No place for the timid

There's a little bromide that used to be very popular on wedding programs, that, like most really popular bits of sentiment, didn't sit well with me. It was meant to be really nice, of course:

Don't lead me, I may not follow
Don't follow me, I may not lead
Just walk beside me and be my friend

Which sounds simple and lovely, but doesn't really work in a marriage or anywhere else. There are times when you have to lead the other person, times when the other person leads you, and yes, times when you both walk leisurely into the sunset together holding hands and everything works out nicely.

I bring this up because I think accompaniment works the same way.

First of all, the chairman of the department of said accompanying in college hated the word. She preferred to call it "collaboration." That does sound like a more equal term in some ways, but it still needs to be understood correctly.

There were folks who joined the "collaborative piano" department because they were too shy to be soloists, much the way violists are sometimes people who don't play the violin well enough or lack confidence. That doesn't really work in either case.

That's because a collaborator has to have the boldness of a soloist, mixed with the discretion of a respectful partner. In other words, you've got to have the ability to take charge and the wisdom to know when that's necessary.

There are some places, of course, when the choir stops singing, or the instrumentalist stops playing, and you have an interlude all to yourself. Some of the wallflower accompanists in college would get nervous and make a mess of passages like that because suddenly they didn't have the security of someone else playing along.

You could be an organist playing an introduction to a hymn or a pianist playing a violin sonata in which the piano plays the opening measures alone. Either way, you have to set the tempo, you have to set the mood, and you have to deal with the fact that people are listening to you alone, and that any mistake in the piano part is going to be noticeable. But then, that's usually true of my situation anyway. Even when I'm collaborating with the 70 voice choir, I figure that if a false piano note develops, it will be obvious who did it. No hiding behind 5 other tenors!

You've got to have the guts to be wrong in order to be right. You can't wait for somebody else to start the piece, or hide behind their sound. In fact, you often have to be ready to equal or even outplay your choir or soloist.

Heresy! they all cry. An accompanist should always be softer than the soloist or choir. That's why they are an accompanist.

Not true. There is also a line, a chord, something that is an important part of the music that needs to be heard. It may be a small percentage of the notes on the page. It usually is. But one of my most important jobs is to recognize those places. It may be that the composer has given the piano alone a chord on the downbeat of the measure and the entire choir comes in on beat two. In that case, that chord has to be the equal in volume to the whole choir or it will sound musically wrong, and it needs to have sufficient vigor to give the choir a secure sense of the rhythm, so they can bounce off of the beat that they don't get to sing.

Changes in harmony that are given to the piano, or to the rhythmic inflection--if the musical information is not in the solo part, than it must be audible. The clarity of the musical argument depends on it.

And if it is redundant--if the soloist or choir is already giving out the information (i.e., singing the same notes)--I back way down or leave those notes out altogether, to let my partners shine out. Unless they turn out to need help, of course, in which case I offer as little as is needed to help them achieve their independence!

One of the best compliments I've received is from the choir members who have said "you make us sound better" because I think it illustrates what I hope is true about my approach to accompaniment. To be solid and secure and to let your choir or soloist shine forth when they are in fine form, giving them strategic help when they are not, and, without drowning them, serving the music such that the important notes come through clearly no matter who has them.

I sometimes hear that the problem with other accompanists is that they think they are soloists. Now here's where it gets tricky. I've been talking about accompanists as if being soloists is a useful skill. I still think so. The problem is in what kind of soloist we are talking about. A good soloist to me is one who listens. Even when playing by yourself, you have to balance the different parts of the music and be sensitive to the musical material, bringing some things up and some down. Often what emerges with persons who cannot accompany well is that they really don't listen very well. Because the only real difference between balancing a solo sonata and playing in an ensemble is that some of the parts that you are listening to, you aren't initiating yourself. But if you are used to listening, to liberating music from your own physical motion, it doesn't really matter. It is just as important or unimportant regardless of where it is coming from. Besides, even in a solo piece, there are often places where the soloist is playing an accompanying figure, as in several piano concertos. A soloist can never escape the need to be a collaborator any more than a person can live completely apart from society. And an accompanist can't avoid being a soloist, either.

But then, I do plenty of both kinds of playing, so I guess I would think that way, wouldn't I?

What makes a good accompanist?

What does it take to be a good accompanist? I'll start with with an accompanist is not: a timid soloist. Unfortunately, sometimes in school it looked like pianists who weren't assured enough to be soloists (meaning they got too nervous about being listened to by themselves) were made accompanists, the way violinists who couldn't quite make it sometimes were given violas. Neither situation works very well.

In fact, I recall much complaining about how some of the pianists in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition weren't very good at the chamber music round because they weren't much for playing in an ensemble. In this case, we are looking at the reverse of the idea in the paragraph above: that it is soloists who are in fact inferior accompanists!

Neither of which ought really to be true. What makes a person a good accompanist is really the very same thing that makes a person a good soloist, or just a good musician, period. In a word, it is this: listening.

A soloist listens to him or herself--for balance between the voices, for the acoustics of the hall, and the clarity of the pedaling, and is constantly adjusting to that external feedback. An accompanist is doing the same thing, only now the task includes notes that they are not playing as well as notes they are.

In the case of an accompanist, particularly if you are working with a conductor, this means surrendering your own inner metronome, while at the same time having a good sense of rhythm so that your playing is clear and rhythmically precise--but the moment the conductor makes an adjustment to the tempo, you have to make that adjustment yourself. In other words, the 2nd beat of the measure only comes when the conductor decides it does, not when you think it ought to. This is probably the thing that causes most people to be poor accompanists, because it means constant attention to a force outside of yourself. I'll give two examples of what I mean, both from the Cleveland orchestra.

When I was in college, back before the turn of the century (I'm now an ancient 42), I used to get to hear the Cleveland Orchestra for free every weekend because at the Cleveland Institute of Music if you were one of the first 40 students to sign up you got free tickets. I learned a lot watching one of the great orchestras of the world and its excellent music director, Christoph von Dohnanyl.

One night an insufficiently prepared soloist did something very rare on the stage of that august hall. He skipped two beats in the middle of a solo section. The conductor reacted instantly. Having been trained in opera, he gave a very fast four beat pattern, smaller than the usual beat pattern, in the manner that a conductor might do if a soloist were singing a recitative portion of an opera to tell the orchestra that the downbeat of the next measure could come at any time without counting out the regular four beats in sequence. Without any ceremony he therefore rushed through the next measure's beat pattern in time to give the downbeat to the following measure right in time with the soloist. This meant that within one measure of the pianist's skipping those two beats, the orchestra was right back with the soloist. The entire orchestra, watching their conductor like 70 well-trained hawks, nailed the sudden change, and I doubt whether anyone in the hall who didn't just happen to be playing the very same concerto with another orchestra later that month (such as myself) and thus know the piece really really well, would have heard anything wrong whatsoever. Amazing!

The next example is even rarer: when the maestro himself made the only mistake I ever remember seeing him make in a rarely performed 20th century American symphony, the entire orchestra had a momentary (but oh so short) collapse--he failed to give a clear second beat in a single measure and the whole orchestra was depending on it. Now if they hadn't been that tuned in to their music director, and had all been operating on their internal metronomes and not paying him that much attention, that wouldn't have happened. Ironic that it was their greatness that caused their downfall! But, like I said, this miasma lasted for only a fraction of a second. So many other golden moments occurred because their own sense of rhythmic precision, as finely tuned as it was in the case of each individual player, was completely given over to the maestro. Where he put that second beat--slightly later or slightly earlier as he sculpted each phrase--that was were the entire orchestra put it, to a player.

I have plenty of my own stories about skipping beats are adding beats to accommodate soloists or choirs or conductors, most or which are not glamorous--but they are good training! The most training I ever got in a single evening involves a young woman who was not prepared for a school recital and kept skipping ahead or behind as her memory failed her: now a line ahead, now a page back--causing her nervous accompanist to have to find where she was in the music as quickly as possible. Now that's accompanist boot camp! (She failed the recital, of course.)

There are many situation that require being in sync with an external force. You can't be a good outfielder unless you put your glove is where the ball is, not where you'd like it to be. Until then you have to constantly track where it is headed. It is not dissimilar with the conductor's downbeat. You can find it if you are tracking the preparatory beats and making adjustments are needed. That requires a good deal of refined focus. It is being able to meet lots of little deadlines--only, they are not marked on the calendar, and they are continually subject to change.