Tag: confidence

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Women’s History Month: Women and the New Gig Economy

“It’s who you know, not what you know.”

Networking has always been a part of the music industry to the great advantage of some and the overlooking of a great many more. Women and other underrepresented minorities often struggle to find footing in the different branches of professional music, from classical to popular styles, and it can feel like there are extra mountains to climb just to get noticed, much less hired.

In psychology, this feeling reflects a trend toward “in-group bias” (the proverbial ‘old boys club’), in which the dominant members of a profession or group select new members based on how well they relate to them. I don’t necessarily think there is always intentional discrimination involved, but that as men in our society have been socialized primarily to interact equally with other men, this can feel like the most comfortable route to take when booking for a gig or filling a position. There’s less risk of conflict and less need to ‘speak a different language’. The end result is that a whole swath of the population that is looking for work or recognition is left out, or feels marginalized.

The fight against sexual harassment through campaigns like #metoo and #TimesUp are incredibly important, and I think go hand in hand with the ways women in the music industry are fighting for equal representation and the ability to be authentically themselves without fear of repercussions. Besides seeking visibility for the issues women and other marginalized groups face in the broader industry, I also see and participate in so many powerful internal movements that, behind the scenes and in the public eye, are changing the game for female performers. I want to highlight a few of my favorites.

Binders Full of Women

As a Minneapolis-area local, the whole game changed for me the day Andrea Swensson started a private Facebook group called “Binders Full of Women in Minnesota Music” (a spoof on Mitt Romney’s 2012 unfortunate comment about the number of female applicants he’d seen for cabinet positions).  Someone added me, and suddenly the whole diverse, beautiful community of women, female-identifying, and non binary folks in my music scene was at my fingertips. Immediately, I knew we could all use it as a place beyond networking- a place where we all felt safe, seen, and valued, a place where we could complain about an incident, spread knowledge about things going on, tell people who to avoid and who to watch out for, and most of all, HIRE EACH OTHER. A whole community of people in love with music and performing, ready to each other up.

Since becoming a part of that group, I’ve hired and been hired, attended a free clinic on sound engineering hosted by one of our members, started a roster of local freelancers, and added exponentially to my list of cool local music to listen to and support. And that leads me to my next feature…

Happy Hour! 

Last year, my good friend and collaborator Rebecca Hass and I decided to go beyond digital networking, and starting doing semi-regular happy hour meet-ups for female-identifying folks in our local music scene. Since then, we’ve hosted 3 or 4 of them (I’ve lost count!) in which a collection of women both diverse in background and musical genre have attended, trading cards and war stories, and agreed to keep in touch and promote one another. Our next venture is to host a jam session, and Rebecca has plans to do composer-specific meet-ups. It’s informal, friendly, and fun- and I’m so glad to have a colleague to coordinate it with.

BrassChix

Sarah Schmalenberger, horn & musicology professor at the University of St Thomas, and another good friend and colleague, started BrassChix ten years ago as a way to bring multiple generations and ability levels of brass-playing women together for a day of music and camaraderie. She hired me in 2012 to be the “Celebrity Trombonist” and I was delighted to present my experiences and educational philosophies to the trombonists in attendance. Since then I’ve presented or participated every year. Women are a minority in brass performance at most levels, but having a community to draw from is so important for the next generation, and so soul-fulfilling for us ‘old guard’ that are paving the way for more women to pick up brass instruments.

The Art of Asking

It’s not necessarily a community (although AFP’s fans would argue differently), but an idea- in 2013 performer Amanda Palmer presented a TED talk on “The Art of Asking” detailing the ways a new, digital marketplace could be a humongous asset to artists and musicians. She had just crowdfunded an album through the most successful Kickstarter in history to that date, and people were listening.

In some ways, I find the approach simplistic, and perhaps not the route everyone would go, but what really hit home for me is the idea that asking for what you want is not a bad thing. I think we are afraid to ask/trained not to. “American exceptionalism” tells us that we should do it all ourselves, bootstraps, etc etc. But what if we made our goals known, showed clearly how we wanted to get there, and then asked for help?

Last year, my student Caroline did something I never would have done in high school. She had an audition for her fall band assignment and it didn’t go the way she wanted to. She was convinced that she could do better, that nerves got in the way of preparation. So she went to her band director and asked for a second chance. He said yes, and after re-audiitoning, she was told she’d made it into the next level band. I was so proud of her for knowing her ability and her power that I could barely contain myself. I think maybe I cried a little bit.

Years ago I was back in my hometown of San Diego having a beer with Sean Reusch, who taught me in high school and continues to be a friend and mentor to this day. I was going through some stuff, really discouraged by the music scene in Minnesota and feeling like no one saw me. I was ready to burn it all down and do something else, ANYTHING, where I didn’t feel like a ‘woman in music’, power- and gig-less. Sean acknowledged all my concerns and then said, “You deserve to play; you’ve done the work. Now you need to ask for what you want: an opportunity, an audition, a lesson, whatever. But you need to ask, you need to be available for it.”

When I got home I messaged a few ‘power players’ on the trombone scene and asked to get together for coffee or lessons or just to be considered on a gig list. I started my professional Facebook page and started marketing myself more as an educator and unconventional performer. It hasn’t all been up from there- and I wouldn’t say I feel like the biggest trombone success on the scene, but I’m happy with the opportunities and experiences I can now rely on getting regularly.

So for #womenshistorymonth my message to you is: Go out, find your people. Ask. Share. Give. Hold each other up. The new gig economy is all of us, creating  and sharing our humanity through art.

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How to practice for Solo/Ensemble competitions

For my Minnesota-based studio, many of my students are preparing to perform at their regional solo/ensemble contest in March. We’ve picked out pieces, done our research, and are ready to dig in. Although preparing a contest piece shouldn’t be much different than your normal practice, I thought I’d give a few specific tips on what solo performing means in the practice room.

1. Pick a piece that will stretch your talents a little farther, but won’t be so hard you can’t get it prepared in time.
2. Start by listening. Find a recording of the piece and note what the instrumentation or accompaniment is. Think about how you’ll perform it.
3. If your piece has multiple movements, choose the ones you’d like to perform. Consider your order. For example, 3 movement suites don’t have to be done in order if you’re doing, say, the Allegro first movement and the slower second one. You could flip them if it makes sense musically.
4. Start with the big picture. Play along with the recording and note where you may need to spend more time, but get a feel for the piece as a whole.
5. Make your musical decisions early. It’s easier to learn notes and rhythms sometimes when we have a direction for the phrase we’re working up. For example, a fast passage with lots of sixteenth notes also crescendos or has lots of slurs. Sing it the way you’d like to play it, then work it up slowly utilizing all the components.
6. Practice bigger chunks once you’ve got the technical stuff smoothed out. Pieces always feel differently in our hands when we see how the whole work fits together. Breaths may be different, or you may notice that one phrase is hard to get into from the previous one. Work out those new kinks.
7. Practice performing. At least once or twice a week in the beginning, practice running straight through your work as if it were a performance. As the contest draws closer, you should be practicing performing more than you are practicing individual sections.
8. Perform for your friends and family! Play along with the recording again so you can understand how the accompaniment fits in. Count count count your rests.
9. It sounds obvious, but when you get to the performance- have fun! Nerves are a part of performance but remember that your jury wants to hear you do well. No one is out to get you or judge you as a person. Let your musical soul shine through and above all, don’t worry about the parts you think you messed up. They’re gone! End strong.

Good luck, students!

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BrassChix 2015

My dear friend Sarah Schmalenberger, who teaches horn at the University of St Thomas, is again putting on her yearly seminar for women and girls who play brass instruments. This year she’s doing things a little differently, partnering with the fine folks at Schmitt Music to do an equipment and technology day.

Check it out, it’s an awesome day of inspiring performances, networking, and above all, camaraderie for ladies who kick brass. 🙂

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Brass Chix 2015

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Preparing for a Big Gig

Since I have a pretty cool show to do tonight that has required a moderate amount of preparation and promises to be one of the bigger concerts I’ve ever played, I thought it would be an appropriate time to do a little post on gig preparation.

I think maybe a lot of my students are really ‘too young’ to be nervous, and by that I mean you haven’t gotten to a point in your lives yet where it occurs to you that performing music is a thing that can ‘go wrong’- i.e. seem so important any wrong note is an unmitigated disaster. It’s fun to play- or it’s just another thing you have to do in a long line of things they make you march through in grade school (man, I hope no one feels that way!).

More power to you! Keep the fun mentality. I can’t count the number of times I’ve allowed what I heard to be a poor performance affect my mood and rule my next few days.

And then there’s performance anxiety. Far more than just nerves, facing down anxiety on stage can cause you to freeze up, forget what you’ve learned, and dread every second on stage. I’ve been there- it’s not pretty.

So if you do experience an excess of nerves or severe anxiety? Buck up, little camper! You CAN fix it.

Nerves are not inherently a bad thing. Being nervous means you have an excess of adrenaline helping you out at that point in time. And all adrenaline does is heighten your senses and give you strength to overcome whatever’s in front of you. Like the tiny woman who can lift a car to save a trapped man after an accident, or a sprinter at the Olympics who’s run the best race of her life, a little adrenaline on stage can make your performance that much stronger. You just need to know how to use it.

It would take a long time to get into all the ways you harness you nerves here, and many people have said it better than I can. Here’s a good start: http://www.bulletproofmusician.com/how-to-make-performance-anxiety-an-asset-instead-of-a-liability/

In the practice room, we tend to zone out. It’s boring, repetitive, and there are distractions both mental and in our surroundings. It’s always Friday afternoon in your brain and you’ve clocked out. But as I’ve touched on before, if you utilize deep practice, you’re actually practicing performance. 

It’s true! You can practice performance. And you should. Being on stage comes naturally to a very few people, and I would wager that many of those people had to work at it a little bit as well. In the more than 15 years of stage experience I’ve had, it only gets more natural as time goes by. When I sit down and really learn a part, finding the connections between notes and phrases, and really hearing what I’m playing so that my technique is left to my motor functions, I’m practicing how I will perform it. And if I can’t perform it, why am I practicing it?

What if, you shout, terrified, you HAVEN’T PRACTICED? At all? Not even a eeny little bit?

Well, my first thought, is why the heck not?

But my practical advice to you is: Fake it.

Fake the confidence you need to put on a good performance. Come on stage, empty your water valve, give a big grin to the audience, and proceed to pour your heart and soul into whatever you’re playing whether you know it or not. Leave that overanalyzing, over-worrying, OCD little Left Brain out of this. Right Brain’s in charge and it’s time to rock.

Now, it’d probably be better if you’d practiced. But have you ever heard the saying, “it’s 10% what you say and 90% how you say it” that people pick up on when you speak? That’s a phrase that’s so immersed in the popular parlance I can’t find a source for it. Never mind that, it’s true. We pick up on confidence and control. We like people who make us think they know what they’re doing, regardless if they actually do or not.

I would say about 75% of the compliments I get after a show contain some variant of the phrase “Wow! You sure looked like you were having fun up there!” (60% of those same comments still come from folks whose cognitive functions have all but ceased because OMG A GIRL IS PLAYING TROMBONE and I seriously hope to whatever higher deity you believe in that your generation is the last of those idiots because I am not an anomaly, people, look it up). What does that really mean? Honestly, I think it’s a little bit of jealousy, a little bit of awe, and a lot of the shared joy of giving and experiencing live music. People don’t go to a show to judge how bad it is. We want to be entertained.

So go entertain. Practice first, but practice with the intention of pure, unadulterated performance.