Music and Time Annotation << Back To the Issue of Working on Accompaniment with the Students of Vocal Department A.S. Krymskaya The article is devoted to one of the most important aspects of the piano course taught to the students vocalists – accompaniment. The accompaniment to a vocal piece is not only an embellishment to a melody line, but it is also a necessary context which «the lyrical hero», created by the composer, inhabits. It is the accompaniment that most often conceals those layers of meaning the presence of which allows a romance to become part of «high classics». The famous Schubert’s «Winter Journey» mesmerizes the listeners not only by the genial melodies but also by the «snow creaking», the «footsteps» of a lonely wanderer and the hopeless «echoes of a street-organ» which can clearly be heard in the piano part. But can a singer who is focused only on his voice perceive all these wonderful skillfully drawn images? Not without reason the greatest masters of vocal art, such as Shalyapin, always paid great attention to even the shortest piano introduction, and their relationship with the accompanist was built on «equality». Meanwhile, the true meaning of accompaniment can only be revealed in the process of learning combined with analysis. In the article an example of such work is analyzed, i.e. a piano lesson on a romance by Rachmaninov. Keywords: accompaniment, piano, vocalist, G. Moore, F.I. Shalyapin, S.V. Rachmaninov. Contacts: E-mail: annakrym@yandex.ru Pp. 52-56.