COVIDiaries 3 - Easter Edition

The Baroque Babes (and me) 

Two singer colleagues asked me to join them to make music in the time of corona, and yesterday we recorded Stabat mater by Pergolesi. We're publishing it on YouTube as an Easter offering. I'd never heard this Stabat mater before we started rehearsing (shocking, I know) and I thought it would be fun. It was. Here's what I learned in the process:

• When living through a crisis - this pandemic is arguably the biggest one so far in my lifetime - making music together becomes an act of hope, defiance, prayer even. Working on Stabat mater with Johanna and Elli has yet again reminded me of how much I love what I do. (Listen to 'Thank you for the music' by ABBA now and be grateful. Then continue reading.) 
• Stabat mater is an insanely beautiful piece when played by a baroque ensemble.
• A piano is not a baroque ensemble. It's important to understand all the implications of this - I didn't. I listened to recordings of ensembles, did my best to imitate them, and quickly discovered that things that sound good with a continuo aren't necessarily applicable to piano playing. Steady, heavy pulse? A robot playing slightly too slow. Walking bass all portato? Directionless shit. Trills together with singers? Not great.
• I understood just how little I had studied baroque - I have played the harpsichord, but pitiably little. I have basically learned enough to know how much out of my depth I am - and knowing this mainly helps in making me aware of how much I'm offending the baroque gods. Whatever I do, it's probably somehow wrong, and who plays baroque music on a piano anyway?
• When you have to baroque as a pianist, however, you've got to pay attention to staccatos. I always end up using them too much and too sharp everywhere, making everything sound light, bright and cheerful. Sometimes it works, but just as often the line and drama disappear, taking the oomph out of the music.
• Trills are hard. "Relax," you tell your fingers, "you've known how to do this since you were ten", but your muscles have already frozen, refusing to co-operate.
• Taping scores is even harder than the trills. This time I copied just some of the pages to avoid page turns, and taped the copies to the score. Well. Not only once but twice I actually managed to tape the upper and lower half of the same paper to different pages. Trying to detach the tape I tore some of the pages and essentially made a huge mess. Finally I managed to tape page 29 next to page 41. I have two masters degrees.
• Recording is energy-consuming business, so bring food. Bananas are the best.
• Buy new tights. If you think the old ones won't break when you start manouvering yourself into them, you're very much mistaken. Counting on a small tear not showing in the video? Of course it will. Forgot to check the colour? No worries, surely no-one will notice how weird your orange legs look compared to the deathlike white of your arms.
• It really is possible to cry so tragically over wrong notes and badly formed phrases that the person who you live with thinks someone has died. (In my defence, I was very tired and hungry, and that's when things get tragic.)
• Things might not sound as shit as they feel like when you play them. We're professionals, so in the end all the music we make sounds quite alright, even if it's not the greatest performance ever. All the embarrassing mistakes I bumbled through in this particular recording are just mistakes, after all. While they make me cringe, they will not destroy all the pleasure another listener gets from the performance. A messed up trill here, an ugly forte there - turns out I'm just human. Who would've thought.
• Looking at the video afterwards I realised that I still have the same mannerism I've had for years now - I tend to rotate in a circle, always counter-clockwise, with varying speed throughout a performance. There I was playing, going round and round. A couple of times I managed to pause the movement and sit still for a phrase or two before continuing my rounds, and that felt like a small victory. Baby steps.
• Concerts are fun. Okay, there was no audience and we didn't actually get paid, but who cares when the piece and the people you work with are awesome. Returning to ABBA I'm saying thank you for the music and wishing you all a happy Easter, while we wait for better times to come.

On Posting Recordings On Facebook

I posted a recording on facebook.

I haven't done this in a long time because of the questions. Every time I think about making a recording public in facebook or on my website, these questions appear in my head like an army of very loud mosquitoes. You've probably never heard them since I'm the Only Musician On Earth With Issues, everyone else looking pretty sane and normal and calm from where I'm standing. If one day, however, you hear this strange buzzing sound approaching you from a distance, you should know what's coming. Here they are.

"Is it good enough?"

It could've been better, you know. The bassline could've been more distinct, better shaped. There was the pedal at the end that I'm not sure about - too much? Too obviously romantic?

"What would Ilmo say?"

Ilmo Ranta is a Finnish pianist and one of the best lied coaches on this planet. He has very high standards that are always just out of my reach. Surely he would cringe at the first bar and make me play it again in a far more imaginative way that made the music shine.

"What if people will think that I'm really proud of this recording and not aware of the shit things?"

I have the urge to post recordings with explanatory essays that detail everything I'm not happy with, so that people would know that I know: "To whom it may concern: I don't claim to be perfect or great by posting this recording. I know the beginning is really quite normal (as in 'not extraordinary in any way') and that the transition on page three is a bit clumsy. I'm also aware of all the unclear left hand stuff that appears throughout the piece. With these shortcomings, your humble servant still has the audacity to offer her recording for the world to hear. Sincerest apologies, Jenna"

"Is it any good?"

This question has a tendency of repeating itself a lot. Usually there are no answers.

"What does this say about me?"

What sort of message am I sending with this particular piece? Have I posted too many pieces like this before - will people think I can't do anything else?

"Can I say I love this piece?"

Admitting that a particular piece is close to my heart - that makes it even worse. If I care about a piece very deeply, I'm supposed to have a Super Interpretation of it. My recording should just Pour From The Heart like little drops of magic gold wisdom and love. Listening to it should be a transcendental experience because of all these emotions that drip from the speakers like nectar. Oh well.

"There are already millions of recordings out there - why would mine be needed?"

Of course it's mainly about advertising myself. I hate that, but it's how it is. The songs are musical calling cards I put out there so people would get curious.

"But why not?"

If I get to this question, I'll post the damn thing. Because why not, indeed. However it could be improved, it is me playing the piano to the best of my ability on that particular day, in that particular space. That is how the song shaped itself in front of me that day, and I felt happy and content travelling through its landscape.

P.S. Us musicians, we face fear all the time. Fear of failure, fear of rejection. We find ways to cope with it and we learn to control it, but let's not fool ourselves by pretending it's not a part of our lives. One way I'm facing my own fears is writing them out for all of you to read - and with that writing process, letting them go. Another great way of letting go is simply focusing on the music. It is why we are what we are, after all.

On Recording with Singers

When recording audition tapes with singers you’re a helping pair of hands, not the star of the show. Great! Time to relax and not stress about every single note. Probably no-one will pay attention to your brilliant background things, so why not just enjoy yourself? There’s just one tiny little ‘but’: if you ruin an otherwise glorious recording with a cock-up, it could be the last recording you ever do. Either because no-one wants to hire you anymore or because a soprano axe-murdered you.

I tend to take recordings quite seriously. I want to play well and destroy as few takes with wrong notes as I possibly can. So I play super carefully, which makes for very boring music. It’s so hard to relax and let the phrases flow when you’re mumbling Hail Marys on every jump and scale. Practice helps, I’ve heard, but how can a pianist stop caring about wrong notes in this day and age? For all the cds are perfect, aren’t they? The recording you upload to youtube will be there for all eternity. How much time is that for other pianists to hear it and mock each of your wrong notes separately? (Because that’s what we imagine others do with their free time. Do we have proof? No. But we can almost hear them laughing.) If it’s a video, then all your funny faces, mannerisms and technical problems will be there as well, haunting your dreams.

Where does that leave us pianists? Looking fondly down from a high bridge before each recording?

Being really honest, all this is unimportant. You get nervous, but if you know your shit, you’ll be just fine. And it’s music we’re talking about here, not brain surgery. The risks are small in the grand scheme of things. (If you avoid dark alleys after twilight and practice well.) However, the underlying reason I want to make every recording my best yet is that I love music. It’s so obvious I sometimes forget it’s true. I really love what I do, and I love songs – how they combine text, human voice and the richness of piano. I want to play these pieces as well as they deserve to be played, so I can share with others this monstrous, life-transcending gift we’ve been given that is music.

Hallelujah.

If that alone didn’t lift your spirits, here’s some practical tips:

1) Do plan and practice page-turns. Don’t, and you’ll die.

2) If there are cuts, add color. I use huge bright red stars whenever I have to notice things.

3) Don’t show your fear to singers. They smell it, just like dogs.