For the 1,000 or so freelance instrumentalists in the Chicago area who shuttle between playing symphonic concerts, church and chamber music jobs, corporate soirees, weddings, recording sessions and any number of other gigs, it’s a jungle out there.
Chicago is one of the nation’s largest and most competitive freelance markets. Often it’s not necessarily how well you can play your flute or harp or trombone, but how well connected you are and how adroitly you hustle engagements.
There is some positive news. The local freelance scene, which not so long ago rather resembled a good ol’ boys’ club to which neither women nor minorities were admitted, has become, to all appearances, gender- and color-blind.
Renee Baker is living proof of that. A string player who doubles on violin and viola, the 45-year-old mother from Bolingbrook has become a virtuoso player of the freelance network in her two decades as one of the area’s busiest “jobbing” musicians. In addition to playing principal viola with the Chicago Sinfonietta, she has performed with nearly 20 local musical organizations, including Symphony II, the Elgin and Rockford symphonies, Chicago Opera Theater and the New Black Repertory Ensemble. And Baker hedges her bets by operating both inside and outside the freelance network: When she isn’t performing or teaching, she contracts other players for vacancies in pickup groups with which she performs.
“I’m happy to get whatever jobs I can and I’m amazed I can make a good living at it. To stay in this business is a game. Some days, I play it well,” the brisk, no-nonsense Baker remarks following a rehearsal for a gospel show she recently played and contracted at the DePaul Merle Reskin Theatre.
A former paint store manager who took musical gigs at night before deciding to devote herself full time to freelancing, she makes no apologies for grabbing as much work as she can or for the income (she declines to cite a figure) that enabled her this year to take a vacation in Italy and buy a bayside cabin in New Brunswick (“My own little plot on the bay,” as she calls it). Baker believes she has paid her professional dues and it’s now payback time. She has not forgotten her first miserable year as a freelance player in Chicago, when she made $4,000.
“Now people come up to me and say, `You get all the jobs [but] you don’t need the money.’ I tell them, who on this planet doesn’t want more money?” she says.
If freelance players tend to talk far more about money than they do about music, blame it on changing times. Although few other U.S. metropolitan areas can boast so large and diverse a pool of top-notch, well-schooled freelance musicians, a weak economy exacerbated by the attacks of 9/11 has shrunk the number of available playing jobs, here as everywhere, compared to the boom years of the ’80s and ’90s.
This means that not every jobbing musician below the level of a Chicago Symphony Orchestra or Lyric Opera Orchestra player has been as fortunate as Baker. Indeed, many younger instrumentalists not plugged-in politically find it tough to break into a tight market.
Audrey Schadt, 24, a recent graduate in clarinet performance from the DePaul University School of Music, says that even though her teachers had warned her playing opportunities would be scarce at first, her two years in the freelance pool have been harder than she expected.
“There are so many clarinet players in the area,” she says. “It’s different for double-reed players — oboes and bassoons — because their numbers are fewer. This past year was much easier for me. My DePaul connections definitely helped. I got my foot in the door a lot of different places such as the Elgin Symphony and one or two smaller orchestras.”
Supplementing income
For all that, Schadt says she probably would not be able to make a living wage if it weren’t for the 45 clarinet students she teaches privately. Most freelance musicians say they must supplement their income by teaching, and many hold part-time jobs unrelated to their activities in music.
Although some have charged that favoritism determines which musician will get a certain job, almost anyone who’s known to be a capable musician will get an opportunity to perform, according to Ross Beacraft, a freelance trumpet player and director of admissions at the DePaul Music School, who also contracts players for Chicago Opera Theater, Elgin and other organizations. (The majority of music contractors in the Chicago area also are musicians.)
“People tend to hire musicians they know and can depend on to do a good job every time,” he says. “You make your reputation based on how well you perform, how well-prepared you are, whether you show up on time for rehearsals, all those factors. Sometimes a player who does spectacular solo work will not be hired because he or she cannot fit in well with the rest of the ensemble. But if you’re respected as a musician and treat others with dignity, it seems to work out.”
Too much power
Even so, some local musicians resent the influence wielded by contractors. “The power exerted by these people is just unbelievable,” Fuller says. “If you aren’t prepared to tell them within 20 seconds whether you’re available for this or that job, they will move on to the next name on their list.”
Is there discrimination based on race, gender or age in the local freelance market? Some beleaguered musicians cite anecdotal evidence of such, but there is no hard evidence that contractors willfully indulge in unfair or illegal hiring practices.
Baker feels she is twice stigmatized by being African-American and a middle-age woman. She charges that contractors, the vast majority of whom are male, tend to hire younger women as a rule of thumb. It’s a charge Beacraft denies. “I think the hiring process is, for the most part, gender-blind right now,” he says. “Twenty five or 30 years ago that was not the case.”
As for the problem of qualified African-American musicians finding freelance work, Baker says she is proud to be a principal player with Chicago Sinfonietta, conductor Paul Freeman’s affirmative-action orchestra, which has done more than any other such ensemble in the Chicago area to develop and encourage the careers of minority musicians.
Questions of race or gender aside, local freelance musicians appreciate the fact that the more versatile they are, the greater their chances to land work. With this fact in mind, music schools such as DePaul and Northwestern University have considerably broadened their curricula to better prepare their instrumental graduates for taking on work in many different types of music beyond the classical repertoire, once they get out into the real world.
“The young musicians I have talked to say they are now going into the music schools not necessarily expecting to have careers in symphony orchestras once they get out,” says Jerry Fuller, director of the Chicago early music group Ars Antigua and a sometime freelance double-bass player. “They know what they are walking into and they are being much more creative about what they will do with that.”
Forward and backward steps
Rather than following a Darwinian evolution, the freelance music scene in the Chicago area has evolved in a pattern of forward and backward steps.
Twenty-five years ago, what freelance work there was went mainly to players of the CSO and Lyric Opera Orchestra.
A good many instrumental graduates of local music schools had to leave Chicago to find work. Lyric seasons ended before Christmas, which allowed their orchestra musicians to play holiday “Nutcracker” performances, then to scramble for openings in the pit orchestras of the big touring musicals and dance performances that took place later in the winter and spring.
Once the Lyric seasons began extending past New Year’s, with the 1985-86 season, more openings were created for freelance players who could fill slots vacated by Lyric musicians. (Lyric players have, in turn, supplemented their incomes by forming their own orchestra, Symphony II, which presents concerts each spring at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall in Evanston.)
Then came the ’90s, and the number of big shows and dance companies that regularly played Chicago started to taper off, a casualty of rising costs. In recent years, the musicals and dance performances typically use taped music or employ tiny pit bands consisting of a synthesizer, keyboards and percussion played by two or three musicians from outside Chicago. Although the local chapter of the musicians union is fighting strenuously on behalf of Broadway producers employing more area musicians, the tide appears to have turned against them. (Virtually all of the freelancers hired by professional orchestras in the Chicago area are union members.)
The roster changes
Counterbalancing these diminished opportunities, to a degree, has been the growth of Chicago’s suburban professional orchestras, including the Elgin Symphony, Lake Forest Symphony, Northbrook Symphony and Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra.
While most first-chair positions are tenured, the rest of the roster changes from season to season as some regulars move elsewhere and other players take their places. A highly motivated freelancer with proven skills and good connections can make a respectable livelihood shuttling from one ensemble to the other. Though union rates vary from orchestra to orchestra, a section musician who is contracted to play all 82 services on the Elgin Symphony’s schedule next season would take home $7,863.
Most Chicago musicians who have jobbed outside the area say the lives of our freelance players are far less cutthroat than those of their counterparts in the nation’s cultural capital, New York. The freelancers who make up Manhattan’s “pickup” pool (which is two or three times as big as Chicago’s) are more territorial, and competition for the plum jobs is fiercer, reports Richard Culp, who plays with various period-instrument groups in the New York area.
Culp was recently hired as a “ringer” to perform with Chicago Opera Theater orchestra during COT’s spring production of Monteverdi’s “Orfeo” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. He said the orchestra of freelancers Beacraft put together for “Orfeo” could never have happened in Manhattan.
“Here,” he says, “every player is so concerned about his or her own turf that there’s hardly any sense of personal camaraderie or of really playing together as an ensemble.”
A positive attitude can carry a freelancer far. Unfortunately, says Beacraft, too many jobbing musicians succumb to discontent and colleague-envy. “It’s just human nature to wonder why that person made it and I didn’t,” he says. “But I don’t think that’s any different in the music business than anywhere else.”
“You can feel snubbed no matter what level you are on,” says Baker. “Getting a high-paying, steady job is not a cure-all for people who are by nature unhappy. I’ve chosen to be very happy — also to be realistic about what comes my way. I have never taken the attitude that, if only I could make it into the Chicago Symphony, that would be the be-all and end-all.
“There’s no pinnacle in my career. Everything, as far as I’m concerned, is a journey. And I’m enjoying the journey.”
