There are two things which have occupied an unreasonable amount of my adult life: pianos and cars. One is an exquisitely complicated musical instrument capable of expressing almost every conceivable human emotion. The other is a machine designed principally to move the first one — or, more accurately, me and an alarming quantity of equipment associated with it — from Wiltshire to whichever wedding venue somebody has chosen at the opposite end of Britain.
I love both of them, although for entirely different reasons. A piano appeals because of what happens when you sit at it. A car appeals because of what happens when you press the accelerator and discover that several tons of metal can apparently disregard Newtonian physics for long enough to get past a caravan.
The Car Nobody Mentions in the Music Brochure
This relationship between musicians and cars is rarely discussed, yet for anyone making a living as a freelance pianist it is enormously important. People naturally imagine that the principal tools of my profession are my hands and perhaps a piano. This is technically true, but somewhat incomplete.
The other essential component is a vehicle large enough to contain a stage piano, stands, amplification, cables, clothes, assorted bags and all the other things which modern professional music has somehow accumulated. There was presumably a time when a pianist simply arrived at a venue, sat down at the beautifully maintained Steinway provided and played. This still happens occasionally. It is delightful. It is also sufficiently unusual to feel like being upgraded to First Class because somebody has made an administrative error.
Most of the time, being a working pianist involves transport. Lots of it. Weddings in particular have an admirable ability to take place nowhere near where you live. Couples may live in Bristol, work in London and decide to get married in Northumberland because they once stayed in a converted barn there and liked the view. This is perfectly reasonable from their perspective.
From the pianist’s perspective it means leaving home at an hour normally occupied by milkmen and owls, loading the car in the dark and embarking upon a relationship with the motorway network which becomes considerably more intimate than intended.
Why a Musician Needs a Proper Car
I have always liked cars, so this is not entirely a hardship. In fact, I suspect that if I had chosen a profession involving a ten-minute walk to the same office every morning, my enthusiasm for cars would have become rather more difficult to justify. But when your working life involves travelling tens of thousands of miles around Britain every year, a car stops being an occasional luxury and becomes something much closer to a mobile office, equipment store, changing room, lunch venue and, on sufficiently long journeys, psychological support system.
This changes what you want from a car. I can admire a tiny sports car as much as anybody. Unfortunately, a two-seat convertible is less appealing when you need to transport a Nord stage piano. The piano would probably fit if you put the roof down, although arriving at a November wedding in Yorkshire with several thousand pounds’ worth of Scandinavian electronics sticking vertically into the rain might undermine the professional image.
The working musician therefore develops strangely specific requirements. The boot must be large. Not merely large in the measurement quoted by the manufacturer, which is usually obtained by filling every available cavity with imaginary litres, but actually large in the real-world sense that a keyboard in a flight case will go through the opening without having to rotate it in a manner normally associated with moving a sofa up a staircase.
The rear seats need to fold sensibly. There should be enough room for equipment without piling it to the height of the rear-view mirror. And, crucially, once everything is loaded, the car should still be capable of travelling several hundred miles without feeling as though it is towing Salisbury Cathedral.
Why I Like Land Rovers
This is partly why I have developed such affection for Land Rovers. They are not, I accept, the most understated vehicles ever conceived. A Discovery has roughly the road presence of a minor embassy and uses tyres which appear to have been priced individually by Sotheby’s.
But as a piece of machinery for the life I lead, it makes an enormous amount of sense. There is room for everything, it is comfortable over long distances and, after several hours on the M6, you get out of it feeling roughly like the same person who got in.
This last point matters more than people realise. A pianist can easily drive three or four hours to an engagement and then be expected to perform immediately. Nobody wants to hear that your interpretation of Debussy has become unusually aggressive because you spent the previous seventy miles sitting behind a refrigerated lorry on the A34.
The car is therefore part of the performance, in a roundabout way. If you arrive tired, stressed and folded into the shape of an economy airline seat, your enthusiasm for providing elegant background piano music may require a degree of theatrical skill.
Warning Lights and Professional Panic
There is also the matter of reliability. Musicians cannot simply fail to arrive. If someone in an office has a car problem, there may be emails, apologies and perhaps a Teams meeting conducted from the hard shoulder.
If the pianist fails to reach a wedding, there is an empty space where the pianist was supposed to be and a bride standing at the end of an aisle wondering why her entrance music consists mainly of people coughing.
Consequently, I take servicing, tyres and warning lights rather more seriously than perhaps I otherwise would. My relationship with a dashboard warning message is not casual. If a car announces that something is “inoperative”, I do not regard this as useful information. I want to know what it is, why it is inoperative, whether it will remain inoperative until Tuesday and whether its inoperativeness is about to strand me in a lay-by outside Gloucester with a wedding beginning in ninety minutes.
Modern cars, of course, contain enough computers to run a small country, and they enjoy telling you things. Older cars broke down without explanation. Modern cars send a notification explaining that a subsystem you had never previously heard of has encountered a temporary fault and that you should consult an authorised retailer.
This is progress in much the same way that receiving a beautifully typeset letter informing you that your house is on fire would be progress.
Pianos Have Become Just as Technical
Pianos have gone through a similar technological transformation. Much of my early musical life involved acoustic pianos, church organs and scores printed on paper. Now professional performance can involve digital stage pianos, amplification, iPads, power supplies and enough cabling to suggest that I am installing broadband rather than playing A Thousand Years.
The modern pianist has therefore become unexpectedly technical. We carry adapters. We discuss outputs. We know which cable produces a hum and which socket has been placed in an inaccessible part of the instrument by an engineer who clearly never expected anybody to use it in public.
This is another reason cars and keyboards seem to belong together. Both have become enormously sophisticated while still being judged on something very simple. A piano can contain extraordinary digital technology, but ultimately it is either enjoyable to play or it isn’t. A car can have thirty-six driving modes, a configurable display and a screen large enough to watch Ben-Hur, but ultimately it is either pleasant to drive for four hours or it isn’t.
Good Engineering Has a Feel to It
I have always been more interested in how machinery feels than what the brochure says it can do. There is something satisfying about good engineering, whether it is the action of a fine piano or the way a car settles into a long motorway journey.
Both involve thousands of components doing complicated things which disappear completely when everything is working properly. You do not sit at a good piano thinking about the felt on the hammers. You play.
Likewise, in a good car you should not spend the entire journey thinking about adaptive dampers and torque distribution. You simply arrive somewhere in Wales considerably sooner and less irritated than expected.
There is also, I suspect, a connection between people who enjoy musical instruments and people who enjoy cars. Both can inspire levels of enthusiasm entirely disproportionate to their practical purpose. Nobody needs to know the precise specification of an organ’s Solo division in order to play a hymn, just as nobody needs to know the cylinder configuration of an engine in order to reach Waitrose.
But knowing is part of the pleasure. The mechanism matters because understanding how something works deepens your appreciation of what it can do.
Pianists Talk About Pianos Like Car Enthusiasts Talk About Cars
This may explain why conversations between musicians about pianos sound remarkably like conversations between enthusiasts about cars.
The action is too heavy. The response is better on the older one. The new model is technically impressive but somehow lacks character. The German one is beautifully engineered. The Italian one looks fantastic but may require more attention. At some point somebody mentions something built in Japan and everyone agrees it will probably still be working after civilisation has ended.
There is something deeply familiar about all of this.
Wedding Venues and the Road to Nowhere
Venues add another dimension to the whole business. The British wedding venue is often situated at the end of a driveway designed when the principal form of transport was a horse. You turn off a perfectly respectable road and are immediately confronted with half a mile of gravel, potholes and foliage apparently determined to inspect the paintwork.
At the end you discover a magnificent country house and a sign saying “Suppliers please use rear entrance”, which sends you down a track better suited to a Challenger tank.
You then arrive at the unloading point.
This may be next to the room where you are playing.
It may also be in another county.
Some venues understand that musicians arrive with equipment. Others appear genuinely astonished.
“Have you got much to bring in?” they ask, while standing beside a vehicle containing a piano, amplification and enough electrical equipment to establish a regional radio station.
“A few bits.”
This is the standard musician’s response. We never say what we are actually thinking, which is that if the service lift is broken somebody is about to discover just how much a stage piano weighs.
The Bit the Guests Never See
Once unloaded, the car disappears from the glamorous part of the wedding entirely. Guests see the beautiful venue, flowers, champagne and musicians performing in an elegant room.
They do not see the loading bay, the trolley, the extension leads or the large vehicle parked beside a catering van behind the bins.
This is perhaps as it should be. Theatre works better when you cannot see the machinery.
And being a professional musician is full of machinery.
The Long Drive Home
Perhaps this is why I have never regarded driving as completely separate from my musical life. The journeys are part of it. I have crossed Britain in every conceivable weather, driven home late at night after weddings, watched the landscape change from Wiltshire fields to northern moorland and spent enough time on the M5 to recognise individual pieces of Armco.
There are frustrations, naturally. Roadworks. Diversions. Motorway service stations charging the GDP of Luxembourg for a sandwich. Drivers who occupy the middle lane with the unwavering determination of people defending ancestral territory. And the inexplicable British habit of slowing to twenty-two miles per hour because there is a police car travelling in the opposite direction.
But there is also something rather pleasant about the journeys. Music is an intensely social profession. Weddings contain people, conversations, noise, requests and constant interaction.
The drive home is often the opposite.
The equipment is packed away, the event is finished and there may be two or three hours of quiet road ahead. For somebody who spends much of life surrounded by sound, there is something restorative about that.
And Then There Is Simply the Car
And then, of course, there is the simple pleasure of a good car on an empty road.
I am a pianist. I am supposed to say that nothing compares with the sensation of sitting at a wonderful instrument and producing music.
That is probably true.
But a large V6 engine, an open road and the knowledge that the piano is safely packed in the back come surprisingly close.