justinkagan1
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(5/4/01 8:59:42 am)
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Garrison Keillor weighs in....
From his comfortable
position as a well-known author,
Garrison Keillor feels every
sympathy for his underpaid, overworked violinist
wife.
A Foot Soldier in God's Floating Orchestra
My wife is a violinist, a freelancer, a foot soldier in
God's floating
orchestra, who waits for the phone to ring, and
then goes off and plays the
Faure Requiem at a Presbyterian
church at 7 PM on the 21st, rehearsal at 5
PM, or six rehearsals
and eight performances of The Montagues and the
Capulets, or a
concert of African-American composers for Black History Month
and comes back to tell me stories about the soprano with the big
diva
attitude and major pitch problems, and the timid
clarinetist, and the blatty
trombone player, and the French horn
player who dropped his mute during the
quiet passage. For her
work, which is highly skilled and requires years of
exacting
preparation, and is stressful, being so unforgiving of errors, she
is paid a fraction of what a rookie waiter of modest charm could
earn on any
Friday night in an upscale restaurant. But she is
glad for the work, and her
complaints about the pay are always
good-natured. Of course it helps that she
married well. When she
was 14, she left the little town that we both grew up
in, and
went off to music school, and to violinist boot-camp, and landed in
New York City, where she worked for 20 years, bopping around
from opera tour
to regional symphony, to pop shows, to Broadway
pit orchestras, to church
gigs, and off to Japan with a pick-up
orchestra, to do Vivaldi and Bach. And
then tour the South with
Madama Butterfly.
My wife has played for Leonard Bernstein,
and she has also played for the
Lippezaner Stallions. She is a
pro. I love to sit up and wait for her to come
home after a
performance, and hear how it went. Usually, it went just fine.
Sometimes she is ecstatic about what they played, or about some
singer who
was especially fine.
Sometimes she grits her
teeth. The trumpets were bad, or the baritone dropped
a wind
glass on the stage, and it rolled into the pit and almost creamed
the
harpist. Often she has something pithy to say about the
conductor or the
soloist. If she says, "I thought he was very
unprofessional," it's a real
slap. A famous soloist who is
haughty towards the commoners backstage --
that's unprofessional
-- it's just not done! A conductor who glares at
someone who
just played a bad note -- unprofessional! Worse than the bad
note. Orchestra professionalism is a world apart from mine: mine
prizes
attitude and a rakish hat, and star quality, and
interesting underwear. And
this concept of professional(alism),
prizes ensemble playing, and precision,
and a sort of
selflessness -- and this concept of professionalism can be
expressed in certain principles. You won't find this list posted
backstage,
but, my wife tells me, that's because everybody knows
this stuff right out of
music school.
1. You are, of
course, on time. Always! Don't come an hour early (amateurish)
but never come late. Never! This is an Orchestra, and you are
Violinist,
you're not some paper-pusher at Amalgamated Bucket.
(Orchestra musicians are
experts at finessing public
transportation, and if they do drive, at finding
parking spaces
no matter what, legal, or illegal. Everybody has a strategy
for
"Getting to the Gig," and a back-up strategy in case the area is
cordoned
off for a Presidential motorcade, and an emergency
strategy, in case of
earthquake or civil disorder, or an
invasion of the body snatchers.)
2. Don't show off warming
up backstage. Don't do the Brahms Concerto. Don't
whip through
the Paganini you did for your last audition. Warm up and be cool
about it.
3. Backstage you hang out with other string
players, not brass or percussion.
You don't get into a big
conversation with the tuba player, lest you be
lulled into
relaxation. He is not playing the Brandenburg No. 3 that opens
the show -- you are. Stick with your own kind, so you can start
to get
nervous when you should.
4. You never chum around
with the conductor, too much. Likewise the
contractor who hired
you; you can be nice but not fawning, subservient. If
one of
them is perched in the musicians' common backstage, don't gravitate
there. Don't orbit.
5. You never look askance at someone
who has made a mistake. Never! If the
clarinet player squeaks,
if the oboe honks, if the second stand cello lumbers
in two bars
early, like lost livestock, you keep your eyes where your eyes
should be. You are a musician, not a critic. String players
never disparage
their stand partners to others. Stand
partnership is an intimate
relationship, and there is a zone of
safety here. Actually, you shouldn't
disparage any musician in
the orchestra to anybody, unless to your husband
(or spouse), or
very good friends. But you never say anything bad about your
stand partner.
6. If the conductor is a jerk, don't
react to him whatsoever. Ignore the
shows of temper. If he makes
a sarcastic joke at the expense of a musician,
do not laugh, not
even a slight wheeze or twitter.
7. Try to do the
conductor's bidding, no matter how ridiculous. If he says,
"Play
this very dry, but with plenty of vibrato," go ahead and do it,
though
it's impossible. If he says, "This should be very quick
but sustained," then
go ahead and sustain the quick, or
levitate, or walk across the ceiling, or
whatever he wants. He's
the boss.
8. Don't bend and sway as you play. Stay in your
space. You're not a soloist,
don't move like one. No big sweeps
of the bow. And absolutely never, never,
never tap your foot to
the music.
9. Go through channels. If you, a fifth stand
violin, are unsure if that note
in bar 143 should be C natural
as shown or B flat, don't raise your hand and
ask the maestro,
ask your section head, and let him/her ask Mr. Big.
10. You
do not accept violations of work rules passively. When it's time to
go, it's time to go. If it's Bruno Walter and the Mahler Fourth,
and you're
in Seventh Heaven, then of course, you ignore the
clock. But, if it's some
ordinary jerk flapping around on the
podium, you put your instrument in the
case when the rehearsal
is supposed to be end. It was his arrogant pedantry
that chewed
up the first hour of the rehearsal, and now time is up, and he's
only half way through The Planets, and is in a panic. If he
wants to pay
overtime, fine. Otherwise, let him hang, it's his
rope. At the performance,
you can show him what terrific
sight-readers you all are.
It's all about manners and
maintaining a sense of integrity in a selfless
situation, and
surviving in a body of neurotic perfectionists. And it's about
holding up your head, even as orchestras in America languish and
die out,
victims of their own rigidity and stuffiness and of a
sea change in American
culture.
Perhaps in a hundred
years orchestra musicians will seem like some weird
priestly
order akin to the Rosicrucians or the worshipers of Athens. But in
the rehearsal for the Last Performance, the players will arrive
on time, and
take their places and play dryly but with vibrato,
and not tap their feet.
And one violinist will come home and
have a glass of wine, and say to her
husband, "Why can't they
find a decent trombonist?"
(Garrison Keillor read this over
BBC Radio 3 over the Easter weekend.)
************
American String Teachers Association - Discussion List - ASTA-L
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