The Down Side

I've posted in the past about the rewards of participating in amateur musical organizations. Today's post looks at the other side.

Earlier this sping I found myself digging deep to find reasons to continue in my community orchestra. I really would like to find them because my wife almost literally lives for orchestra and I want to share things like this with her. We have had some really great moments as a result of both of us participating in the same organization and we have shared some disappointments as well. It has done our relationship good.

Frequently when someone is confronting a quandary people will advise them to make a list - or rather two lists, one of the pros and one of the cons.

First the pros:

Performance can be very rewarding. Many of what could be called the "peak experiences" in my life have come during a variety of performances. Sitting next to a fabulous horn player during a performance of Alfred Reed's "The Hounds of Spring"; being in the midst of the huge volcano of sound that is Orff's "Carmina Burana"; being brought very near to tears during Elgar's "Enigma Variations"; having the rare privilege of participating in a dreamlike performance of the finale of Act I of "La Boheme"; conducting a community theater performance of "Gypsy" where the tiny amateur pit orchestra became more than the sum of its parts and rode its unexpected newfound standard for 2 hours; standing on stage after a solo performance with my instrument in my hand realizing I had just knocked it out of the park; all examples and there are more, but really surprisingly few considering 50 odd years of performances. These moments when you become more than yourself, become outside yourself, become part of the music do not occur often but they are heady indeed and reassure one that something about this is just "right".

Playing a wind instrument is good for you. It provides cardio and respiratory health benefits.It takes you away from routine and relieves stress. It is impossible to play well and concentrate on problems at work or home.

As mentioned before, it is something to share with someone close to you.

It can be a social activity and provides connections with others in the group - a sense of shared enterprise and camaraderie.

Now the cons:

It is affecting my health. I have to fortify myself with strong antacids and IBS calming drugs before I go to rehearsal.

It is incredibly frustrating. Without getting into specifics, at the end of rehearsals I don't have relaxation that the feeling that something good has been accomplished would impart. Instead my blood pressure is up, my head aches, and I feel that much of my time has been wasted, that there is lack of respect for the sacrifices I make to belong to the group and that unreasonable expectations are constantly foisted on orchestra members.

I get so worked up by the inefficiencies of what I have just given 2 1/2 hours to (or 3 or 4 or 5 or whatever length of time I am expected to put up with in order to get to go home) that I cannot relax and I wind up venting my frustrations to my wife who I am sure is getting tired of hearing it not to mention it can't be healthy for her to be worried about my state when there is nothing she can do about it.

I think it is obvious that in order to continue the payoff has to be greater than the distress, but when performance quality is sacrificed to the perceived aggrandizement of the group, the payoff becomes sad and disappointing. Frankly I don't care how many people in Des Moines have heard of the orchestra yet will never attend a concert, I care about quality of performance - not quality of performance as judged by people that are attending to watch their kids perform or even as judged by the regular audience of music lovers - but quality of performance where I myself can walk away thinking "we did the best job we were capable of". It has been a while.

Our season ended in early May. I was so soured on the experience I did not get the old bedpost out of his case until a quintet rehearsal late in June. This really saddens me as I have spent many enjoyable hours alone with the bassoon in my practice room. Currently I am returning to an earlier interest in classical guitar as a way to fulfill the need I seemingly have to express myself musically. The orchestra's programming for the next season is highly motivating, however, with several masterworks scheduled that I have yet to perform and one concert devoted solely to Richard Wagner. I'm hoping that another meeting with the quintet and determination to renew my relationship with the bassoon will help me put a more positive slant on the coming season. But if things don't improve dramatically in the realm of respect for the musicians and efficient use of rehearsal time it is likely to be my last.

Playing for Nothing

I majored in music education in college. I picked music because there was little I enjoyed more than making music (with my friends - thanks Willie). During my final two years while I was playing piano, bass, sax, clarinet, bassoon and trombone at every opportunity and conducting every group I could that I was not actually playing in, my clarinet teacher gave me a piece of advice that I have come to recall many times in the years since. "Never play for nothing", he cautioned me, "people will think that's what you are worth."

I've been on both sides of the pro/amateur musician profile and in previous entries in this blog I've gone to some lengths to explain the rewards of bringing live orchestral music to those who otherwise could never afford to attend and providing full pit orchestras in venues that could never afford the pros. Evidently full pit orchestras will soon go the way of the dodo everywhere as even shows appearing on Broadway are making every effort to replace musicians with digital synthesizers while musicians' unions make futile efforts to preserve these jobs. So even as amateur musicians are working to provide and preserve music performance that is either rapidly vanishing or becoming prohibitively expensive, organizations and individuals who recruit amateur groups to enhance their productions are doing their very best to demoralize and discourage the very people they depend on to complete their audience's experience.

Our local ballet company has been trumpeting their pride in that our city finally has a year round professional ballet. Be that as it may, for a live orchestra this professional company still turns to the amateurs and it is easy to see why. For a recent engagement there were three rehearsals and two performances. The going terms of the musician's union local would be $90.00 per person per 2 1/2 hour service. $90.00 X 40 musicians X 5 services is $18,000.00, a sum that would leave this company, like many throughout the country, using recorded music were it not for volunteer musicians.

Faced with these facts you would expect volunteer musicians to be treated with respect and gratitude. Nothing could be further from the fact. Instead they are treated like galley slaves. Four to five hour rehearsals with no breaks are the norm. With no constraints on time or costs, rehearsals are disorganized and the musicians sometimes wait idle up to forty minutes while problems are worked out that could have easily been addressed in technical rehearsals requiring no live music. Promises as to rehearsal length are made and quickly broken. Offers of buffet lunches in return for early rehearsal times for people who all have day jobs are made and not realized. Musicians arrive and leave for each rehearsal and performance without a single word of appreciation from either those in charge of, or participating in, the production.

Lest I be accused of picking on this particular organization, this has been the norm in various summer theater productions as well. It has brought home the perception that one of the reasons that musicians' unions exist beyond the obvious remuneration consideration is that union contracts force those in charge of productions such as this to realize that a musician's time has value and is to be wasted at financial peril.

My own perception is that money alone is not entirely a substitute for respect and gratitude, but it helps. People that wish to treat others like indentured servants should expect to pay for the privilege. If you can't afford to pay, then consider doing without if you can't extend common courtesy to those you wish to exploit.

My teacher was right. In spite of our huge contribution to these local performances, somehow because we play for nothing, far too many people think this is what we are worth. Personally I have been burnt too many times and am getting to old to expect things to ever change. I'm going to have to rethink the cost/reward equation of doing these things in the future.

Do I Really Sound Like That?

Last Sunday afternoon the orchestra I am a member of gave a concert. The concert was one of our regular series but in this instance it was dedicated to the memory of a former conductor of the group recently deceased. We commissioned a new work for this concert in memory of this man, a tribute not lightly undertaken for a semi-amateur group that struggles mightily with the funds necessary to stage free concerts in order to make classical music more accessible to those whose financial circumstances don’t allow $50 tickets to hear the “pros”. So we had the composer in attendance at what was a world premier of a new work. The widow of the honored conductor flew in from the east coast to attend and many former orchestra members were in attendance as well. The orchestra more than rose to the occasion and rendered a memorable afternoon of music which was warmly appreciated by the audience.

Twenty minutes after the concert ended our current director took me aside to inform me that the student staff of the concert hall we rent from a local university had failed to record the concert. To those of us who help maintain a recorded archive of the history of the orchestra, who planned to provide the widow with a recording of the concert as a memento, and to the composer who rightly expected a recording of the first performance of her new work this was a disaster.

Last night as I began what will ultimately be a long and somewhat disappointing effort to produce some sort of acceptable recording from a fragmentary dress rehearsal recording made with a digital recorder’s built in mikes from an acoustically poor location on the main floor, I began to think about how unusual the performer’s experience is now compared to 90% of the history of Western music over the last one thousand years. It is only since 1877 that the recording of sounds has been possible and only since around 1930 with the development of the electronic microphone that recorded sounds have been more than a sketchy representation of what an actual performance sounds like. And there are still theoreticians who claim that the “fidelity” of modern recordings still require the brain to complete the analogy between what emanates from a speaker and what it heard at a live performance.

Reflecting on Saturday afternoon when my wife and I listened to the dress rehearsal recording of the second movement of Schumann’s “New England Triptych”, where we have slow exposed extended duets between oboe and bassoon, while mentally making notes about balance, reed strength, and other minutia I wondered how, for that 90+% of music history, performers knew how they sounded.

With the advent of recording technology that could be used in the home and small studios from the 1950s on, listening to recordings of oneself or one’s group has been a huge part of the process of a performer’s education and a valuable tool for conductors. Previous to this revolution, a large part of the job of one’s teacher would be to verbally try to mold the sound the performer produces to conformity with what recognized virtuoso class performers produce. The individual himself was, and still is, not able to accurately evaluate how his performance sounds to others. The phrase at the head of this essay “Do I really sound like that?” is almost universally uttered when one first hears one’s recorded voice and points out how sounds that we produce ourselves sound differently to listeners. For the players of wind instruments this may be more pronounced than keyboard or string performers. (Although I have heard a recording of myself on keyboards that I completely failed to recognize as my own performance.)

It makes me wonder about the “original instrument” school of performance. They want to sound like the original performance. How in the world do they evaluate their efforts? No one knows what the first performance of most of the classical library sounded like. Not even the performers. Beethoven never heard, even once, most of his later works and when he did have his hearing he would be extremely fortunate to hear a composition performed anywhere near adequately a single time. If you wanted to hear a new piece of music, either you found a live performance or you did without. Hearing a major work like Beethoven’s Ninth was a once in a lifetime event and far more people read reviews or heard hearsay than ever experienced the actual music. As a result, every town of any size whatsoever had an orchestra and maybe an opera house as well. Live music flourished everywhere. Quality had to be questionable in smaller towns, but there was no alternative. Now we can listen to music written hundreds of years ago whenever we want, we can compare performances of major works as rendered by dozens of major symphonies. We can hear almost immediate replays of our own performances due to the quality of consumer electronics. But live performances not so much and certainly at a premium price. For those who own a library of recorded music what would the cost be of attending a live performance of every selection owned?

In the last 30 years much has been made of the computer revolution because of its economic impact. But the impact to our leisure, hobby, entertainment and general enjoyment of life because of recording technology is incalculable.

Just sayin’

Amateur Night

I've been a musician all my life. Currently I'm employed as a programmer but I have a degree in music and have played woodwinds and keyboards most of my life. I'm not going to try and remember how many years - let's just say that I played in the pit for a production of "Hair" when it wasn't a revival. I've been paid to play all my chosen instruments and still have an ongoing paying gig. I've been in and out of the musician's union and performed a wide range of musical genres. Still for most of my life I would probably have been classified as an "amateur". Wikipedia provides this as part of it's definition "Translated from its French origin to the English "lover of", the term "amateur" reflects a voluntary motivation to work as a result of personal passion for a particular activity."

Currently the majority of my musical activity consists of playing in a "community" (translation: volunteer) orchestra and pit orchestra for a community theater (same translation of "community"). Since I have, at one time or another, performed in professional groups of the same type and paid for the upkeep on my instruments as well as a few beers, then why do I do it for free?

Actually some recent experiences (see future blog entry "It's the pits!" for particulars) have led me to ask myself the very same question. Maybe I can use this venue to work out the answer.

One of the things that has always bothered me is the cost of attending live performances be they theater, orchestra concerts, opera, ballet, and the like. Pop music is kind of a different animal so I'm going to to stick to the venues I operate in the most. Right now (2009) in the Midwest it's $50 for cheap seats at any of these. And I'm not talking road troupes of current broadway productions either.

I'm talking Des Moines Symphony - certainly not one of the big 5 or even the big 50, Des Moines Playhouse, or Des Moines Civic Opera (although the latter IS one of the finest summer opera programs in the country). So it costs my wife and I $100.00 to attend a performance of any of these professional organizations. Got a family of four and you want to introduce the kids to live music or theater? Two Benjamins just for tickets not to mention intermission refreshments or a dinner before. I don't know about you, but I still consider a hundred dollars to be a lot of money. I know I'll consider it a lot of money when I retire on the pittance the bankers and Wall Street left me after paying out multi-millions in bad loans and executive salaries. But I digress.

So what do you do if you are living on a fixed income and you love to hear a live symphony orchestra or go to a live performance of a broadway musical? What do you do if you're a young married couple that wants the kids to absorb some live culture before they are completely brainwashed by MTV? Not to mention what you do if you are a single parent struggling just to put food on the table. What you do is to try to find free or very low ticket amateur productions.

The orchestra I play in gives free concerts and supports itself on member dues (that's right - we PAY to play) and donations. It exists on a shoestring and is constantly teetering on the verge of not being able to afford to put on the next concert. The theater group I play in the pit for charges $12 a seat, but considering the royalties charged by the companies that rent the music and parts in addition to costs to build sets, make costumes, etc. this is about as fine as they can cut it and continue to exist. But in spite of the shoestring budget, the home built sets and costumes, the actors and musicians put everything they have into it. The result is that the productions may not look as slick as the ones seen in the Civic Center, but the performances are filled with the passion and expertise that only tender loving care can give them. Audience responses are universally positive and even relatives visiting from the coasts who have been dragged to these performances are amazed at the quality.

Now I could pick up a gig now and then playing for the folks that can afford the best or I can play for the folk who love live performance and can't afford to pay for it. I can play for people who consider a large part of their ticket price to be their visibility as one of those who have arrived or I can help build the future audiences that will keep live performance viable in the future. I've come to a point in my life where I want to give something to the have nots. I've had a lot of things in my life that I regret and will never be able to change and while this doesn't make up for them - it's a way to do something very positive.

Bottom line, you can go out and drop several hundred dollars on an evening's dinner and entertainment and get broadway sets, polished performances long ago set in stone, or the finely tuned emotionless symphonic performances - you'll get what you paid for. Or you can go on the cheap to a performance where everyone is there for the love of it and every performance, though in humble surroundings, will be full of heart and enthusiasm. And as a bonus, you help preserve the group entertaining you so they can provide entertainment to those who otherwise could never see a live performance. For an old utility outfielder of the music biz there's no comparison.