(Justin Locke spent 18 seasons playing bass with the Boston Pops, and is the author of Real Men Don’t Rehearse, a laugh-out-loud inside look at the secret world of professional orchestras–now in its 8th printing!)
One of the parts of the music business that rarely gets mentioned outside the culture is the relationship between orchestra contractors (a.k.a. personnel managers) and the musicians they hire to play.
Musicians with tenured contracts have one sort of relationship with personnel managers, but for this article I am talking about relationships between contractors and freelancers.
When I was a working freelance bass player, all of the players for the major “gigs” in town were hired by the same guy, and I lived in mortal terror of this man. I always felt that if I ever did anything even slightly wrong I was in danger of losing my livelihood– which was true. As a result, I tended to avoid any contact with him for fear of doing something offensive.
Now that I am occasionally contracting orchestras myself, I get to see this dimension of the business from the other side. I often find myself vexed and frustrated by the musicians I hire and their attitudes towards me and how they market themselves. At one point I got so bothered I called some local music schools and offered to come and speak to their performance majors about how to deal with, and relate to, the people who hire them as professional players. I thought they would leap at the chance to have their kids meet someone who actually hires young musicians. Amazingly, I was rebuffed. I was told that “we are already doing this,” but it is clear to me as a contractor that no one is teaching musicians of any age how to deal with contractors. So while I am just one of many contractors, I thought it would be of some interest to offer my observations and opinions.
When I hire a full orchestra, the process involves an amazing amount of tossing names around on lists. Typically, here is what happens: I have a list of, say, violinists, that I know to be good players. But as we all know, some violinists are better than others, and so I have a numbered list: the best violinist is number one, the next best is number two, and so on. Let’s suppose I have a list of 20 violinists, but I only plan to hire 15 of them. What always happens is, something like violinist number 14– let’s call him Ralph– can’t make the gig for one reason or another. Okay, violinist number 16 gets hired in his place.
OK, months go by, and I’m about to hire another orchestra. I have two lists now: the original list of all the possible people I could call (which is now all marked up with revised phone numbers and recommendations and notes about who will call me back when), and another list, the list of people who played the last gig, which is nice and clean and neatly typed, has no marks on it, and has everyone’s tested current phone number and address. Remember Ralph? I have nothing against him, he’s an excellent violinist, but his name is only on that old grungy list now, and I might not even have that list anymore. Unfortunately, Ralph may think that I am a very small- minded person and may think I will never call him again because he said “no” to me once. That’s not the case at all. I am looking at dozens and dozens of names, many of whom I don’t know personally, and I just wanna get this band booked. So Ralph gets forgotten.
I suppose in musician culture to forget about one player and hire another who is a little lower on the local pecking order is something of a sin. But I’m only human. I forget, I lose track. I have only had one occasion where a player who got dropped from my list in this way called me up to remind me of their existence. I was happy to hear from them, because I had lost their number. But most of the time, people just accept this and don’t do anything about it. I wonder how many gigs I lost because I didn’t bother to remind contractors of my existence.
One of my biggest difficulties with freelance musicians is that they often assume that I am clairvoyant, i.e., that I can somehow sense when they have moved, changed their e-mail, or changed their phone number. I have one violist that I referred to as my “problem child,” because it seems like she moves every three months. Never once has she ever bothered to call me or drop me a note telling me her new information. (I keep telling myself that this next time she does this to me will be the last time. But she isn’t that much different– musicians almost never tell me that they have moved. She just moves more.) But I have to say, there is nothing more vexing, when you’re about to sit down and spend a few evenings calling 90 people, to hear that obnoxious phone tone and be told that that number is no longer in service.
I think a lot of musicians just assume that it is enough to have their information in the local union directory. It isn’t. (I often hear musicians say “I’m in the book,” with a certain air of sophisicated nonchalance . . . when in fact they are sending me, a potential new client, to a place where I will also find the names and numbers of all of their nearest competitors, in equal size font. This just amazes me . . . and I cringe when I remember saying it myself, because I didn’t know any better.)
Anyway, since I am not in the union any more, I do not have that directory, and so I have my own lists, and I use those phone numbers. Now I will admit, I usually misplace notes and e-mails from people telling me their new information, but when I finally sit down to call them for a job I’m suddenly reminded that they made the effort so I don’t mind looking them up. When people don’t keep me up to date, and I have to search for them (and I don’t even know if they left town sometimes), it adds to my workload unnecessarily. It happens so often I don’t really think about it anymore, but it often amazes me that musicians who want to get hired will often make it very hard for me to find them.
Of course, one must remember, that even if I get an e-mail or a card from you telling me your new information, that information might not make it on to the list that sitting in the top drawer of my desk. I’m not the most organized person in the world. I am managing 90+ names here. Forgive me if your name gets lost. Find an excuse to send it to me again.
Every year I send Christmas gifts (or at least a card) to every client I worked for in the past year. It’s a common practice in most businesses. I have never once received anything like that from any musician I have ever hired. If one of them DID do that, I guarantee it would make them stand out from the others on the lists of names.
Anyone who wants to be a freelance musician and get hired by contractors should have a web page. That way, if I don’t have your information I can just google you. Web pages are not that hard to do, they are not that expensive, and if you’re a professional person you can’t afford to not have one. Most musicians, however, do not have one. By the way, announcing your webpage is yet another excuse to send a note to contractors and remind them of your existence without being pushy.
Another problem I run into with musicians is the whole concept of auditioning. A lot of musicians simply will not do it. I know this is a difficult thing . . . an audition can feel like a very humiliating submissive experience for some people. But business is business, and I have a responsibility to the people who are paying me, which is to deliver a product that I know to be good. A good alternative is getting invited to recitals and whatnot… I never go, though, because the only ones who send me these things are people that I already know are good.
I sometimes run into another situation, where a producer for a pop record company needs a single violinist for a rock ‘n roll tune. But they don’t want just any violinist. They want (or least they think they want) a specific kind of violinist, with a certain kind of sound. With such subjective subject matter as “tone” and “feel” it is very difficult for me to know what they mean, so I am always afraid that they will pay $600+ dollars for a session with a violinist I provide and not be happy. It would be great if I could send them a sample recording of the player I have in mind so they could say, “yeah,” that’s it,” and they wouldn’t feel like they are taking a huge risk.
But with a few notable exceptions, I find it is virtually impossible to get players to give me a recording of themselves so I can play it for the producer and say “how is this?” In the Internet age, I really think to not have an MP3 of yourself to e-mail to a contractor at their request is kind of ridiculous. But this is what musician culture so often seems to be about.
This next comment is a little further afield but not by much: a very large percentage of the people in management positions in the union/orchestra business are, in fact, former players. Therefore it would not be a stretch to think that management classes should be offered in every music school, if nothing else to enhance communications between labor and management. If you talk to any ex-musician- turned manager you will hear similar things from them. This is not an attitude problem, it is an education problem.
These are just some random comments and observations, but they all add up to one thing: professional music is a business, and marketing is a part of business. In all the classes I took in music schools, I never saw one about business and marketing. Sad to say, many freelance musicians don’t really know how to do it.
I keep saying this, and I’ll say it again: most musicians don’t know what business they are in. There is a world of difference between being a music student, where you pay people to listen to you, and the professional world, where you get paid to play. Your technique is important, but it’s just a part of what it is to be a professional performer. As a student, you were the customer. As a pro, you have customers. And speaking as one of those customers . . . yeesh.
In closing: hiring an orchestra is a ton of work and stress, and the work of the contractor is usually taken for granted. Of all the musicians I hire, there is one musician, and only one, who makes a point after each gig to come up to me and say a very sincere “thank you.” He always gets called the next time.
©Justin Locke
P.S. It is absolutely amazing to me that if you google “orchestra contractor,” this post is mentioned 3 times in the top 10. You would think there would be a little more discussion about this topic!
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