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Who Are You Working With?
By David J. HahnThere was a time that railroad had a monopoly on transcontinental travel and shipping in the U.S. For over a century the rail industry made big, big money for railroad tycoons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John Hopkins and Leland Stanford. But it wouldn’t last forever.
Railroad ridership peaked during World War II, as troops and supplies are moved toward the coasts to fight in the European and Pacific theaters. After the war, though, increased automobile and plane travel led to a decline in rail travel.
By the 1950s and 60s the interstate highway system, modern trucking and the first jetliners took a huge bite out of railroad ridership. As the industry took a dive, they adapted with mergers and consolidations.
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Case Study: One Musician’s Changing Income During the Recession
By David J. HahnIn 2008 I was working nearly full-time as a music director for regional theaters and tours. When I wasn’t working as an MD I was playing 2nd keyboards somewhere else. I made a little money from blogging, a little from copyist work and very little from selling albums.
I experienced a sharp decline in music directing jobs in the 2nd half of 2008. Regional theaters had been hard hit by the recession, and many were not hiring or closing their doors. It was clear that I would need to fill in the income gap with other work.
As you can see from the chart, I tried a lot of different gigs and had the most success with accompanying and church organ gigs. I started my church gig in spring of 2009. Around the same time I found a job as an accompanist at college.
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When To Take an Unpaid Gig
By David J. HahnYou get a call. It’s a friend of yours, they are throwing a big party, and they want you to play for the guests. They don’t have a lot of money, though, so they can’t pay you. But you can pass out business cards and try to sell CDs. There will be lots of important people there and it’ll be great exposure they say.
You get another call. It’s a local non-profit. They are throwing a fundraiser at a fancy venue and they want you to provide entertainment for a couple of hours. They can’t pay you, but you’d really be helping out the cause if you would do it.
A third call comes in. It’s a local venue. They are having an event next month and 5 bands are playing a 30 minute set each. They’d like to invite you to perform. It doesn’t pay, but everyone gets a free drink and you can set up a merch table in the corner.
So what do you do? Do you take these gigs? You know that you have to make a living, but you know you also have to get out there and play for people.
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What To Do When Nothing Is Working
By David J. HahnThings have been slow moving since this recession hit, and at times it can feel like nothing is working. Maybe you’re doing the same things you used to to get gigs, but no ones calling and you’re not making as much money – what do you do?
The short answer is “try something else”.
Consider for a minute animals in the wild. If resources become scarce – what do they do? They have a variety of coping mechanisms. Some migrate. Some hibernate. Over time, some adapt. The one thing they don’t do is sit on their hands and just hope it gets better. And neither should we.
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The Savvy Musician: Book Review
By David J. HahnThe Savvy Musician is written by David Cutler. You can find it at Amazon
There are several striking things about this book. First, the comprehensive depth of material in this book is remarkable. From marketing, to performing, to networking, to composing – this book covers a huge amount of material.
Second, there are 165 short vignettes of stories and interviews from successful, non-famous, working musicians in the book. The vignettes add a lot of credibility to the material without any gimmickry. The fact that they come from successful, non-famous musicians is what makes them genuine. It’s easy enough to make a living as a famous musician – I’m sure Paris Hilton has sold more albums than me – it’s stories from regular musicians that are really interesting.
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Interview: Hip-Hop Artist Marvalous
By David J. HahnI met Marv last week. I was walking up 6th Ave. on my way to a gig and he was standing outside a grocery store near 12th St., trying to get people’s attention as they walked by. I have a soft spot for people trying to talk to strangers – I have enough experience with cold calls and passing out flyers to know that it ain’t an easy thing to do. I had some time to kill before the gig, so I stopped to talk.
Marv, aka “Marvalous”, is a musician selling his CD. I had no idea what his music sounded like, but after talking to Marv for a few minutes I bought his album. I just have to admire a guy that is willing to stand out on a New York City street for hours at a time, facing the early February cold and sustained rejection, in order to give a pitch and a hard sell to one face after another.
And after talking to him awhile, two more things impressed me: 1.) He does this full time. 2.) He makes a living doing this.
I think about my own albums, which I’ve safely stashed in the big, anonymous cloud of iTunes, and I sheepishly push from behind the shield of Facebook and Twitter – giving my hard sell to profile photos and not real faces. Could I stand on the corner and sell my music? I think I could, but it doesn’t matter – I don’t.
As Marv tells it in the interview below, he hit the streets when the music industry machine started to break down. He had used standard music distribution routes before they started to go out of business, and then – not to be stopped – he just walked outside and starting doing it himself.
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What the Arts Can Learn From NASA Budget Cuts
By David J. HahnPresident Obama’s proposed budget came out earlier this week. His arts budget remained largely the same as last year, but the NASA budget was not as lucky. Obama cut funding to the Bush-era plan to return to the moon by 2020 and, instead, allotted $6 billion to the agency for research and commercial development of space-related technology.
It seems that with a record deficit and 10% unemployment, space travel is not a priority to the U.S. government. NASA suddenly finds itself, not for the first time, in a situation where it must argue on behalf of it’s tax-dollar worthiness.
This is a familiar situation for arts organizations. The threat of budget-cuts to arts education is a near constant concern at public schools, and the budget for the National Endowment for the Arts was only recently restored to Clinton-era numbers.
Ok, so the science kids finally got their budget cut, too. The MIT and Stanford grads at NASA are a smart bunch, of course, and I bet they put up a pretty savvy fight. And you know what? I bet the arts community could learn something from the rhetoric that they use to protest the budget cuts.
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Tips for the Piano-Conductor
By David J. HahnThe task of piano-conducting is a complicated skill that is often neglected during most pianists’ formal training. If you want to be a music director in theatre (or a number of other arts fields), you’ll need to learn the basics of piano-conducting. Here are some tips.
The Head Nod
Here’s the problem. You’re sitting at the piano, sending out your part of the groove – and, well, basically – you’re busy. Both hands and sometimes both of your feet are working on your instrument, and you don’t have any appendages left over to cue the band. So what do you do? Nod your head.
A good head nod is harder than it sounds, though. Major complaints from sidemen in pits usually involve some variation of “the head nod doesn’t match the hands” – that is, the head nod brings the band in before or after the piano-conductor plays the beat with their own hands.
If you only take one piece of advice away from this article, let it be this: get your head and your hands together. Practice it and get it right. Video tape yourself to make sure it’s happening the way you intend it. Don’t let this basic part of the piano-conductor skill set be the complaint you get from your band.
Broadway Show Closings Eliminate 97 Musician Jobs
By David J. HahnJanuary 28, 2010
The closing of Broadway shows Finian’s Rainbow, Ragtime, Shrek The Musical, Bye Bye Birdie and Burn the Floor eliminated 97 musician positions from the Broadway industry this…
The Savvy Musician: Review Coming
By David J. Hahn
Author, blogger and professor David Cutler sent us a copy of his new book, The Savvy Musician, for review. We’ll be reading it and sending out a review…
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Meet the New Director of the NEA
By David J. HahnHere he is, Rocco Landesman. Our guy in government. He calls U.S. arts funding “pathetic.” Nice. And he comes from Broadway, which, of course, I dig.
His initial dig on Peoria is a misstep, but it looks like he got a good, national wallop for that. I don’t mind an arts guy that speaks his mind now and then.
So is he with us, or is he management? We’ll see how he does.
Good luck Rocco – and do me a favor: consider giving grants to individuals, not just mega-huge non-profits.
George Frideric Handel’s Business Savvy
By David J. HahnThe Lehrer News Hour ran a very interesting report during Christmas about the business and finances of George Frideric Handel. It fits in well with our discussion of musician…
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Musician History: Court Musicians
By David J. HahnCourt musician was a career path for musicians in feudal Europe from the Middle Ages to the late 18th/early 19th century. Of the gigs available to musicians during this time, court musician was the most prestigous and best paid job around. The position disappeared in the late 18th century/early 19th century when the court system itself crumbled. Certain elements of the court musicians life and career parallel modern musician careers, but for the most part, court musician is a gig that has dissolved into our past.
What can we learn about ourselves from their careers?
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Learning From Our Past
By David J. HahnAs we move forward into this new era of the musician industry, maybe we should look back. What did musicians do for a living 100 years ago? 300 years ago? Who hired them? How did they get gigs? What kind of money did they make? Which of their mistakes and triumphs can we learn from?
I believe that we are moving into a new musician industry that is a hybrid of the old world (pre-recording industry) and new world (post-recording industry). We still can sell recorded music – we shouldn’t abandon everything we’ve achieved in the past century – but we also have to relearn how to make a living as musicians did before the invention of audio recording.
What if we are able to create a new, more sustainable model for the musician career by combining all of the knowledge of the two traditions? Who knows. Maybe musicians are broke, have always been broke, and that’s just the way it is. I don’t know – I think it’s worth looking into.
Top 100 Piano Bar Songs
By David J. HahnThis list is from my personal files and actually includes 105 songs. I compiled this list of songs from watching and talking to other piano bar entertainers, and from years of research. If anyone is looking to get into this gig, this is a good place to start.
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Gifts for Musicians
By David J. HahnBuying a Christmas present for a musician and not sure what to get? Here’s my list of presents for any musician.
Digital recorder
Digital recorders can be used for all kinds of things. Recording a lesson, a rehearsal, a demo recording, a practice session – it’s very important for musicians to be able to record things and listen back. Our medium is sound, afterall.
I used to use a minidisc recorder, but that technology never seemed to catch on. Now these digital recorders like I have shown here are the new thing. They record better quality audio, in stereo in this case, and download it directly to your computer afterward. That is very handy.
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New Ideas for the Musician Resume
By David J. HahnMy inbox receives a continual stream of junk mail that assures me that the one thing that is most lacking in my life is the condition of my resume, and that, if I will only pay them $29.99 a month, they will help me redo my resume, get a better job and save my loathsome existence. To which I say: delete, delete, delete.
As musicians we know that traditional resume techniques used by workers seeking office jobs, and the junk mail that touts them, are not relevant to our needs. Moreover, we’ve probably at least reflected on the idea that, in general, resumes might not be useful at all in getting work. So what’s the truth?
The truth is that resumes are a useful tool in acquiring work as a musician, but that they are not the universal work-acquiring device that they seem to be in the corporate world. So when is a resume useful and when is it useless?
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Moving to the Big City and Finding Work
By David J. HahnMoving to a major music city like New York or LA is a exciting and stressful thing to do. It takes a lot of courage, confidence and conviction to make the move, and it’ll take more of all three to make it work.
Finding work in the big city starts well before you get there. While you probably won’t be able to land any gigs before you physically get to the big city, there is a lot of research that you can do prior to your arrival.
The best way to survive as a freelance musician in a big city is to have at least one steady gig that doesn’t take all of your time, but brings in some regular money. When you first get to town, this job may need to be a non-music job like waiting tables or temping.
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Why Move to New York City?
By David J. HahnWhen I say “New York City”, I actually mean any big music city in the world. Los Angeles, Nashville, New York, Berlin, London, Toronto…there are a lot of cities in the world where the entertainment industry is more concentrated, to which musicians have migrated for generations.
It begs the question – why do musicians keep moving to these places? Do you need to live in a big music city to make a living as a musician? Should you make the move?
First: you don’t need to live in New York City to make a living as a musician. I, for example, used to work very regularly as a pianist in the far suburbs of Chicago. I made a reasonable living – making a yearly income very similar to what I make in NYC, actually. I worked for schools, theatre companies, country clubs, private parties, weddings – whatever came my way. I also taught lessons, made recordings in my home studio and played with bands.
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Theatre Music Directors: Connecting with Other Music Directors
By David J. HahnMusic directing is usually, by its nature, a solitary profession. Artistic directors and producers only hire MDs one at a time, so we rarely get to work with or even meet each other. We hear about other MDs by reputation or perhaps we’ll meet if there’s an overlap from one show to the next.
Despite the isolated nature of a music directing career, its also an industry in which networking is key. MDs rarely audition for jobs, and are usually recommended for jobs by word of mouth or sub for friends when needed.
Nothing can substitute meeting face-to-face, having a drink, playing together in a pit or collaborating on a project – but nevertheless, here are a few ways to connect with other theatre music directors online.
