Partnerships and perfectionism

Just had a lovely concert (no. 49) in the Fairlee Town Hall. 

Including a collaboration with a town resident, which I thought of as an optional bonus feature when I started out, has become a vital component of each program for me. We haven’t had a concert without one since the early days of the project. 

I’ve also developed the habit of programming pieces relevant to key features of a town or key dates in its history. For instance, in Fairlee, I played Mendelssohn’s G minor “Venetian Gondola Song” because it spoke to the image of pleasure boats on Lake Morey painted on the Town Hall’s historic stage curtain. I also played Ernie Burnett’s “Steamboat Rag”, not so much because of the pleasure boating, but because the lake’s namesake, local resident Samuel Morey, built the first operating steamboat here* (yes, before Fulton’s Folly) and sailed it on the Connecticut River. And I played a variety of pieces from 1913 and 1914, the years the Town Hall was built and dedicated.

Such programming connects each concert to its town. But the most meaningful localization, maybe, and for me the most fun, are the resident collaborations. A couple of times it’s been with someone who lives nearby but works in the host town, and now and then a native son or daughter currently living elsewhere. But I’ve been strict that the connection has to be to the very town, not just the general vicinity.

In Fairlee, we had a couple of false starts in identifying a collaborator. But with less than two weeks to go, Deecie Denison (who also donated the Town Hall’s historic 1898 Chickering grand) connected me with a talented young songwriter, Robert McNelly, a high school senior who joined me on vocals and guitar for a couple of his own songs. I had already resigned myself to foregoing the collaboration part of the program, and I was delighted when Robert came through and kept us from breaking the streak. 

Then at the start of the concert, Kristin Post, the local emcee, introduced him as Robert McNelly, from Corinth. 

Not even an adjoining town, but one over. 

Of course I was still glad to play with him, and his songs were excellent, and he was a hit. Still, I thought to myself, rats, we didn’t quite check that box, oh well. 

Then I had the perhaps even more neurotic thought “but I don’t have to put that in the write-up, and no one else has to know...”**

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*Actually I think Morey lived across the river in Orford NH at the time, but he later settled in Fairlee. And anyway the Connecticut runs between the towns so the boat voyage was just as much in Fairlee.***

**And you know what? I may have copped to it all here, in the blog, but I still might not put it in the “official” concert write-up. Instead I’ll probably finesse it: instead of saying “Fairlee” or “resident” in reference to Robert, I can use a non-specific term like “local”.

***But even that’s not so clear. The NH/VT border was long in dispute, and wasn’t settled until a 1933 US Supreme Court decision, which placed the border at the low-water mark of the Vermont side. In other words, virtually all of the river lies in New Hampshire (since 1933 anyway). Here’s a Seven Days article on the topic.

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.”