The issues here are complex, and I hope that the DMA and the CSO will be able to come to a solution that is fair to all involved and that keeps the music alive. But this point in the authors’ list of complaints caught my eye:
Musicians performing on more than one instrument receive “doubling pay.”
I don’t have the full details of the doubling pay currently available to CSO members (though the amount doesn’t appear to be the issue here—it’s the fact that any doubling pay is offered that seems to offend). But a slightly-outdated agreement between the DMA and the Boulder Philharmonic, summarized below, shows a typical doubling pay structure, and it’s a reasonable guess that the CSO’s is identical or very similar:
25% bonus for first double
10% for each additional double
B-flat and A clarinets count as one instrument
Alto and tenor saxophones count as one instrument
Alto and bass clarinets count as one instrument
Piccolo, larger flutes, English horn, E-flat clarinet, contrabassoon, soprano saxophone, and saxophones larger than tenor each count as a double, even when used in common combinations (like flute plus piccolo)
Though I am not currently a union member (due to a dearth of union gigs in my area), I frequently ask for doubling fees when negotiating my pay for gigs. Here’s why doubling fees make sense to me as a woodwind player:
Each additional instrument I bring to the gig represents a significant financial investment on my part: purchase, maintenance, reeds and other accessories, and insurance, not to mention high costs in past and continuing study of each instrument.
Each instrument—even two instruments in the same family, like oboe and English horn—requires separate study, practice, and effort. The money I earn isn’t really about the time I spend at the gig. It’s about the thousands of hours I’ve spent becoming the musician that can do what is required. If I’m playing two instruments on the gig, then that’s a double helping of preparation I’ve put in. If it’s oboe and English horn, or bassoon and contrabassoon, then I’ve put in separate hours making reeds for each instrument.
Doubling is very much a money-saving practice for those who hire musicians. I’ll happily play four instruments for 145% of scale, and a smart contractor will happily pay that rather than the 400% of scale that it would cost to hire four separate musicians.
I hope to see a compromise struck in Denver that acknowledges the value that doublers bring to an ensemble.
I like to use a Socratic-ish method in my private lessons, and ask my students questions. It means that I have this conversation several times per day:
[Student plays.]
Me: How did that sound to you?
Student: Not good.
Me: What didn’t you like about it?
Student: It didn’t sound good.
Me: What aspect of it didn’t sound good to you? The tone? the pitch? the phrasing? the articulation?
Student: Um, I guess the articulation?
Me: What didn’t you like about the articulation?
Student: It wasn’t good?
It’s an ongoing battle to get my students to listen more deeply than that. Was the articulation “not good” because it started with air noise instead of tone? Because it was accompanied by an unwanted percussive sound? Was the articulation technique perfect but you failed to follow the composer’s markings? Or was it something else?
Often the “not good” is a combination of factors, but if my students can identify even one of them, then they can immediately start working in a focused way to improve it. If it’s just “not good,” then they tend to just play it again from the beginning without any clear approach to making it sound better, and repeat until frustrated.
Part of my job is to help them identify and verbalize the desirable and undesirable phenomena in their playing, and to teach them the techniques for manipulating the variables involved (breath support, voicing, embouchure, finger technique, and tongue technique, to name the most obvious ones). But it’s up to them to take that information and run with it. For my students to become independently-functional musicians, they need to learn to listen critically to themselves and troubleshoot.
For yourself and for your students, don’t be satisfied with bland value judgments (it sounded “good” or “bad”). Be factual and descriptive about what you hear, and tackle problems in a methodical way. Practice smart!
I don’t think a woodwind player really learns the skill of “doubling” so much as he or she learns the skill of flute playing, plus the skill of saxophone playing, and so forth. 99% of being a good doubler is being a good flutist and a good saxophonist and whatever.
There are only a few aspects of woodwind doubling that are unique to multi-instrumentalists. These are:
The physical act of switching instruments. This becomes an issue in Broadway-type situations when instrument changes sometimes need to happen very quickly. It’s worth practicing these little bits of choreography until they can be done as quickly, quietly, and safely as possible. Tips: own good, sturdy stands, and keep your instruments laid out in a consistent way.
The mental effort of switching instruments. Years of developing a fine clarinet embouchure can go right out the window when making a quick change from tenor saxophone. The problem isn’t with your lips, it’s with your focus. As you switch instruments, shift gears mentally, too. Tips: warm up thoroughly on each instrument before the rehearsal or gig, and take a brief (sometimes very brief) moment of meditation as you physically change instruments, so that you are 100% in clarinetist mode by the time the reed hits your lip.
The guts to play an instrument that isn’t your best one. Even if your secondary instruments are quite strong, it can be unnerving to perform on one instrument when you know you can do better on a different one. Courage! You’ll be that much more experienced when the next gig rolls around. Tips: be aware of your body—is your nervousness affecting your posture? Breath support? Hand relaxation? If so, simply recognizing the physical symptoms can be enough to relieve them. Focus on musical things that you may be able to bring to the table despite technical deficiencies, like blend or phrasing.
This is a technique I recommend often to students who are struggling with notey passages. I can’t remember where I picked it up, or whether “anchoring” is my own name for it or someone else’s. No doubt credit for this belongs to somebody smarter than I.
The problem that I sometimes see with my students (and, okay, occasionally with myself) is that fast passages are uneven and panicky. The student sees a long string of notes and frantically dives in, to the detriment of meter and tempo, and with notes accidentally omitted or added.
It’s a challenging passage—shifting harmony, intervallic motion, awkward fingerings. This is a recipe for frustration using the old standby method of playing slowly with the metronome and gradually increasing the tempo. Instead, let’s set the metronome aside for a few minutes, and play the passage in an intentionally uneven way:
with added tenuto-accent-fermatas
Put lots of weight on the metric pulses (the “anchor” notes): play them long, loud, and with emphasis. Hold each fermata long enough to scope out the next four notes, then move through them as quickly as you accurately can, coming to rest again on the next fermata. Repeat the passage in this way as many times as you can stand.
Here’s what this accomplishes:
It makes you think about logical groups of notes, rather than trying either to process each note individually or to deal with the whole phrase as an overwhelming sea of notes. It’s the sweet spot between too much mental chatter and too little focus.
It encourages effective phrasing by treating the notes as leading toward downbeats.
It trains your ears to hear the notes in fours (at least in this 2/4 passage—try threes instead if the situation calls for it). Now as you return to playing the passage evenly, you are more likely to notice if you are omitting or adding notes.
To transition from this technique into a more performable approach, gradually decrease the duration of the fermatas and the weight of the accents, while continuing to mentally emphasize the anchor notes and place them carefully in tempo (time to get the metronome back out). Also try spacing the anchors farther apart as an intermediate step—one at the beginning of each measure, for example, or every few measures as appropriate.
The problems with my original technique are that you have to determine your precise tempo ahead of time, and you don’t have any flexibility to change it on the fly. You also can’t easily change your mind about the sound that you want—if you decide you really wanted something flutey instead of something brassy, you have to edit another sound. If you want to play several pieces or movements at different tempi, you need to dedicate a separate voice to each one. You also get a maximum of 1.27 seconds of echo. For my recent recital, I wanted the flexibility of playing multiple movements and changing my mind about sounds, and I needed a longer delay time for a slow movement.
At the time of my original tutorial, I assumed that the external device needed would be some kind of looper, but upon further exploration I have actually found a digital delay pedal to be the best way of accomplishing the effect. I am using the ubiquitous Boss DD-7, used by many electric guitarists, but presumably these instructions can be adapted to other similar gadgets (you are on your own to work out the details). I also used an auxiliary pedal, the Boss FS-5U. This simplifies things slightly on stage if you want to be able to turn the echo on and off quickly, but it’s totally optional. I’ll tell you how to make this work with or without it.
I first set up a personal website in about 2000 or 2001. There wasn’t much reason for me to do so—I was a college undergraduate, with virtually no worthwhile content to share. But it was a start, and fifteen or sixteen years later I have a few hundred blog posts and some other resources, plus a few college degrees and a university teaching position to perhaps bolster my reputation, and I enjoy a modest flow of web traffic. For what it’s worth, here are a few thoughts on websites for individual working (or aspiring) musicians, particularly those in non-“pop” genres and whose reputations exist primarily regionally or within specialized circles (such as academia).
photo, Markus Tacker
“Home” page: Put some content here. Why have a “landing” page that is nothing but a menu/obstacle to the meat of your site? Put your professional biography here, or maybe a recent blog post (the actual text, I mean, not just links to blog posts).
Biography: Ask yourself, are your site visitors really interested in your life story? (“Bret Pimentel started playing the saxophone at the tender age of ten…”) Keep it simple, professional, and brief. Let people know what you do.
For “who I have played with” lists, I suggest keeping it to 10 or 12 entries, tops. When you play with someone famous/interesting enough to add to your list, drop someone else.
Résumé/vita: Potential employers (for gigs, teaching positions, etc.) aren’t harvesting résumés from websites. Your short bio is probably enough. If you insist on posting your résumé or curriculum vita, strongly consider posting it as a web page, not as a PDF or word processing document. (As a general rule, use a word processing document—preferably an “open” format—if people will want to download and edit it, a PDF if they will want to save or print it without editing, and a web page if they will just want to read it online.) And I suggest removing your address and phone number for safety and privacy.
Blog entries: Not everybody needs or wants a blog, and that’s okay. But if you are hoping to use your website to build an online audience, it helps to have an avenue for publishing new stuff. (Nobody is coming back to read and re-read your bio.) I strongly suggest real blog software (such as WordPress, or a link to a WordPress.com or Blogger.com hosted blog), rather than just typing new entries into a plain web page. That way you can benefit from built-in syndication feeds and other technologies that make it easy for people to find and follow your content in their favorite apps, leave comments, etc.
It’s okay to post only occasionally. Many, many of the musicians’ blogs I follow consist of annual apologies for not posting lately and promises of great stuff coming soon, and nothing more. Just post if you have something to post.
Even if you are planning mostly to use social media sites to connect professionally, bear in mind that those can come and go quickly, and it’s nice to have a home base for your content where it will remain under your control. By all means, post your new web content to the social networks you use yourself, as those connections are the ones most likely to reshare and amplify your content.
Articles/resources: For content that you intend to update or improve over time, it probably makes sense to publish it as a “static” page rather than a blog post. If you are old enough to remember these things, you might consider a blog post to be like a newspaper article, which you probably read once and then look for fresh content the next day, while “resources” are more like phone books, which you refer to on an ongoing basis and which get replaced by newer editions.
Audio/video: I think it makes sense to host these elsewhere (YouTube, SoundCloud, etc.) and link or embed them on your site, since putting them in places where people are already looking for music and video gets them to a larger audience and boosts their search engine juice. They should never play automatically—only when your site visitor intentionally starts them.
Photos: I used to have a photo gallery on my site, but I have removed it. Ask yourself: are you famous or interesting enough (yet) that people are going to have an interest in seeing your career’s visual history? Are you hoping they will be impressed by something related to your physical appearance? Consider using one or two photos on your bio page, and put the rest on Facebook for your friends and relatives to enjoy.
Equipment: I am on record as believing that listing what brands and models you play is useless at best.
(Also, if you have endorsement deals you want to brag about, remember that the correct wording is that you endorse the brand, not that the brand endorses you.)
Contact info: Contact forms are kind of a pain. I suggest providing a real email address so that people can communicate with you using the software or webmail of their choice. Worried about spam? Use a free webmail account with powerful spam filtering.
Social links: You don’t have to link to all the social media sites, just the ones you use and see as good places to connect with internet strangers.
Instructions on how to use a website: If your website includes instructions on how to use your website, either your website is poorly designed or you are talking down to your visitors.
In general, look at each page of your website and ask, is this here because it is potentially of use or interest to my site visitors, or is it only interesting to me? Would I read this content on someone else’s site?
As a fellow musician, in my heart I sympathize with your first and second bullet points. Unfortunately the artist often ends his argument there. As a fellow participant in our capitalistic society, it’s your last bullet that really carries the day. I’m so glad you pointed it out.
One wonders if the Denver Post opinionators (recently departed members of the Colorado Symphony’s Board of Directors) have some axe to grind.
Truth be known……….. Your “illustrious” union should be fighting this battle for the musicians. This is why we pay WORK DUES and MEMBERSHIP. ……
Your not a union member???
OK, you always have “hope” that the producers will recognize and respect your plight (and cough up the extra money you have invested in your craft)…. Hahahahahahaha.
Ray, these are great points you bring up, and I would love to have the union in my corner. But there just aren’t union gigs where I live, so if I were to renew my membership I wouldn’t work at all. I hope at some point the union has the influence everywhere that it has in the major markets.
In the meantime, I’m finding that being a doubler outside the major markets is rare enough that I do have some leverage negotiating doubling pay.
When we were discussing doubling rates in one of the orchestras I play with an interesting situation was brought up that I had not been aware of:
The list of instruments that received doubling pay excluded Piccolo/Flute, Oboe/English Horn, Eb/Bb/A Clarinet, Clarinet/Bass Clarinet and Bassoon/Contrabassoon. When I brought this up they said that is was old language from a previous orchestra in our town. As it turns out, the third woodwinds had negotiated full-time status (despite playing in fewer performances) in exchange for doubling fees. Now, we are not a full-time orchestra yet, so the language was quickly changed, but it did strike me as a fair compromise for that specific situation.
Anyway, I have no idea of the specific situation in Colorado, but I thought I’d throw that out there.
As a fellow musician, in my heart I sympathize with your first and second bullet points. Unfortunately the artist often ends his argument there. As a fellow participant in our capitalistic society, it’s your last bullet that really carries the day. I’m so glad you pointed it out.
One wonders if the Denver Post opinionators (recently departed members of the Colorado Symphony’s Board of Directors) have some axe to grind.
Truth be known……….. Your “illustrious” union should be fighting this battle for the musicians. This is why we pay WORK DUES and MEMBERSHIP. ……
Your not a union member???
OK, you always have “hope” that the producers will recognize and respect your plight (and cough up the extra money you have invested in your craft)…. Hahahahahahaha.
Ray, these are great points you bring up, and I would love to have the union in my corner. But there just aren’t union gigs where I live, so if I were to renew my membership I wouldn’t work at all. I hope at some point the union has the influence everywhere that it has in the major markets.
In the meantime, I’m finding that being a doubler outside the major markets is rare enough that I do have some leverage negotiating doubling pay.
When we were discussing doubling rates in one of the orchestras I play with an interesting situation was brought up that I had not been aware of:
The list of instruments that received doubling pay excluded Piccolo/Flute, Oboe/English Horn, Eb/Bb/A Clarinet, Clarinet/Bass Clarinet and Bassoon/Contrabassoon. When I brought this up they said that is was old language from a previous orchestra in our town. As it turns out, the third woodwinds had negotiated full-time status (despite playing in fewer performances) in exchange for doubling fees. Now, we are not a full-time orchestra yet, so the language was quickly changed, but it did strike me as a fair compromise for that specific situation.
Anyway, I have no idea of the specific situation in Colorado, but I thought I’d throw that out there.