Blog

If you’ve followed this blog over the years, you probably noticed a precipitous decline in the number of posts since 2010.

Just in case you’re wondering, I didn’t fall off the face of the planet.

My work life shifted pretty radically when I started teaching high school full-time. It’s not that I wasn’t busy before that (during most of my first few years writing this blog, I was balancing freelance bass playing, teaching 40 bass students, and going back to school), but taking the full-time job ramped my life up to a whole new level of activity. Not only did I find the bulk of my discretionary time evaporate, but I found my metal energy and creativity exhausted at the end of the day. Working in the types of orchestra programs with which I’ve been involved in suburban Chicago, with all of their myriad intricacies–repertoire, trips, chamber music, and the like–consumed all of my mental capacity. All I wanted to do when I came home was collapse on the couch and try to remember to set my alarm for the next morning.

Taking a day off turned into a week off, then a month off, and before I knew it the blog/podcast workflow was a distant memory. I made a few attempts to get others involved and to maybe take them over (both of these sites still get a lot of traffic despite not being updated much in the past five years), but nothing ever seemed to exactly work out. I would try now and again to ramp them back up, but work would quickly pull me back in.

What follows are some thoughts about the life I used to live (freelancing/blogging/podcasting), the life I’ve been living these past seven years (high school orchestra director), and what I see for myself in the future.

What I didn’t like about the “computer lifestyle” of the blog/podcast
Spending time in our new “second home”
Spending time in our new “second home”

I’ve documented heavily what I don’t like about the life of a freelancer. For me, it was not so much the reality of not having a steady paycheck (I did well as a freelancer and was never really worried about money after the first year or so of that life) as the feeling that I was driftless. I saw year after year of the same gigs stretching out ahead of me and was worried that what I was doing in my twenties would be identical to what I’d be doing in my thirties, forties, and fifties.

Would that be so bad? Of course not. I think that I realized it in the moment, but looking back, I realize how many advantages that lifestyle has to offer. For one thing, you have so much control over your schedule and your discretionary time. I like to think that I was fairly disciplined in my organizational habits as a freelancer (I got up early, practiced regularly, worked out, etc.) but when I think about the sheer amount of time I spend at my full-time job (let alone all the other activities that I still do–teaching at DePaul, playing gigs) I can’t imagine what it would be like to have hours free every day to organize as I wished.

It was actually not until the last couple years of freelancing that I started blogging and then podcasting, and that didn’t really heat up until I’d made the decision to go back to school and try to do something else. Allowing myself to not spend all that time practicing for auditions and beating myself up for not landing that elusive orchestra job freed up my mind and imagination, and I took a lot of the energy that I’d been focusing on bass and poured it into the internet stuff that I’d been hatching.

I had a real moment when I was going back to school where I was convinced that I was on the wrong path (a common feeling for most people at various junctures in their lives). I was set to drop out from the school program and pour all my energies into the blog and podcast, both of which were becoming successful and starting to generate real revenue for me. My father talked me down from that particular ledge and convinced me to finish out the school program. I did so, keeping up a pretty crazy schedule of school, blog, podcast, teaching, and gigs. My wife was starting medical school at the same point, and I got to watch with detached horror as all the money (and then some) that we’d earned as relatively successful freelancers disappeared into the maw of student loans. It was a dark few years in terms of that for sure.

In addition to doing the blog and podcast, I started to help out some nonprofit organizations with podcasting, and I found myself spending more and more time in front of the computer. As I was thinking seriously about dropping the education degree and diving headfirst into my online endeavors, I began to question just how much time I really wanted to be spending in front of the computer. I was really engaged with what I was doing, but I began to think–yet again–about the years and years stretching out ahead of me. Was this “tech stuff” really an improvement on my then current lifestyle of gigging and teaching? In the end, I decided to give the school gig route a go ad rising quickly through the ranks at several different schools. I now find myself in charge of an extremely strong orchestra program in suburban Chicago and living quite a different life from the mid-2000s.

What I like about the school gig
I love my students!
I love my students!

There are a few things that are really cool about teaching orchestra–things that I discovered almost immediately and have continued to believe are true for these past seven years:

– I’m “doing something real” – There’s something to be said for interacting face-to-face with real human beings every day to keep you grounded in reality, and nothing keeps you humble like teaching high school! I’ve never really taken myself that seriously, actually, though I take what I do seriously, and I find that this is a great attitude to take in a school job—it keeps things fun and good-natured while working toward great things.

– I’m having an immediate and discernible impact – With practicing bass, I sometimes (more than sometimes if I’m being honest) feel that I’m pouring hours and hours of my time and life force into these excerpts with little discernible impact. It was a revelation actually spending an hour really thinking about a piece and how to approach teaching and rehearsing it and to see so clearly how that prep time paid off. It’s amazing how much better just an hour of prep time on a score will make me!

– I feel like I’m constantly learning new skills – While I certainly feel this to an extent when practicing the bass (when I’m practicing the right ways, at least), the school gig is constantly throwing new challenges in my path, musical and otherwise. Going into conducting was a real shocker—I’d never thought of myself as a conductor and found occupying the podium wrong and troubling. “Stick fever” (that strange compulsion some performers have to conduct regardless of ability or competence) is a powerful thing, however, and while by no means do I consider myself a “maestro,” I have grown quite comfortable being in front of 100+ teenagers and breaking apart great music together.

– I feel like my “musician brain” is being used more in this lifestyle than in the freelancing lifestyle – This may seem strange, but I find that the activities of my current daily existence are much closer to the reasons why I went to music school than when I was just freelancing. I don’t know that this would be the case in a place that wasn’t as “high powered” as my current school (we have a huge orchestra program with a lot of talented kids, and it resembles much more a regional youth orchestra than a typical high school program),

What I miss about the Internet lifestyle
In Oakland with the wife
In Oakland with the wife

One huge thing that I have missed these passed few years it time to be creative. It was amazing to me how drained I was after each day at school. While the focus of the job is, of course, the face time with the students, which I totally love, there’s an avalanche of paperwork, deadlines, and seemingly urgent requests from students, parents, and administration. I expected nothing less, of course, but it was amazing to me how all-consuming it was. All I wanted to do was crash when getting home. Add to that a pretty long commute into downtown Chicago for most of those years and I found myself with at least 12 hours a day spent at work… and often much more like 15 or 16 hours.

I think that what I really miss is the time to think and to create. I’ve always enjoyed writing and, at the height of my blogging, was putting in several hours a day writing, editing, and thinking up new and interesting projects. That has been hard with the school job for sure.

The thing is, I look back over the past decade of my life and I realize that, like it or not, my Internet activities really were having a measurable and positive impact on the bass community. If I think about what I’ve done in my life thus far that has had some sort of lasting impact, it most certainly is the podcast, blog, etc. So why not give it another go? The pace of tech is so fast that the world I look at now as a consumer of technology (with my iPhone 6S+, Apple Watch, MacBook Air, and iPad) is a far cry from even 2007 or 2008. It makes me excited to think of the possibilities available with a little focus and creativity.

I’ve decided to do it—relaunch and dive back in. I have gotten better with school/life balance, I’ve got a lot more time on my hands this year (more on that later). So here’s what’s going on:

I’ve decided to relaunch with the following focus:

– Blog – useful Internet resource for bass players worldwide
– bass community news
– MP3, PDF, and app resources for students, teachers, and professionals
– distributed through all mainstream social channels (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Flipboard) in addition to the blog
– regular posting (yes, regular posting!)
– Podcast – interviews and music from important figures in the bass community
– regular posting schedule
– shorter in addition to longer content
– make an effort to highlight important older content (interviews with major figures in the bass world that have been buried in the archives, for example)

Here we go!

I had an amusing and somewhat embarrassing incident happen at a teacher event that I attended last year.

I was at an all-day music teacher workshop and was having a great time, like I usually do at this annual event. The whole day consists of hour-long clinics and sessions on a variety of topics, from teaching motion in string playing to score study for the busy conductor. Probably not the most scintillating material for all you bass players out there, but really cool stuff for me now that I’ve shifted career gears.

One of these sessions was taught by a dance instructor and was intended to get us more tied into body awareness (and just to break up the monotony of endless music education clinics).

For this session, we were lined up in parallel rows (there were about 70 of us at the event), and we were being instructed in various dance moves. This is not exactly one of my usual activities in life, but it was a fun diversion and I was having a good time with it.

A young female teacher who I happened to be standing next to leaned over to me early on in the session and whispered to me

“Hey Jason! You’re a really good dancer!”

This caught me off guard and was certainly flattering. I mean, I was just doing a line dance with a bunch of other music teachers, quasi-zombified after hours of clinics. I wasn’t aware that I was cutting such a slick stride across the dance floor. I smiled and thanked her.

A few minutes later, she asked me something that really threw me.

“Do you have a background in dance?”

Flattery on the educational dance floor was an unexpected thing for me, and like an idiot, I responded (quite untruthfully, by the way)…

“Why, yes!”

I have absolutely no idea why I uttered a boldfaced lie like that. It’s totally unlike me. I think that I was just caught off guard by her complimenting my dance moves so much.

I though I was safe with my little untruth, but of course, a few minutes later, the next question came…

“Hey Jason… what kind of dance background do you have, exactly?”

Uh oh.

I responded with something really unconvincing, like “you know…a little bit of this and a little bit of that.” Misrepresenting myself as an experienced dancer was becoming more uncomfortable with every passing minute.

Note to self: don’t lie. And if you do lie, it had better not be about something like your dance background!

I also like that there is a string teacher out there that thinks that I am a trained dancer. What was I thinking?

A friend of mine from my student teacher training program at DePaul once told me a painfully funny (to me, at least) story from his middle school student teaching days:

A bassoonist by trade, this student teacher had been assigned to strong music program in a very posh Chicago suburb. The first week he was “on the job,” his mentor teacher asked him to demonstrate for new band recruits… on the tuba!

It didn’t matter that this student teacher (bassoonist, remember) couldn’t actually play the tuba–the regular teacher decided that it would be a good experience for him. Yikes!

Anyway, he muscled up and gave it the old college try, hacking through what must have been a few entertaining blats and plops of sound.

After he finished, the mentor teacher sidled up to him and, whispering in his ear in a very serious tone, said “You know, that wasn’t very good at all.”

Duh! Gotta love humiliation in music. We’re all one wrong move away from making a complete fool of ourselves in this business anyway, but still, why pile on the pain like that?

Jason’s wife, Courtney, here. Though I’m not a bassist, I do play a
large instrument (the harp, whose lowest note is the same C as a bass’
with a C extension), and as such I feel an affinity for my bass-
playing bretheren and hope you’ll indulge me in a guest post.

As a professional harpist since 2001, I’ve played my share of normal,
everyday gigs that most other freelance instrumentalists have had
experience with. I’ve played with dozens of orchestras, from the
community orchestra down the street to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
I’ve played hundreds of weddings and nearly as many cocktail party-
type gatherings.

Over the years, unfamiliar situations that once made me nervous have
become routine, and I have developed a distinct mental blueprint for
efficiently executing the various gig types I encounter. For example,
my mental map of a typical cocktail party: load harp in car. Drive to
swanky venue using trusty GPS. Park as close as possible, especially
if in a snowstorm. Unload harp and wheel it into the venue, digging a
path through the snow if necessary. Pretend like it’s the first time
you ever heard the joke, “Bet you wish you played the (insert small
instrument here)!” even though at least one person says it to you
every single time you move your harp from one place to another.
Endeavor to keep your head from exploding when one more person looks
at the huge harp, which towers over your 5’10” body, and asks you,
“Hey! Is that a cello???” Find a mirror and make sure all of this fuss
didn’t mess up your hair or otherwise make you look unfit to play a
swanky party. Meet and endear yourself to the client and the catering
coordinator or event planner. Tune harp. Set up stand… Realize you
forgot stand in car while trying to keep your head from exploding when
passerby asked if your harp was a cello. Go back for stand.
Eventually… Play. Have fun. Chat with random and always-interesting
people on breaks. Etc. Okay, it’s not always a perfect blueprint, but
what I’m trying to say is that I generally know what to expect when
I’m on the job.

But my harp playing career has also brought me some rather out-of-the-
ordinary experiences. One summer day a few years ago, I had such an
experience. A call came in from a casting agency, saying that they had
found my website and were wondering if I wanted to come downtown and
audition to be in a commercial. Having zero experience with such
things at the time, I was thrown off. “Uh, well – I mean, sure, but
I’m not, like, an actor or anything,” I stammered. No, no, the man
said, this was an audition to play harp in a commercial, and he was
inviting about 20 other harpists from around town. Now I was back on
solid ground. “oh, a MUSIC audition. Yes, sign me up.”

The next day I was sitting in the casting agency’s office in a row of
other artsy-looking harpists seated along one wall. I learned that we
were auditioning for a commercial for Totes, which I vaguely recalled
as a brand of slippers, umbrellas, and maybe gloves. There must have
been another audition going on for a role called “Skinny Woman” or
“Woman with Pelvis-to-Head Ratio of Less Than 1,” because a row of
impossibly thin and far more fashionable ladies were seated along the
opposite wall.

The agency had rented a harp for the audition, and the paper-thin
walls in the trendy loft that housed the agency permitted each
harpist’s audition to come through loud and clear into the waiting
room. A harpist would be called in, and within moments we would hear a
blazingly confident, supremely professional rendition of a standard
harp excerpt or solo – we were told we could play whatever we wanted.
And this is when things started to become a bit unusual. Following
this performance, we would then hear a long series of muffled,
cacophonous harp sounds that are hard to describe directly. Rather,
I’ll liken it to an actor who has just performed a famous Shakespeare
monologue and then tries to repeat the same monologue, but this time
his mouth is stuffed full of cotton balls and the casting director is
trying hard to strangle him as he speaks. The harpist would then come
back to the waiting room to retrieve her things, face red and eyes
cast down to the floor, and hurry out before we could find out what
had happened. Every audition before me went this way, and I was
supremely uncertain of what was going to happen when I got called in
to the audition room.

Masking my nerves with a smile so wide my face hurt, I breezed into
the room and exchanged pleasantries with the casting director and
others in the room. I sat at the harp and played a piece I figured
people unfamiliar with the harp would like – one filled with
glissandos and other fun, flashy things that let me kind of ham it up
physically. This was an audition to play on camera, after all – I
figured that how it looked was at least as important as how it sounded
in the commercial milieu.

The casting director cut me off after a generous amount of time.
“Okay, that was really great. Now, I need you to play that again…
While wearing THESE.” And he proffered a pair of bright-red leather
gloves.

Mystery solved.

“Ah. Okay. You know, you… Can’t really play the harp with gloves
on,” I protested as politely as I could.

“Yes, so it seems,” replied the casting director, “But I need you to
TRY.”

Shrugging, I donned the gloves – rather loose and clumsy-feeling on my
bony fingers – and dove back into my solo with all the charisma I
could muster. Luckily, glissandos sound pretty darn good even with
gloves on. The bulk of the piece didn’t sound so great, but I left my
pride behind and just tried to have fun and look as graceful as
possible.

The director cut me off, promising a call the next day, and I returned
to the waiting room. The remaining harpists looked at me expectantly.
I walked to the exit and opened the door. Just before slipping out, I
turned and said, “You have to wear gloves.” The room burst into
conversation as I got out of there.

I actually ended up getting a callback audition and was subsequently
cast as the harpist in this commercial for Isotoner Gloves (made by
Totes). They ended up recording the harp separately (thank
goodness!!), then playing the track back as I faked playing the piece.
In addition to a cool experience on a set and getting to feel
glamorous with wardrobe, hair, and makeup, I got a great paycheck and
a sweet pair of leather gloves that had been perfectly tailored to my
fingers in order to look good in close-up shots. Unfortunately, I
eventually lost those gloves – probably in a moment of distraction on
a subsequent gig as I tried to remain polite when the thousandth
passerby asked me if I wish I’d played the piccolo.

A professional harpist for many years, Courtney currently works in a research lab and will be starting medical school at The University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine in August 2010.

What follows is a bit of a contrarian rant…

When you see a teenager walking down the street, white earbuds firmly implanted, swaying slightly to their own inner grove, you can be pretty much certain that it’s not classical music they’re listening to. Teenagers I know can enthusiastically rattle off the name of a dozen bands on their current favorite playlist, but ask them if they know who Brahms was and a funny kind of glazed look comes over their eyes. Even my music students, who I’d hope would know better, are astonishingly unknowledgeable about classical music, and if they don’t even know the names of these composer, you’d better believe that they don’t have an recordings by them.

Sales
The numbers for classical music consumption in general are, by any standard, frighteningly low. Only 3% of recordings sold in 2008 were classical, with the average classical music recording selling only 300 copies. And you’ll be disappointed if you think that this low figure is made up for in concert attendance—only 3% of concert tickets sold in 2008 were for classical music concerts, the same depressingly low figure as CD sales.

Who’s to blame for this incredibly low number? Though schools, television, and video games can all be blamed for the lack of popularity for classical music among teenagers, it really boils down to one reason: it’s just plain boring to them.

Now, I know that this doesn’t apply to all teens. I have plenty of students that listen to classical music all the time, which is very cool. But they’re in the minority! Also, I’m not exactly classical music connoisseur #1 myself–I typically listen for research purposes, while I’m working, or once in a great while for fun. The vast majority of the time I’m listening to bad 80s music (let the tomato throwing begin) or P-Funk-era stuff. I actually listen to music from a vast array of styles–rock, bluegrass, classical, jazz, early music, and more–but my total classical music consumption is probably pretty close to that 3% figure, excluding the listening I do for professional reasons.

Reasons Why Teens Don’t Like Classical Music
First of all, the pace and rhythm of classical music, with its many stops and starts, tempo, dynamic and mood changes, and lengthy moments is the exact opposite of what the turbocharged teenage psyche craves. After all, kids talk fast, play fast, and think fast. They also want their music fast. They also have attention spans of about three minutes (if they’re lucky!), far too short for a four-movement sonata but perfect for that new pop tune. Pop tunes are also structurally much simpler, kind of like an aural billboard, and quite a contrast to the multi-faceted complexity of classical music. A symphony is something that makes a person want to curl up with next to the fire and, like a good novel, sit and savor. How many teens do you know that like to sit still for an hour and bask in the sublime subtlety of anything, let alone music? I don’t know many.

The subject matter of pop music also holds much more appeal to the typical teen than does a wordless, 45 minute symphony by Gustav Mahler. Classical music is incredibly powerful but not exactly about issues that are immediately relevant to a typical teen. To them, listening to that Mahler symphony is about as exciting as reading the Constitution. Interesting? I suppose. Information-packed? You bet. Exciting? Not on your life.

Consumption
Finally, the way that teenagers consume music today is vastly different from what generations in the past did. In the nineteenth century, families would gather in the parlor and sing songs together, and the ability to play piano was a treasured thing for a family member to have. The only other opportunity to hear music was an infrequent journey to a concert hall, where one would be dazzled by the novelty of actually hearing many humans making music in tandem. Fast forward many generations and many technological innovations (the record player, radio, electrified instruments, CDs, the Internet) to the present, and music flows across broadband networks with lightening speed, the entire sum recorded music of humanity available just 99 cents and a click away. Also, the musical fabric of a teen’s daily life is not exactly symphonic. How many movies, television shows, and video games prominently feature classical music these days? Not many.

Audiences
There is wide speculation as to why or even if there is a downturn in classical music consumption. According to Douglas Dempster of the Symphony Orchestra Institute, classical music audiences have actually increased in recent years. This may, in fact, be true, but I’ll hazard a guess that not many of those new audience members are teenagers. I play concerts for all sorts of classical music ensembles, and no matter how “hip” or edgy” they are in their marketing, I see almost nothing but gray hair when I look out in the crowd. These gray-haired classical music lovers seem to continue to love classical music (there is evidence, according to Dempster, that people are more attracted to classical music in middle age than in their youth), but if you’re a teen and your mom and dad love something, chances are good that you’ll, if not outright hate it, at least think it’s pretty lame.

Education
Some blame the schools for this lack of interest in classical music among teenagers. Writing for The Guardian, Tom Service points out that school music programs service significantly fewer children than they did a generation ago, and that schools are ill-equipped in terms of actual instruments and well-qualified teachers to teach them.

Respectfully, I must disagree. The schools I teach in around metropolitan Chicago have first-class facilities packed to capacity with students eager to play classical music in their school band, orchestra, or chorus. They arrive before school to practice. They stay after school to rehearse. They spend their weekends on field trips or traveling to competitions. They love it… but they don’t listen to it for fun! The two activities—playing and listening—have become separated, as has the cultural context of what they play in school (old) and what they listen to for fun (new).

There is little discussion of teenage classical music consumption among those looking at trends in classical music, however, and for good reason: listening rates for teens are practically nil. Even my own music students, who practice for hours a day and spend even more hours in music rehearsals, admit (somewhat sheepishly) that they almost never listen to a classical recording unless it’s for research purposes like learning a new piece or comparing different interpretations. When they want to relax, it’s always pop music. Always.