[Perform-Talk] Blind Collaborative Pianists

[Ella Yu]

Hi everyone,

I am a dedicated blind amateur musician who has a fairly wide range of
musical interests, one of them being collaborative piano and accompanying.
I grew up taking both piano and violin lessons for years, so I am acutely
aware of the need for piano accompanists. I am not pursuing music as my
main career, though I'd certainly like to do it as a side career.

My question is, to those of you pros who must learn large volumes of music
at a time, what do you do? I have accompanied my younger sibling and a few
friends on and off since age 9, and in all those situations, I have only
needed to learn a small number of pieces at a time, which is not a big
deal. However, as you all know, blind musicians can't sight read and play,
even with braille music. I've done a lot of reading and have heard about
the long line of blind church organists in France, for instance. How do
those types of musicians deal with, say, learning 40 pieces on 2 days
notice? The only solution I see is to practice for hours on end, which is
just mentally exhausting. I have spoken to my piano teacher about doing
accompanying/collaborative piano as a side gig, and I mentioned that my
inability to sight read would make it difficult to learn the required
volume of music quickly enough. He basically told me that a lot of people
suck at sight reading, that I'll always have time to prepare my music ahead
of time, but in reality, I see the accompanists for my violin recitals
having to know 40 pieces at a time, and they likely had to learn them on
short notice. What would a blind musician do? I guess this is just
something that is very difficult to work around as a blind instrumentalist,
so we just can't take on anything that requires learning 40 pieces in 2
days. Any thoughts? By the way, yes, I do have lots of experience learning
ensemble music for orchestra/chamber music as a violinist, but in those
cases, I always have at least a few weeks to learn all the music for a
concert, so it's not an issue.