An Amateur Accompanist Takes The Floor

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 232, 3 December 1943, Page 12

An Amateur Accompanist Takes The Floor

O most people an accompanist is just something that has to be included if they -want a bit of music, an immovable object at the piano ignored by all till something goes wrong with the music. Then it becomes an object of derision. Sometimes, of course it is the accompanist’s fault, There are runs that won’t ripple at first sight and abstruse accidentals that keep popping up, not to mention the accompanist’s bugbear, the page that won’t turn over in a hurry or the pages that stick together and flick over in a bundle.

There is also that horrible sinking feeling which supremely confident solo ists seem to impart, which turns fingers to lead and brains to sawdust. "But amateur soloists have their faults too. There are the soloists with their own system of time, the singefs who spread quavers into minims when they come to an easy note, and scamper minims into semiquavers to camouflage difficult passages. Strange retards appear for no reason

and rests are just squiggly signs to be ignored. There are the violinists who ask you to improvise to hide their doublestopping, the soloists who implore you to play the top notes in octaves to help them along or who, maybe, have a sore throat and would like the song transposed a couple of tones at sight. And there are the people who produce pieces of.music which have been so folded: and twisted and crumpled that they collapse at the slightest tremor, so that the accompanist has to play with one hand and hold the music together with his other hand and sometimes with the top of his head as well, Which all goes to show that the actompanist, though only an accompanist, is still a human being and needs encouragement, te Bd He OULD you possibly come round tomorrow night? We are having some friends for music," I hear over the phone. That &f course means people coming to sing without an accompanist of their own. I wouldn’t have been invited otherwise. I am afraid I have grown very cynical. But though I am cynical, I am not strong-minded enough to refuse. So always go. It was at such an evening that I first met Mr and Mrs. Littlewhisper. Mr. Littlewhisper would never be noticed in a crowd. He was small, thin, and faded into himself.’ Mrs. Littlewhisper on the other hand grabbed your eye as soon as you saw her and held it spell-bound. The first thing I saw when I entered the drawingroom was Mrs. Littlewhisper’s ponderous bulk looming over the piano. And naturally Mrs. Littlewhisper was the dominating partner of that combination, while Mr. Littlewhisper was only a faint echo of .her self-assertings. "We are going to sing," she said, bustling up to me, "three solos each, and two duets. Take care with the

accompaniments; the slightest mistake’ throws me out. When I sing my mind is realms away; it is as though I were living the song myself. Sometimes it hurts, I feel the spirit of the song so deeply. So I can’t be dragged back by wrong accompaniments." Mr, Littlewhisper* nodded mournfully in the background, and I solemnly agreed. The room was crowded with people. This was a special occasion, some notable person was present or something like that, and the people were even

ranged in seats all round the piano. Mrs. Littlewhisper thrust a bundle of songs at me and impressively cleared her throat. Mr. ~ Littlewater moved into the empty space behind her and breathed heavily down my back. They were old, old songs, lavishly embellished with runs and trills and_ scrawled all over with pencil notes saying "Pause Here," "Miss out this bar," "Go back to page 2." %* * *

> i\A/E struck up, while I breathed a : prayer. Mrs. Littlewhisper broke into a deep penetrating contralto, the kind that passes from one register to another with booming gasps, and Mr. Littlewhisper, in theory a light-hearted tenor, continually broke into falsetto. Mr. Littlewhisper had never learned correct time at all, and Mrs. Littlewhisper was swayed by her guiding spirit rather than by time signatures. But whether it was because Mrs, Littlewhisper was so far away in spirit that she forgot all about the music, or whether I had brutally dragged her back from those realms and shattered her musical capacities, I never could guess. But halfway through the worst happened. Mr. Littlewhisper had just piped through a few lines of falsetto, and Mrs. Littlewhisper was due to come in with a melodious middle C. She came in, but a page further on, and the harmony, to say the least, was slightly distorted. I stopped and jumped a page and she stopped and jumped back a page. We jumped backwards and forwards for a few moments while I played some sort of vamp witb my left hand and Mr. Littlewhisper wailed in the treble. Somehow we all managed to jump together somewhere on the last page and finished with a flourish. But the crowning moment came when the polite applause died down. Mrs. Littlewhisper stepped forward and apologised for the confusion and blandly said, without batting an eyelid, that the accompanist was @ novice and had turned over two pages at once. This, she said, had thrown Mr. Littlewhisper and herself out of their stride. It would have... I finished the sentence for her becee payne ea it can be tempera"I think," I said firmly, "that it wala have better if they’d been thrown out before they even had a chance

to start."

V.

C.