The Pianist's ABC (Or A Random List Of Things Trying To Appear Meaningful Because It's Based On The Alphabet)

Analysis, Schenkerian. Structurally important tonic? Urlinje? Drawing complicated graphs? Love it. Don't understand half of it, but love it. 

Bench, wrist-friendly. Know the ones where you can just turn a handle and the bench automatically goes up and down? Magic. (Very expensive magic.) Then how about the ones with which you kill your wrists trying to roll, roll, roll away and the bench refuses to get any higher or lower? Especially delightful in a recital where pianists alternate.

Collaborative pianist, the term. Much cooler than "accompanist". Means exactly the same thing, but in a politically correct way.

Damp chaser, otherwise known as the piano life saver. These are the weird blinking lights under the keys that fool people into thinking you've got an electric piano. The damp chaser helps the piano stay in tune for much longer, and keeps piano tuners from earning the money that used to be rightfully theirs. Also I amuse myself by telling young students I'm watering the piano to make it grow into a grand and they buy it, dear hearts. 

Earplugs. Working with singers in practicing venues that are always just a little bit smaller than their voice? Good quality earplugs are indispensable to keeping your ears intact and thus keeping your career going. Yes, I know Beethoven was deaf. He wasn't a collaborative pianist anyway.

Franz Schubert. I've never met a pianist who didn't like Schubert. There are people who don't like Mozart (too cheerful), Chopin (too cheesy), Liszt (too many notes), or Bach (who remembers fugues by heart anyway), but Schubert? Loved by everyone. If you don't like him, please say so - I'd love to get to know you.

Grants. Money rich people and societies give to poor musicians who have a knack for making their artistic aspirations sound convincing on paper.

Harpsichord. Basically an electric piano from hundreds of years ago. When I was a child I loved electric pianos because you could change the sounds (sadly I never had one), and now I love harpsichords for the same reason. You can change the sounds by pulling and twisting things, even mid-piece. How exciting is that?! Also many of the sounds are much nicer than what a modern piano makes. But then, alas, you'll have to...

Improvise. Playing harpsichord means making a lot of stuff up based on numbers you were supposed to learn during theory lessons. 476+? 529-8? Then add a million trills and things, and do it differently every time. It's soooooooooooooooooooooooooo hard.

Jovial. That's what you need to be in order to make it in today's work environment - no suffering artists needed anymore. Unless you are a cursed genius who is so superbly superb that you'll be celebrated and revered wherever you condescend to go - then you probably can be as much of a twat as you like. The rest of us must remain friendly and cheery to keep our jobs.

Knitting. Literally the only interesting thing I could think of starting with K.

Legato, the concept of. An endless source of frustration for pianists, since our instrument is all about pressing buttons. "Imagine you're playing the cello", yes yes, but I'm not, am I? I'm pressing these damn buttons and trying to trick you all into believing they create a continuous melodic line.

Metronome, device or app. When I was a child I had a metronome that had an actual stick-thingy swaying from one side to the other. It was so cool. These days I have an app on my phone that blip, blip, blips away mercilessly. Still helps me practice whenever I bother to use it, though.

Nerves. The ones that make you sweat and tremble before a concert.

Opera. The king of artforms, claimed Kierkegaard. Dozens and dozens of people coming together to create a spectacle of a piece with flashy clothes, hours of singing, orchestra playing their souls away in a black pit where no-one can see them, and stories about love conquering all and about whores dying. It's quite awesome.

Piano, the instrument. Grand, upright, electric, they're all frenemies of sorts. Every time you perform somewhere new it's a voyage of discovery - one piano is soft and gentle, one has a menacing metallic sound, one has pedals so low you break your ankle trying to press them when in heels, one is missing three keys, one is an electric piano that cannot do a glissando but rather stops sounding completely, one has a pedal that is supersensitive and reacts to the slightest foot movement, another has the pedal completely broken or missing... Such adventures!

Question, is "pianist" really your profession? Love it. Yes, yes it is. I live in this elitist cultural bubble where my biggest problems are whether Brahms intended the crescendo to begin from the middle or the end of the bar, and am I going to die of poverty and malnutrition this year or the next.

Rehearse, aka. practice. Something you should do quite a lot if you ever want to do anything well. You know this, at least in theory, because your parents told you so years ago.

Singers. Pianists love them. We also loooove to complain about them, much as old married couples love to complain about each other. Honestly our musical lives would be miserable and meaningless without singers, but we mustn't let them find out we need them! Never!

Tape. A pianist's best friends are (after singers, of course) scotch tape and a pair of scissors. Finding the perfect brand of tape takes time and effot, but it's worth it.

Una corda, the pedal. You press it to make the piano sound a tad softer and quieter. In some pianos it works only for some of the keys, which is awkward to notice mid-concert, let me tell you... Personally I have a very distant relationship with this pedal. I rarely use it and find its existence slightly baffling. So I'd be happy to hear your views on this.

Vivace, meaning of. When I was a child I was told it means I need to play super fast, but later I found it means "lively". So basically whatever tempo I'd like. Thinking about it further I realised it applies to all tempo markings ever written, whether they include the metronome numbers or not - I could choose for myself, and the dead folks could not stop me. What freedom I felt, what joy.

Wagner, Richard. Everyone has an opinion about HIM - unless you're a pianist and you don't actually have to have one since he didn't really write anything to piano anyway.

Xylophone. I've literally got nothing more to add.

Y...

Z.

On What Pianists Don't Like

Nope, don't like!

1) New Bärenreiter opera scores

The score wants to be closed. It has absolutely no interest in being open for you to see the notes inside, so you'll have to hold the score with one hand and play only with the other. That's a meaningful contribution to music, right? Don Giovanni, the left hand version? Bärenreiter folk, a friendly tip: do start developing new score technology - an EasyToTurn page system and an EasyToKeepOpen pianist edition of all your operas. And if you could deliver them before I get any more gray hairs that would be great. Thanks.

2) Being told how difficult a piece is

The scale starts from somewhere like "It's super easy, you'll sight read it in no time" and continues all the way to "This is very, very hard. It's better that someone else plays this, someone who already knows the stuff". It can put a pianist in a tricky situation - if you're told it's not that hard and for you it is, can you admit it? Or should you just smile and nod and try to hide the panic rising to your throat? And if you're told it's way too hard for you, should you try to prove them wrong or smile and nod and only burst into tears when you get home?

Singers are notoriously bad at estimating what is easy and what is not for a pianist, but this applies to pianists themselves, too. So many times I've been told how difficult a piece is to learn or sight read just to find that for me it's much easier or harder than what I've been led to believe. The truth is, and this should be obvious to everyone, that different things are difficult for different people. I'm really good at sightreading stuff, leaving out whatever I don't have time to deal with and bringing out the harmonies and the basic form of the piece. What I'm not so great at is accompanying with chords. I know how to read a score, but to invent something out of thin air using only my imagination? Let's set something straight here: I don't have an imagination, so please don't expect me to improvise on the spot just because the other pianist had no trouble with it. I'll work on it, ask friends for help and come back later with a tolerable version, but that's that. Also, I hate playing from handwritten scores and French editions with their minuscule print.

This works both ways now: pianists, do not believe any assesments of a piece but rather make your own, and you non-pianists expecting us all to be God knows what kind of monster geniuses - remember we're all individuals with different personalities and skillsets, just like barbies or cats.

3) Conducting and finger snapping

Snap at dogs, not at pianists, and if you're not an actual conductor, don't conduct. Don't wave your arms or try to guide the poor player into the correct tempo with any sort of gesticulating, thank you very much. It is seriously annoying and won't make you any friends. So what is a poor singer to do when the pianist has a wrong tempo? Either sing faster or slower and let them follow you, or just tell the pianist. With words. They'll love you for it.

I was performing once with a teacher turning the pages, and they started to conduct my intro to an aria because they felt my tempo was too slow. We were onstage and there was an actual spotlight on us so the whole audience could see the teacher's displeasure with my choice. Did I change the tempo accordingly? Hell no. Did I seriously contemplate setting their car on fire? Oh yes.

4) Not getting attention

Let's be honest here: pianists working with singers don't get their equal share of the limelight. Singers are interesting to the general public, and pianists - not so. This manifests itself in so many ways it would take a couple of blogposts to do justice to them all, but shortly and simply: it's not nice to hear that your contribution to a concert is irrelevant or uninteresting. Of course we know that a vocal recital with just the singer would in most cases be found wanting, but it's sad that we have to defend ourselves by pointing this out. No picture in the advertisement, no name in the program, requests to work for free or significantly cheaper than the vocal expert because it's "just accompanying" - I've encountered all of these and more. And why did we perform again? Because we're attention-seeking narcissists who want to be in the spotlight in fancy clothing. So you, singer, yes, I'm talking to you! - next time you're working with a pianist, make sure their name is out there and praise them a little. Tell them they are indeed important to you. And look, you've acquired an obedient, adoring piano slave who'll stay with you for life.

5) Badly copied scores and untaped ones

Scores that have the vocal line and plenty of space above but with most of the bass line missing from the lowest staff? Scores with the last bar missing from every line? Yay! How am I supposed to know what The Great Composer was thinking there? As mentioned above, pianists aren't evil monster geniuses that possess a hidden mental vault that includes all music ever written, so they cannot dip into that reserve when notes are missing from the page. Of course one can make an educated guess of what might logically come next, but that kind of exercise was aplenty on my theory lessons back in the days, and personally I'd rather not go back to that sorry time. I completed the courses and now I have zero interest in guessing what Schubert / Strauss / Grand Something had in mind for this particular passage. I'd rather be tempted to believe the composer had a brief Schönbergian period on that particular gap, and fill it with accordingly delightful sounds.

Untaped scores, however - let's see, how many here like taping scores? How many of you can't wait for the next intense session of you, sheets of paper and scotch tape? If there are any people passionate about this, please contact me at once; your passion will not go to waste. The rest of us just have to deal with it the best we can. On singing lessons these flyabout papers are a particular annoyance, because they will fall and they will be in the wrong order at some point and there will be chaos, wasted time, and tears of frustration. This could be avoided, I'm told, by buying an ipad - an expensive digital item that can contain all your scores forevermore. Well I don't trust machines. There has to be something deeply wrong with playing music from a screen instead of paper. I'd much rather tape and rant instead.

6) C sharp major

What can I say. It's a shit key.