Caryn Diamondand Cammy Dell Grote, left, and Barbara Leeds and Nancy Lineburgh, right, rehearsed a Mozart piece arranged for eight hands in Grote’s home. The four will perform as an eight-hands ensemble in the Dayton Music Club’s September Musicale Sunday Sept. 15, at Epiphany Lutheran Church. (Photo by Lauren "Chuck" Shows)
Eight hands, two pianos, one score
- Published: September 4, 2024
The piano is often a solitary instrument — after all, it only takes one musician to elicit tones from its 88 keys.
For local musicians and educators Cammy Dell Grote, Caryn Diamond, Barbara Leeds and Nancy Lineburgh, however, playing piano has become something of a team effort. The four have revived a local piano ensemble with a history stretching back decades, swapping a single piano and player for two pianos, four players, eight hands — and a rich, full sound.
Grote, Diamond, Leeds and Lineburgh will perform as an eight-hands ensemble Sunday, Sept. 15, as part of the Dayton Music Club’s season-opening September Musicale. The concert — which will also feature local violinist Marna Street — begins at 3 p.m. at Epiphany Lutheran Church in Dayton. Admission is free.
It’s unclear exactly when the local eight-hands piano ensemble was established. What is known is that it was started by two local musical legends, Ava English and Jean Putnam, likely in the ’50s or ’60s.
Both English and Putnam were longtime piano teachers in the village, as was Helen Dunham, a later member — and so are all four of the ensemble’s current members, though Grote is retired after 40 years of teaching.
At a recent rehearsal of the eight-hands ensemble in Grote’s living room, which holds two pianos, Grote said she originally joined the eight-hands ensemble in the early ’90s, and recalled the first night she and fellow local resident and musician, Karen Gardner, showed up at English’s house for rehearsal.
“We were both nervous because we weren’t sure what we were getting into,” Grote said. “But it was a lot of fun, and we had a larger group — four people would play, and then somebody would come off and another person would go up.”
Over the years, Grote said, the ensemble’s makeup would change, waxing and waning, with other local musicians, such as Bev Logan and Larry Halpern, joining for a season. As with many local traditions, the pandemic put a stop to it for a while.
In May this year, Grote, Diamond, Leeds and Lineburgh began practicing to revive the ensemble; at that point, Grote was the only member of the group who had experience with eight-hands playing. At first weekly, and now twice each week, the four pianists have met to play together from yellowed prints of music first performed locally at least six decades ago.
That’s because much of the music the ensemble plays — all of which is arranged specifically for four players on two pianos — has been passed down from that original ensemble group. One piece bears an inscription dated 1967, though Grote reckoned that the original ensemble predates the inscription by several years, if not a decade.
“The music went from Ava and Jean to Helen Dunham, and then it was passed from Helen to me,” Grote said.
For some pieces, the group uses copies of music that is now too brittle to withstand the rapid turning of pages often necessary in piano-playing. But with two players at each piano sharing the same score, who turns the page?
The musicians don’t leave that to chance, they said. Page-turning is planned in advance, based on whose fingers will be busiest when the time comes to turn.
“You negotiate it, page by page, and you write it on the page — this time I turn, next time Nancy turns,” Leeds said. “Sometimes we get tangled.”
Grote added, laughing: “You have to be very accepting of sharing space.”
It’s just one of several quirks of the eight-handed style of playing that the ensemble has worked into their growing comfort with playing together. Diamond, who plays and teaches both trumpet and piano, said eight-hands playing is distinct from both the large-group experience of being part of a symphonic band and the often solo nature of piano.
“There’s no conductor — I’m used to playing in a band where I’m getting fed the downbeat, and playing piano by yourself, usually you can kind of do whatever you want,” Diamond said. “But I feel like I’m finally over that hurdle and trying to be very attuned to everybody — we all take turns being the head nodder or sniffer.”
She referred to the ways the group will signal to one another that it’s time to play, either with a head nod or a sniff — sometimes both — indicating the upbeat and setting the tempo. Grote referred to the sniff in particular as an “old chamber music technique.”
“It depends on the tempo,” Leeds added. “Sometimes you can’t sniff that fast.”
For all the challenges inherent in turning a solo instrument into an ensemble experience, the group agreed it’s well worth it for the depth of sound eight hands produce.
Lineburgh said eight hands on a piece of music means that, particularly for pieces originally written for symphonies or orchestras and arranged for two pianos, there can be more focus on melodic or harmonic lines that might be obscured or overlooked in arrangements for a single piano and player.
“It’s a much fuller sound with eight hands,” she said.
“And there’s more use of the highest and lowest notes [on the keyboard] — the extremes,” Diamond added.
Besides the music itself, the ensemble’s members said they’ve enjoyed learning to work together. Each of them, they said, has a different way of approaching the music or the instrument, but they’ve become comfortable communicating about what they feel the music asks of them.
“We might suggest a slower tempo, or say, ‘That’s too accented,’ or ‘You need to be louder here,’” Grote said. “All the parts are important, and you need all four to make the music feel whole.”
“We’ve had to really work to develop our listening to each other,” Leeds added.
And the group said they’ve enjoyed the social aspect of the eight-hands ensemble’s regular rehearsals.
“It’s fun to talk together about teaching, about music, about what to have for dinner,” Grote said. “It makes piano — a solitary activity — into a social activity.”
The eight-hands piano ensemble will hold two invitation-only dress rehearsals ahead of their Dayton Music Club performance, and will be performing pieces by Mozart, Debussy, Schubert, Grieg and Liszt, as well as a piece composed specifically for eight hands by Bedřich Smetana.
For more on the Dayton Music Club’s season opener, as well as its wider schedule of events, go to http://www.daytonmusicclub.org/concerts-programs.
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