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.”