Part 1 – locked out in the cold
You’ve just gotta love this profession. No matter how many roadblocks get tossed in their path, musicians always seem to find a way around them, taking things in stride and laughing about it later with each other over either coffee or beer (depending on the hour!). Whether it’s butchering the Messiah by whacking the transposition button on the organ, dropping bows and breaking into hysterics mid-concert, or finding oneself face-to-face with a leering colleague just as they are about to play a big solo, musicians are often only a hair’s breadth away from making fools of themselves in very public settings. As a result, we musicians are apt to take life’s inconveniences in stride and roll with the punches more often than other folks, making lemonade out of lemons on a regular basis.
I had a recent week of orchestral work that teetered on the brink between hilarity and disaster recently. It’s amazing how unforeseen circumstances can take an excellent pack of musicians (which this group most certainly was) and make them want to tear their hair out by the end of the experience.
But, being both a musician and a person who gets a kick out of borderline disaster situations, I couldn’t help but smile as the week unraveled, knowing that I’d have some great blog fodder for future weeks.
This is one of those tales that, just when you think the weirdness is over, continues to surprise you. I’ll spread this over a couple of posts, so expect more soon.
One quick note before I start–this is an excellent ensemble that I’m referencing, and the wackiness results strictly from unforeseen circumstances and never from musical shortcomings. In other words, I’m not ripping on the group in any way, shape, or form, simply pointing out the bizarre behind-the-scenes situations we musicians regularly encounter.
The week in question started with a Sunday morning rehearsal in a nondescript downtown Chicago office building on a blisteringly cold winter day. Being my usual obsessively early self, I arrived well over an hour before the rehearsal, parking underground, listening to my iPod in the dark, and trying not to accidentally fall asleep as I killed time before the gig. About 45 minutes before the start of the rehearsal, I finally pulled my bass out of the car and maneuvered my way up to street level, strolling over to the venue with plenty of time to spare.
Turning a corner with my bass, I noticed that the conductor for the gig was standing outside the rehearsal venue, chatting with another early arriver while glancing impatiently at her watch. The entire office building was locked tight–not surprising for a Sunday morning downtown, but sure to put a crimp it our morning rehearsal. Like a lemming, I started pulling on the door handle, thinking that it would magically open for me.
Nope.
I stood outside, bass in hand, my fingers chilling in the wintry air, as the conductor made a series of increasingly exasperated phone calls.
“What do you mean, you left the key? I’m standing outside! Where did you leave it? In your office? How could that possibly help?”
More and more musicians began to arrive, until the entire orchestra was standing outside on the sidewalk, a shivering mass of frosty cases and grumpy faces. Homeless guys were forced to reroute themselves around us as we began to slowly consume most of the sidewalk. In fact, take away the instruments and we could have easily passed for a group of homeless people ourselves, shivering in the Loop on a Sunday morning, huddled in front of the rehearsal space (soup kitchen), getting colder by the minute, waiting for the doors to let us in and play (eat).
Musicians remain musicians no matter what the circumstances, and I watched as two of the orchestra members started to chat animatedly about their various chamber music groups. Pretty soon, demo CDs and season brochures came out as these two players networked with each other, their breath puffing around their faces in the frigid air.
I couldn’t help but glance over toward the Wabash Avenue side of Symphony Center, the home of the Chicago Symphony, directly across the street from where we were huddled. The irony of huddling behind the home of the Chicago Symphony seemed to me that morning a perfect reminder of my place on the musical totem pole. I really am a bottom feeder, scuttling about, trying to get into office buildings when everyone else is asleep or at church.
“Does anyone have an apartment nearby?” asked the conductor. “Maybe we could all cram in and….”
I smiled at the thought of us hauling timpani up some rickety Chicago stairwell and cramming an orchestra into someone’s little bachelor pad. Would the violins be in the living room and the brass in the kitchen? Maybe they’d put me in the bathroom.
“Anybody know anywhere we can rehearse?” asked another ensemble member.
Folks halfheartedly mumbled various locations, perhaps realizing the dim likelihood of being able to actually find a new venue on the spur of the moment. I suggested that we try to ‘crash’ Symphony Center, grabbing the rehearsal room and seeing how long we could play before being shut down. That didn’t go over too well. I then suggested just unpacking and playing on the sidewalk. I had been standing outside for nearly 45 minutes already, so my bass was probably about as cold as it was going to get. Hey, we could even put out hats and collect spare change at the same time–a whole orchestra of buskers, complete with conductor!
No dice. Oh well.
I began shifting back and forth, tightening and relaxing my muscles to try and warm up, my fingers tired and numb from holding my bass up. The contractor suggested that we all head over to Starbucks for a coffee while they try to get things sorted out. I’m always up for a coffee, but especially so after being trapped out in the cold for the better part of an hour. Most of the musicians started to migrate down the block toward for coffee, myself included.
Rotating doors stood in my way, mocking me with their bass-crunching panels. Although it was technically possible to squeeze in one of these with a bass, I was nothing but trouble awaiting me if I attempted it, so I did a little dance through a connecting building, ignoring the suspicious gaze of the security guard, and squeezed through an old-fashioned regular door for my coffee. We had now divided into two groups–the coffee-desiring and the non-coffee-desiring.
As I stood in line, I glanced back toward the rehearsal venue and saw….musicians going in! Someone must have opened the door. Forgetting about coffee, I did a little dance back through the connecting lobby and out onto the street, The last of the non-coffee-desiring musicians were ntering the building as I sped down the sidewalk with my bass, the door shutting behind them just as I was coming up on the rehearsal venue.
I pulled on it.
It was locked.
Again!
I looked inside, seeing the elevator doors closing, the musicians heading upstairs a few stories to the rehearsal space. I banged on the glass, now really irritated, as the rest of the coffee-bound musicians returned.
“Where’d they go?”
“I…don’t…know!”
“Did they….forget about us?”
“……..”
“Does anybody have a cell phone number….for anybody?”
Apparently, survival of the fittest kicks in when musicians are locked out in the cold. No one returned to let us in! We were yet again trapped outside in the cold (now for well over an hour) without even a cup of coffee to show for it, and no one seemed to notice that half of the orchestra was missing.
One of the violinists started cracking wise about the whole thing, making me smile even in my annoyed state.
“That’s it! They’ve left us. Who’d notice that there are no strings? Who could say? Is this some kind of joke? Where’s the camera?”
About 15 minutes later, one of the musicians we’d seen enter the building came down the stairs. He looked at us, confused.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
I mouthed some very not-nice words through the glass.
He opened the door.
“What’s going on?”
rrrrrrrr……
We all tried to cram (unsuccessfully) into the tiny office building elevator, finally making it to the rehearsal space, quite late, cold, annoyed, and grumpy–the perfect way to start a rehearsal.
My bass was a block of wooden ice at this point, and my fingers felt like little icicles. I’ve been trapped in the cold like this with my bass before, so I know the feeling of trying to play the bass with icy club hands , but that doesn’t mean that it feels good. In fact, it feels downright lousy.
I remember locking car keys inside my car with my bass inside several years ago on a day with air temperature hovering in the single digits below zero (Fahrenheit). I had eaten dinner without realizing that I had left my keys in the car, and I then had to call a tow truck, stand in the cold for around an hour, get into my frozen car (with my frozen bass) and tear down the road to try and make my rehearsal on time. I came trampling in just as the tuning A was being given, unpacked my bass with my frozen hands, and immediately started playing.
That day was much worse than simply being locked outside for a while in the cold, so I couldn’t be too annoyed at the situation, but it was only a harbinger of things to come. We had another rehearsal that night in a different location, seven hours later. I had lessons sandwiched together in the intervening hours, so I sped off to the suburbs to go teach some bass, my 13 hour day of bass playing only beginning.
Part 2 – parking nightmares
All things being equal, it is almost always a better deal to accept in-town work rather than out-of-town work as a freelancer. The pay is usually better, the hours are usually shorter, and the artistic quality is usually higher.
The one big bummer with working “in-town”, at least in Chicago, is dealing with urban parking. Although I have learned over the years when it’s advisable to hunt and when I should admit defeat and park in the $20 garage, it is still much more of a hassle than simply pulling into the ubiquitous parking lot of suburban gigs, pulling out my gear, and walking in the door.
Even the logistics of simply getting all the right musicians in the right place at the right time can be a considerable challenge, as evidenced by my tale about being locked outside the hall on a bitter winter night. This kind of thing happens all the time, and though I may have thought that getting locked out was the worst I was going to get during that week of work, I was dead wrong.
We had a second rehearsal, again in the city, later that evening for this plucky little opera company. Finishing a rehearsal at noon and having nothing until 7:00 p.m. always causes groans among musicians. We usually prefer to double up rehearsals and then get a good solid day off. Working early in the morning and then late at night may be fine for folks gigging within walking distance of their home, but for musicians commuting from far-flung suburbs, it’s a no-win situation. You end up either sitting in traffic for half of that break in an attempt to get a few minutes at home, or you find yourself drinking eight cups of coffee at the local diner or bookstore, shaking, sweating, and twitching from both caffeine and a lack of activity.
I ended up scheduling lessons for the entire break, making for a long but profitable day. That’s the way I like to operate–when I’m out of the house I’m on the clock and working, and when I’m home I’m on my own schedule and can set my own priorities.
The second rehearsal of the day was in a city neighborhood just north of downtown Chicago, the worst kind of area for parking, with extremely specific restrictions everywhere (15 minute parking, no parking after 6 p.m. except residents, etc.) but a dearth of garages or other legal places to leave your car. I arrived at the second rehearsal for the day quite early, knowing what I chore it would be to find parking in this neighborhood. I had to bring my bass, stool, stand, and stand light to this gig (plus my laptop), and I didn’t relish the prospect of trudging around in the bitter cold for seven or eight blocks hauling all of this gear.
I looked on a map, realizing that there was a university parking lot with free night parking about a mile away. Perfect! I headed for the lot, actually finding a spot on the street about a block closer to the gig. I pulled out my gear, got it all balanced as best as I could manage, and started the long walk south.
I immediately realized that the distance was…well, much greater than it looked on the map. Block after block went by, and I began to regret my parking decision…not that there was much that I could do at that point. As I neared the gig I found a whole bunch of open spots on the streets just a block away. Aaargh! They hadn’t been there when I passed that street earlier, and they would of course be snatched up if I tried to go get my car at that point.
I played the rehearsal, enjoying the music (this was a good group) but dreading the slog back north with my gear. I contemplated leaving my gear and getting my car, but I hate doing that–if I’m already walking to the car, why not just haul all the gear with me and save as trip? Maybe when I’m 60 years old I’ll change my mind, but I’m still young enough and full of enough pride to not resort to this.
Heading out the door, I glanced in the alley, noticing that all of the musicians had parked their cars up against the building, blocking the alley from other cars but making life a lot easier for their commute home. Irritated, I began to trudge back toward my car. So this is what honesty gets you….
As I walked back with all of my gear, several of the orchestra musicians rolled down their windows as they passed me.
“Why are you walking?”
“I like walking!”
“Really?”
“Yes!”
They looked at me like I was a weirdo (not the first time I’ve gotten that look in my life!) and drove off.
Part 3 – behind the scenery
Now on our third rehearsal, the orchestra for this small but feisty opera company congregated at the concert venue (a nice modern facility) for our first time performing with staged cast. We had been informed that, though this was a large theater with an orchestra pit, we would be playing the entire score backstage.
One may wonder why management would choose, in a theater with a perfectly serviceable orchestra pit, to put the orchestra behind the scenery. One would be justified in wondering about this. Truth be told, I have absolutely no idea, and neither did the orchestra conductor. Questions directed toward her about this from the orchestra were met with a sardonic smile and a shrug, an appropriate response to many things that happened that week.
Despite the considerable size of the stage (and small operatic cast), we orchestra musicians found ourselves jammed into a little strip against the rear wall of the theater, crunched up beneath a big white backdrop which was elevated about five feet against the far wall. This, to put it mildly, made for an odd spectacle. Here we were, with plenty of space on three sides of us, jammed together like a bunch of sardines, our bows banging each other’s instruments, the trumpet’s bell pointed directly into the violist’s ear, the tympani player ducking and weaving like a musical boxer to try and see around my bass. When I asked if the white backdrop could be raised up a little more (my bass scroll kept banging against it as I played, and I didn’t have an extra inch to move elsewhere), a cranky stagehand launched into a condescending and aggressive lecture about how there as “absolutely no way” that this could be changed.
“OK,” I said. “But I’ll be banging against it the whole show trying to play.”
We were then treated to a lecture about how expensive the big white backdrop was and how we needed to be careful around it. The conductor flashed that sardonic grin at us, letting us know that she realized how ridiculous this all was. We proceeded to start the rehearsal in our sardine can setup, bumping elbows while staring out at the vast expanse of vacant stage on all sides of us.
We began our rehearsal, despite the fact that the stage crew was in the middle of a very noisy set-up just a few feet away from us. Such is the fate of small arts organizations. Time in a hall is expensive and therefore limited, and what would be spread out across multiple days and in multiple rooms (scenery assembly, ensemble rehearsal, vocal coaching) at the Metropolitan Opera must often happen at the same time in the same cramped space in smaller organizations. The result is often noisy and chaotic, and it makes rehearsal difficult if not impossible.
Drills buzzed loudly as we began the delicate strains of he opera, the conductor grinning and doing her best to tough it out through the anarchy. She tried to shout out some comments but quickly gave up, waving her hand disgustedly at the drill crew and soldiering on through the first part of the score.
The conductor had a camera trained on her that connected to two small monitors located on either side of the stage (they looked like old computer LCD screens). There was, however, no monitor for her! She had to basically wave her arms at a wall, hoping that the singers were paying attention. Communication is, to put it lightly, quite difficult under these circumstances! The conductor would try to move the tempo but have absolutely no success. Why? Well, perhaps the singers weren’t looking at the small LCB screens at that moment and missed the change in tempo. Accurately catching singer entrances was also practically impossible. The poor conductor had her arms up, poised and listening for an entrance, and then playing catch up with the tempo to bring the orchestra back in line with the singer.
This less-than-ideal situation gave the entire piece an untidy and out-of-phase quality, like watching a movie with the sound out of sync, and it certainly gave me a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.
To complicate matters further, the stage director for the production was what one would politely call a ‘hands-on’ type of guy. He dashed around back and forth like he’d just had 12 espresso shots, chattering animatedly and gesticulating wildly at cast, crew, and….us!
Instructions for the orchestra usually come through a chain of command in a theatrical situation, with directions from the stage communicated to the conductor, who then proceeds to pas them along to the ensemble. No so with this stage director. As we began our first rehearsal with him in the room, he immediately popped his head around the doorway, like a mother ostrich who’s just discovered a predator going after her baby. He began walking toward the orchestra, yelling animatedly and waving his arms around.
“No! Is not how music goes! Why is so slow? Why, why, why, WHY? It must move–yes yes….harp! Why is sound like that? NO! Is not the way!”
Part 4 – look out!
We had just wrapped up our dress rehearsal for this plucky little opera company, having cheerfully survived being locked out in the cold, rehearsing in all sorts of scattered venues across the city, enduring drills and nail guns during rehearsals, dodging overecaffeinated stage directors strutting and pecking backstage like giant roosters, and watched with fascination and confusion as our conductor attempted to lead the singers and ensemble backstage, with no monitors, headphones, or any sort of two-way line of communication whatsoever.
So how’d the concerts go?
Well, despite having our share of circumstantial struggles during the rehearsal process, we were seasoned pros, and as freelancers we’d all seen more than our share of the aforementioned wacky experiences. But the wackiness had not yet finished for the week, and we would soon have our biggest challenges thus far for the week.
Our first concert for the series happened on a Friday night, and I schlepped my gear down early, plopping down my $20 for parking (the same garage was $4.75 only a few years ago–jerks!) and hauling my gear down into the theater where our performances were happening. This was a great little theater (not that we could see much of it wedged backstage like we were), and I was excited to play these concerts. Working in the city, good money for fun performances–good times, good times. I got myself situated backstage, the first musician to show up (not a rare occurrence for me), tuned up my bass, and watched some video podcasts on my iPod as I waited for my colleagues to arrive.
People started streaming in, and by the half-hour mark the entire orchestra was assembled, brushing snow off their cases and tossing their coats up against the rear wall of the hall. As folks began tuning up and chatting with each other, I overheard a startling and alarming little tidbit:
Our concertmaster had, between the previous afternoon’s rehearsal and this evening’s opening night concert, caught a flight out of town, and he was now trapped in an airport one state over! And this performance had only one first violin, meaning that the primary orchestral melodic voice was…missing!
The freaked-out backstage scramble began.
One may wonder why a musician would fly out of town with such a tight time margin between rehearsal and performance, but such is the life of a freelance musician. Cobbling together a series of part-time jobs necessitates highly intricate scheduling, and this violinist did quite a bit of business out of town. For freelancers (and I’ve certainly done my fair share of this!), if it works, even just barely works, we do it. It’s part of the job, the piecemeal lifestyle of the at-large musician, and though I like to think that I wouldn’t fly out of town for just a few hours in the middle of winter and reasonably expect to make it back to Chicago (especially given today’s airline environment plagued with delays and cancellations), if someone had offered me a similar proposal, I may have rolled the scheduling dice and accepted the work.
Anyway, his original return flight had been canceled, and he was rescheduled for a later flight that was supposed to land at 6:30 pm at O’Hare International Airport. The downbeat for the opera was 7:30 pm. Land at 6:30 pm and make it into the hall, ready to go by 7:30 pm? On a Friday evening? Hmmm…this was probably not going to work.
In some towns, getting from the airport to the city center in an hour would be a breeze, but this is Chicago we’re talking about. Sprawl, traffic, congestion–yup, we’ve got it all. The actual stretch of road between airport and downtown was only eight miles, but those eight miles could crawl along at an excruciatingly slow speed, with a drive that would take five minutes in my native South Dakota easily taking over an hour.
And he didn’t have to just drive the distance. He also was facing:
Getting from tarmac to parking garage (this step alone could take 20 minutes easily)
Getting from parking garage to downtown (again, easily an hour)
Finding parking downtown
Getting from downtown parking to concert hall
He could have hopped the Chicago El Blue Line to get downtown, leaving his car stranded at the airport. But even that ride takes an hour (this train line is undergoing extensive renovation, making it even slower at present than usual–and it’s not all that fast normally!), making him automatically late if he boarded that train. His only hope was to get on the highway and pray for miraculously light rush hour congestion.
You could see the sweat start to break out on the contractor’s brow and the mental gears start to furiously whir. What was looking like a walk-in-the-park opening performance had suddenly turned into a frantic scramble for a last-minute replacement. Where on Earth could one find a quality violinist who knew the part (remember all the previously discussed adverse performance factors for this gig–not a great time for sightreading) and was available on a Friday night with less than an hour’s notice.
Much scurrying and frantic cell phone dialing commenced as we all looked around uneasily. As the contractor called down the list, we were getting cell phone updates from the stranded concertmaster:
“He’s landed! He’s on the highway. Uh, oh…traffic’s bad.”
Miraculously, a violinist who knew the piece answered her phone, and she got in her car and dashed downtown to help with damage control. She came in with a few minutes to spare, out of breath and brushing snow off of her case as she was quickly informed of the situation. The second violinist agreed to play the first violin part, and the stop-gap violinist agreed to play the second violin part.
The conductor smiled at all of us (though she must have been knotted with stress inside from all this last-minute panic), and we began.
About 20 minutes into the performance, the stranded concertmaster arrived, and there was some speedy shuffling as the second violinist moved back to her chair, the original concertmaster took over his part, and the stop-gap violinist took off, her job finished for the evening. Talk about a pro! Anyone who can go from hanging out at home to donning concert dress and driving through snow in Friday traffic in a matter of minutes, walk in, play the part, and slip out the back after her job’s done is a real freelance pro. If it were me, I’d probably have had my phone off, so I’d never have gotten the call.
One would think that our ensemble misfortunes would be over for the evening, but this was unfortunately not the case. About ten minutes before the conclusion of the opera, we heard a strange sound above us.
A piece of the light fixture suddenly came whizzing down from the fly lines directly above us.
Wooosh!
It slammed down in the middle of the orchestra, missing the flute player by less than a foot.
Bang!
We all jumped as if someone had thrown a grenade into the orchestra, looking around, unable to believe what had just happened. Then as we continued to play we all began looking up at the fly lines uneasily, squirming around in our chairs, waiting for something else to fall and take one of us out.
The next performance, I looked up at the lights as soon as I got to the hall. There was now duct tape all over the place up there, having been apparently applied sometime between the previous night’s performance and this evening’s show. I frowned, wondering just how well tape secured hot metal lights. Well the stage crew must know what they’re doing, right?…..uh….well, I just hope I don’t die before this week is done!