Tag Archives: ballet pianists

Rudy Apffel’s Czerny For Ballet Class blog

Click the image to go to Rudy Apffel’s Czerny for Ballet Class Blog

Absolutely thrilled to discover Rudy Apfells’ Czerny for Ballet Class blog — lovely recordings of huge numbers of Czerny exercises, together with reimaginings/reworkings of them (see here for a description of the project) lots of interesting commentary, and downloadable scores.

Not content with just one reworking, some exercises, like Op 335 No. 6 have six.

Czerny Op 335 No. 6: reworked in six different versions by Rudy Apffel

In the wrong hands (what a great metaphor for a pianist-related post!) this kind of music can sound so drab, just the kind of thing that should be banned from ballet classes forever. But Apffel’s reworkings are witty and clever, and hold a mirror back to the original that make you hear it differently. There’s one in the style of Prokofiev’s “Dance of the Knights,” for example, but my favourite is the jazz waltz rendering. If you didn’t know it was based on Czerny, you could believe it had been a No. 1 chanson in Paris in the 1950s. Sometimes when you come to rearrange things like this you realize that the underlying composition is cleverer than you realized, obscured by a patina of tired familiarity.

This is such a magnificent labour of love, but I fully understand Apffel’s fascination with Czerny. I think it’s Taruskin who said that there are two Beethovens (or Bachs? Or Mozarts?—I’ll correct this if I’m wrong another time) —there’s Beethoven, and “Beethoven.” The one in scare quotes is the composer that comes with all the baggage—the music appreciation classes you hated, the feeling that you had to like the music even if you didn’t, the way that people look in concert halls as they’re listening to his music. Without the scare quotes, you might feel quite differently about the music (for good or ill, as it happens, with some of the great names).

Likewise, with Czerny: there’s Czerny the fun composer, Czerny the man who worked like crazy, with so many simultaneous projects on the go that he reputedly set them all out on different desks in his study, spending an hour at each in succession in order to make progress on them all (even if the story isn’t true, I love it); Czerny whose exercises dance and sing and convey drama. Then there’s “Czerny,” the scourge of young pianists, who are handed the books of exercises as if they were not really music, but “merely” technical machines to improve technique, like those things 19th dancers used to splay their feet in to improve their turnout. “Czerny” the abandoned sheet music in the Oxfam shop, with a stained cover, musty smell, and pencilled ticks and music teachers’ fingerings in. I feel sick just thinking about it.

Take away the scare quotes, and there’s a joyful, imaginative composer here with a staggering wealth of material, and that’s what Rudy Apffel is mining with his new arrangements and reimaginings. There’s a danger that you might miss Apffel’s humour and ingenuity if you just turn on a single track and think “I wonder if I could use this for tendus?” Get inside the music, listen to them as a series, compare one with the other, and this is a wonderful musical journey. One of the things I especially like is the use of technology to do the impossible—freely admitted by Apffel!— as in this Schubert-Impromptu-Meets-Czerny-Op 335 No. 18.

Music in “Where Snowflakes Dance and Swear” by Stephen Manes

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I bought Where Snowflakes Dance and Swear when it first came out in 2011: I didn’t particularly want to read it (because I spend enough time in this world at work) but I couldn’t ignore it as a kind of ethnography of the ballet world that I was writing about. It was a good decision: unlike so many other authors of backstage views of the ballet world, Stephen Manes actually talks about music—the problems, what people play, the problems of hiring and marking up orchestral parts, how much it costs, and so on.

For anyone who has ever had a problem with music publishers, copyright and licensing in the ballet world, pages 252-258 will probably be one of the first times you’ve seen your experience represented in a published book, with the exception of Matthew Naughtin’s Ballet Music: A Handbook, which tells the story (and gives information) from the music librarian’s perspective. Even he, though, doesn’t get into the kind of gory embarrassing detail that Manes does, where a company has to do things that are on the grey, fuzzy margins of legal, in order to get by. Everything in these pages I had experienced myself, and was delighted and surprised to see that my troubles had been shared by others. You think you’re mad, criminal and incompetent until you realize it’s the craziness of music publishing that is the problem.

I can’t think of another book or article that contains so much about everyday musical practice in the ballet world: what pianists play for class; the decision to use CD or piano for rehearsal; the embarrassing moment when you do a new work, and find that there’s no rehearsal score, so the company pianist has to do one. It’s just a shame that you have to trawl through the book looking for the references—the indexing could be improved so that it’s easier to find topics, rather than very granular references to particular people or ballets, but at least the references are in there somewhere: ethnographies of ballet often say little more than ‘classical music plays in the background’ and leave it at that, so this is a welcome change.

Ballet pianists and company class

The author (see comment below) has reminded me of one of the biggest sections on the work of ballet pianists, on page 697-703, with detailed explanations from two company pianists, and their route into the profession. One ended up playing for the company “because they hated the class pianist” (p. 698), another started out when he was left to sink or swim in a class in Moscow— “. . .there’s something about someone foreign yelling at you, screaming at you. . .” (p.700). Quite. We’ve all been there. But the balance in Manes’ writing is everything: despite the awfulness, there are compensations, and reasons why ballet pianists end up loving their job and staying in it. A lot of so-called “behind the scenes” writing on ballet musicians is nothing of the sort, because it’s commissioned and written under the auspices of the ballet companies themselves.

Repertoire

Dotted around the book (and this is what prompted this post) are little references to music that to my mind, make a huge difference, not just to the evocation of the scenes that the author is describing, but to our knowledge of what music in the ballet world is like generally. The book may be specific to a time and place, but musically, it sounds very familiar: “A medley of ‘Stairway to Paradise,’ ‘Bidin’ my Time,’ and ‘Nice Work if You Can Get it’ played with strong emphasis on the beat accompanies a combination that involves what Otto calls ‘many’ turns.” (p. 44). Stretches are done to a Dvořák Slavonic Dance, and sit-ups to Carmen (p. 119); “Flashy jumps and big turns to Beethoven, Bach, “Be a Clown,” and “Meet Me in St. Louis” begin to lighten the mood of the room. (p. 505). In a description of a rehearsal, Manes mentions that “The Merry Widow Waltz” wafts in from an adjacent classroom (p.173), prompting a momentary digression in the rehearsal to remember fondly the time the company did Ronnie Hynd’s ballet The Merry Widow.” It’s a lovely detail—it’s exactly the kind of thing that happens in rehearsal. In writing about ballet, there is usually so much emphasis on the hyperfocus and determination of dancers as elite athletes, that these little overhearings and spillages of music and memory usually go unmentioned.

Ballet pianists on film

Confessions of an anxious ballet pianist day #18: Page turns

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Picture of a page of the score for Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker (Sugar Plum Fairy variation, the manège section)

The manège from the Sugar Plum Fairy variation. This line (the end of a page) should be a left hand page – if it isn’t, you’re stuffed.

I’m not a particularly tidy or obsessive person, except when it comes to scores that I have to play from. If it’s for a performance, I’ll want to know exactly what the score does long in advance: where are the page turns? Can the score be cut and pasted to make better places for turning? How thick is the paper, and what does it feel like to turn the page? How easy is it to turn two pages at once? How does it sit on the music stand? Sellotape, glue, PrittStick, loose leaves or A4 sheets stuck back-to-back, thin paper curled in a photocopier, bad pagination, poorly marked cuts, these are almost the only things in life that turn me into the kind of nutcase that could feature in Channel 4 documentary.

I think it all goes back to a single traumatic incident when I was playing for a performance by West Midlands Youth Ballet very early in my career. It was during the section choreographed for the youngest children, that consisted of several short dances accompanied by different piano solos. I had carefully pasted all the separate pieces in order into a scrapbook for the show, to avoid having loose-leaf pages on the stand. So far so good.

But in the first show, at the end of one of the dances, I realised – way too late, because the dance had finished – that I’d turned over two pages at once, thanks to a tiny protrusion of Sellotape that caused two pages to stick together as I made the page turn. It meant that the children had danced (let’s say) Section 4 to the music of Section 5. I realised the only thing to do was to play Section 5 again, this time, with the right dance. To their eternal credit, you would not have known that anything had gone wrong – the children had danced an entire dance to the wrong music, and then had to work out what I was going to do next without any communication between stage and pit. We got to the end, and it was fine. I felt shamed and awed by their professionalism.

Perhaps it was that early experience that made me obsessive about page turns in all the syllabus books that I’ve prepared over the last few years for the RAD. The thing about playing for dance is that you just have to keep going, absolutely in tempo, when you’re accompanying a dancer. You can’t ask them to wait while you handle a page turn, or correct a wrong note. In an ideal world, there wouldn’t be a single difficult page turn anywhere in a ballet score. On the whole, copyists (the people who prepare scores for print) are careful to position page turns where there is a rest, or where the music leaves one hand free to make the turn.

That’s why it’s vital to get LH and RH pages in their correct position when you make a copy. By long publishing tradition, odd page numbers are always RH pages, and even page numbers are always LH pages. One of the worst things you can do to a musician is put a score through a photocopier so that even-numbered pages come out on the RH side – easily done if you’re photocopying an extract that begins on a LH page, but you don’t put a blank page on the top of the pile to force it on to the left when it comes out of the copier. Every carefully positioned page turn will now be in the wrong place, and those places that were deliberately given two-page spreads because they constitute impossible turns, are now on a page turn.*

This was the case with a score of Nutcracker I was playing from the other day. The manège, which in every other score should be (and is) on a two-page spread, was split over a LH and RH page, and you don’t have a hand free to turn. What’s worse, I turned two pages at once, because the bottom corner of the page had disintegrated, so I accidentally turned the page behind it instead. I tried to save myself, but I discovered to my horror that without the music, I haven’t a clue what the manège of the Sugar Plum Fairy does, even though I’ve been playing it for years. I apologised, and we started again. I turned the corner of the page up nice and sharp, so I wouldn’t miss it this time. Unfortunately, this was one fold too many, and the corner of the page ripped off in my hand. I think it may be time to carry my own copy around with me, or learn the manège by heart.

* So the golden rule is, always photocopy a score starting at an odd-numbered page, even if you don’t need that first page.

Confessions of an anxious ballet pianist day #17: Why’s she looking at me like that?

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The very first time I ever played for a ballet exercise was in my audition at RAD headquarters in 1985 (they’d advertised for a pianist, with an offer of training for a suitable candidate if, like me, they didn’t have experience). They got a couple of students into a studio, and asked the teacher Debra (Debbie) Wayne to set a few exercises as if it was a real class. It can’t have gone too badly because I got the job. But I’ve never forgotten the moment when, during a pirouette exercise, the teacher suddenly stopped right in front of me, fixed a terrifying wide-eyed stare straight at me and shouted “STOP!”

I snatched my hands from the piano keyboard, looked at her and cowered. “Sorry….” I began. Everyone looked at me – her, the audition panel, and the students. Why had I stopped? You said “stop,” I explained. The wide-eyed stare melted into a smile. “I said SPOT,” she explained, “I was talking to the students.” I remember thinking “So why were you looking at me, then?”

Only several weeks later did I realise that this is normal for ballet. Teachers sometimes half-do an exercise in front of the dancers, as if they were part of the group, acting normally for the most part, but then suddenly isolating particular directions, positions or movements, admonishing or encouraging as they go. When they appear to be looking at you, they’re not. They’re facing whatever direction the exercise has taken them, which might mean that they’re standing feet away from you, staring right at you and through you at the same time – which can look menacing if you don’t realise what’s going on.

Sometimes, dancers use you to spot when they’re doing some fiendishly difficult diagonal, so you see this person coming straight at you with tense features, gritted teeth and wide eyes that seem to say “I’m going to kill you.” They’re not, of course: this is just their “fouetté” face or whatever horrible step it is that they’re trying to achieve while they come at you from their corner to yours. But it’s difficult to turn off the fight-or-flight instinct that such a gaze naturally evokes in you, especially as, you never know, maybe today they really do want to kill you because you’ve got the tempo wrong.

I don’t think I’ve ever quite got used to the weirdness of ballet directions, that is, the way that dancers just face the way that they’ve got to face when they’re doing an exercise. Just when you look across to someone you know in class during pliés, they turn away from you, with a pained expression. The pained expression is probably nothing to do with you, it’s just their “it’s too early, but I’ve got to do this plié anyway” face, and they only turned away because that’s the exercise. But even after all these years, you can’t help occasionally feeling a visceral tug at your emotions when it happens, that makes you wonder why she’s (not) looking at you like that.

Slightly weirder is the opposite – when you’re facing a dancer because she’s hanging on to the edge of your piano, or you’re looking that way, and the directions of the exercise mean that you’re staring straight at her for several counts at a time. That’s when you have to use what Erving Goffman brilliantly termed “civil inattention,” the way of acknowledging that someone is there, but in such a neutral way that you make it clear that it’s OK, you’re not going to demand interaction. With its carefully choreographed deference, changes of direction and eyeline, ballet teaches you exactly how to do that for hours at a time. When you step out of that into the real world of messy interaction, you begin to miss it.

Confessions of an anxious ballet pianist day #5: Playing for the White Swan variation

You say tenuto. . .

The bit in question was the two-note anacrusis at the end of bar six (F# E#) going on to the two-note slur at the beginning of bar seven (G# F#). Yes, a life hanging on four darned quavers. “Don’t slow down!” said the coach. We tried again. The rehearsal stopped. “Just play it in tempo, don’t go ‘dah dah da dah,’ [exagerrating the anacrusis] just play it straight. Don’t follow her.” I tried again. The rehearsal stopped again. This time, the ballerina said “Don’t follow me, just play it straight, even if you think it looks like I need more time, because I can catch up, but if you slow down, I can’t do the step.”

Another tricky corner in the “White Swan” variation

This time, I had to speak “I’m really sorry,” I said, “I thought I was playing it straight. I’m trying my best to do it, but I don’t even know I’m not playing it straight any more.” Before I’d even finished, they both said “No, no, it’s fine, don’t worry, it’s natural. With this phrase you want to go “da dah da dah” because that’s what you want to do musically, but you just have to do it straight.”

So once again – how many times is this now? Four? – and this time, finally, I got it right, and do you know what, they were right. It took me that long (28 years, plus four repeats in a single rehearsal) to realise that I’d never played those four quavers straight in my life. I like to think that the explanation is something to do (again) with Justin London’s “many meters hypothesis” that I referred to in the “musicality” post, i.e. that a time signature like 6/8 isn’t a single, arithmetically precise metrical framework for music, but a model that has many variants in a musical culture, each of which can exhibit different types of squeezed and stretched microtiming effects in different parts of the bar: a bit like taking one of those molecular models and bending it in your hands (that’s my analogy, not London’s). In this case, as my colleagues noted, it’s “natural” to want to add a bit of space to the anacrusis, because that’s what this particular model of 6/8 always seems to do.

I hope that is the explanation, and it’s not just that I’m incapable of playing in time any more. This solo is difficult because it’s often so slow that you begin to lose your sense of when the last quaver happened. Added to that, the older you get, the more ingrained your habits become unless someone points them out, not to mention the fact that types of expressive timing go in and out of fashion too.

Another day, another dolour

That’s not the end of the story, however. The next day, armed with my squeaky clean and fresh timing, I played for a different ballerina, who – yep, you guessed it – wanted the expressive timing put back in. “Can you just watch me there…” she said. I’ve since watched several videos on YouTube, and noticed that some ballerinas want that anacrusis slowed up forever, but then the tempo switches back to something that’s faster than the opening, because that was slow because they can hold the extension in the ronds de jambe.

As a musician, you look at this music on the page, and it looks light, capricious, free; dainty and thin. Whether it was ever that in the ballet, I don’t know, but now, in some performances every movement in the solo seems to drag the music along behind it like a huge family checking in excess baggage, and then there is a moment of release where the orchestra catches up the tempo they would have preferred to play all along.

I could write another four posts as long as this on another four awkward bits in this solo, and there are probably more, but that’s enough White Swan for one advent calendar. The trouble with this solo is not just that it’s difficult for the ballerina, and difficult to accompany, but also that it’s so replete with meaning: it’s Swan Lake, the ballet that almost defines the art form, and defines the ballerina. I’m not sure that there’s a single work in the musical repertoire that you can compare that to.

If you’re thinking “You think White Swan’s difficult? Black Swan’s even worse!” hold that thought – that’ll be tomorrow’s post.

A christmas ballet class #01: Warm-up – Oh come all ye faithful

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Jonathan Still, ballet pianist

Music, dance, IT, trivia. Not necessarily in that order.