May 16, 2025

On track

Hey, I wrote another article for VAN Magazine!

You can find it here, freshly published. There’s a paywall, but I encourage you to subscribe - there is some great journalism happening there and it’s worth your time.

However, here it also is for free or whatever you care to pay!

Thank you for reading, and please share from whatever site fits the bill. I’m eager to talk to all y’all further about the questions raised in this piece and discussed so eloquently and passionately by the colleagues quoted therein. How we move forward responsibly in our current age is the question for all of us, not just in the tiny world of classical music (but certainly there).

Thank you to Chanda, Randall, Darin, Jan, Leslie, Carlos, and Sonya for being part of this story.

here ’tis -

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ON TRACK

“collaborative keyboardists are artists who need  training, inspiration and nurturing. They should have a chance to receive those…before they are blamed for failing to shoulder burdens of keyboard scarcity they did not create.” 

On the Sunday before Christmas, a friend invited me to church in Llano, Texas. Music poured from a classic Allen electronic organ, the go-to of small congregations everywhere. Unexpectedly tasty registration, flawless playing—how did this tiny town come by such a good organist? But the bench was empty. Invisible hands finished the intro and the congregation sang. 

I couldn’t understand it at first, craning my neck to see around the music rack: Maybe this musician was particularly short or shy? There was someone sitting in the corner of the long-empty choir, holding a thin tablet in her hand. The people around me pushed at the familiar hymn’s tempo, but the phantom organist held firm. Clearing this was a recording, but I could swear the music was coming from the instrument before us. Yea, though I walk through the uncanny valley…

When the pastor invited us to rise for the next hymn, I looked up at the woman in the corner. She flicked a finger across her screen, waited, flicked again, and the organ played in a new, mellow registration. 

Church Music Solutions, a small, family-owned Illinois company, provided the music that Sunday through their Substitute Organ Service. For $45 per service, the SOS provides music from liturgy to hymns, played on the church’s organ through an iPad connection. You just need a human to press “start.”

Pastor Jan Unger of Fredricksburg, Texas  became familiar with the SOS when she substituted at another pastorless rural church. Church Music Solutions is “easy to use,” she said. “The people who manage it don’t have to be musicians. And the organists who record the music are top quality. The only difficulties I experience have to do with liturgical flow—it’s hard to get that without human connection. But it’s better than singing a capella.” (Church Music Solutions declined an interview request.) 

That Sunday before Christmas, the little church had been without a pastor or an organist for over a year. Their choice wasn’t between a person and a program, but between downloaded music and none at all. 

***

Service music has been recorded for virtual playback since the 1980s. At first, demand was driven by the growing Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) market. Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI), the industry leader, was founded in 1988 and today serves about 230,000 congregations worldwide, providing backing tracks to more than 600,000 songs and hymns. Congregants who loved listening to CCM artists wanted the same sounds on Sunday morning; buoyed by CCLI tracks, the local church’s praise band could sound more professional. And crucially, tracks gave praise bands a tool for learning music. 

As it turns out, the demand for such tools stretched across genres. Darin Adams, the CEO of Appcompanist, remembers lugging a cassette recorder into his classical voice lessons at Pepperdine in the ‘80s. “Recording accompaniments as a practice tool? That ship sailed long ago,” he told me. When he began making practice tracks for his own students, he quickly saw their shortcomings. “Whatever tempo I chose, any mistakes I made when playing—that all got baked into my students’ practice. They weren’t learning to be flexible collaborative musicians.” 

Adams began exploring MIDI technology with the goal of enabling students to manipulate digital recordings, adding an element of active musical participation to the use of tracks. Appcompanist launched its app in 2017; in the current version, a singer can control tempo, add fermatas, transpose, record video, create loops, place bookmarks, and bring out a melody line. The technology is coming ever closer to a realistic simulation of collaborative music-making. But why explore a simulation rather than encourage more work with humans? This is a question resonating everywhere at the moment, as industries, universities, and governments consider whether to continue employing humans in various jobs that can be done at least well enough by AI. 

Adams cites two major barriers faced by aspiring musicians in need of accompanists: expense and scarcity, particularly of pianists with broad repertoire knowledge. “Most of my students struggle to pay for the collaborative hours they need,” he said. “I want to give them tools to explore musical practice just as they can with a live pianist, preparing them to effectively collaborate when they get the chance.”

Sonya Baker, the voice area coordinator at James Madison University, also confronts barriers of finance and supply in her work. “Many of our students can’t afford to hire a collaborative pianist for all of their lessons and performances,“ she told me. “Some even turn down performance opportunities in studio class because of the cost. One solution is to use Appcompanist some of the time. However, those students are behind students who have always paid to collaborate with a pianist and gotten a chance to form partnerships. They miss the chance to work with the best pianists, to learn with someone over time.”

Research for Chanda Vanderhart’s upcoming book Accompaniment in America: Contextualizing Collaborative Piano (Routledge, 2025)—to which I also contributed a chapter—shows that American music schools routinely pass the costs for collaborative pianists directly onto students, creating significant inequities. It is not unusual for individuals to spend upwards of $500 per semester to secure required accompaniment for their studies. Even schools with collaborative pianists in staff, faculty, and graduate assistant positions along with other students and freelancers struggle to cover the hours of piano playing required by their curricula.

A thousand dollars a year or more poses an insurmountable barrier to some students. “I want humans in my studio!” Baker said. “But it’s an uphill battle: too few pianists and too much expense. Every school I know grapples with these challenges.”

No school, it seems, can act with the alacrity or effect of Appcompanist. 

“We are all music makers, in this together,” Adam said. “I’m proud that we’ve compensated pianists fairly for about 15,000 hours of work since the pandemic started. And now, schools can buy an inexpensive license for access to our full catalog, which is constantly expanding. We know there aren’t enough pianists and schools’ budgets aren’t big enough. So if a school has x thousand dollars set aside for pianists, we’re saying spend a fraction of that for a resource to help all your students prepare for the precious hours they’ll finally get with a fellow musician at the keyboard.”

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“What has happened to the organists — the ones who read three staffs of music, dance on the pedals, maneuver multiple manuals, pull organ stops, push pistons, manipulate swell and crescendo pedals and follow a director — all at the same time?” wondered the Baptist Press in 2017. “Is there no one else to sit on the bench where ‘Aunt Sally’ sat for 40 years?”

That list of virtuoso requirements alongside the condescending sobriquet “Aunt Sally” is a devastating giveaway of the unspoken expectations placed on accompanying keyboardists. Do all that, and  we’ll still think of you as Aunt Sally or the pastor’s wife (or the voice teacher’s—Darin Adams told me how ‘stuck’ he would be in his graduate voice lessons if the instructor’s wife wasn’t there to play). As in other “helping” roles whose compensation lags far behind that of the professions they support (think nurses vis-a-vis doctors), most accompanying keyboardists are women. Additionally, service is something expected by both academia and the church; it’s well documented that these institutions extract disproportionate service hours from women.  “Aunt Sally” might be expected to graciously offer her prodigious gifts without demanding too much in return, whether from her department chair or the Lord. 

In a 2022 Facebook post, pianist Carlos Avila claimed that New York conservatories were paying their accompanists just $20 per hour. Case studies for Accompaniment in America revealed multiple first-person stories of low hourly wages and contracts kept below full-time hours, and of pianists’ reliance on income from their partners or other sources. Collaborative pianists are often categorized as staff employees without benefits or paths to advancement, even if their required expertise, workloads, and performance exposure are equal to or greater than those of colleagues on university or conservatory faculties. Is it any wonder, then, that it is so hard to find skilled keyboard virtuosos to accompany, whether in school or church? 

Randall Bradley, director of Baylor University’s Center for Church Music Studies, points toward other entrenched beliefs that inhibit progress in both classroom and chapel. “Churches are long past the decision to adopt ‘traditional’ or ‘contemporary’ worship styles, but real change is still a work in progress,” he told me. “That’s rooted in how we educate. We should prepare our students to respond to people’s wants and needs for worship. I see young keyboardists struggle if they are new to improvisation, transposition, or complex rhythmic structures. We’re called to know all styles of music, and that plate gets fuller and fuller—but we have to keep integrating preparation and practice.”

***

Musicians may be able to substitute collaborative keyboardist time with programs like Appcompanist. But what about  aspiring pianists —how do they get the training they need to become partners in the “precious hours” of collaboration? 

 “If we’re going to enter the academic space, and make money in it, we need to be responsible about how this plays out,” Adams said. “We give back to singer development already; why not to pianist development as well?”

“In the little church where I first served, we discussed a digital subscription for our organ,” Reverend Leslie King of Waco, TX told me. “The church elders talked me out of it. Instead, we allowed our church organ to be used by anyone willing to learn from our organist. ‘Grow your own musician’ is a rough road but in the end it paid off for us then and informs me now.” 

Randall Bradley agrees that music directors must step into the training gap: “It’s not enough for me to say, that musician isn’t skilled enough, let’s shop for another.” 

Unlike an app, upcoming collaborative keyboardists are artists who need  training, inspiration and nurturing. They should have a chance to receive those before others consider what required service they might perform, before others get impatient with their inexperience, and before they are blamed for failing to shoulder burdens of keyboard scarcity they did not create. 

Appcompanist, CMS, and other such services serve people affected by that scarcity. They make good products to meet real needs. These genies aren’t going back in the bottle. It’s incumbent on the entire musical community to be, as Darin Adams put it, responsible about how it all plays out. 

In church settings, tracks have been ubiquitous for years, but congregational singing can weaken in the absence of live musicians. After that Christmas service, I decided to put my money where my mouth is: one or two weekends a month, I sit on the classic Allen bench. It’s been years since my regular church gigs, and my skills don’t measure up to Aunt Sally’s. But the small congregation never fails to welcome me, and to share what they need and prefer. Between me, another person, and the SOS, the organ plays every Sunday. 

“I don’t sound nearly as good as those recordings,” I said after an Easter morning service, in response to a compliment. 

“That’s true,” came the reply. “But it’s so much nicer to have somebody here with us.”

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thanks for reading.