Life as an Accompanist: The Art of Following Everyone Else

There is a particular sort of musician who spends a large part of life waiting for somebody else to breathe. This person is the accompanist. We sit at the piano, usually slightly to one side, rarely the centre of attention, apparently calm and composed while privately calculating whether the soprano is about to take the high note early, whether the conductor has changed the tempo again, and whether the Grade 6 violin candidate has remembered that the second page exists. I have spent a great deal of my musical life doing exactly this. I have accompanied choirs, singers, instrumentalists, music exams, church services and assorted performances where the principal requirement has been to listen very carefully and react before anyone notices that anything unexpected has happened.

Accompanying is one of those jobs which looks much easier than it is. To somebody watching from the audience, the pianist appears simply to be playing the piano while another person sings or performs. In reality, you are doing something rather different from solo playing. You are following, supporting, anticipating, adjusting and occasionally rescuing. You may have a perfectly clear idea of how a piece ought to go, but the person standing beside you may have developed an entirely different interpretation somewhere between the rehearsal room and the stage. At that point your own views on tempo, phrasing and historical performance practice become largely academic. Your immediate job is to make it sound as though both of you intended exactly the same thing.

This is particularly true with singers. Singers breathe, which already makes them rather less predictable than a piano. A pianist can play the next bar whenever required. A singer has lungs, nerves, words, consonants and occasionally an entirely personal relationship with rhythm. A phrase which has always taken four bars may suddenly require four and a half. A pause which barely existed in rehearsal can, during the performance, develop into something Wagner might have considered excessive. The accompanist waits, watches and follows. If everything goes well, nobody notices. If it goes badly, there is an excellent chance that everyone looks at the pianist.

That is one of the great truths of accompaniment: success is almost invisible. A brilliant accompanist can help a singer sound secure, shape a phrase beautifully and support the entire performance without drawing attention to themselves. Nobody leaves saying, “What extraordinary competence from the person at the piano.” They leave talking about the singer. This is exactly as it should be, although it does mean that accompanists develop a certain philosophical resilience. We learn to take satisfaction from the fact that nothing terrible happened.

Choirs present a different sort of challenge. I have accompanied everything from church choirs and choral societies to community choirs and smaller ensembles, and each has its own particular ecosystem. With a large choral society, the pianist may be required to produce a fairly substantial sound while simultaneously following a conductor whose beat has become increasingly expressive and decreasingly connected with measurable time. Conductors are fascinating creatures. Some have a wonderfully clear technique. Others communicate mainly through eyebrows, shoulders and sudden movements which may or may not indicate the beginning of the next bar.

As the accompanist, you get used to this. You learn that what appears to be a sweeping gesture towards the ceiling might mean “crescendo”, “broaden slightly” or possibly “why is the heating still on?” Context is everything. You also learn not to assume that a rehearsal will begin at the beginning. Choirs have an uncanny ability to start at bar 73, second beat, with no warning whatsoever. Somebody says, “Let’s go from ‘and the glory’,” and forty singers immediately know where this is. The accompanist is expected to know too, preferably before the conductor’s hand comes down.

Community choirs bring another kind of joy. They are often full of people who genuinely love singing, which makes them enormous fun to work with, but rehearsals can travel in unexpected directions. There may be no great concern for formal rehearsal procedure. Somebody asks a question, another person has forgotten a pencil, someone in the back row is still discussing lunch, and eventually the conductor announces that everyone will start from the chorus. The accompanist’s job is to remain ready throughout, like a musical emergency service.

The advantage of accompanying choirs for years is that you become extraordinarily good at finding places quickly. This is a skill rarely mentioned in music colleges but arguably one of the most useful abilities a working pianist can possess. Anyone can prepare page one. Professionals become adept at opening a score at random and beginning immediately because somebody has just said, “Can we take it from the third entry of the tenors after the modulation?”

You also learn to read several things at once. In a choral score, there may be four vocal lines, a piano reduction, text, rehearsal marks and a conductor waving somewhere in your peripheral vision. If you are unlucky, someone has also added handwritten notes in pencil from three previous conductors, all of whom had different opinions. You begin to appreciate clean scores in the way other people appreciate fine wine.

Then there are music exams.

Accompanying music exams is perhaps one of the purest tests of the accompanist’s ability to remain calm while somebody else is under enormous pressure. The candidate may be ten years old, terrified, clutching an instrument and wearing the particular expression of someone who has just realised that the examiner is a real person. The pianist, meanwhile, needs to be the stable element in the room.

I have always felt that the role of an exam accompanist is partly musical and partly psychological. You are there to play the accompaniment, obviously, but you are also there to make the candidate feel that at least one person in the room is entirely on their side. If they rush, you follow. If they hesitate, you wait. If they miss an entry, you find a way back in without turning the event into a public inquiry.

The interesting thing about exam pieces is that they are often short, deceptively simple and capable of going wrong in ways no composer could possibly have predicted. You may rehearse something several times with a student and become confident that every note is securely in place. Then the exam begins and, through a combination of nerves and adrenaline, they play the opening at approximately twice the agreed speed. At this point there are two options. You can maintain the carefully rehearsed tempo and leave them playing an unaccompanied solo in another dimension, or you can follow.

You follow.

This is where classical training suddenly becomes very practical. Scales and arpeggios may have seemed a slightly abstract exercise when learned as a teenager, but years later they turn out to be excellent preparation for playing an accompaniment significantly faster than anyone had intended.

Young instrumentalists are not the only ones capable of surprising an accompanist. Adult singers can be equally inventive. A performer who has been perfectly secure throughout every rehearsal may decide during the concert that now is the moment to introduce a completely new ritardando. Sometimes this is deliberate artistic inspiration. Sometimes they have forgotten what comes next and are buying time. The accompanist must not judge. The accompanist must simply be there when the next note eventually arrives.

There is a strange intimacy to accompanying a solo singer or instrumentalist. You become acutely aware of how they perform. You notice where they breathe, which phrases they find difficult, where nerves affect the tempo and where they are likely to take risks. A good accompanist gradually learns the performer almost as much as the music. This makes collaboration particularly satisfying when it works well. Eventually you reach the point where very little needs to be said. A glance is enough.

This is one of the reasons I have always enjoyed accompanying. It is fundamentally collaborative. Solo playing can be hugely rewarding, but accompanying requires you to become part of somebody else’s performance. You are not simply presenting your own interpretation. You are helping create a shared one.

That does not mean the accompanist is musically passive. Quite the opposite. The piano may need to lead an introduction, establish tempo, shape harmony, support tuning and create the entire musical atmosphere around a solo line. Some accompaniments are substantially more difficult than the solo part, although it is considered bad form to mention this to the soloist immediately before they perform.

There are also practical realities. Accompanists spend a lot of time playing unfamiliar pianos. This can be character-building. Occasionally you arrive to find a magnificent Steinway in excellent condition. On other occasions you are introduced to an upright piano which appears to have been tuned during the Blair administration. One key sticks. The sustain pedal squeaks. Middle C has developed a personality of its own. The person organising the event says, “It’s a lovely piano,” and you smile in the professional manner of someone trying not to ask when it last saw a technician.

Church pianos provide their own particular adventures. They are often tucked behind pews, beside radiators or underneath arrangements of artificial flowers. The stool may be the wrong height, the music desk may have disappeared decades ago and there is always the possibility that somebody has placed a hymn book inside the instrument for reasons nobody can remember.

You play it anyway.

This, perhaps more than anything else, is the life of the working accompanist. You play the instrument provided, follow the person in front of you, adapt to the room, cope with whatever happens and make it all sound deliberate.

And things do happen. Pages refuse to turn. Music falls from stands. Conductors lose their place. Singers enter early. Singers enter late. Instrumentalists skip an entire section and arrive triumphantly at the coda while the pianist is still somewhere near the second subject. The experienced accompanist develops a particular expression for these moments: calm concentration combined with an internal vocabulary which is best not reproduced in a church.

Yet the satisfaction when everything comes together is enormous. A choir suddenly produces a perfectly shaped phrase because the rehearsal has worked. A nervous student finishes their exam piece with a smile. A singer takes a difficult phrase exactly as hoped and the piano lands beneath it at precisely the right moment. These are small musical successes, but they are real ones.

Accompanying has also taught me a great deal about listening. Pianists can sometimes become rather preoccupied with the keyboard immediately in front of them. Accompaniment forces you to hear beyond it. You have to listen to the singer, the choir, the conductor, the room and the balance of the whole performance. You cannot simply play your own part beautifully and assume your work is done.

That habit of listening has carried into almost everything else I do musically. It matters when playing for weddings, when accompanying a singer at an event, when working with a choir and when playing alongside Anne-Marie in JAM Duo. Music is rarely improved by somebody stubbornly refusing to acknowledge what everybody else is doing.

After decades of accompanying, I have come to think that the accompanist is a peculiar mixture of musician, navigator, diplomat and emergency repair service. We are trained to read music, but much of the real skill lies in reading people. We learn when to lead, when to follow, when to wait and when to pretend with complete confidence that the unexpected modulation was absolutely meant to happen.

And although accompanists spend a great deal of time slightly out of the spotlight, I have never regarded that as a disadvantage. Some of the most enjoyable music I have made has happened from that position: sitting at a piano, listening carefully and helping somebody else give their best performance.

It may not always be glamorous. It may occasionally involve an elderly upright piano, an anxious Grade 5 clarinettist and a conductor whose beat has become entirely conceptual.

But it is rarely dull.