I used to do concerts with orchestras, New York, Chicago, L.A., San Francisco, St. Louis, Seattle, Minnesota, and it always was scary, making my entrance up a narrow path between the first and second violins, and nodding to Maestro Philip Brunelle, and picking up my note from the cello as I sang the Habanera—“I always wanted to sing in the opera, / To sing with passion, to sing with rage / And fall in love with inappropriate women, / Fight senseless duels, and die on stage.” Then I did a concert with the Boston Symphony at Symphony Hall and thought, It will never get better than this, and sensibly retired from the field. Orchestras exist on a higher plane than the one I inhabit and consist of a secretive tribe of chummy perfectionists, one of whom I am married to.
My wife is a violinist and violist, a freelancer, a foot soldier in God’s floating orchestra who goes off to play a wedding one night, an opera the next, and comes back to tell me stories about the squeaky soprano with the big diva attitude, the timid oboist, the blatty trombone, the conductor whose hand movements are a mystery to everyone so thank goodness for the concertmaster’s bow. Her work demands great skill for which she is paid a pittance, but she is glad for the work and proud to be among the rank and file.
When she was fourteen, she went off to music school, then landed in New York City, still a teenager, and worked there for twenty years, bopping around from opera tour to regional symphony to pop show to Broadway pit to church gig and off to Japan with a pick-up band to do Bach and Vivaldi. She has played for Leonard Bernstein and also for the Lippizaner horses. She is a pro. And she is not tolerant of unprofessional behavior. A big star who is haughty toward the commoners backstage—that’s unprofessional. A conductor who glares at someone who just played a bad note—unprofessional. Worse than the bad note.
You won’t find this list posted backstage, but that’s because everybody knows this stuff right out of music school.
1. You are, of course, on time. Always. It’s amateurish to come an hour early, but never come late. Never. So orchestra players are students of public transportation and, if they drive, adept at finding parking places, legal or illegal. Everyone has a strategy for Getting to the Gig, and a back-up strategy, in case the area is cordoned off for a presidential motorcade or a gas leak or some other civil disorder.
2. Don’t show off warming up backstage. Don’t do the Brahms Concerto. Don’t whip through the Paganini you did for your last audition. Warm up and be cool about it.
3. Backstage you hang out with your own kind. String players with other string players, not brass or percussion. You don’t get into a big conversation with the tuba player, lest you be lulled into relaxation. He is not playing the Brandenburg No. 3 that opens the show; you are. Stick with your own kind so you can start to get nervous when you should.
4. You never chum around with the conductor too much. Likewise the contractor who hired you; you can be nice but not fawning, subservient. If either one of them is perched in the musicians’ commons backstage, don’t gravitate there. Don’t orbit.
5. You never look askance at someone who’s made a mistake. Never. If the clarinet squeaks, if the oboe honks, if a cello lumbers in two bars early like lost livestock, you keep your eyes where your eyes should be. You’re a musician, not a critic. String players never disparage their stand partners to others. Stand partnership is an intimate relationship, and there is a zone of safety here. Actually, you shouldn’t disparage any musician in the orchestra to anybody unless to your husband, or very good friends. But you never say anything bad about your stand partner.
6. If the conductor is a jerk, don’t react to him whatsoever. Ignore the shows of temper, the hissy snits, the nasty looks. Turn a stone face toward him. If he makes a sarcastic joke at the expense of a musician, do not laugh, not even a slight wheeze or titter.
7. Try to do the conductor’s bidding, no matter how ridiculous. If he says, “Play this very dry but with plenty of vibrato,” go ahead and do it, though it’s impossible. If he says, “This should be very quick but sustained,” then go ahead and sustain the quick, or levitate, or walk across the ceiling, or whatever he wants. He’s the boss.
8. Don’t bend and sway as you play. Stay in your space. You’re not a soloist, don’t move like one. No big sweeps of the bow. And absolutely never never ever tap your foot to the music.
9. Go through channels. If you, a fifth-stand violin, are unsure if that note in bar 134 should be C-natural as shown or B-flat, don’t raise your hand and ask the maestro, ask your section head, and let her ask Mr. Big.
10. You do not accept violations of work rules passively. When it’s time to go, it’s time to go. If it’s Bruno Walter and the Mahler Fourth and you’re in seventh heaven, then of course you ignore the clock, but if it’s some ordinary yahoo flapping around at the podium, you put your instrument in the case when the rehearsal is supposed to end. It was his arrogant pedantry that chewed up the first hour of rehearsal, and now time is up and he’s only halfway through The Planets and is in a panic. If he wants to pay overtime, fine. Otherwise, let him hang, it’s his rope. At the performance, you can show him what terrific sight readers you all are.
It’s all about manners and maintaining a sense of integrity in a selfless situation and surviving in a body of neurotic perfectionists. And it’s about holding up your head, even as orchestras in America languish and die out, victims of their own rigidity and stuffiness and of a sea change in American culture. Perhaps in a hundred years orchestras will be as obsolete as the six-day bicycle race. But in America’s Last Surviving Orchestra, the players will arrive on time and take their places and not look askance at malefactors and play drily but with vibrato and not tap their feet. And one violinist will come home and have a glass of wine and say to her husband, “Why can’t they find a decent trombonist?”