The instrument and the music

kw: observations, music, skills

There are two young women who play piano to lead the hymns in the church we attend. One is in college, so currently she plays only when she is home. The other, a high school senior, plays the rest of the time. In the past, they alternated week by week. Let us call the older one Allie and the younger Bethany.

Both have been playing piano since first grade, so they have a dozen years of instruction accumulated. Both have played in competitions and concerts and public recitals, and in such a setting, they seem equally gifted and skilled to me (but I reckon I'm a bit of a Philistine, so what can my poor ear discern, anyway). There is, however, quite a difference in the way each leads a hymn. I'll use the analogy of leading singing with a guitar, which is a skill I have.

The music scores in a hymnal are written for a singing quartet or a four part choir. They are the notes the Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Baritone (or Bass) would use when singing in harmony. These notes also form a chord sequence. A guitarist who can read music quickly enough can play those chords as an accompaniment to the singing congregation, which usually just sings the melody that is in the Soprano part, the top line. Of course, the men sing the Soprano part an octave lower.

There is a certain technique to song leading with a guitar. For a novice, a double-strum (down-up) is used for each beat of the measure. Someone with more skill may use more complex strumming, or even finger picked accompaniment. It is rare for a guitarist to play the melody and extremely rare to have one who can play both the Soprano and Alto or Soprano and Tenor lines. With rare exceptions, it is simply impossible to play all four parts on a single guitar, because the fingerings would require larger hands than any human has.

But this is not necessary. Most chords have three unique notes, and some have four. They can occur in any order and the chord can still be recognized. A chord may be scored as C-G-E-C, with the upper C being two octaves higher than the lower one. This is a C major chord. As long as the C, E and G are all heard, the singers will be able to tell what it is. On a guitar, if all six strings are played, the notes will be G-C-E-G-C-E, which doesn't quite cover two octaves. But all the notes are there. As long as the chords are right and the rhythm is steady, the singers can comfortably sing their melody with the guitar accompaniment.

Now, there is the issue that the notes of the melody are of different lengths. Many or most will be quarter notes. Some will be twice as long (half notes) and some twice as fast (eighth notes). Even longer or shorter notes can be used,such as whole and sixteenth notes. The guitarist does not usually play a chord for every sung note. Instead, he or she will strum down-up for each quarter note, so a chord is heard with each eighth note. That means for a half note four repetitions of the chord will be played. When I play, I usually use a slightly more complex strum, called "Boom-chick-a Boom chick-a", where the Boom is a strike to one or two bass strings at quarter note speed and the chick-a is a quicker down-up strum at eighth note speed. There are thus two patterns per four beat measure when the time signature is 4/4.

Back to the pianists. Allie plays the music pretty exactly. In cases where the Baritone and Tenor parts are more than an octave apart, she may just choose to play only the lower note with the left hand, but if you read along as she plays, what you see is very nearly what you hear. When I play hymn music on my piano, that is how I play them also, though more clumsily than Allie.

What does Bethany do that is different? She is quite capable of playing precisely what she sees, and being classically trained, for concerts and recitals that is what she does. The interpretation of classical music is not in playing different notes, but in making emotional shifts of timing and volume, beyond the sparse notations that the composer has made. But for song leading, she has learned something similar to what guitarists do from some experienced accompanists. She augments the music. Where it is quicker, being all eights or even sixteenths, she plays it as written, but wherever the notes are longer, you'll hear extra chords or portions of chords added to keep the rhythm going more smoothly. They add a lot to the experience of singing under her leadership.

A music teacher would say that both Allie and Bethany long ago gained sufficient skills to go from playing the piano to playing the music using the piano. But Bethany, in learning to augment the music, takes music playing and song leading to an exceptional level. And by the way, this is in a completely different direction from jazz improvisation, which frequently takes a melody in directions singers can't follow. I enjoy a "jazz service" for reasons quite different from the musical enjoyment I have when Bethany plays.