THE PIANIST/ACCOMPANIST

The pianist interested in conducting choirs has a distinct advantage in the rehearsal because the luxury of having one’s own accompanist is

rare. A choir teacher’s professional life is greatly benefited by strong piano skills. It is not unusual for vocal music education majors to have beautiful voices but weak piano skills, and they must do everything in their power to rectify this weakness. There is only one answer, and that is the discipline of daily piano practice of choral music with a metronome, even after the required piano classes and tests (e.g., Piano Proficiency Exam, Upper Divisional Exam) are completed. Any choral score can be used for practice, and you can download them free of charge and legally from the Choral Public Domain Library (http://

www.cpdl.org). A sample of pieces found on CPDL and appropriate for piano practice can be found in Appendix B of this book.

A sequential approach to developing the needed piano skills is listed below. However, it is not only the practice of choral pieces that will make your score study and rehearsals go more efficiently, but also the ability to accompany vocal warm-ups complete with modulations to all keys. Your practice should start today.

Warm-Up Skills

The choral director rarely has an accompanist available for all choral warm-up exercises, and therefore needs to be able to function at the piano with regard to establishing tonality and key centers for each warm-up. Because warm-ups are often transposed up and down chro-matically, or by whole tones, the teacher needs to be able to give at least the chord in the new key during the singers’ quick breaths between transpositions.

1. Practice playing all major and minor triads, transposing up and down by half and whole steps on every 4th beat of the metronome as a starting point. If you are limited by being able to play only one hand at a time, be sure to practice both the right and left hands equally; and move to both hands as soon as possible. Be sure to keep an accurate sense of time with the metronome; if errors in time are made, slow the metronome down to an achievable tempo, and later increase the tempo incrementally.

2. The next step in practice would be to sing the desired warm-up and play the appropriate chord during the breaths between

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key changes. This should alternate with playing the entire warm-up.

It should be mentioned here, however, that choral singers do not need all of the warm-up played for them while they sing because it detracts from their ability to hear themselves, which in turn makes them more dependent on the piano. The phrase “less is more” often applies to piano accompanying on warm-ups. It should also be mentioned here that the upright pianos found in most rehearsal rooms are particularly loud because the strings and soundboard face the singers, which is not as apparent to the pianist on the other side.

Score-Reading

The choir director needs to be able to play choral parts at the piano, and therefore this is a skill that needs to be honed well before the student-teaching semester. Every future choral teacher should achieve the following steps:

1. For 15 to 30 minutes every day (starting today), practice playing at least two parts of a choral score at the piano; then try singing one line and playing one other and then two others;

and always use a metronome set at any tempo at which you can keep from missing the beat. Slow tempos are perfectly accept-able if the beat is kept steady, but pausing between beats is not.

Keep your eyes on the score, not the keys; and cover the keys if you must, because much time is wasted by looking back and forth from the music to the keys. It is possible to play the piano without looking at the keys (think Ray Charles, George Shearing and Stevie Wonder).

2. When that step is achieved (according to an objective source!), repeat it, but play the piano in a vocally expressive way. Shape phrases as a singer would, complete with lifting of the hands at breath marks.

3. When those steps have been achieved, practice three to four parts at the piano, with a steady metronomic tempo. Begin very slowly if necessary, but push yourself to increase the metronome setting incrementally. Remember to play expres-sively and breathe!

4. Practice steps 1 to 3 every day with different pieces of choral music.

5. If you are unable to achieve the goal of playing multiple voice parts on the piano, it is important to stress that you will need to be able to sing all vocal parts for all pieces, on solfege or scale degrees, with pitch and rhythmic accuracy. While it may seem preferable for the choristers to hear the pitches modeled by the voice rather than the piano, they need to hear the way two or more parts sound together. It is also important to know that some school employers choose to hire applicants with piano skills over those without, and have been known to ask applicants to play the piano at the job interview (advice:

practice!)

Technique

Piano technique exercises train and strengthen the fingers for every-thing from warm-ups to accompaniments. The choral teacher should continue to practice exercises learned in piano classes, with metronome, including:

1. major and minor scales (four octaves);

2. major and minor arpeggios (four octaves);

3. chord progressions using primary and secondary triads and secondary dominants in major and minor keys;

4. seventh chords; and

5. modes (Uszler, Gordon, & Mach, 1991).

Accompanying

The choir director should be able to play simple accompaniments, but is not necessarily expected to play more elaborate ones unless he or she is a skilled pianist who chooses to conduct from the piano. In most cases, if there are no funds to hire an accompanist, there are piano students available who will enjoy and learn much from the experience of working with a conductor and collaborating with a choir. However, the choral conductor should continue to practice accompaniments for when the need arises.

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