Today I went to the home of a wonderful local pianist who is accompanying a student of mine for the district solo contest. The pianist is a veteran of the concert stage and has played just about everything written for violin, viola and cello (with piano) over the years. The student was on his maiden voyage of the Hindemith Op. 11 no. 4 Sonata (a masterpiece for the viola, or any instrument, for that matter). I may be wrong, but I think that there are few pieces for viola and piano that represent such a daunting challenge to both players as this sonata. Hindemith sees fit to change meters, but not tell the player when he’s done so. It takes some getting used to, when you’re reading through the piece for the first time with the piano present. The first movement is a study in rubato and intricacy, with much interplay between the two parts (three, if you count the left-hand of the piano independently). My student did a great job for his first try. There are so many traps, and you’re worried about sounding good with a new and unfamiliar accompanist, and your teacher is there listening for anything untoward.
It’s hard for non-musicians to know how difficult it is to play something with someone else for the first time after weeks and months of working your own part alone. There is so much distraction in the piano part! The left hand proves a welcome support, but then it gets yanked out from under you when you need it most. Places where you are landing on the first beat of the bar, the piano gets there first, and makes you doubt your timing. It’s quite an adventure. This doesn’t even take into account intonation – nothing to give you a raging case of humility like a first run-through with the piano
It’s a similar situation with the orchestra, either in works prepared ad-nauseum for auditions or for new, technically challenging works that we’ve never seen before. There is that time spent in the practice studio, working certain passages over and over again, looking for a solution to that knotty place between beat three and beat four, which the fingers and brain try to run like a class V rapids, only to be forced to portage past again and again. You try to hear the parts you’re playing with, and there is a good deal of listening to recordings with the music for a completely unfamiliar work, but sooner or later, it all falls away and you hear everything that’s wrong with what you’re doing. It’s an insular, neurotic place to live. So, when you get to the first rehearsal, you’ve hopefully learned all the nasty bits and you’re raring to go. You get through the easy parts and then the roar of the impending rapids signals the entrance from hell – suddenly you’re in, and it doesn’t feel like you’ve ever seen this blasted passage in your life! How could this be? Your mind flails, searching for anything that might help, and you’re dimly aware of what you’re stand partner is doing, or the person behind you, but it doesn’t sound exactly like what you worked on at home. To make matters worse, the cellos are doing something really strange that doesn’t match up at all with what you’re doing, and the conductor from the side looks like he’s doing Noh theater. These moments are what make the practice necessary: because when you’ve developed the short-term and long-term memory (of fingers and brain, respectively), your fingers remember where they’re supposed to go, and the brain knows what’s coming up next at a near-subconscious level, and you get through the passage pretty well. Maybe not perfectly, but you squeek through and the next time it gets better and better.
This is why, if you live next to, with, upstairs, or downstairs from a musician, you hear them practicing the same damn passages over and over again. They’re not doing it to torture you, in fact it probably hurts them more than it hurts you, they’re burning the passage into their brain like a chip-burner puts information on a ROM chip – permanently there to be retrieved at any time in the near or distant future.