by Eric Summer
When I left you, my loyal threes of readers, hanging two weeks ago, I was rambling on about potential career paths for music school graduates and how I’d arrived at the conclusion that I didn’t want to do any of them. If you remember, there was a fascinating tutorial about symphony playing, chamber music, weddings, and studio playing. If you don’t remember the “fascinating” aspect, then you’re just not remembering it right. I’m pretty sure I put “fascinating” in there somewhere. It’s OK if you don’t remember; memory can be a funny thing. I won’t fault you for it.
Anyway, I’d neglected at that point to mention one interesting offshoot of studio playing, which is called “sidelining.” That’s when some movie or TV show or commercial needs an orchestra on-screen, and the music has already been recorded. It’s basically just musical pantomime. You just fake playing along to the recorded track. I did a few of those–a few music videos and a car commercial or two, I think. The best money I ever made was on a sidelining gig. On the flipside, a different sidelining gig was pretty much the penultimate straw for me as a professional musician. Let me describe it for you: it was a music video for a John Legend song, directed by the acclaimed director Kanye West, so there was already a talent-vacuum in the room that could have snuffed out the creative fire of Beethoven, John Lennon, and Stephen Spielberg combined. But that wasn’t really what set me off, nor was the grand-canyon-sized disparity between the amount of money the sideliners were paid and the middle-finger-shaped pile of gold the Kanye-Legend juggernaut no doubt made on the deal. It was just one guy who did it, but he was a guy I was familiar with in many forms over the course of hundreds of gigs. It was Professor Cranio-rectum (real name unknown). This was a guy who didn’t know what he was talking about, but wanted everybody on the gig to know he really had something to show us rookies. So he advanced the notion that since we were playing pop music, we shouldn’t use vibrato. There was no vibrato in pop music, according to the Professor.
Let me explain: vibrato is a technique string players use that basically amounts to waggling one’s finger around while playing a note. It sweetens the tone, and hides little inconsistencies in intonation, and it’s one of the things that makes a string instrument sound like a string instrument. It’s always been one of my strong suits–which is good, because intonation has always been one of my weak suits, relatively speaking. And it’s true that in some forms of non-classical playing, vibrato isn’t used very much. Fiddle players, for instance, rarely use vibrato. But the Professor wanted everyone to know that he was the master of non-classical style, and you should never ever use vibrato unless you were playing classical music. This happened at a point where I was beginning to play rock and roll, and with my usual reckless abandon, I’d thrown myself into research mode, inhaling every bit of information I could find about string instruments in the rock and roll genre.
“You deluded fucking gasbag,” I wanted to say, “I’ll forgive you for never having heard ‘Ocean Rain’ by Echo and the Bunnymen, or ‘1000 Umbrellas’ by XTC. But have you heard of a little tiny band called the Beatles? Maybe you’ve heard a little-known song called ‘Yesterday’? It’s only the most frequently covered song of all time. Or maybe ‘Here Comes the Sun’? Those are just two examples out of hundreds I could name right fucking now of classical-style arrangement in rock and roll, filled to the goddamn brim with vibrato. Or I could point you in the direction of Nelson Riddle’s orchestrations for people like Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra. Or the jazz playing of Stephane Grappelli. All non-classical, all chock full of vibrato. And it may have escaped your laser-like perception, but we’re not even playing this song; we’re pretending to play this song. So how about blowing all that silly bullshit right out your ass?”
But I didn’t say any of that. I just sat and seethed and collected my insufficient paycheck and decided I was just about done with all of this.
The post-penultimate straw came a few weeks later, when I got a call from the colleague who had gotten me the sidelining gig. It seemed that Kanye West wanted a string quartet to play at his Grammy party, and he wanted them to play for two or three hours while he and his friends did whatever people do at a Grammy party who aren’t the hired help. Probably involved a swimming pool filled with diamonds and some gold-plated strippers, I’d imagine.
“OK, how much does it pay?” I asked, anticipating a fairly standard string quartet rate of around seventy-five dollars per hour per person.
“Fifty dollars.”
“Per hour?“
“No, total. For the night.”
And that was about it for me. This was a guy who had won Grammys–ostensibly, at least, a musician himself– and he was willing to pay musicians probably about a quarter of the amount he was going to be spending on each bottle of champagne at his party. Per hour, less than the average entry-level employee at Ralph’s or In ‘n’ Out Burger makes. Fifty dollars for three hours of quartet playing was a big diamond-studded “fuck you” from Kanye. I wouldn’t have even worked for that little when I was in high school. In Montana. Well, fuck all that.
I was done. I was sick to death of musicians, and attitudes, and being scared shitless that I wasn’t going to be able to pay rent every month. If I ever played music again, it was going to be on my own terms or not at all. And with that final decision, the weight of a thousand backstabbing contractors and a thousand infuriating know-it-alls and a thousand screaming conductors, all holding my own dreams and aspirations over my head like a guillotine blade, all vanished. I was free, and happy in a way I couldn’t remember ever having been since I first picked up the viola. Music was mine again, and no one else’s.
Of course, it also meant I probably wasn’t going to make money with it ever again. And there were years of feeling like a complete failure before the liberation and happiness set in. But after I learned to redefine my ideas of “success” and “failure,” it was smooooth sailing. So if there’s a lesson buried somewhere in this mess, I guess it’s this: musicians are miserable bastards, and to be avoided at all cost. But if you’ve gotta be one, not because it’s cool or fun or to make money but because you have no other choice, because your only two options in life are either play music or die a miserable wasting death, prepare for it to suck for a while. And then it’ll suck even more for a while longer. Then there’ll be a period of lighter suck, with a heavy suck front moving in later. But truly miserable bastards will learn to love the suck, and then everything will be fine. And since I’m once again reaching a state of word-meltdown, I’ll explain all about that in two weeks. Isn’t that something to look forward to?
