15 Minutes with Doug Schultz, a Ballet Class Pianist

Through Doug, I realized, musicians and writers have in common an invaluable quality: We get better as we mature.

Doug Schultz is a pianist. A slender, agreeable man with a graying ponytail, he spends his days shuttling around New York City, carrying a slumpy satchel full of sheet music. Mostly, he visits professional ballet studios, where his job is to animate ballet class. For a good part of the 1980s, Doug toured with the Joffrey Ballet Company as their main rehearsal pianist. And even though he retired from touring in 1991, he still makes a living playing alongside luminaries in the ballet world. Specifically, in their practice rooms. This is called being a class pianist.

In addition to playing the piano, Doug composes music. His album, “Ballet Class from New York City,” is available for purchase on Amazon, and he is a skilled improvisationist. In his compositions, Doug draws from operas like Carmen and the romantic composers, such as Beethoven and Haydn. Also—Swan Lake, Chopin, and jazz. Over the years, he’s learned a lot by observing the dancers who come to class. Doug’s job is to produce music with the right energy. There are many traditional steps and variations that the dancers are required to move through, and Doug is skilled at timing his endings to end with the room.

“Every pianist develops their own style,” he explains. “Most of us learn by trial and error, and knowledge gets passed on from pianist to pianist by word of mouth.” Doug himself had a mentor, Gladys Celeste, who played for the American Ballet Theater for three decades, starting in 1960. Without her, Doug never would have mastered the many conventions and rules that are specific to ballet. For example, if Mikhail Baryshnikov (or any star, really) is rehearsing a difficult move, it’s best to play music that sounds familiar—music that is well-known in the ballet canon, like Offenbach or Prokofiev. When Doug was a less experienced musician, he never would have picked up on these kinds of nuances in the rehearsal room. Today, this ability to perceive what dancers need is fundamental to what Doug does.

It is a niche job to have. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, Doug always knew he would be a musician, so he studied piano at Bard. But when he moved to New York City in 1980, it was almost an accident that he landed the job at Joffrey. He had no prior experience with the strict traditions of ballet. So the director sent him to observe classes with top pianists like Celeste, who taught Doug the value of paying attention to other people’s work.

I first met Doug when we sat next to each other in a bar. I was reading The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek and he commented that he liked the title, which was how we got to talking. I had never attended a ballet class in my life, but I’ve always admired the art of it from a distance. So I was excited when Doug invited me to sit next him during a professional class at Steps on Broadway (located on West 75th Street in Manhattan). Steps is considered one of the premier studios in New York, rivaled only by Broadway Dance Center—though I’ve been told that people in the business disagree about who’s best. Something people at the tops of their crafts always seem to have in common is that they don’t mind a bit of competition.

Dance class happens in a large room with enormous windows, bare ceiling tiles and scuffed up floors. It smells vaguely like an old gym, which is comforting. Part of me is relieved at this evidence that the practice room is not as glamorous as the stage (as if the mystique of the stage and theater, as it exists in my imagination, is somehow a thing that dancers carry with them). In a corner, Doug sits at a well-worn Steinway piano. His job is to observe the room and play music that helps lift the dancers through their exercises. He picks music based on tempo: Slow and melodic at first, while everyone is stretching and warming up, then faster and more energetic later, as they move on to practicing quick kicks and pivots.

The teacher is Nancy Bielski, a petite, airy woman in a gray, loose-fitting tunic. (Just before Nancy, in the same room was Heather Hawk, and nearby, I saw Wilhelm Burmann teaching guest soloists from South America. Alessandra Ferri was also on the premises that day. These are all big names, apparently, even though I would not have recognized most of them on the spot). Nancy circulates and gives directions in a voice that is more quiet than what you might encounter in other kinds of exercise classes. Most of the dancers here are professionals, of course, and they spend hours inside these rooms. So it makes sense: They did not come here to be instructed. They are doing work that is self-directed—simply keeping their muscles in shape, practicing gestures that need fine-tuning.

“That’s Diana Vishneva,” Doug whispers, pointing to a dancer in the corner with porcelain skin and jet-black hair, fiercely quiet and serious, practicing pliés. “She’s a prima ballerina.” Earlier, in the elevator, I had asked this woman in her street clothes if she was going to dance class, and she had nodded. “I know I’m in the right building because you look like a ballerina,” I’d blurted. Then the elevator doors opened onto the dance studio, and I was inside a stampede of tall gazelle-ladies in tights and tube socks. I confess, it made me immediately aware of my own body.

I should say: I am short, shy, and bookish. Most people would probably describe my appearance as librarian-ish, and I would definitely be uncomfortable walking around with my butt and hips as exposed as all the butts and hips I saw at dance class. I did not grow up in a town with access to these kinds of institutions! My athletic accomplishments from growing up amount to a handful of participation prizes for track and field events in high school.

I need to share this information with you now, readers, because I was surprised at how much this experience made me think about my own body image issues. And I am not alone in feeling this way. Studies about the “cult of slenderness” inside ballet communities are prevalent. Professional dance companies usually avoid hiring dancers they suspect of having eating disorders, Doug says, on the grounds that it interferes with work and performance.

During a pause in the exercises, an elegant dancer drifts to the piano and leans over to say hello to Doug. They speak for a minute about their travels and various artist retreats. She seems barely to be sweating, and Doug is riffing casually on the piano the whole time. “Her husband is a famous choreographer,” Doug whispers, after she leaves. “They are both so lovely.” You can tell Doug is the rare kind of person whose professional, personal, and artistic lives are all blended together seamlessly, which lends him a rare sincerity. I would even venture to say Doug is incapable of being insincere, which makes me trust his judgment even more.

Later in the class, the elegant woman from the piano jumped three feet in the air and scissored her ankles perfectly fast—eight times!—as if it was the easiest thing in the world.

“What is that?” I gaped. “A grand jeté?!” Doug told me it was not.

You can tell Doug is the rare kind of person whose professional, personal, and artistic lives are all blended together seamlessly, which lends him a rare sincerity.

Ballet culture comes from centuries-old traditions in French and Russian courts, which is why it might strike people who grew up with American democracy and reality TV (like me) as formal and inaccessibly high-brow. In class, I sensed an unspoken hierarchy that dictates who stands where in the room. Doug explains to me later, “Nobody with any sense of propriety would dare stand in front of a principal.” Then, every dancer in the room came up to thank Doug after class, which was nice. It all got me thinking about art and discipline, how sometimes there is more freedom in constraint. And also, somehow: About all the things that girls want but can’t have. “Art is meant to be looked at,” I wrote in my notebook. Art is meant to be seen. And it is lovely to be seen.

A lot of little girls admire ballerinas. Most don’t get to become ballerinas. Even in these classrooms, there are plenty of serious dancers who want the prima roles, but they will never get them. It takes an incredible amount of work, and even then, concert performers often retire young, due to the damage their bodies endure. Sitting next to Doug at the piano, I realize writers and musicians have one thing in common: We get better as we mature. For Doug, the tens of thousands of hours he’s spent playing piano have granted him a kind of confidence, which he is grateful for.

Writers and musicians have one thing in common: We get better as we mature.

I am grateful to be on this kind of trajectory, too. For all my awkward teenage years, and all the ways I sabotaged myself with devastating shyness in my twenties. All the boyfriends I never worked up the nerve to open up to entirely. It occurs to me that I feel lucky—just to be here, writing, writing words that will be seen. It is possible that after an hour and a half of dance class, the music was getting to my head.

*

For Doug, class is a place where he gets to sharpen his techniques, too—within limits. “I get to practice concentration and endurance,” he says. “I practice getting a good tone out of the piano. Good posture and carriage of the hands.” Doug is always working to acquire new skills. Especially if he hears an unusual syncopation or musical phrasing, he works to get this in his vocabulary.

“I love this job because I never get bored,” he says. “In a big class filled with professionals, you need to have high standards. I’m just grateful that people enjoy my music, and I get to be friends with these people.” Indeed, Doug’s wife is Gretchen Gunther, a retired dancer and teacher who also teaches at Steps on Broadway.

Doug’s first exposure to ballet happened when he was still a student at Bard, on a chance visit to Manhattan. His then-girlfriend took him to a performance of The Green Table, by the German Expressionist choreographer Kurt Jooss. On stage, a gun was fired in a way that coincided with the music, and the magic of this theatrical experience filled Doug with conviction.

“I had never seen anything like it,” he explains. “The ballet was scored for two pianos. In the pit, there were two pianos playing this amazing piece of music, and I said to my girlfriend, ‘Someday I am going to play that ballet.’”

Several years later, Doug did get the chance to play The Green Table. He played it all over the world while touring with the Joffrey Ballet. Once, he even played it in Athens, in an amphitheater at the foot of the Acropolis. He still remembers those rehearsals as one of the highlights of his career.

“I was lucky,” Doug says. “Young people today don’t have as many opportunities for mentorship.” He cites their addictions to digital life. Since TV became pervasive, people don’t go to the ballet or to the theater in the same numbers they used to. Since everybody switched to streaming, Doug says, sales for his CDs of practice music have also dropped. I checked Spotify, and there are hours’ worth of “Doug Schultz’s Ballet Class from New York City” available. Many tracks have been streamed over 150,000 times. It’s nice music. I am listening to it now.

“It’s a hard way to make a living,” Doug says. He also plays church services, weddings and teaches piano lessons. (Just get him started on the Protestant vs. Lutheran church hymnals of Bach, and you understand what a vast body of knowledge is at his fingertips.) One thing is clear, though: Doug loves what he does.

“I play the piano so much that I don’t even think about what key I’m in anymore,” he laughs. “Sometimes I’ll think about the chord progressions. It’s kind of technical. It’s a bit of math, arithmetic. You have to think about it really fast. So I’ll do the progressions in different keys. That keeps me in my seat.”

I understand entirely. As someone who spends a lot of time in my own seat, at a writing desk intended for good posture, next to open windows, with nice music playing—for no other reason than that I like to spend my time this way—I think I’ve found a friend in Doug.