paul for your two hands. Thanks Graham and the Heart of Texas orchestra for your kindness.