Hats off to accompanists!!

[doreen]

Hello All,

So this is the thing, I play at church; the first director makes me play along with an orchestral track while the choir sings with the background vocals?  Another guy brings music mixed up music where the chorus and the verses are in two different keys and I have to play for the service right then?

How about 10 orchestral reductions 1 week before the concert? Or learn the concerto and then find out there only doing the third movement? Right now I'm waiting on several other pieces to be played in three weeks.
The best one was 200 pages of music for Royal Academy Of Dance evaluation, 2 weeks, I could go on. I'm not complaining, I've been lucky to work with really nice directors. In high school I played violin, and I am a vocalist, but I became an accompanist because to me that guy/gal was always the smartest in the bunch.

So let's all pat ourselves on the back, and tell me your funny stories,

[richard black]

The ones I always enjoy are when a colleague goes off sick or something like that and you get called to play for rehearsals on a brand new opera, unpublished, in full score, at sight. Some of these pieces you can only find out whether transposing instruments (clarinets, trumpets etc.) are written at sounding or playing pitch by asking the composer, because the music's so discordant that either is possible, and of course the composer hasn't used key signatures anywhere for anything.

I was once given, at an opera audition, an aria from Harrison Birtwistle's opera 'Punch and Judy'. It was at least a piano score but it was handwritten and ridiculously small, and of course both discordant and arhythmic and generally tricky. The singer said, 'Don't worry, I don't expect to hear much of this', to which I couldn't resist replying, 'That's a stroke of luck, mate, because you ain't going to'. He took it on the chin and actually on a later job we became good friends.

[perfect_pitch]

I just had to post this... possibly one of the funniest things I've heard in a LONG TIME!!!

How do you HONESTLY BUTCHER a I-IV-I cadence???

[quantum]

Horn students at university all hire same accompanist for jury.  Two days before jury, said accompanist bails on all of them.  One of them happens to know Quantum is a pianist.  Playing a pile of horn concertos you've only been familiar with for two days or less for a jury... priceless. 

Nonetheless, I really did enjoy the music and acquired somewhat of an appetite for it.

[kalirren]

I just had to post this... possibly one of the funniest things I've heard in a LONG TIME!!!

How do you HONESTLY BUTCHER a I-IV-I cadence???

Sounds like they were playing a digital, and accidentally hit their transpose key to transpose the whole keyboard down one half-step.  The off chords are I-IV-I, relative to each other.

[quantum]

Sounds like they were playing a digital, and accidentally hit their transpose key to transpose the whole keyboard down one half-step.  The off chords are I-IV-I, relative to each other.

From what I've heard, the organist may have wanted the Tutti button, but instead hit a transpose button that was adjacent to it. 

Probably a good heads up to console designers.  Don't put transpose controls where they may be accidentally activated!

[faulty_damper]

I once practiced with a young singer from England.  We had an entire semester for her to learn a famous Schubert song, "Gretchen am spinnrade" but she could never sing her part right.  The opening three notes were sung in double time, turning 8ths into 16ths, and sometimes even faster because she usually didn't come in on time.  She would never listen to the piano so she often didn't come in, forcing me to play extra measures - or she would come in early, forcing me to cut measures short.  Every single time she made a mistake, she would stop and say, "can we start over again?"  I complied each and every time. *sigh*

Sometime in the middle of the semester, I told my friend, who was also a pianist, that I was accompanying a singer with this song.  She loved this song!  So I started playing and she sang.  When she came in, on time and with the correct rhythm, I screamed, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?"  She was confused.  I had to explain that this girl I was accompanying never sang her part right so actually hearing it sung correctly startled me.  She didn't understand how you could mess up something so simple. But anyway, I started the song again and it was the first time all semester that I played it from beginning to end without having to stop or add/subtract measures.  It was such a relief not having to worry that I'd be asked "can we start over again?"

At the end of the semester, I saw that this girl had signed up to perform this song in the Christmas concert.  I was confused as to why since she's never once sang her part correctly.  Was she serious?  Unfortunately, she was.  *sigh*  So now I had to get to work, teaching her how to sing her part correctly.  (Her teacher was a graduate student who allowed her to sing like this.)

There was a period of two weeks that she finally sang the first three notes correctly, though she still forced me to play extra/less measures.  After these two blissful weeks, it all fell apart; she went back to singing the way she sang before.  While I didn't ever show it, I was frustrated as hell at her incompetence.  And we had to perform this piece of sh9t in a couple of weeks.  Let's just say that the concert performance was quite ironically unexpected.

We needed extra rehearsal time at the concert venue which was an incredibly sonorous church.  The reverberation was incredibly echoey and unfortunately for me, playing the piano, I couldn't hear her voice, which was already small to begin with.  So I asked her to stand very close to the piano which made it easier to see her lips move.  If she opens her mouth, I would know that she's singing.

The next day was the performance and we rehearsed again just as we did the day before.  Did she sing her part right during rehearsal?  Hell no.  Of course not.  Why would she miraculously sing her part right when she's been singing it wrong since the very beginning of the semester?  Why would I ever expect her to do anything right when she's been doing it wrong like, forever?

During the performance, did she stand close to the piano like we rehearsed?  No.  She stood several feet away which forced me to turn my head just to see her.  Did she sing the first three notes in the correct rhythm?  No.  Did she come in on time?  No. Of course not.  But then that miracle happened.  She came in on time every time.  I couldn't hear her because of her small voice and I had difficulty reading her lips.  So every place that she usually screwed up, I ended up screwing it up by playing extra measures since that's what we always practiced.  Sh*t.  It was an absolute atrocity, my accompaniment.  I don't want to mention just how much I screwed up but it was an atrocious amount.  I should have been shot and then quartered, with all my fingers severed and fed to dogs.

Ironic, isn't it?  Had I not tried to listen to her, had I not tried to follow her, I would have played my part correctly and it would have been uneventful.  Instead, I have this story to tell you.  It actually got worse, what she did after my horrendous performance.  Even though we continued to rehearse as usual and had already scheduled another performance and her jury, she stood me up both times.  She didn't tell me that she was using another accompanist.  Not a word.  So I showed up expecting to accompany her only to find her rehearsing with another pianist.  And her jury, the same thing.  I was kind enough to let her sing her jury before I gave her a piece of my mind.  Of course she got upset.  She was this prissy little bit8h who blamed me because she sang like sh8t.  You had an entire semester to learn one simple song and you couldn't even do that.

The most important lesson I learned from this is that the worse the singer, the less you should listen.  Don't follow them because they'll lead you into a grave.  Yours.  I did gain one other thing from it, though.  Because she never sang her part right, after rehearsals I would go into another practice room and play and sing.  It was one of the few times I ever played exactly as written and heard it sung as written.  No less, no more.