Think like a violin, he would say, drawing his right arm over an air violin held in his left hand. No, Scott, no! she would coo, you must think of it like a singer, a beautiful singer with the line soaring out effortlessly over the audience, floating in the air. Follow your notes in your mind, Scott, think of them as sustaining, holding, track them along as they emerge from the piano, send them somewhere deliberately, like Lena Horne singing to her audience in Las Vegas, like a great actor delivering his lines to his audience, each one individually but all collectively.
I’ve heard ‘em all, over the years. Heck: I’ve said them all. What’s more, I’ve been an accompanist to no end of instrumentalists and singers, both in lessons and rehearsals. I’ve attended at violin lessons, at voice lessons, at clarinet and oboe and trumpet and trombone and bass and cello lessons.
And you know something? Not once in all that time have I ever heard any of those teachers say to their students: think like a pianist! Play it like a pianist would.
Why on earth would they? You don’t tell a violinist to play like a pianist, because to play like a pianist means to plunk, tinkle, and thump. To play mechanically. To push buttons that trigger levers that throw a hammer up against a string and then fall back. To play too loud. To play bombastically or harshly or rigidly. To be a plumber, not an artist.
Nobody wants to emulate pianists. Pianists aim to emulate violinists, singers, flutists, clarinetists, even harmonica-ists. That’s because the instrument itself, just as it comes out of the can, is bitterly unpalatable. It needs doctoring and fixing and primping and spicing. You can’t play the piano because you’ll sound like shit if you do. You must play beyond the piano, past the piano, over and through the piano. You must learn to make music despite the piano, and not because of it. The only way to create art with the piano is to defeat it at its own game. Left to itself the piano is an ungainly, unmusical, unloveable Rube Goldberg contraption. Overweight and overpriced, the piano is nobody’s idea of a loving musical companion. You can’t hold it or hug it or lug it; you can’t take it with you; in most cases, you can’t even tune or maintain it yourself. Forming a relationship with a piano is like forming a relationship with a cappuccino machine. Futile isn’t the half of it. Kinky is more like it.
And yet music can be made on the miserable puking podknocking thing. To do so requires copious reserves of imagination and an ability to think orchestrally. It demands a sonic fantasy comparable to the film director who can visualize an entire movie in the imagination. One must conjure up acoustic dreamscapes, plateaus and fields of sound, layers of texture in which fingers and feet work together to blend, release, balance, shift, and contrast, all with a wizard’s grace, in order to substitute textural whimsy for the instrument’s fundamental lack of musicality. You can’t really make music with the piano, but if you play your cards right, you can come up with a pretty convincing fake.
Which is why I am so dismayed by your average pianist’s near-complete ignorance of the orchestral literature. One would think that pianists would flock to the orchestra as the Holy Grail of piano salvation, the ne plus ultra of everything the piano can suggest without actually possessing. To think orchestrally is to gain an upper hand over the piano’s atavistic boneheadedness. To hear the hustle and bustle of an opera buffa finale over the thumpity plink of a Mozart rondo, to aim for the gold-tinged nimbus created by a fine brass section in full throttle, to imagine the woody organic wholesomeness of a string section—that’s how you inspire your fingers past their inherent tendency towards obtuse, ovine stolidity. You sure the hell don’t get there by thinking: push the key, release the key; push, release; push release push release push push push push release release release release.
The Yellow Brick Road sits there, twinkling and promising and teasing. How few pianists find their footing. Instead they plunk and tinkle and thump, content to play the piano—God forbid—instead of tricking the silly thing into making real music. Pianists instead of artists, in other words. Too bad for them, but even more, too bad for us.