Magic box

When is a pianist not a pianist?

Pianos are magical.

You wouldn‘t think so to look at them with their boxy bodies embracing their giant steel frames. Woodenly parked on stages, taking up dusty space in theaters, collecting cigarette burns in practice rooms (I’m dating myself), languishing under the family photos: pianos are yesteryear’s most bourgeois home accessory, signaling far more outlay of cash than use will ever justify, like a Hummer or a Peloton. It’s no surprise, then, that they are often treated as furniture everywhere from upscale homes to expensive cruise ship suites.

But the sorcery! You have a keyboard with access to hundreds of sounds? Child‘s play. Explain to me how this huge rude box of levers is capable of producing a legato line.

That is magic.

Yikes, three short paragraphs and this is already geeky.

OK, for the non-musicians - are any of you reading this non-musicians? - legato means smooth, connected. A singer or a clarinetist can connect one sound to another with the flow of their breath; a violinist, with the stroke of their bow. Literally any musician can play legato, except percussionists. And a piano is a percussive instrument, meaning it’s something you hit. You play by pressing or striking the keys, which are basically levers, and the other end of the lever hits some strings, producing a sound that immediately begins to die away, the end of the lever having moved on, unable to sustain anything.

It is quite simply impossible to physically connect one sound on a piano to another. But we pianists convince you we‘re doing just that. That‘s our magic. We are not more amazing than other musicians - in fact, there are fundamental things about our instrument that are embarrassingly easy. For example, we‘re not responsible for being in or out of tune, or for the basic tone quality of our instrument. I know! It‘s crazy! But pianos are so dang unmanageable that we are the only musicians in the world who aren‘t expected to manage our instruments. On the other hand, we have to take on another task, also kind of unmanageable: spending years getting the coordination of our fingers and ears just right, matching one dying sound to the next in a perfect line, so that listeners believe we‘re singing. Eventually, we believe we‘re singing.

(The ultimate madness here is when you become an opera house vocal coach and starting demonstrating what you want by actually singing…at…opera…singers. Sigh. Good times.)

So, that‘s the magic pianists bring to pianos. But the potteresque relationship between those magicians and their giant lacquered wands works both ways. Pianos can do extraordinary things to pianists, too.

A piano can make a pianist into a superhero.

It can also render her invisible.

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Grand pianos, typically, are seven to nine feet long, unreasonably huge for a solo instrument. Indeed, you can‘t take them anywhere. Every now and then there‘s an eccentric superstar like Vladimir Horowitz or the guy from Phish who carts their pianos around the world, but most of us dance with what they bring us.

Maybe it‘s that lack of connection between us and our instrument that places us slightly outside the realm of other musicians. Singers literally are their instruments (yes, that psychological burden is the hardest one. Don’t @ me). Great wind and brass players seem to meld with their axes after years of pouring breath into them. String players seem to caress their instruments with actual love (fun with history: check out this article for Yehudi Menuhin‘s thoughts on whether women violinists are lesbians or narcissists!). But no pianist has ever seemed at one with her instrument, no matter her level of physical skill or poetic musicality. Solo pianists are more like race car drivers or matadors, masters and commanders on the deck of their Bounty fiercely commanding a mutinous ten-fingered crew.

When a virtuoso pianist plays a concerto (a work for orchestra that features a solo pianist in a prominent role), we get the sense that the soloist is conquering the beast, turning the monster into a prince and making it sing love songs. Fun fact: there are many more piano concertos than any other kind. Apparently audiences for hundreds of years have preferred piano soloists to any other gifted player on a *ahem* smaller instrument; nothing sells like a good prize fight, even in classical spaces (it’s the same reason opera exists, except there the singers are the matadors and the bulls. Woof. See above).

There are other virtuosi, to be sure - violinists in particular have pride of place - but no instrumental soloist commands the accolades or coins of the star pianist. Training programs the world over prioritize the pursuit of this kind of playing. If you want to be a pianist in the classical realm, you must study solo repertoire and perform as a soloist. But the vast majority of pianists are not playing solo repertoire at all. While the student pianists are playing their recitals, other pianists are down the hall providing the piano parts to the instrumental sonatas, filling in for the orchestra in a trumpet concerto, playing everything from Schubert to Sondheim in voice lessons. Every choir rehearsal has a pianist, and so does every ballet class. The opera and the music theater programs are this very minute forgetting to give their pianists a break.

There are so many more of these collaborative pianists than there are solo aspirants. Indeed, without pianists in these roles for even a few days, musical training programs, choirs, theaters, and worship services would grind to a halt. The activities listed above describe the vast majority of piano-related jobs available. Why is this kind of playing, then, not the center of our training?

It’s the magic again.

In these other spaces, our pianos make us invisible.

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Sometimes, the piano feels like a service counter. As long as we’re delivering what the customer came for, we get anything from no commentary to gracious thanks. And if we fail to deliver, all bets are off.

Lest you think me an old keyboard curmudgeon, I assure you it’s worse than that - I’m also a conductor. I’ve been able to observe what happens in the move from bench to podium. I’ve shot looks at rehearsal pianists that I’d never send out at singers, and surely owe as many apologies to pianists as conductors owed to me in my rehearsal piano days. That’s a disappointing thing to admit, but it’s true. I should have done better, because I know intimately what it’s like to be absolutely essential to a process and yet barely considered as a person within it. I’ve been handed unreadable music by a singer entering a career-making audition, then blamed for ruining the aria when it turned out the pages were out of order. I’ve been glared at for the wrong tempo (and clapped at, and finger-snapped, and eye-rolled). Singers and conductors living through a terrible rehearsal have schooled themselves to stay civil to one another and blown up at me instead. There have been so many undersides of metaphorical buses, so many breaks forgotten or denied, so many neglected introductions or absent thanks, and so, so many fewer dollars.

I used to think it was the size of the instrument itself that was the problem. I was drawn to that size at first (it mattered!). Like a surprising number of performers, I wanted attention but also didn’t want.. attention (in my brain this still makes sense). The piano was my spirit animal, bringing me accolades and physically hiding me at the same time. Magic!

(This was years before I got all feminist and went down the rabbit hole of nineteenth century commentary on women pianists. Fun fact time again: the piano made it possible for women to have lucrative instrumental careers! Women could be famous singers or actresses, but for centuries it was expected they would leave the stage at their marriage; to perform was to belong to the public, rendering a woman essentially promiscuous with untold hoards of admirers, and that of course had to stop for a respectable husband. Women lovingly bowing a cello or pursing their lips to play a flute - maybe in your own home, dear, with the blinds drawn, but certainly not for a crowd. But the piano! The lady playing it is not even looking at the listeners! Her dress covers her feet, her sleeves reach to her wrists, if she has a lovely décolletage it is probably not visible to the audience. The piano made lady musicians seem chaste, which might have been its strongest magic at the time).

Clara Schumann, chaste genius

Anyway, I used to imagine that my big piece of furniture, my big box of levers, was something like a drycleaners’ counter, with a similar depersonalizing effect on the worker (me) and emboldening protection of the customer (anybody else). But it’s all so much more obvious than that.

Sometimes I felt like a worker at a service counter because I was one.

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As I wrote earlier, piano training is not primarily structured around building skills for most of the work available to pianists outside of school. However, schools need an army of pianists to make the school function, playing all the rehearsals and lessons and performances mentioned above. There’s an ocean of notes that need to be played, and often precious little guidance about how to play them. This is especially true given the ever shifting role of the pianist within an institution - more about that in a bit.

Let’s take a pianist who is entering a degree program in collaborative piano - so, someone in position of relative advantage, with a dedicated instructor and time set aside each week to get mentorship in a private lesson, just like any other musician majoring in vocal or instrumental performance. Most schools have their collaborative programs set up to shoulder as large a share as possible of the daily institutional piano burden. They can’t do it all, but they’ll do a lot. So, while their peers in the voice and instrumental studios (including the non-collaborative pianists) are learning one recital program each year, the collaborative pianists are learning many more than that. This year, I know pianists in such programs learning between eight and twenty recitals. They’ll also be assigned to play for choirs, acting classes, dance classes, and opera rehearsals. Other musicians are also required to teach lessons or play in large ensembles, but the workload required of them in total, and the amount of music they have to learn, is astronomically less than that of the collaborative pianists. And in no situation is their individual performance so intensely linked to the success of a colleague as is the collaborative pianist’s to their partners.

For collabs, graduate study is tightly bound up with getting our school’s keyboard work done; we’re in service from the moment we decide to be professional artists. We have more to do than is possible to prepare perfectly, more so than any other student. We prioritize - degree recital over opera rehearsal over voice lesson - but that’s not all. On any given day, we move every hour from situations that call for notes only (voice lessons) to reading open score (choir rehearsal) to making myriad unwritten pitch and articulation choices (opera rehearsal) to being a full collaborator with opinions and leadership (coaching or recital partnership).

It’s a monumental task requiring endless calm, receptivity, and flexibility. And we’ll inevitably fail, as does every student.

Here’s the thing, though. If you suck in your lesson, your teacher is obligated to help you, but if you suck in somebody else’s lesson, you’re in the way. If an orchestra or choir member is struggling, they might lose a principal position or be asked to join a different group, but they won’t be barred from band. If a choral or theater pianist struggles, they’re often not treated as developing artists, but as a service providers who are compromising everyone else’s experience. And that’s because they are providing a service, one needed by the institution, one that the institution will almost always prioritize over a student collaborative pianist’s developmental needs.

A mentor once told me, “you’re the pianist, you don’t get to make mistakes.” Ma’am, this is not a Wendy’s.

(Actually, I worked at Wendy’s, and we did make mistakes. And then we got to eat them).

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One thing pianists sometimes laugh at the rest of you about is that you have no idea how long it takes us to learn stuff. We’ve forgotten that we were trained to never let you know. We develop a sort of Rube Goldberg collection of smoke and mirrors around us to make it seem like we’re always on top of things. That is absolutely rooted in the school years, when due to our workload we can’t avoid playing badly in public from time to time. We will and do fail in front of you, so we’re loathe to add to our unemployability by asking for things or telling you our needs.

This can make other musicians solicitous around us in ways that are sweet but not very helpful. We get a lot of respect, gifts, private notes, and love from many of our partners, maybe even most of them. But the vibe in rehearsal rooms, the planning, and pay structures? They don’t really change. In schools where powerful professors run the collaborative programs, things are somewhat better in the respect department, but not much better in the day to day repertoire pressure. Collabs are running from studio to studio, barely hanging on, in every institution. Is it any surprise that underpayment, lack of skill in negotiation, fear of standing up for ourselves, and obfuscation of our needs continues into our professional lives, aided and abetted by the ignorance of our colleagues, however loving and well-meaning?

Change needs to start early in the process, and I think we might move mountains if we acknowledged the inherent service burden of the collaborative student, the fact that this burden breeds inequality with other students, and that this model of relationship is what we all spend our professional lives trying to fix. If everyone in an institution prioritized the collaborative student over the need for their service at the piano, perhaps the Dead Man’s Learning Curve of repertoire pressure faced by collabs would be less often met by impatience or disdain. Maybe our colleagues could begin to understand what our learning process is like, and begin incorporating it into their own.

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I think this is the last piano-centric thing I’ll write for a while; I’ve kind of said my piece. This essay is in some ways the conclusion to this series of three, and it might be more than a little repetitive. It’s definitely time to move on to topics more artistic and generative. I’m ready to start filling you in on the Amateur Challenge of 2024.

And I’m starting a lil’ Overcoached podcast, probably with insufficient equipment. But hey, I started this whole piano journey on a spinet that never was once perfectly in tune, or even close. You figure it out as you go.

That whole piano journey has been and continues to be worth it. My sincerest hope is that it not only remains worth it for generations after me, but that it gets better. I hope that everyone helps to make it so.

Watch this space. You never know when some magic might happen.

Thanks for this one to:

• every pianist who has ever changed in a church bathroom or behind a hotel ballroom curtain, warmed up by moving their fingers on their backpack while seated on a subway, or fanned out just-copied, unpunched pages across a Steinway music rack.

• Rob Best’s dad. He knows why.

• JB and EV and MK and EA.

• My parents. Thanks for buying the piano after the spinet.