I have had a very busy week. Last Thursday, I embarked on an adventure at 6:30 am, driving halfway to Columbus to a regional dance festival. I would be accompanying classes for members of various youth ballet companies from all over Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New Hampshire, led by the cream of the crop of instructors and paying 75 bucks a class, plus mileage and free food. My first class was scheduled for 8:30 am (ugh) but I was wide-awake and excited.
I arrived at 8:05, where a staff person gave me a tote bag full of goodies (cookies, water bottle, pens, tourist info on Ashland county, etc.) and led me to my first class location. "Some of the locations had pianos but some only had keyboards," he said, adding that some of the other pianists had, shall we say, expressed dissatisfaction with the keyboards the night before.
"Oh, Diva Syndrome!" I said with amusement, adding that I am used to playing a keyboard for class (I play mine for Troy's class twice a week). I was sure I could deal with whatever was there, and I had long ago learned that crappy pianos in the dance studio are simply a fact of life.
So we get to an enormous gymnasium. On one side was a taped-down marley floor with a Yamaha Clavinova (circa 1988) in the corner. I saw Troy and waved, thinking we were going to work together. "No, your space is over there," said my guide, pointing to an identical setup on the other side of the gym.
"Two pianos in one room?! How is that going to work?" I wanted to know. He assured me that they would roll a divider down the middle of the room and that should help some. I wasn't so sure about this but figured they must have thought this through so it must be okay. I checked out my keyboard, noting the volume was set only halfway to the max. Well, I guess it won't be that loud, I thought.
The divider, a thin vinyl sheet with nothing but mesh on the top third, was rolled down. Of course, it did absolutely nothing to mute the sound from the other side of the room. I heard Troy's voice giving the first exercise to his class, and then the music from the other guy's keyboard filled the room as if its speakers were directly in front of us. Uh-oh.
My instructor, Nina Danilova, started showing her combination. I couldn't hear her at all and when I started playing, could hardly hear myself. I turned up the volume to three quarters max. I could now hear myself, but the other guy still sounded louder. Plus, the instrument, although cutting edge technology in 1988, only has 16-note polyphony. This means that with the pedal down, once you play 16 notes either as chords or as a series, the first ones you played start cutting out. It sounded disjointed and all cut up, which certainly didn't help the 50 or so students in my side of the room hear any better. They couldn't even hear me well enough to tell whether they were on the music, so they were always ahead or behind me.
Eventually a staff person came in with an extension cord and I moved away from the wall and toward the middle of the space where we could hear each other a little better. Nina and I developed a system where, when I saw that they were off, I would yell out the counts. Oh, I forgot to mention that I was going on only about 4-5 hours of sleep so my focus wasn't the greatest. But I was eventually able to focus enough to shut out the other pianist so at least it wouldn't throw me off.
It was kind of cold in there but I had the foresight to bring a long-sleeved shirt. At precisely 11:00 am, halfway through my second class, a huge, earthquake-like rumbling sound engulfed the room. Big thunderstorm outside, I thought. But no. It was followed by grinding and whooshing of gigantic industrial-strength fans directly overhead. Blowing cold air, I might add. Just what we needed, a white noise machine! Now it was even harder to hear, and also freezing. The staff person came back saying they were working on getting it turned off, which never did happen.
At lunch in the Ashland University cafeteria (which had very good food, I might add), I sat with some of the other pianists, including the one I had "duelled" with, and laughingly shared our horror story with the others. It turned out that on his side of the room, all they could hear was me! We all agreed that whoever thought this setup was a good idea was seriously lacking something upstairs.
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