Let 'em work, let 'em live

When I was dating my ex-girlfriend and visiting her at her home in Connecticut, I saw a series of road signs with a slogan in connection with construction workers: “Let ’em work, let ’em live.” As many motorists will doubtless infer, it basically means that motorists are to slow down enough in construction zones to be sure they’re not going to accidentally hit a construction worker. On another level, the slogan has a broader meaning that can apply to just about any job: interference with a worker while he’s working could lead to an error on either side that could affect his ability to work in the future. And whoever can’t work can’t make money. And whoever can’t make money can’t live. And musicians are no exception.

You’ve doubtless seen the occasional movie or an episode of a TV series in which a musician is seen talking and playing at the same time. From a filmmaking and storytelling standpoint, it makes sense to have such a musician do that, because then the producers don’t have to use twice the film, twice the story time to get the performance out of the way and then allow the musician to deliver his speeches. Unfortunately, having a musician talk and play at the same time in a film or TV episode leads some viewers to believe that musicians are capable of doing that in real life. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Music is a language all its own, with its own rules, its own syntax, its own mode of expression. There’s a lot of multitasking going on when it comes to just playing. For any given note in a classical piece, the musician has to consider whether he’s playing it at a volume level and at a level of expression appropriate for the type of piece it is, the style it’s written in and the emotion it’s intended to convey--all while concentrating on his performance, ignoring ambient sounds such as people coughing and the like. Jazz musicians have it even tougher--when soloing, they have to consider the chord progression, and whether the solo is making musical sense, both as a whole and in progression from one chord to the next.

Now try doing all that and having a conversation at the same time. Not easy, is it? The reason for that is that your concentration is constantly shifting back and forth. You can excel at either one or the other at any one time, but the two of them simultaneously--forget it. Playing music and talking involve totally different parts of the brain.

Most musicians perform to entertain, and in a lot of entertainment venues it’s a given that people are not to disrupt the performance. Some musicians, like me, play for church services, and while most people follow common sense there too, I have encountered a few who haven’t, one of them as recently as this afternoon.

Now, while church services are not entertainment, there is no logistical difference between a church service and a musical theatre piece. In a church service we have a script called the liturgy, music we call hymns and settings of parts of the mass, costumes we call vestments, props we call things like the chalice, the ciborium and so on--I could go on and on. It therefore follows that there is no difference in the professional responsibilities involved between a musician who plays to entertain and a musician who plays to help glorify God.

As I pointed out last month, one of those responsibilities a professional musician has is that he is to play every gig like it’s his last. If you’ve read my last entry, you remember the story of that band that goofed off at a gig and ended up losing that other, potentially career-boosting gig before they were even aware the booking agent for it was even in their audience. In this case, though, the band was responsible for the disruption of their own performance. If you try to talk to a musician while he’s playing, you are responsible for disrupting his performance.

I’ve addressed this topic once before on my old Netscape site, and I made the point there that if you have a band playing, you can talk to one of the musicians to pass on a message to them along the lines of, “Last call for alcohol,” or “We’d like you to play such-and-such”, because the other musicians can cover for him in such a moment. And when you’re dealing with a DJ, your conversation with him is not going to affect the performances on the records or CDs he’s spinning because they were recorded and pressed before he even brought them to the venue. But when you’re dealing with a solo performer, be it one who is entertaining you or helping you worship, that performer has no one to back him up. When a solo performer is distracted, not only is the distraction a detriment to his focus on his performance, but the resultant slippages in his playing is noticed by everyone else, and their enjoyment of the event is thus reduced.

I’ve spoken of musician marketability before in these Chalk Talk entries, and this is no exception. Take, for example, my own situation. Right now we are starting to go into summer mode at St. Augustine’s, and I will be playing for all three masses this summer. Aside from the regulars, you never know who will be attending a given mass. People from out of town will be visiting our parish who have never heard me play before. Any one of those people might want to hire me afterward for a house party or an upcoming wedding or something. But I can’t know there are any such people there until they come up to me after the mass. As a result, I have to play as if there are such people there. I can’t afford to let anyone disrupt my concentration. If someone does that, how will the resultant mistake make me look in the eyes of those people? Are they still going to ask me to play that gig now? If not, then there goes whatever income I would have made at that gig, and thus some of my ability to live. And the gossip can spread, just like in that old shampoo ad, thus making the problem worse.

So my advice to you is this: Let us musicians work. Let us live. Don’t do anything to disrupt our performance, because that will mess things up for everyone. And nobody wants that. It’s never any fun discovering you were the one responsible for turning a performance into an artistic disaster, let alone that you were the catalyst for turning a musician’s dream of bigger and better things into more of a logistical nightmare than necessary. So let us do our job and give us the room we need to do it well. In the end, it’s the right thing to do.