Intertwined
“aber hie und da jemand zu wissen, der mit uns übereinstimmt mit dem wir auch stillschweigend fortleben, das macht uns dieses Erdenrund erst zu einem bewohnten Garten”
“but now and then to know someone in harmony with us, with whom we can go forward without saying a word - that makes this world into an inhabited garden”
Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Lehrjahre
This quote always makes me think of the big community of musicians, and especially of my chosen profession. Today I want to write about a lovely corner of that big garden, otherwise known as the International Keyboard Collaborative Arts Society.
My friend Elvia started this organization a decade ago. This weekend, more than a hundred collaborative pianists have descended upon Denton, Texas for the yearly IKCAS conference, ready to illuminate and celebrate the many facets of our profession. They’ll talk concert repertoire, ballet class, opera scores, recitative, improvisation, research, writing, and more. They will teach and mentor, and every day will end with performances of chamber music and song.
Better still, this group will be together in person after multiple post-pandemic virtual conferences. Those virtual years were well spent, maximizing the opportunity to reach out beyond geographical and financial boundaries to include more and more voices. This conference will welcome members from four continents - IKCAS has earned its “I!” There will also be a virtual conference day in November for members who don’t have time or resources to travel this time around (stay tuned for more on that).
I’ve got some opera rehearsal to finish up tomorrow, but after that my truck will drive me up the road to Denton and the last day of the conference. I get to help some friends talk about some writing that we did.
But first I have to tell you about Kristin.
Kristin and I worked together for three years at the Wiener Staatsoper. She moved through that chaotic, remarkable, toxic, commendable, ridiculous house like a ship’s masthead on a roiling sea, her calm Nordic features easily breaking into a sunny smile. When she played the piano, her torso and arms stayed quiet too, unleashing power or inviting serenity with economic gestures. And she was - naja, Wien, du schöne Stadt, you are known for many things, and kindness doesn’t usually make your top ten, but Kristin was- unfailingly kind. She didn’t say much at work, but you could count on her to use her words to make any situation run smoother, any colleague feel easier. I benefitted from her grace more days than I can count.
Kristin died a few days ago, unexpectedly and far too soon. She leaves an incomprehensible hole in the musical life of Vienna, a particularly rich corner of the big garden. Primarily, what’s lost and irreplaceable is her, the unique human, woman, partner, mother, daughter, sister, and friend. Work colleagues like me can’t speak to the loss of those who knew her intimately. But we stand devastated in another way.
In thirty years as a vital part of the Staatsoper’s daily activity, it’s almost impossible to imagine the breadth of history residing in Kristin’s hands and heart. I imagined sitting down with her again to talk about the things she could only mention in passing during our jampacked days in Vienna, the stories of artists long gone, triumphs and shenanigans living only in her memory. She’s the last pianist at that house to possess that kind of treasure, and she left before we could try to preserve it.
But then again, how many individual voices Kristin unlocked, encouraged, shaped, supported, and brought across the finish line! She played the piano in the orchestra pit with the Vienna Philharmonic, and concertized on Viennese stages large and small with countless artists. If it feels impossible to calculate what we lost with her death, how much more incalculable is what she paid forward.
someone in harmony with us, with whom we can go forward without saying a word.
May the angels lead her into paradise.
On Saturday I will sit with Elvia and Chanda (who was one of Kristin’s students at the conservatory in Vienna) and talk about “Accompaniment in America: Contextualizing Collaborative Piano.” This is the book and the digital archive that I mentioned in July - actually, looking through my archive I can hardly believe that I mentioned the book almost not at all. Co-writing a single chapter of it with Chanda consumed most of fall 2024, and the interviews that preceded the writing ate up a chunk of the summer. That labor paled next to the sheer beautiful, complex web of connection that made it possible.
Preparing for our talk, I re-listened to some of our interviews. We’d always planned to organize the book around Gwendolyn Koldofsky, a pioneering figure in collaborative piano especially through her role in establishing academic programs for the discipline. Koldofsky died more than thirty years ago, so we knew we’d be speaking with students who treasured memories of her. We didn’t know that two other colleagues would leave us too soon just as we started interviews for the book. Losing Allen Smith and Russell Miller threw a particularly urgent, poignant light on what we couldn’t learn in these interviews. One example: Koldofsky’s students had so much to say about the elegance of her playing, but we discovered precious little aural documentation of her skill since she worked in an era when almost no women accompanists were given the chance to record. It became clearer and clearer that the bulk of the evidence of our mentor’s lives existed not in papers or on discs, but in the lived experience and memory of the community - the inhabited garden. The spirits of absent teachers and friends felt like balloons whose strings had come loose from our careless hands. Even when we began the interviews for the last chapter on contemporary practice, we understood that we were documenting something precious, something that could be lost if we didn’t hold on to it.
We may not have named every flower in our book, but the whole garden is there through connection to the myriad musicians whose stories fill its pages. The hybrid format (writing plus digital repository) keeps the document alive. It will be easy to augment it in the future, and possible for anyone to reach out with suggested additions and changes.
The process that led to the book stayed alive too, and it led to something new. But that’s the big reveal at the end of our presentation on Saturday. Can’t wait to tell you all about it.
It’s big garden stuff for sure.
Thank you to Elvia, Chanda, and the long long list of Accompaniment in America contributors.
Thank you to the IKCAS membership.
Vielen Dank, Kristin. Auf wiedersehen.
thanks for reading.
What a rich metaphor and beautifully expressed tribute. Thank you for sharing these words, and I’m sorry for your loss.
Thank you for your beautiful tribute to Kristin . She is indeed irreplaceable. I am also grateful for all of your work for our important collaborative pianists. Danke vielmals.
Thrilled to hear about the continuing success of IKCAS and sorry to learn about Kristin. I am guessing that the person you refer to as Allen Smith, however, was surely Alan Smith, like Gwendolyn Koldofsky an instructor of collaborative piano at USC and a fine collaborative pianist. I knew Alan as a student at the University of Michigan and later had a chance to work with him at Tanglewood. Those of us who knew Alan of course regret his all too early departure from this world. When he passed away not so very long ago, Martin Katz told me that no one could get a sound out of a Steinway like him.
Beautiful as always Kathleen. You manage to move, provoke and inspire! Condolences on the loss of your friend Kristin, you will carry the torch forward.