|
“I spend a lot of time these days learning other people's notes,” says Fran McBurnie with a grin, and she'll forgive me, I'm sure, for correcting her understatement. As a school teacher (teaching math and music at Belfast Consolidated), an organist at the Kirk of St. James, a much-sought after accompanist, and a private piano teacher, she must need her math skills just to manage her time.
For some, the combination of math and music might seem strange, but, Fran says, “Math is beautiful, and that's what I try to communicate to my students. Much of the thinking in math and music is the same—numerical relationships and patterns.” And if kids in Belfast know the connection intimately, it's because they know Fran. “Basically, I know my kids,” she says. “I see a lot of these kids almost every day for nine years. I probably taught their parents. And they know me. They know I live in Belfast and have a dog and three cats and a huge garden.”
Fran reflects, “It's a very connected business, music.” Relationships, like those with her students, are vital to Fran's music making. “I very much value my musical relationships with serious people,” Fran says, and her most important relationships have developed through private teaching and accompanying. “Accompanying is an intimate art. The longer you do it, the closer you become,” she says. To accompany well, “You really have to be a fine listener, with a good sense of empathy. Then the music gets a chance to come through. The goal for me is to allow a person to express himself as best he can within the music.” There is a satisfaction in accompanying that is different from the satisfaction of solo work, she adds: “Sharing of ideas is so much better than one person alone, even if there are compromises along the way…It's double the creativity.”
Accompanying choirs and congregations during worship services at the Kirk of St. James presents more mechanical challenges to intimacy. Her advice for beginning musicians—that “the note is just a visual representation of the sound, and there's no point learning that thing on the paper until you play it, since it's the sound that matters”—bears real fruit for her technique as a professional organist, since there's a delay (of probably about 1/4 second) between what she plays at the front of the church and what comes through the pipes further back. “That's why I'm just desperate not to look at my fingers while I'm playing! I'm always playing a little ahead of where my fingers are.”
And although she admits to liking the piano better than the organ, since “you can control it with your fingers while the organ is more mechanical, because it's partly controlled by the stops,” she adores organ music. “Nobody compares to Bach,” she asserts. “Math and music are so much in Bach. It's so organized, so intellectual, yet so emotional at the same time.” She admits to feeling awe at the scope of his oeuvre: “I will never in a lifetime of playing be able to learn all of Bach's organ music,” she admits, with a certain relief that she'll never run out.
Fran confesses that her work is more rewarding spiritually than financially: “I get lovely notes and lots of gratitude,” she says. But when she reflects on her most serious of musical relationships she recalls what she learned and gained from each. Of Alan Kennedy, just one musician she has accompanied, she remembers, “He was a huge influence on my life. And he was only 12 or 13 years old.” But it was while playing for him, “then I realized I could do something beautiful with my life.” She says, with appreciation, “That's the amazing thing about music. When you enter into a musical relationship, it doesn't matter how old, what sex, what sex they like, what race. Those boundaries are gone.” The sound is what matters.