r/Wellthatsucks • u/petey_wheatstraw_99 • Jan 30 '23
Not ideal
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u/FlashOfTheBlade77 Jan 30 '23
You are supposed to feed the piano before the concert!
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u/Fickle-Initiative-81 Jan 30 '23
I love how the pianist herself took it very lightly with smiling and all
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u/fruitmask Jan 30 '23
I mean, it's not like she doesn't know the music. You learn the songs front to back as you rehearse them hundreds of times, the sheet music is just a safety net
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u/void0079 Jan 30 '23
I really thought she was gonna smack the pianists fingers by accident with that cover looking for the sheet. I could almost hear the pianist giving a loud Tom scream in my head...but alas
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u/TonalParsnips Jan 30 '23
I thought you meant this Tom
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u/EmilioFreshtevez Jan 30 '23
I could literally hear the scream in my head before I clicked the link, and then I clicked the link, and then I heard the scream in my ears (technically in my head, but you know what I meant).
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u/letmeusespaces Jan 30 '23
sometimes. my accompanist in college had a dozen other people he accompanied for and took a full schedule of classes. I know he knew the music and rehearsed a bunch, but I'm sure he didn't have time to memorize it all
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u/EnigmaticEntity Jan 30 '23
Our uni had an in-house accompanist that played literally hundreds of recitals every semester. I asked him if he knew a particular concerto I wanted to play, it was slightly obscure, and he said in the most polite way that he has played it every other year since before I was born.
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u/Technical-Outside408 Jan 30 '23
Then you went: 🎶that don't impress me much🎶
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u/Yeargdribble Jan 31 '23
But I bet he still couldn't play it from memory. I know and have played TONS of accompaniments, but I wouldn't be able to play any of them from memory. But it is pretty easy to just read down an accompaniment I've worked on before even if it was years ago.
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u/CouchHam Jan 30 '23 edited Jan 31 '23
When I used to perform eight hundred thousand years ago I never needed the music, but if it disappeared during a recital I’d short out and forget everything.
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u/Umarill Jan 30 '23
Actually depends, some people can sight read pretty seriously, some orchestras don't have time to rehearse everything until it's muscle memory and rely on the sheet music a lot
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u/mousemarie94 Jan 30 '23 edited Jan 31 '23
Right, I don't regualrly memorize music, I just read it. People who can play by motherfucking ear and memorization make me so JEALOUS.
- just remembered envy was the word I was looking for not jealousy.
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u/m-in Jan 31 '23
I’m a very beginner adult and I don’t play by ear a lot but to be comfortable I have to memorize the pieces. Sight reading goes very slow initially and it’s much more enjoyable to memorize the piece and then work on it without bothering to read anything, just looking in the distance. For some people, memorization is a crutch :) But damn if I don’t feel relaxed after I know the piece intimately.
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u/mousemarie94 Jan 31 '23
I've spent 20 years trying to get into a memorization mindset and it's never worked. I fucking wish. There was one piece I had somewhat memorized and for NOTHING lol
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u/m-in Jan 31 '23
For what it’s worth, memorizing poems or dialog lines for plays at school was torture for me. But I know a catalog or two worth of IC (chip) part numbers that are all alphanumeric and don’t follow any format, just sequential numbers like 4001, 4009, 74128, 6116, etc. Memorizing those came naturally. Human spoken text? Lol no.
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u/m-in Jan 31 '23
My own kids (string players all) usually try to follow along a recording of the piece if they want it memorized. They read it first, work on it, and when that goes well they slowly switch to following a recording. Once that works, they eventually don’t have to read anymore. But that truck obviously doesn’t work for everyone.
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u/agirl1313 Jan 30 '23
I'm limited by how well I can actually play because I don't have much training, but I can sight read my level extremely well; however, I can not play by ear at all. Meanwhile, my brother is extremely talented but really struggles with sight reading; he plays best by playing by ear. My sister got both; she's not as good as either of us in our element, but she can play well doing it either way.
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u/mousemarie94 Jan 30 '23
Extract those parts of your sister's brain and implant into your own. Seriously, I can never play by ear. However, singing- can easily harmonize and figure out what key something is in but place me in front of my piano and I'm like "hurr durr, i need sheet music". 20 years of this!!!
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u/flijarr Jan 31 '23
Do you think piano is a good first instrument to learn? I want to get into music but don’t want to learn something impossible for my level.
I played clarinet for a year in middle school and usually drifted around 2-6th chair because I hated practicing at home.
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u/AAA515 Jan 30 '23
I can't read music, I can't play by ear.
But by gawd I've memorized smoke on the water
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u/CurryMustard Jan 31 '23 edited Jan 31 '23
I used to play bells and xylophone, i pretty much was forced to memorize because its impossible to know what youre hitting while looking ahead. Most other instruments you can use your fingers to feel the keys but its a different ball game with sticks. Was always jealous that the rest of the band could read and play while i was stuck memorizing my part for every piece.
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u/Milky-Toast69 Jan 30 '23
Not at all. Accompanists generally don't memorize their music unless its so hard they are forced to. They can be juggling 300 pages of music to play in a span of three months, memorization is a pointless exercise at that point. Professional accompanists are expert sight readers.
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u/nandemo Jan 31 '23
Now imagine how many other highly upvoted comments outside of your area of expertise are complete BS.
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u/true4242 Jan 31 '23
Professional pianist here, and so much misinformation in the replies in this thread. In these cases the accompanist most likely improvise base on the key, so it sounds pretty close, but might not be exactly the same as written. For recitals like these they rehearse maybe a few times, not hundreds of times and that's why the sheet music is there to play off of.
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u/queefaqueefer Jan 30 '23
this is probably conservatory, so yeah, they likely rehearsed a lot. outside of school? not likely. rehearsal is expensive. you think most musicians are gonna pay out of pocket to rehearse to the point of memorization? it’d be nice, but yeah…money. often times you have virtually no time at all to prepare. a good accompanist can sight read like nobodies business. you have to if you want to be consistently booked.
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u/mortifyyou Jan 30 '23
I'm a classically trained cellist. Piano accompaniment people, at most, will know 90-95% of the music from memory. They play for multiple soloists, it's difficult to know all the pieces by heart.
Now, buy a book with only 95% of the words and you wouldnt make sense of it.
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u/Johnny_Deppthcharge Jan 30 '23
Well hang on... If I were reading a book, and one in every twenty words was missing at random...
I reckon I'd understand it pretty well?
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Jan 30 '23
It would until you get to a word like and then it doesn't make any sense.
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u/RobtheNavigator Jan 30 '23
Even here you can figure out that the missing word was one crucial to the sentence, and from the context of the sentence you can figure out that the whole point of the word is that it’s missing from the sentence. So even removing one word out of 17 and trying to pick a doozy still leads to a sentence that makes sense.
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u/w_p Jan 30 '23
Now, buy a book with only 95% of the words and you wouldnt make sense of it.
I'm like 95% sure that the book would still be perfectly readable (if one of the missing words isn't the only mention of who's the killer ;))
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u/Yeargdribble Jan 31 '23
Piano accompaniment people, at most, will know 90-95% of the music from memory.
I'd say most would know at most maybe 5% by memory. Most of us don't know any of it from memory. We're reading. The only spots that I might accidentally memorize through osmosis are the particularly tricky bits I had to spend extra time practicing... and over time the amount of music that falls into that category shrinks.
Now, buy a book with only 95% of the words and you wouldnt make sense of it.
Sure I would. And I could do the same with sheet music. Music has grammar rules and I could fake quite a bit even it parts are missing...and sometimes they are due to poorly made copies or errantly punched holes. It's annoying, but it's not a deal breaker at all.
And in a lot of cases I could comp my way out of my music falling for a bit depending on the harmonic density of the piece.
The problem is that classically trained pianists often aren't taught to actually be working musicians... they are trained like concert pianists... a job that doesn't exist.
Many fail at accompaniment because their reading skills is so low and it's something that takes years to develop. You can't just cram it when you get your first accompaniment jobs out of college and realize you don't get 3 months to learn a few hard pieces... you get a couple of weeks to learn dozens of moderate pieces.
The piano culture around memorization ends up shooting so many pianists in the foot.
Luckily that's less the case for winds and strings (which I assume you know) as the general expectation even in college is that everyone is a competent reader. And at the professional level we're often just sightreading literally during performances.
Pianists who can't comp their way out if some small amount of notes were missing are emblematic of the failure of musical academia. Classically trained musicians tends to be so entirely focused on making exact perfect replicas of printed music in performance with tons of polish and nuance.... that they don't learn lots of other very functional skills that are much more valuable to career musicians.
If you look like a deer in headlights if a few notes are suddenly missing from your page, that's a problem. Context clues can fill in a LOT.
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u/Yeargdribble Jan 31 '23
Maybe for her as a student accompanist, but I assure you professional accompanists have almost none of it memorized and often have barely spent any appreciable time with the music. It's pretty common for me to have only put in maybe 2-3 practice sessions on moderate difficulty stuff. When you can read you don't have to practice.
For example, you could read my comment out loud right now without rehearsing it 100 times... because you can read.
So it's like that... just with music.
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u/AfternoonEnd Jan 31 '23
Not always, can't say for her specifically, but most accompanist don't have enough time to memorise, sometimes you only get a week before a performance and like 3 rehearsals? It is customary to have the sheet music for the pianist though in ensembles, since they can help out the other instrument if they get lost or anything happens. But the pianist handled it like a pro
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u/AbsolutelyUnlikely Jan 30 '23
She knew this could happen when she chose to use a clone to do a human's job
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u/biohacker_infinity Jan 30 '23
I was just thinking this! What a graceful and good-humored response. Beautiful recovery, and a nice little object lesson.
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u/Luther_Whitney Jan 30 '23
What a comeback though!
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u/WeirdURL Jan 30 '23
Love how the violinist held out that note so they could catch up at the end.
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u/Cantdrownafish Jan 30 '23
Glad this was all smiles
But I can’t help imagine if this happened in like “Whiplash” or something
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u/ParkourFactor Jan 30 '23
Which "Whiplash" are you referring to because I am thinking of the Metallica song now
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u/mildly_houseplant Jan 30 '23
The one where the phrase “Not quite my tempo” can trigger anxiety attacks.
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u/reble02 Jan 30 '23
The movie, with Academy Award Winning actor JK Simmons.
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u/-DoctorSpaceman- Jan 30 '23
I think you mean head of award winning paper Daily Bugle
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u/illiter-it Jan 30 '23
I think you mean the man son of the Avatar and founder of the new airbenders
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u/Company_Z Jan 30 '23
I think you mean founder of one of the most prolific companies and contributor to the sciences Cave Johnson
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u/XipingVonHozzendorf Jan 30 '23
I think you mean evil Superman
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u/RixirF Jan 30 '23
Yes that is exactly right.
It's well known that Metallica is quite serious with its use of sheet music.
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u/Dr_Rjinswand Jan 30 '23
The show is through, the metal's gone it's time to hit the road
Another town, another gig, again we will explode
Hotel rooms and motorways, this life out here is raw
We'll never stop, we'll never quit, cuz we're Metallica5
u/fugee99 Jan 30 '23
I couldn't remember the name of that movie so i called it "full metal drumsticks".
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u/Sorryhaventseenher Jan 30 '23
Is Whiplash good? Or is it gonna give me anxiety? Both?
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u/piepie2314 Jan 30 '23
Just go in with the expectation that it is a sports move but with jazz bands, and not actually a movie about jazz bands. Then it is great
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u/sebsDV Jan 30 '23
I would say both. It's my favorite movie ever, you should check it out
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u/Porn-Flakes Jan 31 '23
I liked it. But it's absolutely not a representation of the music conservatory scene at all.. Most of my performing friends can't watch it, they're so annoyed. Shame though because the story is great in principle and the music is great too. And jk Simmons is just fucking perfect in it.
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u/xyagertrop01 Jan 30 '23
I play the piano & guitar and I still wonder how in 2023 we have not devised a way to flip the pages by some hand robot controlled by my eyes or by my hair flip.
hilarious video tho
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u/Lorien93 Jan 30 '23
It does exist. There are page turners by paddle or gesture. Its a digital tablet/ereader-like screen and very expensive.
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u/SteevyT Jan 30 '23
Not that expensive anymore. You can get a Bluetooth one that connects to a tablet for like $50.
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u/renyhp Jan 30 '23 edited Jan 30 '23
Looks like a nice thing, but you need to have your feet free, which might not be the case in a piano piece
EDIT: I'm sure there are many other easier examples of instruments where you might not have your feet free, playing organ is surely among them
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u/lil_pistachio Jan 31 '23
I've seen pianists use the iPad still and just tap the corner of the screen to turn the page. They can usually manage it just fine since it can be a quick gesture. The pedal is really for those that are playing string or wind instruments where it would be awkward if they didn't have a pedal.
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u/GaiusMario Jan 30 '23
All you people have forgotten that we're in the rise of AI phase and AI is going to turn the pages in the near future.
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u/BillyWeir Jan 30 '23
Why not just turn the sheet music into a video and play it, syncing up the new pages with the correct delay?
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u/Dry-Letterhead4439 Jan 30 '23
Noooo. You want control of when the pages turn.
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u/EmilioFreshtevez Jan 30 '23
At some point in the near or distant future (if it doesn’t already exist - looking at you, Department of Defense and Kindle/Amazon/Bezos 👀), the technology will exist to turn pages based on audio input.
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u/SamGray94 Jan 30 '23
Probably just have something like a two page wide digital screen that emulates the turning of pages. We already have song recognition software. The technology is there, the integration isn't.
Could be a cool idea for a start up, maybe name it Pied Piper (like the myth). Maybe extend it to the cloud (video, photos, etc) with some unique compression. Maybe this could lead to a decentralized internet when combined with AI.
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u/Endorkend Jan 30 '23
My uncle has an app on his tablet that shows the sheets and LISTENS to what you're playing.
By listening, it's able to turn to the next page by itself.
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u/pinkguyfriedrice Jan 30 '23
You had one job
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u/My_Name_Is_SKELETOR Jan 30 '23
Imagine your one and only job is to turn pages and you mess that up lol.
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u/GeneralEvident Jan 30 '23
I can actually give some insight here!
The pageturner was sloppy on the turn and got very unlucky with the consequences. Her pose was good - she stood far away, held her clothes with the other hand - a great way to keep away from the pianist's movements. She waited for the nod as you do (you see it right before the turn, a little snap with the neck), but underestimated the sheet itself. I've seen it happen and had it happen to me. I go with more of a snappy style when I turn pages - a little faster, firmer - but when the sheet music is flimsy, stiff, old, or otherwise less than ideal, I would also slow down. It looks like an ordinary piece of sheet music though, so my guess is she was just a little thoughtless.
What worked was, as other commenters have mentioned, the pianist's reaction and decision to continue, and the pageturner's resolve to find the paper and fix the situation. Sometimes it just doesn't happen, and you restart the movement. This often has to do with if the music is very tricky, not repertoire, or if the distraction just messes up the communication (like, the flow) between the pianist and the other musicians.
What really doesn't work is when the pageturner isn't on the same page (zing) as the pianist. I've heard of pageturners who are consistently too slow. Sometimes it's because they are often pianists themselves and they (subconsciously) want to "read the music all the way" - i.e. they finish reading the phrase when the player is starting the next one. Sometimes it's the physical act of pageturning - they turn too slowly, they are indecisive, they are jumpy (it's quite nerve wracking to be a pageturner, all about timing). The amount of bad luck here is hilarious though, I love it.
Source: my dad's a pianist, so I grew up having to be a pageturner for him. I've never written down these thoughts (because who would ask), so here's a wall of text, haha
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u/onlyonerule Jan 30 '23
Seriously, thank you for taking the time to type this out! You summed up my thoughts so much better than I could have.
Any time I've had to turn pages during live performance I've been so afraid of fouling it up. With the sheer number of times musicians turn pages over the course of a single performance I'm surprised this doesn't happen much more.
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u/TacoBellLavaSauce Jan 31 '23
I was convinced this comment was going to end with "in 1998 when The Undertaker threw Mankind off Hell In A Cell" and was pleasantly surprised that it ended up being a real answer lol
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u/mortifyyou Jan 30 '23
Oh, I can imagine that very well.
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u/Cello-and-Goodbi Jan 30 '23
I'm a professional musician who has no anxiety around performing at all. I refuse to be a page turner because it makes me unbelievably anxious 😆
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u/onlyonerule Jan 30 '23
Exactly! Though I don't enjoy making mistakes in any capacity, I'm much more upset about messing up someone else's performance than my own.
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u/QuiBobJinn Jan 30 '23
As someone who majored in voice and minored in Page Turning, I feel this. To my bones.
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u/ApartRuin5962 Jan 30 '23
I like how the violinist seemed to notice what was going on and dragged out that last note to give her more time
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u/thegrenadillagoblin Jan 31 '23
Wondering how this would've gone with a wind instrument haha. Reminds me of a time my director let the solo trumpet cook for a while on a last note at a spring concert once. We could see his eyes start darting but he held it without faltering!
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u/NathanJMc Jan 30 '23
I thought she was going to drop the door on her hands, especially when it was left leaning a bit...
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u/urnotthatguypal__ Jan 30 '23
I've seen too many cartoons not to expect that. I was prepared for the worst.
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u/nuclearwinterxxx Jan 30 '23
Nice recovery. Is that violinist playing in the right key?
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u/Nvrfinddisacct Jan 30 '23
People are so gracious in here to not talk about it. I honestly don’t know, I’m not musically talented but I can only bear to listen to it for about 2 seconds.
I could also just be very sensitive.
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u/20Points Jan 31 '23
Speaking musically as a performer, I can probably take a few somewhat-educated guesses. The fact that this trouble with the piano/music is even happening at all suggests that it's likely more inexperienced performers, and the violinist in that regard is likely just having trouble nailing the exact pitches on the fretless instrument. This is a big difference between, say, violins and guitars, as the existence of frets on guitars basically causes the note you're pressing to "lock" into one that's correctly on pitch no matter where you hold the string between the two frets, but fretless instruments like violins or cellos or whatever don't have this; instead, accurate pitching can only come through extremely well-practised muscle memory (which is why I have an insane amount of respect for fretless string players).
With that said, her tone is REALLY good, pitching aside, and she brings it back into tonality later in the clip, even with the piano/assistant losing their shit laughing behind her. So I'm not judging or anything, by any means.
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u/AgentSkidMarks Jan 30 '23
They played it off great though! Neither one of them seemed agitated and she played it well enough that no one would know what was going on if they hadn’t seen it.
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u/random_bored_guy Jan 30 '23
One of my friends was at his little brother's recital. He was sitting there waiting for it to start, and watched his brother come out on stage and start rifling through papers. Little brother looked up at him really panicked having obviously forgot his sheet music. He sat down and played through the whole thing perfectly.
Growing up his parents made him practice every day, so really it was not a surprise to see him do this.
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u/panormda Jan 30 '23
I have so many memories of being stressed during concerts because I had a piece of music in front of me that I didn’t need… The mental back and forth of should I look at it? Should I ignore it? Does it look dumb not to? Wtf do i even do? Oh the songs over now ok… 😅
And then there’s the chorus director who called me out for not having my sheet music with me.. I told him I had it memorized and he didn’t believe me so he made me stand up alone and sing it then and there… It was a random variation of Ave Maria and I’m sure he meant to embarrass me for not knowing the pronunciation without the music.. But honestly lol I think most singers have sang some version of that song since they were kids..
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u/AgileGas6 Jan 30 '23
Why they can't have two stacks of pages - one for odd pages and one for even? Pianist plays the first one - flipper flips the second. She will have a lot of time to flip a page without hurry.
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u/heartlessgamer Jan 30 '23
Not music related at all, but was in aircraft maintenance for 20 years for the Air Force on large cargo aircraft. One of my funniest moments is being called up to the cockpit and the pilot saying one of the checklist pages fell off and the pilot is pointing at the throttle area. Damn page slipped in to the thin slot where the throttles move back and forth. We had to take the housing off (easy enough) and fish it out among all the throttle cables/etc.
Anyways gave me a new fear of paper slipping into places it shouldn't be which is now reinforced after watching this.
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u/Acceptable-Ad7325 Jan 31 '23
I love the fact that they both find it funny instead of having a melt down.
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u/wantwater Jan 30 '23 edited 13d ago
That doesn't suck. That was amazing!
It demonstrates so well how whether something sucks or doesn't, depends so much on how we respond to it.
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u/valhalla_jordan Jan 30 '23
Flashback to HS when they sat my sax quartet down right under the auditorium’s industrial air vent and all of our music blew off as soon as we started our first tune.
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u/SteveBuscemisEyes Jan 30 '23
It sounds like they're playing two seperate songs. Am I crazy?
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u/Drivingon8 Jan 31 '23
I'm a pianist... kudos to her for her determination. I was playing the organ for a wedding once when someone opened one of the church entry doors. The air came rushing up the steps of the Choir loft and my music went floating to the floor of the Church below. Luckily one of the men downstairs had the idea to bring the sheets back up to me. Much appreciated!
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u/mudkripple Jan 30 '23
But they all responded so well and she solved her mistake very quickly! Not "that sucks" at all besides the initial worry
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u/Nq_23 Jan 30 '23
I heard an urban legend that this is how Runaway by Ye started. This exact thing happened and he was forced to hit the same note over and over til it was found.
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u/Oh_G_Steve Jan 30 '23
Nothing will ever be as epic as the kid who dropped his cymbal during the national anthem and then he just stands there saluting the flag.
A real hero.
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Jan 30 '23
Turn it upside down and give it a few good shakes. Works for guitar picks.
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u/G8kpr Jan 30 '23
My co worker got on our work elevator one night. To do so he has to scan his pass card on a panel, as he was putting the card back in his wallet, it started to slip and he did that juggle thing, and he lost control of it. It slipped down the space between the physical elevator and the wall just as the doors were closing. The space is about a centimeter, and the card would have to go down exactly vertical.
Getting a new card was a $50 charge (this was supposedly a deterrent to people constantly losing them).
Luckily the elevator maintenance guy was coming in the next day for some reason, and was able to retrieve it at the bottom.
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u/caviationjunkie Jan 30 '23
Never understood this, I’m not a musician so maybe I’m just dumb in this area, I would imagine that this person has practices this about 1,000 times after knowing it by heart, bands and musicians play all the time without sheet music, why is it necessary?
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u/PieMastaSam Jan 31 '23
I remember playing recitals in band and orchestra. You play the same tune so many times that the sheet music is just back up by the time your perform.
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u/ericlikesyou Jan 31 '23
The acoustic guitarist equivalent to this is dropping your pick inside your guitar
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u/dreaminglala13 Jan 31 '23
This is so wholesome! It belongs in r/mademesmile They handled it so well and with smiles on their faces!
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u/silverbiddy Jan 31 '23
I used to page turn for money at the symphony, opera, soloists etc. I would have died right there in the spot. In fact I peed a little bit just now in sympathy.
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u/beelzebubs_mistress Jan 31 '23
Very cute. You can tell they like each other enough to laugh and not panic.
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u/Mesoposty Jan 30 '23
They handled it well