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.

Music Therapy

It had been a long tedious work day. Expiring deadlines coupled with unreasonable requests for last minute changes. Members of other departments calling for help rather than solving problems on their own. The ongoing process of new and exciting software bugs appearing requiring fruitless hours of troubleshooting. I was tired. Maybe not physically but certainly mentally fatigued. When I got home the last thing I wanted to do was go out again and exert any effort whatsoever.

But we had a double reed quartet rehearsal scheduled. After a quick frozen pizza refueling (frozen pizza hardly qualifying as food but simply fodder) I packed up the bassoon case, grabbed a stand and crawled into the car. My wife, in much better spirits than I, loaded her oboe and english horn and we headed for the interstate and a thirty minute drive to our second bassoonist's house.

Our double reed quartet is a fledgling effort, as yet gigless and still in search of coherence. We'd not met since the end of our orchestra season in May and I was hoping to make it through the evening with little heavy lifting. All four of us play in the same orchestra. The thirty something accountant second oboe with the blazing technique and amazing sight reading, the mid twenties band teacher second bassoon starting her family and my wife and myself, both of the latter of another generation.

The four of us are good friends and as we assembled instruments and fussed with reeds we caught up with each other. Second oboe was back from a weekend country music festival - wife and I had tales of horrible and amazing experiences playing for a community musical. As we began to rehearse we kept it light playing several tangos, a Gottschalk dance and a Csardas and as we played some of the things that keeps guys like me playing began to happen. When a group like this is formed there is a period when everyone may be playing their parts but the real ensemble, the "oneness" that is the goal of fine performance only comes with time, with familiarity with the other players and learning to feel what the other players will do, how they will form their expression and nuance almost before they do it. And finally, last night after three years of sporadic rehearsals searching for repertoire and a voice as a group, it began to happen. We began to sense how this player would interpret this phrase, that ritard. How two of us should articulate a passage together. How we begin to transcend the written dynamics and shape the rise and fall together. As the two hours came to an end we worked on a Bach prelude and finally for a brief moment we four became one voice - the voice of an organ - the whole much greater than the sum of its parts.

Driving home I was no longer tired. My wife and I didn't speak much - we have been together long enough that we didn't need to. This is why we keep doing it. Because sometimes, sometimes the magic happens.

Midwest Mediocrities

This week's exasperations revolve around the orchestra I play in. It's a major crapfest and a lengthy explanation. Proceed at your own risk.

As you may recall this is a "community" orchestra meaning there's no pay - there's not enough money in Insurance City to support more than one paying orchestra so the surplus musicians band together to thumb their noses at midwest mediocrity by giving free concerts. This year a somewhat misguided decision was made to provide live music for the city ballet corps. Whether a semi-professional ballet company can survive here is problematical, but some new blood has been brought in to try to pump life into the previously hit and miss amateur group. The result of this collaboration has been a series of bumbling mishaps as the current production lumbers like Karloff in Frankenstein toward the performances.

The first near disaster for the orchestra involved obtaining the music. The selected ballet was choreographed to a hodge podge of twentieth century European compositions. In a classic cart before the horse maneuver, the orchestra committed to the performance having no knowledge of what it would take to obtain the music and how much it would cost. (It seems that the previously performances used recorded music and to hell with rights and royalties.) Music that is still in copyright and is used for ballet requires the acquisition of "grand rights", a "gotcha" section of the copyright law that allows music rental companies and copyright holders to deliver a huge kick in the gonads to the bank accounts of the performing organization. The cost of obtaining the music for this performance thus ends up costing five times what our regular concert music rentals cost. Yeah - we'll just ask our wealthy patrons to cough up more cash - you know, the people who attend our concerts because they can't afford tickets to the pro group in town.

Problem two with the music rental is obtaining music from Russia. Combine a fog dwelling rental agent in New York with recalcitrant heirs of the Shostakovich estate in Russia and we wind up getting most of the music for Act III one week before the final rehearsals with the ballet. Can you say "fake it and hope for the best"? I knew that you could.

The music itself is dauntingly difficult. The music is unfamiliar enough that some of it was only known to our conductor from listening to a CD. Estimating the difficulty of music without the score in front of you is risky to say the least. In an organization like ours we have a wildly divergent array of abilities and most of the top quality string players in town have been absorbed into the pro group. While there are moments of adequacy within the slings and arrows of the scores, for much of the time the rendition of the faster string passages is - to be kind - chaotic.

But enough about the music. Here we have a ballet corps trying to make a big impression as a newly vitalized group, they want big crowds, they want four nights of rehearsal with the orchestra and two performances on a Saturday. So when do they schedule the performances? The week of the high school state wrestling tournament with the performances on the day of the finals! Now in a civilized state located more toward the easterly part of the continent this might cause many to say "so what?" but in corn country high school tournaments attract crowds only rivaled by visits of the Pope to Central America. And in this state wrestling is HUGE. So all during rehearsals and particularly during the performances finding a place to park within walking distance of the Civic Center becomes challenging. Ballet vs. wrestling in this town? Ballet is going to take a beating.

So last night we enter the Civic Center for our first round of rehearsal with the dancers. Rehearsal scheduled 5:30 to 9:30. Are you KIDDING me? Volunteer orchestra you egotistical dance twerps. That means everyone has a day job. Sorry, I'm not taking time off from my job that I might use later in some leisure activity of my own choosing to accommodate this insane schedule. Yeah, and feel free to abuse volunteer musicians. If you were dealing with union musicians they would laugh at a four hour rehearsal with visions of dollar signs dancing in their wee little heads.

Conditions in the multi million dollar civic center are eye opening. Getting to the orchestra pit requires negotiating a formidable concrete staircase. For the young and fit no problem. For some of the elderly instrumentalists this is a major obstacle. No, there is no elevator. The pit itself lives up to its name. It looks like the janitor's room in my high school. Pipes and electrical conduit festoon the ceiling and walls. The black paint has not been renewed since the center opened in 1979. The web site for the center says the pit accommodates 50 musicians. The word "accommodate" seems to mean "will hold 50 musicians if arranged as in a Japanese subway car". Playing with someone's elbow in your ribs can offer a unique challenge.

Through the evening surprises abound. The center supplies a CD player for the playing of sound effects. No one in the building, including the crew demanded by the union, can figure out how to make it work. Constant tinkering finally makes it available for the last fifteen minutes of the rehearsal. One entire bank of stand lights in the pit flicker and fail completely from time to time leaving the players concerned either dropping out or improvising with varying degrees of success. Pleas to the house crew have no effect.

Professional ballet company? Sorry gang, but you are several reality checks short. Better luck in the future.

Professional venue? I've played in professional venues and Civic center - you are no professional venue.

Two more nights of rehearsal followed by two "anything can happen" performances. I can hardly wait.