Noteless

Music has been a big part of my life for a long time. I play the piano by ear, and since I was a kid I’ve been able to listen to a song and (mostly) play it back without any sheet music. This has served me well playing in bands and doing theatre work, and besides that, it’s a lot of fun. Plus – without that skill, I would never have met Wanda and have the life we have together today. So it’s pretty important to me. I was thinking one evening: I’m sure as I get older, my brain and my fingers aren’t going to work as well as they always have, until eventually I’ll sit down at a piano and… not understand what to do, not know how to get that stuff out of my head through my fingers in to the keys any more. It must be that way for anyone that does anything they love – maybe the ability to do it slips away slowly, maybe it goes in a rush, but there will come a day when that familiar thing you love to do becomes difficult and unfamiliar.

That feeling. That’s what I want to put in an image.

The first plan for this image was to show some kind of split reality with time passing – the young man at a shiny piano, fresh walls and plants, happy photographs… the old man at a well loved piano, faded wallpaper, evidence of change (and not necessarily happy change).

I love images with that split-reality thing, but it seemed like it would be too hard to make the main subject work, and and transition the young version in to the old version without being confusing. Instead, let’s focus on the older version of the subject, and really focus on that moment when it becomes clear those hands aren’t going to play any more.

Perhaps there’s a way to ramp it up even more. What if the subject wasn’t just a musician… what if they were a teacher? So this isn’t just the end of their own music, it’s the end of teaching others? (Shane McCaffery and I talk about these images, and I’m pretty sure he gets the credit for that idea.)

As always, really important to pay attention to the big three when planning an image: Location, props, and talent.

Location: A space with the right sort of piano, the right sort of walls, the right sort of floors, and enough room to get some distance between the camera and the piano? No problemo. After a few promising leads (thanks Blair!), the perfect location presented itself, in the home of fellow photographer Lynda Coulson, who was happy to let me come in and disrupt her house for a morning.

Props: There are some really cool props in this picture. The sheet music comes from Michele Walsh, Head of Strings at the Brisbane Conservatorium of Music. After a lifetime of use, her teacher gifted the sheet music to her on his retirement; some of it is over a century old. That gave an incredible weight of history to the day of the shoot. Michele loaned the metronome as well. The other significant prop was a little travel clock, the sort of thing people recognise because their grandfather or grandmother had one just like it. If the viewer sees the clock, and in a small way connects with the subject by recalling their parents or grandparents, that connection would help to drive the message home. It took some hunting to track down a little clock like that… and once I had it, it seemed like every other person I spoke to could have gotten me one if I’d just asked. :/ The clock, the metronome, and the chair would hopefully set up a location that was clearly for teaching.

There’s a neat little easter egg to connect this image to me and my work with ImproMafia. A few years ago, when accompanying an improvised production, the musician was in the reality of the show, and the character I was playing was endowed with the name “Mr Smiggins”. In a later completely different show someone named me “Phil Smiggins”, and since then it’s stuck. I’ve even been the “Phil Smiggins Orchestra” for a season of shows (as a solo musician). So it was fun to title one of the books “Phil Smiggins Consolidated Piano Teacher’s Guide”.

Talent: I’ve been fortunate to photograph Brisbane actor Alex Lanham a number of times, and he was a natural fit for this part. On the day, as we revised the brief and talked about the character, he listened and processed, and then in the shoot gave me everything I asked for, then took it up a level, then another, then another.

The edit for this image came together pretty smoothly – most of the work was doing lots of duplication of sheet music to give the room chaos.

There’s the addition of some light coming from an unseen window – hopefully evening light, that last bit of gold before it goes cold. One of the considerations for images like this is to keep every single element photographic, so there’s nothing that might disqualify it from being entered in the AIPP state and national print competitions. That light beam portion of wall is actually just lifted from the same photograph, using some of the wall with lamplight on the right side of the image – rotated, expanded, masked to give it shape.

For a little while, the light cast a very distinct shadow on the wall to the right, to make an in-joke that sightreading musicians would hopefully understand. It didn’t last; it kind of unbalanced the image and made it quite busy, which wasn’t really worth it to reward the small percentage of eagle-eyed musician viewers that would spot it.

It’s always a balancing act to work out how much ambiguity to leave in the image. The last element to be added was a bottle of pills up on the piano, to perhaps give an explanation of why the pianist can’t use his hands any more. Too much?

This print has seen a few print/image competitions, and it’s fared pretty well, with Silver Distinctions at QPPA and APPA (and part of the winning Illustrative portfolio for both of those), finalist in the Fremantle Portrait Prize, finalist in the Australian Photography Awards, and a Silver in the WPPI 2nd half 2017 competition.

 

If you enjoy our BTS videos, this one is special – we don’t usually do speed-edits, but we’re giving it a shot for this one!

 

Huge thank you to Lynda for lending her house, Michele for the sheet music and metronome, Tara for being an awesome assistant (again!), and Shane for bouncing ideas and for printing. As always, Canson paper on an Epson printer never lets me down, and injecting an Eizo monitor in to the mix helps me make sure the end result looks just right. And massive thanks to Alex for lending his acting skills and being a great subject.