Where’s Waldo, or, A Day in the Life of a Rural Piano Scout

Most concerts originate with an invitation from the venue, prompted by the general publicity around the project or audience word of mouth from prior performances. But I also do a fair amount of scouting, particularly in smaller towns, to identify locations with working pianos and, in essence, invite them to invite me. This may start with internet sleuthing for likely locations (church, town hall, Grange, etc.) and maybe a call to the Town Clerk or other contacts people may have tipped me to, but eventually many hours of on-the-road legwork too, going from village to village all over the state—some of them really ghost villages, yet often with a functional building and ancient but functional piano. This “Where’s Waldo” hunt for small-town piano-appointed public spaces is an ongoing and fascinatingly evocative facet of the project.

Last Thursday, I found myself in central Vermont with time on my hands and decided to tackle the towns of Pittsfield and Chittenden, for which I had no leads yet. In Pittsfield (pop. 504) I determined via Google maps that there was a federated church, a town hall and a library, all in the one village within spitting distance of one another. There was no one in the locked church. As I have done countless times, I peered into the windows along the sides, but they were shaded and there was no view. I wandered over to the Roger Clark Memorial  library, above the town clerk’s office, and asked Lisa, the librarian, if there was a piano in the adjacent Town Hall. She though not, but a trio of women who were planning the next book club meeting thought there was. Two of them, Doreen and Katrina, were on their way there to see if the library wifi signal would reach that far, as they had recently acquired a projector and were preparing to inaugurate a town movie series there. So I tagged along. The door code that the librarian had given them wouldn’t work for us, but Randy, the assistant town clerk, on his way back from the post office, used his own code and got us in.

There was indeed a piano—a Hughes & Son, serial no. 5084, manufactured for the Wade company in 1908, in Maine (the first Maine piano I’ve ever encountered). A grand old upright from the “golden era” of piano manufacture, when there were literally thousands of manufacturers in the U.S. alone. Someone at the factory had taken the trouble to hand-pant some arabesque filigree on the internal plate. The plate also had a record of past tunings, the most recent in 1985. Which, judging from its current sour intonation, may well have been the last time it was tuned. The 1985 tuner had noted that even after that tuning, the pitch was “1/2” (presumably a half-step, or maybe half of a half-step) low, no doubt because it had started so far below pitch that it wasn’t advisable to bring it up all the way in one tuning.

In other words, it was wicked out of tune. So far so, in fact, that some of the unisons (multiple strings tuned to the same note) sounded not like even out-of-tune unisons but rather a full half-step apart. I had to open the lid and check that the hammers were not just out of alignment and striking adjacent strings by mistake.

Even so, the old thing had life in it. Doreen was kind enough to take a couple of short videos of some Joplin and some James P. Johnson—music that is fast and reliant on rhythm for its interest while also harmonically relatively simple, and thus can come across even through deeply troubled intonation. And Doreen and Katrina volunteered on the spot to help facilitate and eventual Town Hall performance in Pittsfield. Assuming the pins and pin black are not faulty, and the strings not too badly rusted, it should be tunable. (The project never collects a performance fee or any other compensation, but we do ask that the piano be tuned. If this is a hardship, we can occasionally use some of our modest grant funds and patron donations to cover tuning costs.)

It’s always possible that the situation will be more favorable at the church—I’ll follow up there with calls or emails. But as most of the project concerts are in churches (to paraphrase Willie Sutton “because that’s where the pianos are”), I do enjoy scheduling Grange Halls, Town Halls, schools, and libraries for variety when I can.

This little diary covered half of my 6-hour piano scouting day in Pittsfield and Chittenden (where I also found a likely venue and several helpful friendly potential organizers). Or in other words, less than 1% of the 252 towns total, or just over 1% of towns remaining to be played. (Though I also squeezed in a visit to Ellis Music in Bethel, where I made contact with Tony who it looks will be able to identify locations and local collaborators for several of the adjoining towns.) As the saying goes: Magna patria, vita brevis.

“Jungle Drums” by James P. Johnson

How to schedule 252 concerts, part ??

Once again I’ve fallen behind in concert scheduling. I’ve been acting chair of the UVM music program, covering for a colleague on sabbatical. And for lots of reasons, including but not limited to the lawless chaos raining down from the authoritarian regime in DC, it’s been far more work than the advertised seat-warming gig. 

But whenever I’m in any kind of low point in the project, whether it’s because of delinquent posting frequency, scheduling challenges, new repertoire overwhelm, general burnout, or whatever, some serendipitous exciting new thing pops in to pull me up.

Today a quick call led to an immediate date just a few weeks ahead. (The hardest assignment is filling in the upcoming schedule on short notice.) At a nearby elementary school, a fun thing I’ve been looking to do more of. 

The only downside to an in-school gig is that it’s probably not appropriate to make it a fundraiser and may limit the audience—thus depressing my all-important STATISTICS. (I track attendance and donation amounts, partly for purposes of grant-writing, but mostly out of obsessive competitive self-analysis…I have a draft post about this, about the seductiveness and insidiousness of quantification.) 

But the school principal on the other end of the line said they were planning a celebration to dedicate a newly redone playground. On a Friday—my project’s only convenient weekday concert slot. Could we do something in conjunction with that? Thus making it a schoolday yet also a public event. 

I was already fully cheered up. Then he mentioned that a student was hoping to sing the national anthem at the event…there’s my “local collaborator” box ticked with no further legwork.

It was just one good vibe after another from there. To top it all off, he had what I (having admittedly little clue) would call a non-posh London accent. I’m a total sucker for that inflection; it was like talking to Idris Elba.

x

Number theory

I like 251. It’s prime, which is a pretty rare distinction at this magnitude (there are only 16 primes between 201-300). And it was the foundation of my Scarlatti ii-V-I intro pun. 

But when the village of Essex Junction calved off from Essex Town, my number went to 252. Not prime, but it has some redeeming features. It’s 7 x 36, and 6 x 42, Coincidentally, as I write this, I’m exactly 1/7 of the way through (36 completed concerts) while 6 more are fully confirmed, meaning exactly 1/6 of all towns (42) have been played or scheduled. And 7 x 36 also means that at an average of exactly 3 concerts a month, the project will last exactly 7 years, which is my current goal. Which is of course subject to change, like everything about the project. Like everything, period. If the destabilization of the climate continues to accelerate as it has been, it’s not obvious we’ll have a well-organized society six years from now.

However, 252 is not my actual number. I plan to play the four gores and grants as well, as I suggested at the outset of the project. The gores and grants are not, and have never been, officially organized municipalities, so they were never part of the official tally of 251 or 252. But I’m using a gradually filling-in map as the trademark representation of the project's progress. If I don’t play the gores and grants, there will be residual white space, and the project will look forever incomplete.

So my true target number is 256. Also not prime, but a power of 2, 2⁸, which is nice. 

As the gores and grants are not proper towns, I don’t have to do proper concerts there. Like: I don’t have to play a new, ordinally matched Scarlatti sonata, I don’t have to have a local collaborator, I don’t have to play a full concert of an hour or more, and I don’t necessarily have to play the piano. Also, to avoid confusion, I’ll give them ancillary numerical designations, like “51a” for a gore performance that follows the 51^st regular concert.

Again, as with everything about this project, all professed schemes are subject to change, with details coming into focus as the events approach. 

How to book 251 concerts, part N: super-presenters (impre-CZAR-ios)

Sometimes we reach out to people we think can help us identify a venue in their town. Sometimes they reach out to us. Now and then an angel agent appears who fingers venues or local performers for many towns at once.

Composer Sara Doncaster is the longtime head of the music program at Lake Region Union High School. The typical town in Vermont does not have its own high school but belongs to a consortium of several towns with a single school, the result of a rural and aging population, and the fact that Vermont has the highest number of towns per capita any US state. So Sara knows decades of current and former students from multiple towns. For many years she also ran a new music festival in the Northeast Kingdom, using several venues, so she knows most of the places in her area with decent pianos. Sara has helped us to identify venues or student musicians in Brownington, Conventry, Irasburg, Albany, Lyndon, Newport, Derby, and probably others I’m not recalling now.

Anne D’Olivo is ideally situated to offer us help: a percussionist and singer who has performed and directed church music for years throughout Southwestern Vermont, she is also founder of the local node of 350 Vermont—and was formerly an arts promoter in the UK. She knew the places to play and people to play with in half of the towns in and around Bennington County, and reached out to her extensive network to get information on many more. She organized our Manchester concert, negotiating with the Southern Vermont Arts Center to offer us their fancy facilities at no cost and engaging local favorite vocalist Maxine Linehan, helping to draw a large and enthusiastic crowd. Anne may also act as the presenter or promoter for future Play Every Town concerts in the area.

Special mention goes to Mark Violette. He found us locations in “only” three Northeast Kingdom towns, but as a church music director in all of them, acted as the presenter for all three, making him our only triple-sponsor so far: Brownington, our first “away” gig; Westmore, pop. 357, our first seriously small town, and Holland, Mark’s hometown, date TBD at this writing. 

In the limelight

Casting light on the relation between ego and nerves…

Of the 16 concerts so far, exactly half have been in churches. Three were in galleries or multi-use art spaces. I’ve played one school auditorium, one senior center, and one Grange. Our first library and town hall are coming up soon, and we’re looking at some interesting one-off locations in the uninhabited and barely inhabited towns. 

These venues have diverse setups, sometimes including a stage, but always with the piano in close proximity to the audience and a clear sense that we are all sharing a single space. 

Only two performances have been in dedicated concert halls: the launch concert at UVM, and concert 15 at the Chandler Music Hall in Randolph.  Compared to less formal spaces, the concert halls have larger, higher stages that separate the performer and audience. The isolation and elevation can be intensified by lighting: in Chandler, I was lit with the light of a hundred thousand lumens, while the house was completely dark. It was hard to feel communion with an audience I couldn’t see, while my hypervisibility shouted that the show was All About Me. Months of adjusting my attitude to look on performance as a community act went out the window.

And sure enough, for only the second time this project, I properly lost my place. Early into the concert, near the start of the Bach Partita, in the Allemande. It lasted only a couple of measures, during which I fumbled along convincingly enough, but it was enough to knock me back and keep me self-conscious and second-guessing for the rest of the first half. The other time I got lost? Concert no. 1…in the UVM Recital Hall.

Fortunately, the other thing these two performances had in common was an intermission, giving me a chance to reset. (In all the intervening concerts, in less formal settings, I’d been playing and talking for 70-80 minutes without leaving the piano.) Then, in the second half, singer Jennifer Grout encouraged the audience to follow the translations in the program. This was basically impossible the way the lighting was set, so I asked the good tech crew to bring up the house a bit. 

I could see people! That, and working in concert with Jennifer, rescued me from my self. No longer marooned in a sea of darkness on my island of light, now buoyed by the community, I could give myself up to the music and give the music to them. 

How to book 251 concerts, part 5: Other pianists

An obvious source of information on piano venues that I somehow left out of my preliminary list of networks: other pianists. I’ve received expert advice from Michael Arnowitt, who spent decades living and playing all over Vermont before moving to Toronto, Claire Black, who has been here on and off since 2012, and Tom Cleary, who has lived and played in Vermont most off his life. These three pianists sent detailed notes on several dozen options ranging from house concerts to opera houses. No doubt I’ll learn of many more from other Vermont pianists.

I was assiduously pasting their copious notes into our 252-town spreadsheet when the coin dropped. Why not make this a public wiki document? I could retain info on alternatives even after I’ve chosen a venue, with notes about the space, piano make and condition, contact info, etc. We could share this with pianists and promoters, spreading the knowledge base and also deepening it with user input, perhaps encouraging more pianists to play more concerts in more places.

One goal of the Play Every Town project is to contribute the vibrancy of village and town centers—a precious and valued resource in Vermont, but imperiled here as everywhere by the discount store at the edge of town, Netflix at home, and (anti)social media online. Sometimes this feels like a self-important notion: one concert is not a sustained contribution to a town’s cultural activity. Perhaps playing all 252 goes a bit farther, making a symbolic statement of support for town and village activity.

In this connection, the idea of a Piano Performance Places wiki spinoff is exciting to me—a way for the current project to resonate beyond its original scope.

How to book 251 concerts, part 4: Cultivate advance publicity

When I began thinking about this project, I scheduled a discussion with the incomparable Natalie Neuert (Director of UVM’s Lane Series and Lecturer in arts management) and Lane’s Operations Manager Katie Masterson to get their general advice on promotion and logistics. 

Going into our meeting, I had imagined that media interest would start to trickle in only after I had played a few dozen concerts. “Guy Says He’s Going To Do A Thing” did not sound to me like a story that would attract media attention.

Natalie and Katie had a completely different take. They advised me to go for maximum startup splash with a launch concert in a prominent, populous venue and with press release, website, and other PR machinery in full gear before the kickoff.

And they were right. (This is why Natalie teaches Arts Management and I teach Fundamentals of Music Theory.) As result of our PR push, we had a top-of-homepage web story from UVM Communications, a video preview from the UVM Center for Vermont Studies, a feature article in Vermont’s largest daily, a half-hour interview on Vermont’s most prominent private talk radio station, and a feature on the area’s most-watched TV news station, all before the first downbeat. (Vermont Public Radio and Seven Days, Vermont’s largest weekly, are coming up in the next week or two.)

The primary goal of all this publicity, from our perspective, was not personal glory (though I’ll take any I can get). It was rather to build awareness and buzz around the project so as to open doors when we knock on them asking presenters to make their spaces available (for free) and to promote the programs. And it worked! Better still, it has led to a couple dozen unsolicited offers (and counting)—some unimaginably cool, that we might never have otherwise found.

This is a good moment to mention the best thing about working for a university: collaborating with great faculty colleagues, brilliant students (Katie is a 2021 Music Technology and Business graduate and my advisee, and there's also a team of three current MTB majors working with me), and support staff who are exquisitely skilled and generous (despite being woefully undercompensated—are you listening, UVM admin?). 

How to book 251 concerts, Part 2: Charge no money

This is actually a bit nuanced. Many, maybe most solo recitals I’ve played have been without a performance fee and without an admission charge. (Again, I have a day job teaching, and performing at my school and elsewhere is considered part of my creative work and service.) Yet even so, I’ve often had to rely on personal connections, or nag, to persuade people to host concerts, at least at spiffy venues. 

Why is that? A couple of things are in play. One is that performing, even for free, lies somewhere on a spectrum between a selfless sharing of God-given talent and an exercise in self-aggrandizement. A presenter receiving a cold call isn’t sure where on that spectrum an unfamiliar performer lies. And of course, even if a performer is not being paid, 

Then—maybe more for audiences than presenters—there’s the Chivas Regal effect: the perception that you get what you pay for, and that when it comes to luxury items, where non-experts may feel insecure about making quality judgments, the inexpensive option can’t be very good.

So people’s enthusiasm for hosting Play Every Town concerts has to do with the intersection of the freeness and the story I’m telling. It’s not just that it’s free, but that I am doing a Generous and Good ambitious thing and not asking to be paid. I must be pretty good if I’m playing every town in the state...even though that’s a circular argument. The story serves as a substitute for name recognition. “Hmm, why is this person doing this for free?” is replaced by appreciation that I’m doing a grand thing and not charging for it.

On a similar note, this is framed as a Project that I am serving, not a personal concert tour. That makes it feel less like we’re asking presenters to do something for me personally. It’s “can you support this project?” not “please give me your space and attention”. Hopefully this will even convince fancier venues to waive normally hefty rental fees.