Just don’t call me late for dinner…
A few weeks ago, I was asked by the choir I play for how I’d like to be listed in the program. I was happy to be asked!
“Would you like to be called collaborative pianist?”
they proposed?
I like the term collaborative pianist, particularly because of its connotations of team work and togetherness. It’s how most pianists in my specialty of work like to be called (or ‘collabs’ if you wanna be really cool).[1] In collaborative situations, we are working together toward a shared communication of the music as equal parts; it might look like a few musicians performing chamber music together.
With Martha Guth, Mireille Asselin and Laura Loewen at a Dream Big Collaborative Piano pop-up concert at Café Earle in Wakefield, QC
So in a choir setting, with a conductor, collaborative pianist doesn’t seem like the right fit.
For rehearsals, I’d consider myself a repetiteur. Sometimes I think of myself as a coach when I get to nerd out with diction. So, what am I when I play for their concerts? “Pianist”, on the other hand, encompasses all the roles I play from the piano bench: rehearsal pianist, collaborative pianist, coach, pit pianist…Adding more specificity starts to feel like an exercise in semantics…
“Pianist is fine with me,” I responded, “ that or accompanist. It’s all good.” I flippantly added. “Just don’t call me late for dinner!”
“No problem,” they said, and within minutes my title was changed everywhere in their system.
Later that very same day, I went to the art song recital of a widely renowned singer, and a marvellous pianist. Guess what?
The pianist wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the program. And that’s when I realized… my “dad joke” about not calling me late for dinner? Not being called or listed at all: that I do mind a very great deal.
It’s always bad form to leave a pianist off the program. But this particular instance really got under my skin, because I teach that in art song, there are four equal players: the poet, the composer, the singer and the pianist. These four plays weave music and storytelling together, to create one beautiful, musical text.[2]
All are intrinsic to conveying the story. And it is weird, out-dated and frankly, just plain rude to leave one of these parts off of the program. Because with one of these players missing, it can no longer be the music you are hearing performed. So it’s fundamentally necessary to name each one of these four artists in a recital program.
Besides not being listed at all (and I’m sorry to say that yes, it has happened to me and to my colleagues on numerous occasions, and it is still a regular omission with radio announcers), here’s a short list of things I’d rather not be called in reference to my job while I’m on the piano bench:
1. Accompanyist. Sorry, you’ve added one too many syllables.
2. Accompanier. This sounds like a comparative/superlative debate. She’s accompanier, but she’s not the accompaniest.
3. Keyboardist[3]. I do not play the keyboard. I play piano.
4. “Pianistin”. This is the German word for Pianist in its feminine form. And while I do understand that this is grammatically correct, I take exception to careers having genders (which of course happens in many other languages, too). This is probably in large part because of the number of times I heard, while living in Austria, “Oh! I didn’t know a ‘Pianistin’ could play like that,” comparing my playing with another “Pianist”: the male form of the same noun.
Then again, perhaps there is some danger with just referring to myself as a “pianist”. Just this weekend, without any notice, I discovered that I was banned from YouTube, for reasons of multiple infractions of spam, scams or deceptive practices. I’m trying to get to the bottom of what happened. But I’m sorry to report that all my Bernadette videos are now gone. It’s quite sad.
This is the screen you’ll now get when you try to watch my Well-Tempered Bernadette series…
I’ve been scratching my head as to why I’ve been banned for life from ever having a YouTube channel again. The best I can figure is that when I say “pianist”, I put the stress on the first syllable, which maybe sounds like a particular part of the male anatomy to the AI-infraction-searching-bots on the YouTube.
So, it’s decided. Moving forward, when asked, I’ll request “Pi-AH-nist” (after all, it is a Pi-AH-no, not a PEE-a-no”) as my title. I always appreciate being asked, because clearly everyone has their own preferences. Much like our preferences for going by our given or chosen name.
Speaking of which, and thank you so very much for asking!, if you were wondering, I do prefer Valerie to Val. As Julia Louis-Dreyfus introduced her character in the Marvel series Loki:
But please, please, most of all, just don’t not call me at all!
FOOTNOTES
[1] My friend Chris Foley has a really great article on what a collaborative pianist is and isn’t. You can check out his article here.
[2] “An art song strives to be the perfect combination of music and literature, based on four elements: poet, composer, singer and accompanist. The composer uses the full resources of the art form to embellish the poet’s text, sometimes even realizing potential interpretations that were not explicit in the poet’s words. In well-realized art song, the composer creates a duet between the accompanist and the vocalist. That is, the art song paints for us a picture of what the poet might have envisioned. The performance of an art song literally breathes life into this picture through a complementary, coordinated partnership among the four significant elements.” (From Artsong Update)
[3] I categorically do not perform on keyboards because something always goes wrong with them in performance. You can’t control the balance, nor can you hear what the other musicians and audience are hearing. So you are always too loud or too soft. And who gets the blame? The person playing the thing. This happened to me when I had to play CBC Radio’s keyboard at the NAC for a choir performance because, oddly, there was no acoustic piano available for me to play. The radio announcer DID introduce me, which was cool, but she called me a keyboardist, which was not cool. See above. And when CBC’s keyboard didn’t work and the NAC found a different keyboard for me to play, I was told, again on live radio: “nice place to be when your keyboard doesn’t work, hey Valerie?” Not my keyboard. But still somehow my fault. High points, though for not calling me Val!
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