Familiar Faces
Sarah and I have mentioned once or twice before that, despite being a global industry, the music world actually feels very small, and you tend, over the course of your career, to run into the same folks over and over, sometimes in the most unexpected places. When I started in the Minnesota Orchestra back in 2000, two of the first people I ran into on my first day of work were percussionist Kevin Watkins, who I'd known well at Oberlin Conservatory, and substitute violinist Dorris Dai (now with the Kansas City Symphony,) with whom I'd gone to summer camp in the late '80s and hadn't seen since. This kind of thing happens constantly, and the unexpected reunions can be a lot of fun, as well as an ever-lurking reminder that you'd better be careful whose toes you step on in a business where you're almost certain to see everyone you've ever met again someday.
I found myself thinking about this "small world" phenomenon last week, when I was talking to someone about the first major national music competition I ever took part in. It was my senior year of high school, and the competition in question was one of the bigger ones going at the time, sponsored by General Motors and Seventeen Magazine (there's a sponsorship combo, right?) with finals held at the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy in northern Michigan.
To be honest, I had little to no interest in the GM/17 shindig. I've never really understood the point of competitions that don't end with job offers, and I spent most of my time as a student coming up with clever ways to avoid them. But that year, my teacher was bound and determined that I was going to take a serious run at a serious competition, so we spent an afternoon in my high school's auditorium making the best tape I was capable of, and packed it off to the judges.
I was honestly shocked when I was invited to the national finals - since the age of ten, I'd been living in small-town Pennsylvania, and hadn't had a lot of opportunities to measure my abilities against the huge numbers of talented musicians who gather in big cities to play orchestra and chamber music every weekend. But invited I was, so, battling a nasty cold and a lingering disinterest, I packed myself off to Interlochen, there to spend the next week living with and competing against four other violists, a gang of violinists, plus flutists, horn players, and a few other assorted instrument groups I've forgotten.
To be blunt, it was not the greatest experience. First of all, the competition had a bizarre rule severely limiting our individual practice time once we arrived on site, and the rule was enforced by not allowing us to leave our assigned dormitory floor without a chaperone. Second, my cold morphed into full-on Martian Death Flu within hours of stepping off the plane, and I didn't stop hacking, wheezing, and sniffling for more than thirty seconds for the next week. Third, I wiped out of the finals on my 18th birthday, partly because the Death Flu was preventing me from hearing anything coming out of my instrument.
Still, as I was telling a friend this story last week, I started to think about the other finalists I'd met at Interlochen that winter, and I realized that, almost without exception, I know, off the top of my head, where every one of them is today, even the ones I haven't seen in over a decade. Because like me, they're all in the music world, and most of them are doing quite well for themselves, too. Of my fellow violists, one is living and playing for various ensembles in Berlin, one is the violist of one of America's fastest-rising string quartets (which, coincidentally, is performing in the Twin Cities this very evening,) and a third (the winner of the string division at GM/17 that year) is the assistant principal of the Boston Symphony and a much-respected soloist, which is saying something when your instrument is viola. Four of the five of us wound up attending college together for at least a year or two.
Going beyond the alto cleffers, one of the flutists I spent most of my time hanging out with in our dorm prison at Interlochen wound up in Minnesota only a couple of years after I arrived, where she became a member of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. And the sweet, unassuming horn player who no one knew what to make of when we arrived at the competition (but who wound up walking away with the well-deserved grand prize) is now the principal horn of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Oh, and just to drive home the small world point, she's also the sister-in-law of MN Orch tuba player Steve Campbell.
Musicians tend to take the close-knit nature of the business for granted after a while, but it never fails to amaze me that we can work in a business that more or less guarantees that the people we grow up knowing will be flung far and wide around the globe (you go where the work is, as the saying goes,) and yet, we never stop running into each other. It's definitely one of the fringe benefits of doing what we do for a living...
I found myself thinking about this "small world" phenomenon last week, when I was talking to someone about the first major national music competition I ever took part in. It was my senior year of high school, and the competition in question was one of the bigger ones going at the time, sponsored by General Motors and Seventeen Magazine (there's a sponsorship combo, right?) with finals held at the prestigious Interlochen Arts Academy in northern Michigan.
To be honest, I had little to no interest in the GM/17 shindig. I've never really understood the point of competitions that don't end with job offers, and I spent most of my time as a student coming up with clever ways to avoid them. But that year, my teacher was bound and determined that I was going to take a serious run at a serious competition, so we spent an afternoon in my high school's auditorium making the best tape I was capable of, and packed it off to the judges.
I was honestly shocked when I was invited to the national finals - since the age of ten, I'd been living in small-town Pennsylvania, and hadn't had a lot of opportunities to measure my abilities against the huge numbers of talented musicians who gather in big cities to play orchestra and chamber music every weekend. But invited I was, so, battling a nasty cold and a lingering disinterest, I packed myself off to Interlochen, there to spend the next week living with and competing against four other violists, a gang of violinists, plus flutists, horn players, and a few other assorted instrument groups I've forgotten.
To be blunt, it was not the greatest experience. First of all, the competition had a bizarre rule severely limiting our individual practice time once we arrived on site, and the rule was enforced by not allowing us to leave our assigned dormitory floor without a chaperone. Second, my cold morphed into full-on Martian Death Flu within hours of stepping off the plane, and I didn't stop hacking, wheezing, and sniffling for more than thirty seconds for the next week. Third, I wiped out of the finals on my 18th birthday, partly because the Death Flu was preventing me from hearing anything coming out of my instrument.
Still, as I was telling a friend this story last week, I started to think about the other finalists I'd met at Interlochen that winter, and I realized that, almost without exception, I know, off the top of my head, where every one of them is today, even the ones I haven't seen in over a decade. Because like me, they're all in the music world, and most of them are doing quite well for themselves, too. Of my fellow violists, one is living and playing for various ensembles in Berlin, one is the violist of one of America's fastest-rising string quartets (which, coincidentally, is performing in the Twin Cities this very evening,) and a third (the winner of the string division at GM/17 that year) is the assistant principal of the Boston Symphony and a much-respected soloist, which is saying something when your instrument is viola. Four of the five of us wound up attending college together for at least a year or two.
Going beyond the alto cleffers, one of the flutists I spent most of my time hanging out with in our dorm prison at Interlochen wound up in Minnesota only a couple of years after I arrived, where she became a member of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. And the sweet, unassuming horn player who no one knew what to make of when we arrived at the competition (but who wound up walking away with the well-deserved grand prize) is now the principal horn of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Oh, and just to drive home the small world point, she's also the sister-in-law of MN Orch tuba player Steve Campbell.
Musicians tend to take the close-knit nature of the business for granted after a while, but it never fails to amaze me that we can work in a business that more or less guarantees that the people we grow up knowing will be flung far and wide around the globe (you go where the work is, as the saying goes,) and yet, we never stop running into each other. It's definitely one of the fringe benefits of doing what we do for a living...
posted by Sam at
11:12 AM
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