but i can belt like a pop star and i stay pretty well in tune so people keep picking me to do the "black" solos much to my increasing embarrassment and chagrin i can't do runs like a pop star though! and there's a reason they don't pick me to do the soft gentle solos :P sigh.

and it sucks being more known as a singer in choir than an accompanist (me taking over while the other accompanist is on leave has helped though), because with VOICE, my technical fluency is even more limited my breathing is shit my expression of emotion is shit my voice doesn't do what i want

i think that, specifically for an ACCOMPANIST, the intuition piece is the more crucial one.

the main accompanist in our choir (who is on leave right now due to caring for her very old ailing parents) does, or did, have the magical floaty arpeggiaty fingers but either she doesn't have, or has lost with age, the musical intuition piece

i am not a technically gifted pianist, in terms of i do not have magical floaty fingers that can do crazy arpeggiations and stuff my fingers are short actually, though the thumb-to-pinky span is pretty good what i'm good at is musical intuition, and i have just enough technical fluency to impress

like, i can't go "i practiced my scales 10 times a day" because i never did, scales are boring "i practiced piano 2 hrs a day as a kid" nope, hated active practicing. PLAYED piano 2 hrs a day, maybe, but it was just playing beatles stuff and (unintentionally) training myself to play by ear

and this is one of those things i feel weird talking about because it's not a skill i consciously developed, it's just sort of a natural way my brain grew when people say things to me like "wow you're so good at that" i feel obligated to provide an explanation of why i'm so good but i don't have one

the vast majority of western performed music is really logical (at least to me) in terms of chord progression and rhythm and so I don't have trouble sight-reading the majority of things, either vocally or piano, with maybe like one or two accidentals whiffed

i am a very good sight reader, but some things are hard to sight-PLAY, because my sight-reading is "rhythms and directions of phrases" and the more 20th century you get, even if the rhythms make "sense" the pitches might not and so then your fingers are going "wait what"

i do know that that year i also accompanied a freshman tuba player on the hindemith tuba sonata a freshman(?) sax player on the glazounov saxophone concerto - maybe just the first movement? that year taught me that there are levels of accompanying that i am not at and do not aspire to