Who Am I This Time?

When I told him…that I wanted him in my play, he said what he always said to anybody who asked him to be in a play—and it was kind of sad, if you think about it.

“Who am I this time?” he said.

Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 short story “Who Am I This Time?” centers on an introverted and unassuming hardware store clerk in a small midwestern town. Although completely characterless in life, when handed a script he has an uncanny gift for putting himself in character, a quality which makes him the anchor of the local community theater group, where he is perpetually cast as the leading male.

I not only have a knack for accompaniment; it gives me a particular pleasure and sense of purpose. As someone who wrestles with the existential question (particularly in matters of musical pursuit) “Why do something instead of nothing?” I find comfort in the sense of assignment that comes with the commitment to a collaboration. The external obligation removes any annoying optionality about my need to prepare. The sense that I am providing support, often a favor, to someone else makes my practice feel clearly purposeful, as the better I prepare, the happier my partner will be; and this feels like a more direct and certain correlation than “the more I practice, the more the audience will get from my playing”. This satisfaction in supporting others manifests whether I am performing with a brilliant mature artist or accompanying a nervous student in a jury or audition.*

Usually the repertoire is proposed by the featured soloist, so I am also relieved of the need to decide whether I should learn new music, and what. The serendipity factor, particularly in this project where I am thrown together with people of varied musical traditions and experience, also keeps me entertained while introducing me to lots of wonderful music I would otherwise probably never encounter.

I like to think that I don’t immediately turn back into a pumpkin the way the protagonist of “Who am I this time?” does the moment the curtain comes down on the play. But I resemble him more than a little.

*My friend Steve Sweeting had a ping-pong teacher in Shanghai who told him: “You should play a third of your games with players at your level, a third with players above your level, and a third with players below your level.” I have found this to be excellent advice in diverse contexts.

Now that, I can do

Readers of this blog will know that I carry around a hefty share of self-doubt, judgmentalism, and impostor syndrome. 

There’s one thing, though, I know I’m really good at. My musical superpower is accompanying soloists. 

Part of it is just intensive preparation, especially when there will be only one short rehearsal just before the performance, as is usually the case for the collaborations in this project. I don’t just get comfortable with my part; I study and sing the solo part too— as everyone knows you should, but not everyone usually does. I listen to a bunch of different performances if available, and practice playing along to them. And then, alone again, I practice speeding up, slowing down, and pausing in various places and to varying, often wildly exaggerated degrees, so that I don’t settle into a too familiar groove.

But it’s more than preparation. I can sense what a performer is going to do before they do it. Staying with a soloist is usually called “following”, but it requires anticipating someone’s intention and moving along with them to help set up whatever accelerando, ritardando, crescendo, or breath pause they’re planning.

This comes so naturally to me that when my wife asked me how I do it, I really didn’t know. But (unlike the proverbial centipede) I’m so secure doing it that I’ve been able to watch and think about what I was doing even as I was doing it, without tripping myself up. 

I imagine people think it has a lot to do with eye contact and visual cues. But the communication involved is mostly aural, at least for me, and the visual component is essentially peripheral and subliminal. (I’m rarely focusing my eyes on other performers: my eyes are busy dealing with the music, which is often at an unaccustomed angle or distance—there’s significant variation of height and orientation of the music desk form piano to piano—and with the keys; I’m not the greatest at playing “by feel” when it comes to leaps.) My ears, though, are alive to people’s breathing, which tells me most of what I need to know. And I’m good at extrapolating from tiny shifts in tone or tempo or dynamics just where someone is going. It’s not ESP, but the subtlety of the cues and the speed with which they’re processed can make it seem a little miraculous.

It feels cocky to go on about my accompanimental virtuosity like that. Which is very off-brand. But I feel I’ve earned it with my otherwise harsh self-criticism. When my partners tell me what a pleasure it was to perform with me, that they felt so safe, well-supported, musically liberated—my internal reaction is not, as it is for virtually all other kinds of praise, “aw shucks” or “how sweet of you to say so, but…”; I think “yeah, I pretty much nailed it, again.” 

Barnard writeup

 ...is now posted. 

I made a resolution to complete new writeups within days of the concert, even as I have a large backlog to work through, so as to avoid adding to that backlog. Also so that we can create timely post-concert social media posts. In support of this I reminded myself that not all writeups need to be elaborate and multifaceted, like the prior one I did for Landgrove. 

However, I felt compelled to make a decent video (below) of the collaborative piece I did with artist Pamela Fraser—because it was cool, but also to help the new UVM School of the Arts document the interprogram collaboration that leadership is so keen to promote. This meant compiling a split screen from different source videos, incorporating good stills of the before and after art pieces multi-source, aligning the audio from the different sources, etc. Nothing state-of-the-art, but a solid day’s work for me and my still newbie video editing skills. Maybe the next writeup will be a quickie.

I was pleasantly surprised at how the collaboration worked out. Free group improvisation always presents the challenge of coming to a satisfying ending together. In a musical group effort, the players can communicate through sound and gesture. In this piece, Pamela wasn’t making any sounds, and I couldn’t see what she was painting from where I sat. At the outset, Pam said she’d need at least 5 minutes, and my spouse and on-stage videographer had the presence of mind to give me a sign when Pam was wrapping up. That end cue was very valuable, but it was of no help in letting me know when I was (say) one or two minutes from wrapping up, making it hard to shape the improvisation accordingly. But if it was a little rambling, I was nonetheless happy with how pleasant it sounded and how much I caught the stark angularity of Pamela’s piece with my opening idea.

I was also satisfied with the Scarlatti and my intro, for a change. It sometimes got a bit brash—the piano was nice but astonishingly loud and bright—but overall I felt like I achieved maybe 85% of my happy, at-home, in-my-sweats pianistic potential, as opposed to the typical ~60% of my potential I felt I reached in most performances when I played my first project concert 16 months ago.

An appreciation of tokenism

One of my favorite aphorisms is “Hypocrisy is the deference vice pays to virtue.” Similarly, tokenism is the deference hegemony pays to diversity. I’m afraid that’s a pretty good description of my current programming of music by women.

I think about the hypocrisy saying a lot in relation the present political climate. A common take is that the recent surge in explicitly racist, antisemitic, anti-LGBTQ, and misogynist discourse doesn’t indicate a true shift, because attitudes don’t change overnight. We’re simply seeing out in the open what has been festering under the surface, unchanged since before the feminist and civil rights movements. Some go so far as to say this is a good thing, because now that hypocritical masks of tolerance are off, we can see more plainly what people are really thinking and what we’re up against. (“We” who believe women and minorities have full human rights.)

But hypocrisy can serve a beneficial social function. A mere decade ago, if you were pro-Nazi or pro-KKK or pro-male supremacy, in most contexts you had to at least pretend otherwise (or anyway soft-pedal it, in the case of male supremacy). I’d rather people weren’t those things, but given that many are, I’d rather be in a society where they’re ashamed to say so publicly and inhibited from forming conspicuous alliances with other bigots. Social license is just that: permission to say and do things that would otherwise be forbidden. I liked it better when racists didn’t have one.

My first program in this project, and a few since, have had no music composed by women. This bothered me. But I didn’t know a lot of music by women, I didn’t have tons of headroom to learn lots of new music, and the little I did know didn’t always fit well into my programs. 

I also wanted to include music by Vermont composers. As I started looking for Vermont music, I was hoping I might accomplish a twofer, and happily, I was drawn to the music of Brandon composer Eve Beglarian. But I still didn’t have a ton of music-learning time over and above what I needed for the collaborative pieces (usually new to me) and the ever-new Scarlatti sonatas. So I learned a couple of wonderful but also easy and short Eve Beglarian pieces. One of them, the sublime and tender “Another Time”, has become a frequent closer, a good way to cap off a program as a sort of gentle cooldown following a more extroverted and showy piece as one expects at (or near) the end.

Then for my Brunswick concert, in which every piece was connected to a key date in Brunswick history (see program below), I was looking for a piece from 1748, and came across the sprightly op. 2 of Elisabetta de Gambarini, the first British women to publish a collection of original compositions. The “Lesson” op. 2 no. 11 is now my go-to opener. It’s flashier than the Beglarian pieces, though also short. So now most of my programs begin and/or close with short pieces by women, across a span of almost three centuries. 

I’m keenly aware that it would be hard to find a clearer example of tokenism. I was explicitly looking for music by women. I chose a (very) few pieces, all short and not too hard to learn. And now I take pains to include them in most of my concerts.

But as I said in my opening paraphrase: Tokenism is the deference hegemony pays to diversity. I have a ways to go, and I’m planning to work more non-male-composed music into my repertoire. In the meantime, a couple of token pieces are better than nothing.

P.S. I should make something clear. “Tokenism” frequently carries the implication that the included thing is not up to snuff, and is there merely because it represents an underrepresented category. Not the case here! The Beglarian and de Gambarini pieces kick butt.