February 2, 2024

Return of the stress dream (First Ballade blues)

Two weeks ago my tidily ambitious plan to tackle several ongoing projects was thrown into disarray when I got a call from This American Life asking me if I could go into the studio the following week to record excerpts of a piece of music I currently didn't know.

No, I didn't just accidentally resend an old post from 2023. If I had a nickel for every time This American Life asked me to record a piece on short notice, I'd have two nickels, which isn't a lot, but it's weird it's happened twice.

I'd figured that the marathon speaking-and-playing session I did at the end of December was it, but I guess I laid the tracks for my own (schedule) undoing when in the December recording session I mentioned the emotional connection I'd made between Florence Price's Fantasie Nègre No. 1 and Chopin's Ballade No. 1. The interviewer, J, asked me to talk more about my feelings about Chopin's Ballade, and I guess I spoke so rapturously that the editors and producers told him that they wanted audio footage of me playing the piece.

I learned Chopin's First Ballade years ago, and thanks to its overrepresentation in music school repertoire and some personal emotional baggage in my life/career I couldn't truly love it when it came to actually playing it. It's my go-to example of canon fatigue, which I wrote about in 2019:

Let’s take Chopin’s First Ballade in G minor. It is, objectively, a gorgeous masterpiece, full of pathos, desperation, and transcendent beauty. It’s also freaking everywhere. I loved it when I first heard it. Then I heard fellow pre-college students playing it at recitals, I went to multiple music schools and heard fifty million other fellow conservatory students playing it every semester, sat through people playing it at so many master classes and festivals I could probably teach a master class on it myself in my sleep, and heard a couple of famous people playing it well in concert. By the time I finally got around to learning it myself, I was already so sick of it that I could barely take practicing it seriously.

I’d heard Chopin’s First Ballade so many times that every moment in it had become hackneyed and there wasn’t any magic in it anymore. I’d heard every possible permutation of interpreting every phrase, and it seemed completely pointless to craft my own interpretation when everything I did was either derivative because it had been done before, or wrong because there was no way to do something new without it sounding bad. It was hard for me to commit to giving convincing performances of the Ballade because it started to feel pointless. Not to get all dark, but working too much on music in this kind of mental space made me start to question what the point of it all was, and you know you’re not doing too well when you’re questioning the meaning of your life’s work.

The thought of having to, in the space of a few days, prepare an excerpt from a piece I had this much baggage with, to be recorded professionally for a major radio show with a listener count in the millions, was enough to make me want to renounce society and move into a cave.

It also introduced a new kind of pressure I hadn't felt in a while. While I've written and spoken a lot about the unique pressure of performing underrepresented composers' works for the public, there is also a flip side to that terror in that once you get cozy with the fear, there's a freedom to playing non-canonic works. I've become sort of used to the fact that in playing more and more pieces of music that aren't hamstrung by the weight of tradition, I don't have to live up to expectations that don't exist. Chopin's First Ballade, though, is the very model of a modern major-general piece that comes with expectations you can never live up to, because everyone who knows it holds some platonic ideal of the piece in their head that no new performance can ever match.

I was also having the recurring daymare (that's like a nightmare, but when you're fully conscious) of the teacher I'd learned the Ballade with hearing my horrible rendition on the radio, and then furiously calling me up to excoriate me for doing such a bad job and for clearly having learned nothing. If anyone knows how to keep their brain from spinning up destructive fanfiction about themselves, please let me know.

But the job is the job. (Metaphorically speaking—I am not getting paid to be on This American Life.) And I had to remind myself: this is what you've prepared for. Countless teachers in music school had said that there will be times you have to pull together a performance on short notice for something big, and I can't be doing too badly if it's happening to me.

So after a few frantic days of dropping everything else and relearning this baggage-laden piece (and also other excerpts of the Price Fantasie, but for narrative cleanliness, we're focusing on the Chopin Ballade), I went back into the studio. (I don't know how TAL/NPR is funded, but if it does receive government funding, does that mean that I went into the studio on the taxpayer dime? Thanks, America!)

I played the 3-ish minute Chopin excerpt I'd prepared, then just to be safe played it again, completely clean, and looked at the faces of the TAL team on Zoom.

"Wow," J said in awe. "If I could do that, I would just never shut up about it. I'd be constantly going 'Look what I can do!' and making people watch me at parties."

Here's the funny thing: I get so deep in the weeds on playing and living up to the impossible expectations I think everyone has for me, and feel so much like I have to prove that I can do things, that I truly forget that what I do is at all impressive or enjoyable for other people.

The great and terrible thing that music school does is train you to view every performance as a critique session. I can't help but be proud that I can pour out my soul in a piece of music I spent hours on and then sit calmly with a neutral expression on my face while someone tells me that everything I just did was bad and/or inadequate and/or a waste of time for a litany of highly specific reasons. Being able to take criticism without freaking out on the spot is a skill that, frankly, more people could use. (I can think of a couple of world and business leaders who could use some breaking down in one of the more cutthroat performing arts schools.) But this practice has left me with the feeling that every time I play, someone is listening closely to whether I'm articulating the inner 16th notes adequately or pacing the rubato tastefully or if my flutter pedal is too blurry or what have you and they're going to let me know it. You can take the girl out of music school but you can't take the music school out of the girl.

Anyway, I survived a second session of recording for This American Life (they should give out t-shirts), and like a dissatisfied man who finds after a mid-life crisis that his poor devoted and beleaguered wife is his soul mate after all, I realized that I love the Chopin Ballade again. I'm currently relearning the rest of it to perform this spring.

Give your local collaborative pianist a hug

Every post my mentor, Kathleen Kelly, writes is gold, and her latest post made me realize something about myself.

For [collaborative pianists], graduate study is tightly bound up with getting our school’s keyboard work done; we’re in service from the moment we decide to be professional artists. We have more to do than is possible to prepare perfectly, more so than any other student. We prioritize - degree recital over opera rehearsal over voice lesson - but that’s not all. On any given day, we move every hour from situations that call for notes only (voice lessons) to reading open score (choir rehearsal) to making myriad unwritten pitch and articulation choices (opera rehearsal) to being a full collaborator with opinions and leadership (coaching or recital partnership). 

It’s a monumental task requiring endless calm, receptivity, and flexibility. And we’ll inevitably fail, as does every student. 

Here’s the thing, though. If you suck in your lesson, your teacher is obligated to help you, but if you suck in somebody else’s lesson, you’re in the way. If an orchestra or choir member is struggling, they might lose a principal position or be asked to join a different group, but they won’t be barred from band. If a choral or theater pianist struggles, they’re often not treated as developing artists, but as a service providers who are compromising everyone else’s experience. And that’s because they are providing a service, one needed by the institution, one that the institution will almost always prioritize over a student collaborative pianist’s developmental needs.

I know a lot of pianists who started out on the standard solo track and then went into collaborative piano—and they are all beasts. Collabs operate on a different level, man. I've seen (and tried to do) the amount of mind-boggling work they have to do—playing new, difficult rep on short notice well enough to carry a soloist or ensemble, reading straight from the orchestral score, transposing an entire piece up or down keys to accommodate a struggling vocalist.

I'm weirdly good at accompanying soloists and playing in ensembles—I've followed vocalists who skipped entire phrases or made inexplicable repeats, I can pick up a dropped beat (or three) while making it sound like nothing happened, and I have at times filled in for a player out of their depth. But I also had enough experiences early on to know that the collab life is simply not for me.

Reading Kathy's post, I remembered all the "Nope, I can't live like this" moments I had. The time a director set me up to fail by giving me a Brahms sonata way too late for me to learn it properly and play it with a professional. (I'm still salty about that one.) The time a vocal coach casually asked me if I could play a Mozart aria transposed up on the spot. (I'm terrible at transposing!) Looking at a score with all its clefs (is alto clef even real) and having to sight-read it on the spot to accompany a choir that's reliant on you magically playing all 20 instruments' worth of pitches correctly. Learning the orchestral reduction for a concerto and realizing that the accompaniment is actually harder than the soloist's part. Drilling and drilling the most difficult music to not get credit or recognition and watching a partner whose ass I saved too many times get all the glory. (Look, I'm petty.)

A lot of collab friends have told me they chose that path because they figured out early on that the solo life was not for them. "I couldn't do all the memorizing," several have told me (and in fact memorizing issues/traumatic memory slips seem to be, anecdotally, the number one cause for why so many people I know quit solo music performance). "It's hard being all alone on stage," "The pressure is too much," etc. I hear so many of these stories that you would think that soloing is hard and collab is somehow the easy way out, when I frankly think it's the other way around.

All professional piano playing is impossibly hard in different ways and the trick is figuring out which form of torture you can handle the best. I am perpetually in awe of collaborative pianists and think they deserve more appreciation, because truly I cannot do what they do. Musicians of the world, give your local collab pianist a hug and buy them a drink.

Some housekeeping

In my last post, I mentioned that Buttondown (the new platform these newsletters are sent from) doesn't support comments—well, immediately after I wrote that, Buttondown added comments support, so I've turned on comments on my posts. Please comment responsibly.

Also, February is shaping up to be a jam-packed month for me, so posts may be a bit sporadic for a few weeks. Things should ("should" being the operative word here) regulate in March. As always, thank you for reading! 🎹