{"id":98635,"date":"2018-04-30T07:00:01","date_gmt":"2018-04-30T21:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=98635"},"modified":"2020-10-12T09:04:09","modified_gmt":"2020-10-12T16:04:09","slug":"20180430-01","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20180430-01\/?p=98635","title":{"rendered":"The seasoned pianist&#8217;s guide to musical collaborators"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The wife of one of my relatives is a classical pianist. She shared with me her hot takes on musicians she collaborates with.\u00b9<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Violinists tune <i>forever<\/i>. Her husband is a casual violin player. Their daughter is a beginning violinist. For fun, her husband decided to play a duet with their daughter. <i>Twinkle Twinkle Little Star<\/i>. Great. He picks up his violin and starts playing and says, &#8220;No, wait, stop, I need to tune.&#8221; He then spends the next ten minutes tuning his violin, and then tunes his daughter&#8217;s. They then play a song for 30 seconds.<\/li>\n<li>Singers are always complaining about the temperature, the ventilation system, and any other imaginable aspect of the venue.<\/li>\n<li>To be fair, she concedes that pianists take forever adjusting the bench.<\/li>\n<li>Cellists complain that the piano is too loud. &#8220;Of course it&#8217;s too loud. You&#8217;re sitting right in front of the open lid. All the sound is being directed into your head. Besides, the piece is a piano trio. <i>Piano<\/i> trio. Guess what instrument this genre of music is named after. Uh-huh. Oh, and your cello part? Yeah, you&#8217;re basically doubling my left hand. So suck it up.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Reed instrumentalists blame the reed for anything they mess up. &#8220;Oh, of course, it&#8217;s the reed&#8217;s fault. Wait a second, didn&#8217;t you make that reed?&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>She asked a French horn player, &#8220;Do you need to tune?&#8221;, fearing a tuning marathon based on her experience with violinists. But the horn player said, &#8220;Nah, I&#8217;ll tune as I go.&#8221; Because apparently this is what horn players do because the characteristics of the instrument change as it changes temperature, etc.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As you might expect for a pianist, she is hired to do a lot of accompaniment. I learned that she makes more money from bad musicians than from good ones. For one thing, bad musicians are generally willing to pay a higher rate. And for another thing, they ask for more rehearsals, which means that you get paid a higher rate for longer. (The downside, of course, is that you are accompanying a bad musician.)<\/p>\n<p>Though there is one specific musician that she refuses to work with any more. The other musician is drop-dead gorgeous but is always a measure late. I guess there are some musicians so bad that you won&#8217;t accompany them at any price.<\/p>\n<p><b>Story time<\/b>: When she came to visit me last year, she asked if she could bring some music with her because she had to practice for a performance. This was a silly question because <a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20070430-01\/?p=27053\"> everyone should have a house pianist<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>While she was out, I peeked at her music. One of the pieces was the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=sw9DlMNnpPM\"> Busoni piano transcription of Bach&#8217;s Chaconne in D minor<\/a>. I fumbled through the first page before giving up. One of the tempo markings was <i lang=\"it\">non affrettare<\/i> (don&#8217;t rush), which made my mind boggle that there are people so expert at piano that rushing is even possible!<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I told her about my experience trying to play the Busoni\/Bach piece, and she replied, &#8220;Oh, yeah, I love that piece. I use it to warm up.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>For me, so difficult I can&#8217;t even get past the first page. For her, just a warm-up.<\/p>\n<p>\u00b9 Note that attitude may have been added for entertainment purposes. Actually, that note pretty much applies to anything I post.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What&#8217;s it like working with others?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-98635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>What&#8217;s it like working with others?<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98635"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98635\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}