Workshop 99 mini-test

1. What four roles does an accompanist alternate between?

2. Why should the singer's melody be treated as part of the piano harmony even though the piano does not play it?

3. Why is sparse accompaniment often safer under rubato singing?

4. What should you do if the singer unexpectedly adds or skips a bar?

5. Why is wrong anticipation often more disruptive than slightly late accompaniment?

6. What is the accompanist's complexity-budget principle?

7. Why can reharmonization that is theoretically valid still be a poor choice for a singer?

8. What should happen when the singer or soloist becomes uncertain?

9. What is the difference between following and stabilizing?

10. What is the deepest lesson of Workshop 99?

Answers

1. Follower, predictor, stabilizer, and leader. A good accompanist changes roles according to what the performance needs at each moment.
2. Because the singer is effectively the top voice of the sonority. Their pitch determines whether the total harmony contains a chord tone, 9, 11, 13, alteration, suspension, or clash, so piano voicings must leave room for that external voice.
3. Sparse bass and shells leave temporal flexibility and allow the accompanist to adjust immediately when the singer delays, stretches, or changes the phrase instead of being trapped inside a rigid rhythmic pattern.
4. Follow the music that is actually sounding. Identify the singer's present phrase and nearest harmonic/formal landmark, simplify, and meet them there rather than insisting on completing the planned bar structure.
5. A premature chord may place the singer's current melody against the wrong harmony and reveal that pianist and vocalist disagree about form. A slightly delayed sparse voicing can often enter naturally after the phrase becomes clear.
6. The ensemble shares complexity. If the soloist becomes harmonically, rhythmically, or melodically dense, the accompaniment often needs to become simpler so the total texture remains intelligible.
7. Unexpected harmony may undermine the singer's expected pitch context or create altered tones against their melody, making intonation and phrasing unnecessarily difficult. Harmony must serve the actual melody and performer, not merely theory.
8. Become more explicit: clearer roots, pulse, cadences, landmarks, and recognizable cues; reduce reharmonization, ambiguity, and decorative counterpoint until everyone is reoriented.
9. Following means adapting to the soloist's actual timing and phrasing; stabilizing means preserving enough tonal, rhythmic, and formal clarity that their expressive freedom remains intelligible. Often the accompanist does both simultaneously.
10. Accompaniment is the art of making enough musical information available that another musician can be free—while remaining flexible enough that their freedom can change what you were planning to play.

The central lesson of Workshop 99 is:

Do not accompany the song you expected the other musician to perform. Accompany the phrase they are actually singing now, while hearing enough of the harmony, pulse, and form ahead to make whatever happens next sound as though the two of you intended it together.