“The show must go on” — except when it can’t.

Earlier this October, at our performance of Morton Feldman’s final composition “Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello” with Trio Fadolín and Dan Tepfer at the New York Studio School, we had a technology fail that’s worth sharing as a cautionary tale.  (You may have read about it in George Grella’s review of the concert.)

… But first, a little background:

I’ve been using an iPad for sheet music in concerts since at least 2015.   In these years, I’ve been blessed to experience no major issues — sure, sometimes I’d turn two pages forward by accident, sometimes I’d turn a page backward instead of forward — but on the whole, nothing has ever happened to me that would derail a performance, that I couldn’t fix in a split second.  Playing sheet music from the iPad is a blessing — having access to thousands of pages of sheet music, performing from full scores, having your scores backlit, using your feet (with a pedal) to turn pages instead of your hands, having a smaller object between you and the audience versus a traditional 2-page music stand, being able to AirDrop scores between musicians — all of that and so much more is fantastic.  Best of all, theoretically, if your iPad gets lost one day, you can simply buy a new one and re-download all of your scores from the cloud. (I haven’t had to do this yet.). You cannot simply re-download three suitcases full of paper scores the same way.

There are a growing number of apps for sheet music — PiaScore, nkoda, Henle Library, IMSLP and others — but the one I see most musicians in New York use is ForScore.

One of the less well known feature of ForScore is the “Cue” feature, that lets one person turn pages — and even change selections —  for an entire group.  I’ve heard about this feature working for some wedding bands, where the leader seamlessly calls the tunes and puts them in front of the band.

….And now that you know all this, back to the concert….

Feldman’s “Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello” was published by Universal Edition as a manuscript score.  There are no parts, no bar numbers, only 34 pages of score, at 15 staves a page, in very small but precise handwriting.  Pulling it up on my 12.9″ iPad, I found it far too small to read.  After unsuccessfully trying to persuade UE to engrave the score, I decided to engrave it myself — after all, what better way to learn a piece than to type it up?  I was inspired by Derek Bermel’s story about his time driving with Penderecki.

After typing it up, Feldman’s 34-page score became a 99-page score, but now it was big enough to read even on smaller iPads, it had bar numbers, bracketed repeat markings, and rehearsal numbers that corresponded to the systems of the manuscript.

A comparison between two editions of Morton Feldman’s “Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello” – manuscript on the left, and the other re-engraved by yours truly.

However, as a 99-page score, the margin for page turn accidents was high.  A couple of times in rehearsal, one of us turned two pages at once; another time, someone turned backwards.  In a piece where each pages varies subtly from the next, this is a recipe for chaos.

We decided to try ForScore’s “Cue” function — asking our cellist, Valeriya, to turn pages for all of us.    If anything happened with the pages, at least we’d all be “on the same page”.    This worked beautifully for our rehearsals, and also at the soundcheck.

As the concert was about to start, there were the usual announcements about silencing / turning off phones — but this turned out to be not good enough.

Ten minutes into the performance, one of our iPads stopped responding to page turns from the Cue function. It disconnected from the server.   Three of us were on one page, but one was on another page.  We could improvise in the style of Feldman until we found each other, but this would be dishonoring this beautiful, meticulously crafted piece — so we had to stop.

What to do? Dan Tepfer, a pianist who has a magical way with technology, thought it may have been some radio interference. He suggested that we ask the audience to put all of their phones on airplane mode –– really, truly, just pretend you’re on a plane for the next hour — and the audience complied.

And then we started over, from the beginning.  It was a miracle — everything worked just like in rehearsal!  With each successful page, I felt a sense of magic, of gratitude — at the same time, I was completely resigned and accepting to whatever happens — but everything worked out. At the end of the concert, we thanked the audience — we couldn’t play the concert without their cooperation.

So what happened? We’re not sure.  It could be a bluetooth issue, or something else.

But whatever it was, the experience of typing up, learning and performing Feldman’s piece in a space where he worked was incredibly special.   Having performed the first ten minutes twice — even more so.

I’m hopeful that we can play it again.

Thanks for reading!

See you out there,

Ljova