rant

I’m going to get a few pet peeves off my chest – this isn’t a typical blog entry for me, so if you’re looking for pithy prose about arcane aspects of the classical music business, you might want to skip this one. If you’re interested in the petty whining of a professional violist and malcontent, then this is right up your alley.

I really hate the judgmental attitudes of people in the music business. If you don’t have a full-time job, or the right job, or haven’t studied with the right people, or just people that they think are “right”, then you are the musical equivalent of second-rate chopped liver. I remember being at school, both a private university and a conservatory, and looking down on people who were ed majors, or studied with the “lesser” teacher at the school, or who just hung out with people who didn’t play as well as I thought I did. And it makes me sick to my stomach now to think back on it. It was so petty – and it IS so petty.

Another thing that I hate is that if you want to be noticed in this business, you have to shove your nose well up into the anal region of people who have the “power”. Brown-nosing is a skill that starts to get developed as soon as you are old enough to get some sort of gig. You start talking nicely to the contractor for some crappy wedding gig – telling them about how great your teacher is, what hard repertoire you’re working on, what great jobs you had before this one, and how nice their new tailored jacket looks on them. Networking seems to be a constant need in a lot of professions, but somehow it seems obscene in the context of the fine arts. If you turn something down, fail to flatter the contractor, or simply don’t call someone for a few weeks, you are dropped off the “list”. It’s a horrible way to make a living.

There’s a class of people in almost any orchestra who thrive on gossip: who’s dating who, who’s having an affair with whom, about who played badly in the last rehearsal or concert, and how much they hate that person for their mediocrity – how dare they play below my high standards! [Does this sound familiar after reading the first paragraph?] I find that when I don’t know the drama behind the scenes, my enjoyment of the process of being a professional musician in an orchestra grows exponentially. I remember teaching at a festival held at Interlochen and the bass teacher there was Paul Ellison. We were talking about life in an orchestra, he after having been the principal bassist of the Houston Symphony for decades, and me after being the the Oregon Symphony for a couple years. One of the topics we alighted on was the crowd of people that were constantly running down their colleagues and their orchestras. Paul called them the “Ain’t It Awful” crowd. I struggle constantly to keep from falling into this trap, but it is like a siren song to all musicians, and it often takes more willpower than I possess to resist it.

Here endeth the rant.