We had a tough audience tonight. Comatose is probably a better word, but I’m not sure I’m qualified to diagnose something like that.
Audiences on cruise ships are different than on land. On land, whoever you’re playing for has most likely paid for a ticket, or made some kind of initiative to attend the event at the very least. On ships, people basically just roll out of the buffet and go take a nap in the theater.
Nevertheless, you sometimes get a good audience. We had a great audience the last time my boss was aboard (lucky for us). They laughed and clapped and stood at the end.
Tonight’s audience did only the minimum necessary. They would finally, reluctantly clap long after the echoes of a song had finished echoing. At the end of one particular song we received one, solitary clap and that was it.
Clap.
You do this enough and you start to forget about the audience. I do, at least. Maybe it’s a psychological mechanism to not get nervous. When I start playing, I just ignore that there are people out in the darkness past the edge of the stage.
Except when you get one clap. That’s just cold.
In situations like that, where the audience in heinous, it makes the performers not want to even bother doing the show. Then you have a situation where the performers don’t look like they care at all, and the audience has already proven their apathy.
David J. Hahn
David J. Hahn is a Broadway conductor and keyboard player. He co-founded MusicianWages.com with Cameron Mizell in 2008. Visit his new project, Songwriter.fm and sign up for his songwriting newsletter.
As an independent contractor, what is the current rate for transcribing someone else’s rough copy into publishable quality music using Finale software? Is the rate determined by the number of measures in a composition, or the number of staves per page…etc. etc.?