On a deadline

I don't usually put off writing the blog until the last minute. It's an uncomfortable feeling when I do. Some people need the shot of adrenaline this gives them, but I'm not such a fan. I'd rather plan ahead.

Somebody asked me the other day if I just played the piano for fun. Having found out that I am a professional musician it occurred to her to wonder whether I ever approached the instrument the way an amateur would, simply to derive enjoyment from the playing and not care if and when the piece was ready for prime time--perhaps not even to get that worked up over mistakes that would not be cited in the paper.

My answer? sort of. Then I elaborated.

I tend to enjoy what I do generally. Practicing, in various situations and at particular stages of preparation, can be fun. Other times it is difficult (especially when a piece is new). Chiseling away at a piece that is nearly ready to go to make it better is actually fun for me; it might not be for amateurs. But nearly always, the deadline looms.

I rarely play something just because I feel like it. There is usually a reason, and that reason is a public performance, and that means I've got a schedule, and a deadline, and pressure to get it right. That would seem to cut back on the fun quotient. But it doesn't entirely. It does ration it a little.

And even then, many of my selections are voluntary. Tomorrow I have a piano recital. I chose the program. Next day, there is a church service. I got to select the prelude and offertory. Next weekend I have a wedding. They aren't being very particular, so I'm playing stuff I already know and enjoy. In the fall so far are three organ performances. One is a joint recital (a single piece will suffice), one is an open house (so virtual background music), and one is a full recital. All of them with selections determined by me. I'm also teaching a class at the same time (on a subject I pitched to the administration), and will be getting ready for Christmas (whatever that means, TBD!). Those are the deadlines. As I mentioned, deadlines take some of the joy away. So I try to prepare as much as I can as soon as I can so that when the performances draw near it isn't any big deal.

Over the years I've experimented with pressure, and with the lengths of projects. I've attempted to set ridiculous deadlines for myself to see if I could meet them. I've tried to balance several projects at once, some long term and some medium and short term. And I've tried to make friends with the deadlines. They do, after all, give an outline to our efforts. If left completely to playing whatever whenever, I might not develop anything. Perhaps I would sit down and play something different each day, not caring if anything ever got good. And then you'd never hear any of it. Which doesn't work for me.

Sharing music with others presupposes two things: nerves, and a deadlines. That's the way it is. Maybe for some people that wrecks the fun. For me it disciplines it, and serves a higher purpose. And, to mangle Nietzsche, whatever deadline doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

For what it's worth, I banged this entry out in 20 minutes. That's probably a new record.

Back to practicing for tomorrow.

Attention to Detail

I just finished, not five minutes ago, two pieces for this week's opening voluntary and offertory. I am not a fast composer, (a trait I seem to share with several of history's proficient improvisers, ironically--we come in two speeds: instant composition, and slow and laborious!) so this is a minor miracle. Seven pages in three days. I could have made both pieces up on the spot but there would be little left afterward to share with anyone. There should be recordings up on pianonoise.com in a few days.

You would think that under those conditions--having just been informed by the choir director on Monday that I would be playing both an opening voluntary and an offertory after all (most years on "choir Sunday" the choir fills all the musical slots available and I, in a sense, get a week off from solo selections, just as the pastor gets a week off from giving a sermon), you would think that there wouldn't be enough time to take care of all of the niceties of full-bore composition. Just do enough to get by. And you would be right: there aren't any dynamic marks or tempo indications in the scores I just printed out; since I am playing them myself, this is unnecessary. It had occurred to me that I might have to just sketch parts of the pieces and fill in the missing portions in the moment. My concentration will be entirely on the choir on Sunday so I'm not taking any chances as far as my own role is concerned; therefore I'd like to minimize anything that requires inspiration for this particular week, and yet, there are some things I could have safely left to the moment even under these circumstances. In other situations I could have just left the entire piece un-composed.

And yet somehow I managed to finish; and on Wednesday morning, no less. Now I will about a day to learn what I've written if I want to record them on time. But before the composer handed off to the performer I took care of a couple of details with a touch of a few buttons. Which is the point of all of this: not to brag about speed, but to discuss a few important details with any music publishers that might be listening.

Before I printed the offertory I observed that the piece had very slightly bled over onto a fifth page, which now consisted of only a few measures. I only have room for four pages on my music rack. Since I was using Finale, a popular music writing program, I went to the "page layout" menu and shrunk the staves down to 95%. This barely changed the size of the staves overall, and yet the entire piece now fits on four pages so I won't have to figure out when to put up the fifth page while I am playing. Since I printed all four pages single sided they will all be staring at me when I being to play. There will be no page turns. Walla.

While I was making that change I was reminded of all the church music publishers who make life hard by not paying attention to issues involving page turning. How often do you see an anthem on which, one or two measures after a page turn, there is a repeat sign, wherein you have to turn the page back to the opposing repeat, which in some cases is only a measure or two before the end of its own page! So you or your page turner turn the page forward; two seconds later you have to go back two pages, and a second or so later you have to turn forward again. Ridiculous. And it is not hard to avoid these situations: you simply fit the music, which I can do myself simply with operations like the one I've described above.

It reminded me of all of those Youtube videos where you see the organists spend 45 seconds running to the other end of the church between hitting the record button and starting to play. I'll bet it's not hard to edit those portions out with some free software and a touch of a button. Before I had a blog I thought all of those typos were caused because you couldn't go back and edit what you'd written after you posted it. Not true, it turns out.

Which is handy, because when you are in a hurry you tend to make all sorts of mistakes you might not otherwise. I do it myself. And if I happen across an entry later with a spelling mistake or a typo I fix it. Not hard to do, either. Takes all of a few seconds.

A while ago I came to the realization that publishers of choral music purposely put piano interludes on the page turns because they think that choir members can't handle singing and turning pages at the same time, even though they've got two hands free while the pianist doesn't. Since the pianist is generally the most highly trained musician involved they get the joy of figuring out how to plan such a turn while they are playing with both hands and cannot very well leave out one of them while they are the one making a musical noise at the time of the page turn. There will be a forthcoming blog on this curious art!

But every once in a while, I will find a piece in which the page turns have been planned carefully, put in places where the measure before the turn is easy to play with one hand alone and not in the middle of the most complicated measure of the entire piece! And to those publishers I would like to say a great big thank you. Thank you for paying attention to those details and for making my life easier.

And for the rest of you, you know what is on my Christmas list this year. Peace on earth, of course, and something that is, I'm afraid, equally hard to come by. Paying attention.

You have my gratitude in advance.

Triage

When you are a working musician time is important. I estimate I play around 60 different pieces of music each week. I play for five choirs, for four weekend worship services, with two bands, and in the last two weeks I had two different concert programs to play. There is never enough time to practice everything, let alone practice it as thoroughly as you'd want to.

That's where being able to figure out just how and how much to work on each piece becomes not only a useful skill, a point of pride, but a necessity, a survival skill.

A few thoughts I've collected about how to do that effectively:

I usually gravitate right to the most difficult part of each piece and start to work on it first. My theory is that time--the total amount of time in days and hours between now and the time that I will be playing this in public--is the single most important ingredient for playing the piece well, because the longer I have to become familiar with a piece the more time I can practice not only consciously, but also my brain can work on it in my sleep or while I am doing the dishes, etc. I want to get the maximum distance between myself and the performance. This means that for me Monday is the single most important day for preparing for next week's church service. Most likely I've already been working on the offertory for this week, but if I haven't, I want to hit it hard on Monday so I can gradually work less hard the closer one gets to the deadline. And I want to know immediately if I can handle the hard part or if I need to find something else. I usually have a plan B on hand if I am choosing the repertoire myself, but often I do not get to make that call. In any case, I know the piece will begin to feel comfortable and easy once I have spent a certain number of days on it (I've gotten very good at being able to tell in advance how long it will take me to learn something) and I want to get to that stage as soon as I can, polishing and perfecting, but knowing that if I run out of time I will still manage to get by decently.

As my sight reading skills have improved over the years I can get away with very little or no practice on many of the pieces I play for groups each week. That's important, because there is no chance I would get anywhere splitting my time between over a dozen pieces a day, much less around 60. Some of those pieces are repetitive things, like the church doxology, which I have memorized and can play in my sleep, as well as most of the hymns in the hymnbook. I've learned what I can leave alone, both in terms of whole pieces, and parts of pieces. I also learn more quickly, and often, during rehearsals, I can actually be improving my accompaniment part while simultaneously helping the tenors.

How did I learn to learn fast? By having to do it. Swimming in the deep end is a learned skill. There is no time to worry about it, no time to complain or to stress out. You just concentrate. Hard.

Sizing up difficulties and priorities occurs both on a macro and a micro level. Within a single piece of music there are always notes that are very important and notes that aren't. If I can't figure out which note that double sharp belongs to in the middle of beat four while playing thick chords at a hundred miles an hour I can leave that note out, play the rest of the chord around it and keep going. When you are playing with others they don't have time for you to figure out what you are doing. Many notes double the singers, some double other notes in the accompaniment, most simply fill in harmonies. But some are necessary as rhythmic foundations for the other parts to bounce off of. Or they carry the melody. Or some other bit of interesting musical information without which the texture is incomplete, or at least a lot less interesting. It would take a series of blogs to explain how I tell, on the fly, what notes I can safely leave out if I am getting my fingers twisted or if I need to be helping the altos and can't get all of the accompaniment notes squeezed in at the same time. In sum, I listen. Listen. Listen.
Being able to improvise and compose helps enormously because if I can figure out what is going on I can paraphrase it in a pinch. Being able to read a full score helps too because when in rehearsal with a choir I almost never play the same notes--sometimes I am helping the full choir, or part of the choir, or playing the accompaniment as it is with the occasional important notes for the choir to latch on to, or I can't get the page turned fast enough so I am making playing both staves with one hand (happens occasionally--involves a lot of jumping around!). The result of constantly changing is you learn to do it as a matter of course. It causes one to be extremely flexible because you can't very well complain about not having done it that way before if you never do it the same way twice to begin with!