To be an accompanist for a dancer, singer, or instrumentalist requires that you become an organic part of something larger than yourself. As a musical majority of one in the dance classroom, you and your music exert a tremen-dous influence over what transpires. You will feel like a soloist playing a non-stop recital for the duration of the class, but you must behave like a partner.
The fact of the matter is, you have been hired to provide a service—first to the teacher, then to the students. The service to other people enhances the enjoy-ment you will find for yourself in this work.
I hope that the information in this section reflects the essence of what a dancer reacts to in music, as well as how an accompanist goes about eliciting that reaction.
There are a few facts about dance and dance training that you should keep in mind. Simplistically, dance is mind over matter: A dancer’s intelligence and willpower demand response from almost every muscle in the body. (Because of the nature of this book, the spiritual motivation that spurs a dancer’s desire into action will be touched upon only occasionally.) A pre-professional dancer takes at least one daily class (usually three or four) and must invest nonstop mental application—a fact that is not always apparent to non-dancers.
Dancers’ daily classes are just like your daily practicing. However, here are a few ways in which the two learning processes differ greatly.
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Someone may teach himself to play the piano, yet dance is an art form that cannot be self-taught. Permanent, debilitating damage can be done to many parts of the body if it is not learned correctly from the very begin-ning. Body placement is of the utmost importance in all phases of a dancer’s life. A dancer cannot see his back—a great source of strength—without putting his body completely out of alignment, so he must rely on a teacher’s knowledgeable eye from the very first lesson.
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If a pianist hits a C-sharp instead of a C, he knows instantly that it is wrong.It takes years, often decades, for a dancer to learn correct technique. (I once
heard Dame Margot Fonteyn say that she finally learned how to do a proper tendu at age forty-two.)
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If a pianist comes to a tricky section of music, he can almost always repeat it until it is a part of his muscle memory—for fifteen minutes, if neces-sary—and he can play it correctly without thinking. Because of the sheer strenuousness of classical dancing, a tricky section for a professional dancer usually cannot be repeated more than four or five times; otherwise, his muscles may cramp, and he will run out of breath.·
Classical dance is rarely practiced at home, except for certain isolation or strengthening regimes; dance must always be executed in a warm space, on a floor especially constructed for dance. (A floor that is too hard destroys a dancer’s body.)You have a tremendous responsibility to provide good music for dance stu-dents. In most cases, what you play will be the only musical education they will receive. Generally speaking, artistic consciousness in the United States is not yet at a level where it is deemed necessary (or important or financially profitable) to train artists properly; in the musical area, proper training for dancers means a thorough education in how to use and love music. In many of the state schools in Europe and the former Soviet Union, dance students are given music history and music theory, but these subjects are abstract compared to the embodiment of music that one sees in a truly musical dancer. At certain periods in their training, many dancers’ ears have to be propped open to take the music in and use it as the sole reason to move. It is up to you and the teacher to provide a broad base of motivating music.
You must believe in everything you play. You must play every piece with conviction and substance, no matter how slow and/or soft it may be. Dance music is not piddly, dinky, or tinkly. Ballet music especially has gained this loathsome reputation, probably because good classical dancing is performed with a deceptive look of ease, which leads anyone who has never tried it to believe that the music should match the movement. (Classical dancing is like being a mother: if you’ve never done it, you can’t imagine how hard it is.) This undeserved reputation also may have come about because accompanists are rarely made aware of the orchestral scope that lies beneath their fingertips.
The full range of the keyboard should not be reserved only for the dancers in the rehearsal studio who are preparing for a performance to orchestral music;
breadth of movement encouraged by an orchestral sound must become part of a dancer as soon as he is able to assimilate it. When hearing you play, a layman or a musician uninitiated in the demands of dance accompaniment should be able to comment, “That’s music,” not, “That’s dance music.”
There are certain guidelines you can follow to be able to translate move-ment into music. A good accompanist must train his eyes as meticulously as
he trains his hands. This is an easy rule to forget because, unless you impro-vise, your eyes will be glued to the music most of the time when you begin.
You must train yourself to look at—and really see—what is happening. Watch the teacher as she demonstrates. See and, if possible, hear in her voice the flow, accents, and quality of the steps in a combination; don’t stop at merely ascertaining the meter. Since movement in the classroom is taught in patterns and phrases, a helpful approach is seeing what comes between the instructor’s counts “one” and “two”: how much time there is, where any accents may fall, and so on. That may sound terribly simplistic, but it works for me. By the fourth count of a demonstration, I almost always have a concrete idea of what I will play; then I observe further, to see if something else would work better.
We tend to forget the basics in our fast-paced life, and a basic of dance accompaniment is that our music should match the quality of movement.
One thing that helps obscure this basic idea is that any given step, when com-bined with other steps, can sometimes take on a whole new feeling. You can’t always pigeonhole dance accompaniment by linking particular steps to par-ticular meters. When you hear “rond de jambe à terre” or “fondu” included in a center combination, you can’t always assume that it’s going to require the same music—or even the same mood—as the barre combination of the same name. You must learn to react to phrases of movement, not individual steps. On the best of days, each piece we play in class sounds as if it had been written expressly for its corresponding combination.
The vital area of communication between teacher and accompanist is stressed throughout this book. To establish the necessary rapport with the teacher, you must become aware of certain generalities. At its best, the teacher-accompanist relationship is like a healthy marriage: Each partner re-spects the other’s talents and feelings; both work toward a common goal; and neither feels superior to the other. However, in this relationship, the teacher has the final say. After all, the purpose of a dance class is to teach students how to dance, and you do not know how to do that. If you feel that the teacher is mistreating the music (as opposed to being unable to communicate her needs to you—or your being too inexperienced to understand her), speak to her after class to solve the problem together. Or find work elsewhere. There is nothing more destructive to egos or to the training of students than a class in which the teacher and accompanist do battle with each other.
Teachers’ patience levels vary from person to person, but most teachers are very patient with beginning accompanists. Experience has taught them that they often train accompanists as well as students. During your initial training process, teachers will very often gear their classes to your abilities. As you become more skilled and inventive technically and conceptually, they will be able to teach their students more creatively. Teachers will always respond fa-vorably if you evince the desire to improve.
Ideally, you should work toward becoming the teacher’s alter ego, and I hasten to add that this is not a secondary, submissive position unless you choose to see it that way. It seems that there are certain facets of a good accompanist’s personality that give him the ability to enjoy and to make con-tributions to his work without receiving constant praise. (You will have to learn to accept the fact that one of the best “compliments” you can receive is the teacher’s not saying anything to you during class, because you are doing your job so well that you have given her the freedom to do hers.) If a teacher could accompany and teach at the same time, she most certainly would, since there would be a perfect unity of purposes. But this is almost impossible.
During the process of finding out what dance accompaniment is all about, your ego may become terribly bruised, as it will seem that you will never un-derstand the complexities of dance. Gradually, patterns will begin to emerge.
You will play just the right piece of music for a combination (and not just by accident), and the whole room will come alive with renewed energy. You will catch a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel. (I remember very clearly, at the beginning of my years in New York City, feeling that I was just a neces-sary evil in the dance classroom. No one ever said it to me; it was just pure frustration at not being able to be consistent in producing what the teachers were requesting. A lot of the problem was that they were unable to express themselves in a manner that I could understand. [I would have given any-thing to have had a book like this!] This started to improve as soon as I began taking dance classes.)
Your ego will probably be your biggest problem. Possibly never before will you have felt so inept, but I must stress that your understanding will increase so that you will be in full control of what you are doing. A starving ego is not a helpful attribute anywhere, and especially not in a dance classroom—for the accompanist, teacher, or student. But pride in your accomplishments is very healthy, and the elation you will experience playing for dancers cannot be equaled.
At first, your personal musical expression may feel very restricted. It may seem that you are always required to play what the teacher wants, and are rarely given a chance to take the initiative. But as your understanding and perception increase, you will be able to take over the reins and initiate the impetus for movement. Dance accompaniment is surely one of the most cre-ative musical outlets; it lets you play a broad range of musical styles for others’
enjoyment—and you get paid for it too. (There have been times in my career when I felt I should have paid a teacher, dancer, or choreographer for the privilege of being part of such an incredible experience.)
The piano is one of the most physical of instruments. The length of the keyboard demands “controlled freedom” in the torso. Arms, feet, and hands must be in perfect coordination. The unique qualities of the instrument lend
themselves to the production of full, orchestral-sounding rhythms in the left hand and rich sonorities in the right. I try to re-create the breadth of an or-chestra so the dancers will feel a substantial support for their movement, and also so they will get used to the orchestral sound that they will dance with most often onstage. (This does not mean that you play loudly all the time, or that you never use quiet music.) This concept of orchestral fullness may seem somewhat elusive at first, and will be dealt with more extensively beginning on page 154.
On the subject of physicality, there is a special energy and momentum in a dance class that will come directly from you. Because of the muscularity of dance, rhythm is the first musical element that a beginning student becomes aware of. When you provide a rich, consistent propulsion for him to use, he cannot help but respond to it, and you will find yourself answering his re-sponse. It’s very catalytic and wonderfully contagious. Your music will help him ignore the difficulty and exhaustion, while a classroom full of happy, moving bodies will help you ignore your fatigue. (It is not wise to complain about how tired you are or how much your arms, shoulders, or back may hurt; an aspiring or practicing professional dancer always aches more in-tensely and in more places than any pianist on earth.)
Watching class is invaluable for increasing your powers of observation. If you are a beginner, you can practice your ability to decipher how many phrases of eight counts there will be in each combination, and whether the quality and meter you perceive in any given combination match what the accompanist actually plays—or what the teacher actually demonstrated. As an experienced accompanist, you can experiment mentally by imagining how many different meters you could play for any given combination. I think we pick up a lot subconsciously by watching; freed from the demands of coming up with music to match each combination, we can see the class better as a whole. Regardless of your level of experience, you may want to write down questions to discuss with the teacher or accompanist after class.
Watching class is invaluable; taking class is even more so. There are many fine accompanists who have never taken a dance class, but I feel that their enjoyment, perception, and capabilities could be greatly enhanced by getting in there and physically producing what they are trying to motivate musically.
My years of intensive dance training have helped me immeasurably with the art of accompanying for dance, as well as with other life-essential areas such as discipline and concentration (to say nothing of how good my body and soul feel when the endorphins are flowing from such a strenuous endeavor!).
After dance has seeped into your muscles for a certain length of time, you will feel kinesthetically each movement as it progresses, even though you are rela-tively stationary at the piano; this cannot help but beneficially affect what you are playing.
If you take class, you may find, as I did, that it is one of the few activities in life in which you can completely lose your self. The more you learn about dance, the more challenging the physical execution becomes, and nothing else exists but the teacher’s voice, the music, and your mental, physical, and emotional responses to those elements. The classes I was lucky enough to take were so draining that they acted like truth serum on me. If anyone asked me a question within about twenty minutes after class, I had to tell the truth; I had been pushed past so many mental and physical barriers in the class, and I had no resources left to be tactful, polite, or evasive. This condition was produced by Mr. Brunson’s nonstop corrections and verbal support during class (as well, of course, as the musical support he demanded from every accompa-nist), which increased everyone’s energy output. While some people may say that students can become overly dependent on a teacher like that, I feel very strongly that it is practically the only way to get students to break through their own barriers of resistance and self-doubt.
I never would have learned to accompany dance as I do now without hav-ing been exposed to—and without myself havhav-ing physically produced—that kind of energy. Playing for a demanding class has the same effect on me.
I would like to see musicians choose dance accompaniment for a career be-cause it is a viable profession and an enjoyable occupation. This, of course, is possible only if musicians are made aware that it is a career choice. When I attended a well-known music conservatory in the United States in the late fifties, we pianists were neither made aware of nor prepared for any options other than heading for Carnegie Hall or teaching music education in a local high school. (And I don’t think the system has changed much.) I started to accompany for dance not because it interested me, but because my husband and I were broke, he was in school, I was pregnant, and it was the only job on the employment board that I could do.
Dance accompanists have the totally undeserved reputation of being the low (wo)men on the totem pole of musicians. This is a vicious circle which must be broken. A pianist may consider himself (or be made to feel like) a failure because he can’t (or maybe doesn’t want to) compete with the techni-cal whiz kids in his class in music school. Because he doesn’t respect himself, he is bitter, falls into the syndrome of believing that playing for dance is only one step above washing dishes for a living, and doesn’t allow himself to see the challenge, personal expression, and just plain fun of being such an impor-tant part of an artistic whole. He may feel, as I did, that playing the piano is something he’s done since childhood; it may be an important part of his life, but he has neither the technique nor the desire to devote many hours a day to practicing in order to maintain a grueling concert schedule playing a limited
number of pieces. He may have a dormant sense of response to movement; he may enjoy working with others more than being a soloist; he may have any number of personality traits that make him a good candidate for a dance accompanist but, because the job is often characterized by a lack of respect from his peers, he ignores its possibilities—if he is even aware of them.
You may wonder if you can make a living at dance accompaniment. As with anything else, it depends on your level of expertise. (I have supported either myself alone, or my two daughters and myself, solely on playing for dance since 1972.) One great advantage of being a dance accompanist is that one can almost always find a job, since there are so few of us. It is usually much easier to find a competent substitute teacher for a dance class than a
You may wonder if you can make a living at dance accompaniment. As with anything else, it depends on your level of expertise. (I have supported either myself alone, or my two daughters and myself, solely on playing for dance since 1972.) One great advantage of being a dance accompanist is that one can almost always find a job, since there are so few of us. It is usually much easier to find a competent substitute teacher for a dance class than a