The Plight of the Pianist, Or How I Thought I'd be Murdered in a Church Basement

Kinda like this one.

I recently received a gift of a painting from a thoughtful friend who is a visual artist and music lover. In the painting, a pianist plays in a darkened but grandiose hall, with a humanoid lamp-bearer as the only witness. I love it because it depicts how we pianists work in private to be able to perform in public, how we labor away for hours mostly unseen in sometimes less than ideal situations.

The fact is that we are often grateful for a practice instrument at all, and the search for one can be a constant source of stress. Nowhere is this more true than in the city. Pianos are big. Pianos are loud. Pianos are expensive. This means that many pianists expend considerable energy finding an instrument before they can even do the grueling work of actually practicing. 

This is true even at Juilliard. The combination of a practice-obsessed student body and a city-constrained campus means that the search for a practice room is a daily struggle. Before the rooms were fitted with electronic locks, people wandered the hallways for hours waiting for a room to open up. Knowing this, people with rooms would park themselves and their stuff there all day, perhaps taking a nap under the piano or dispatching a friend to grab food, so that no one could swoop in. The recent implementation of an electronic lock system provided hard data on how dire the situation was — the practice rooms were at full capacity pretty much all day. Your odds got better after 11pm in the hour before the building closed, but that’s about it. No matter that the rooms were windowless and smelly from lack of air (and ounces of sweat). No matter that the pianos had been battered to oblivion. You were grateful just to be there.

Practice room utilization towards the end of the day.

Lest you think you could better your situation by putting a piano in your apartment, you might find that, out in the wild, things could be even worse. Those pianists lucky enough to afford or borrow a piano, whether an upright or grand, live in constant fear of neighbor complaints. Not to mention the space requirements! Some rooms hardly admit a twin bed, let alone anything else. And if you need to move, good luck finding a landlord who will accept both you and your piano. It’s worse than having a St Bernard. 

I can’t adequately explain how it feels to have dedicated your life to a pursuit, only to have to fight every day for the mere chance to pursue it. Some people marvel at how pianists can practice for so many hours a day, but we sigh in relief when we finally sit down on the bench. Now, we can get something done. Now, the hardest part is over.

The painting I received reminds me of this fight, of our persistence, of the unexpected corners of society that emerge to help. I’m reminded of one memory in particular, from a time in my life long before I even suspected I wanted to become a pianist. After college, I got a job at a consulting firm in downtown Boston, moved across the river from Cambridge to the city, and settled into my new identity as a working adult. It was the first time in my life I didn’t have access to a piano, and, despite having “quit” the piano years ago, I felt utterly lost about it. I can’t quite explain why. I was genuinely excited to try consulting, to learn about business, to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and I knew I wasn’t going to be a pianist. But the thought of not being able to play once in a while made me anxious.

So I went on a search mission. During my lunch breaks, I wandered around my office in concentric circles, inquiring at every church, community center, hospital or building that might possibly house a piano whether I could use theirs. I knew I had to find a person with enough power to give me that permission, so I knocked on the doors of only the most managerial-looking offices. One guy I ambushed turned out to be in charge of one of those historic theater buildings on Tremont Street, a once noble building that stood six stories tall and housed several elaborate performance spaces, some seemingly abandoned despite their past grandeur, and others used once a week for church services. In his surprise (and likely desire to get rid of me), he admitted there was a piano in the basement church space that was unused during the week and granted me access. However, we were short on the details of the arrangement and I waited many days at the door before finally befriending the only person who ever seemed to be there, a blue uniform-clad janitor, and eventually finagling the electronic code to the building. Finally. I had somewhere to practice. 

Some of the buildings in Boston’s beleaguered Theater District, at least, the ones not yet replaced by condos.

So, whenever I could get away from my desk on lunch breaks, when most of my coworkers fanned out to get an Italian’s Italian sub from Al’s South Street cafe, or a corned beef from Sam LaGrassa’s, or a Chilean chacarero from … Chacarero (I dearly miss all of these sandwiches), I would sneak away with a score of the Schumann piano concerto, let myself into the building, feel my way through a twisted maze of darkened hallways, turn on the lights above the piano, and practice for the remainder of the lunch hour. Once in a while the janitor’s figure would emerge at the periphery of my lighted view, which made my heart race a little faster, but I pretended not to notice him. He usually watched silently for a bit, then disappeared back in the darkness. He never said a word, which added to his creepiness. As far as I could tell, it was just me and him in this giant building. The setting was so unnerving that I was convinced he would kill me one day, and no one would ever find out — how could they? Despite these thoughts and against my better judgment, I kept coming back. I never told anyone at work where I was going, which was also dumb, but I was on company time. Most people ate at their desks, so going to practice seemed utterly wrong. Luckily, I always emerged from the building (and from other dubious practice spots over the years) unscathed. 

There is something insatiable in pianists’ need to practice, to keep exploring, to keep getting better. I felt it then, even if I didn’t understand it. We overcome such odds for our art without even realizing how nuts we are because we’re seeking something we desperately need. 

I once joked to my brother that if I wrote an autobiography, it would be called, “Where’s the piano?” He replied that his would be “Where’s my pillow?” A talented sleeper (he can easily sleep until late afternoon if undisturbed), he has devoted his life to medicine, which requires him to be up at ungodly hours to help people in their hours of greatest need. The sacrifices he makes for his patients are greater than mine. But I think the musician’s battles are lesser known. I found that few people (including Rachel Weisz) even in New York, where I struggled the most, understood the fullness of the struggle. I made housing decisions based on pianos. I built my schedule - eating, working, socializing, sleeping - around practicing. I made travel plans based on instrument availability. I asked total strangers for help (including cold-calling and leaving handwritten letters under people’s doors). And I am not the only one — many musicians do some version of these things. The good news is that we cannot and do not go it alone. Every last musician has a small army of people who help them along, and I am no exception. From that unwitting building manager in Boston to the dear friend in Brooklyn who loaned me her family’s Steinway M while I lived in New York (thank you, Cynthia!), I have many people to thank for the victory of just being able to do what I love. 

I will treasure that painting (thank you, Jill!) because it reminds me what crazy things we do for love, for a love we may not even recognize until many years later. I can no longer pinpoint exactly where on Tremont Street that building is, nor find my way through the shadowy maze to that basement space. But I remember very clearly the feeling, in furtive midday moments, of soaring on the exultant phrases of the Schumann concerto, of basking in a small pool of light surrounded by a pitch black of silence and space, of hearing the piano’s sounds reverberate into the cavernous emptiness, of trying my hardest in a few stolen minutes to make what I heard ever more profound and beautiful. Of sharing it with no one but myself, but yet finding it totally worthwhile.