More scouting notes from the road

Yesterday on my way home from an accordion lesson in Strafford I detoured through the town of Washington to scout for a piano. I’d had an invitation to play at the Unitarian Church, but unfortunately they had no piano, while the other church in the village had a fairly restrictive statement of beliefs on their website which made me think it might not be the ideal PET venue. So I stopped by the Washington Village Elementary School.

Jessica at the front desk buzzed me in. I explained my project to her and aksed if the school had a real piano. She replied “You just walked past it.”

Yes I had, and there it was, a Samick studio upright in the covered walkway outside (!) just before the main entrance—even as I was looking for a piano, I did not register one right next to me in such an unlikely place. Jessica told me “They were going to get rid of it, but I said no, put it out there, the kids will use it. And they love banging around on it!” 

I went back out with appropriately low expectations for an outdoor piano in Vermont’s harsh and variable climate. But the real enemy of pianos is the swing in relative humidity, which can be less extreme outdoors than in a heated environment, and the piano was in surprisingly OK tune. Everything worked except for three keys, but they were pretty important ones, not at the extreme registers as is often the case but in the middle of the keyboard. I tried to open the lid to see what was the matter, but it was screwed shut.

I buzzed back in and said to Jessica I said “I see that the top is screwed shut.” I was waiting to hear something like "Yeah. The kids were messing around on the inside and we didn’t want them to break more stuff.” But Jessica said “Yeah. Someone’s head got stuck inside, so we screwed it shut. Kids!”

I feel like I need to start wearing a body cam, because there's no reenacting these first encounters for video. The photo here will have to do. 

I am now working to schedule my Washington concert at the school.

 

There’s a map for that

...or, How to schedule 252 concerts, Part N+2

In my last post I bemoaned the time spent on scheduling now that I no longer delegate it to assistants. 

This is a real issue, but my experience of the last few weeks was (I hope!) atypically heavy on logistics, because I’ve been working my way through a huge backlog old notes and stale email threads going back sometimes to the first summer of the project, i.e. two years ago. 

I’m about ¾ through that task and feeling good about being much better situated for future scheduling, because I finally figured out to go visual.

From the outset, I’ve been working from a master spreadsheet of all 252 towns (actually 251 when I started). I just copy-pasted the one on Wikipedia, which came with populations, and added columns for things like contacts, venue leads or likely possibilities, local performer-collaborators, attendance, donation beneficiary and amount, and of course concert date. I tried to take all incoming email invitations, tips from other pianists, scribbled notes from conversations after concerts or from pianos seen when peering church windows as I passed through villages, etc. and enter all that into the spreadsheet. I did tend to get behind, which is why so much of the past month was spent digging up information. But otherwise I thought it was working just fine.

When thinking about scheduling a concert, though, it was always a bit disruptive to have to switch to a map view to see where the town lies—location being important not just to avoid concerts too close together in both time and space, but also to facilitate scheduling of double-concert weekends, where we desire the two concerts to be relatively distant from our home base, not too far from each other (but not too close), with an overnight in between. (As I said we might here, Annelies* and I have indeed settled on a plan where we devote two weekends a month to this project, to keep roughly half our weekends free for Everything Else, which now includes trips down to Boston to visit our grandbaby. To keep on my 7-year desired pace, that means every other weekend needs to be a double-header.)

Yet somehow, even though a state/town map is prominently featured in both the Concerts page of the website and also, in physical form, at each concert, where the host gets to fill in the town being played…somehow I didn’t connect dots to realize I needed a scheduling map as well. A third map, one that shows not only the towns already played (like our giant physical poster) plus those coming up (like the map on the website) but also the towns where I have a lead or a conversation started.

But I got there eventually! and now I have a top-secret home map that shows everything: towns played (filled in with highlighter), and towns both scheduled (with little sticky notes and a date) and with scheduling conversations (with blank sticky notes). The image here shows the map after going through about 3/4 of my communications backlog. It’s a bit heartening, because while I’m now a bit under 1/4 through the project, the map indicates some sort of activity—past, scheduled, or in discussion—for about half of the 252 towns.

Now, whenever an invitation comes in, or whenever I’m considering a particular town, I can see at a glance where it is relative to us, and how close it is to other towns awaiting a date. So obvious! Not sure why it took me two years to figure it out.

*i.e. my life partner and also project partner. I hate saying “my wife” which to me has a patriarchal legacy connotation I can’t shake off. And “spouse” is just an ugly word. 

How to schedule 252 concerts, Part N+1

(Another logistical-technical and slightly complainy post. Probably boring, with apologies to my Dear Readers, as this blog serves as my personal record of project progress and reflections, as well as a place to share them publicly.)

One of the reasons I haven’t caught up on concert write-ups even after the end of my teaching year is that scheduling logistics has been taking up a huge amount of time.

Except for looking into very small towns where I anticipate it might be tricky to find a piano, I no longer do a lot of internet sleuthing and Google map searching to try to find venues. I rarely cold-call anyone anymore. Instead, invitations keep rolling in, and at the current pace of three concerts a month, I have more than a year’s worth of invited concerts to schedule.

About a year ago I decided to stop delegating searching and scheduling to my assistants. The problem was that I was never sufficiently disengaged from the discussion to make the time savings worth the complication in communication. I thought that by using a shared internet calendar, and marking blackout days in advance, it would be fine to have other people making booking decisions.  

But unlike a full-time touring musician, I’m trying to lead a more or less normie life, with a full-time day job, wanting to keep half my weekends free for non-concert activities (and not always able to plan months ahead exactly which weekends will be claimed for special family or other events). I would inevitably find myself back in the conversation soon enough, if not to confirm the place and date, then soon after to talk about finding a local collaborator. Which is also delegable, but it was hard for an intermediary to “feel out” the situation exactly how it would feel to me. Similarly for getting a sense of the piano being proposed—that’s hard for a non-pianist assistant to assess via emails or phone calls, or a quick phone video of someone playing all the keys from bottom to top.

By contrast, interns can assess the energy and enthusiasm of an inviting group—a very important factor in setting up a successful event—about as well as I can. But then there would often be a decision to make, whether to respond with an immediate yes or to politely express that we needed to consider the options in that town before settling on a venue…and again, that would involve a side conversation with me first. Again, it just felt like the time gained for me in not making the initial outreach or search was largely lost to the inefficiency of an added layer of communication.

But the grass is always greener! After spending most of my project time the last few weeks on scheduling and programming, I wonder if I should reconsider delegating more. 

Yes and

Last summer my wife and I biked over to the neighboring town of Starksboro. The village had always seemed a little moribund to me on casual drive-throughs. I think it’s partly because the old general store is shuttered. Maybe also because it’s a mostly linear village, that is, the public buildings and most of the residences lie all on one road, without any significant activity on cross streets, which to me always makes a village feel incomplete. 

But you should never trust drive-by impressions. Turns out there are several public buildings of interest. I’d made plans to check out the old pianos in the old community church, which the town has been renovating, and upstairs in the library/town hall building, which some folks are also interested in resuscitating.

Like a lot of big century-old uprights, both pianos have solid bones and rich sounds but plenty of issues. The Meeting House is a humbly awe-inspiring space, the stained-glass windows and striking kerosene chandelier casting an orange-red glow on the roughly square intimate interior. But the piano hammers are bone-hard, allowing for a dynamic range from ff to fff in the acoustically boomy space. The Town Hall’s upstairs has a quaint old stage and similarly venerable piano, which makes some nice sounds but has a few nonworking keys. And the rickety stairs, no ramp or elevator, restrict access. I wanted to support town efforts to revitalize theses traditional gathering places, but neither piano/space was appropriate for a full-fledged concert.

Meanwhile, on an earlier pass through the village I’d snooped (as one does) into the windows of the other church in the village, the First Baptist, looking for pianos. (Were there ever two Baptist churches in Starksboro, I wondered, whose population back in more churchy times never reached 1,500?) I could see there was an upright piano of some sort and made a note to come back and check it later when Jan McCleery popped out the back door and asked if I needed any help. In New England, “Can I help you?”, when asked of a stranger on the property, usually means “go away”, but she asked in a kindly, inviting—I want to say Christian—way, and when I explained my project she proudly showed me the not one, but two old uprights in the church, one in the sanctuary and one in the community room below. Both in much better shape than those in the Town Hall and Meeting House. Jan said the church would be enthusiastic about hosting our concert.

But that wasn’t my first piano inquiry in Starksboro either. About a mile outside the village is Camp Common Ground, a wonderful inclusive family camp. They had a decent Yamaha upright console, though it was a little beaten up. And though the space was not acoustically great, it looked like it would be a mostly flat and not too bumpy shot to wheel it into their gorgeous renovated barn with a piano dolly.

Before I’d thought of Camp Common Ground, and before I realized the village center was not so disused as my casual drive-bys had led me to hastily conclude, I had reached out to the elementary school to ask if they had piano—they did. And before that, I’d been invited by Marijke Niles, proprietor of a perennials greenhouse outside the village, to do my Starksboro concert at her house—on her probably much better maintained Yamaha upright, but a venue that would not allow for much of an audience.

So there I was, with a lot of competing options, all intriguing, none ideal in every way. I was describing the situation to my friend Anya Schwartz, a freethinker who often has great off-center ideas, which must have rubbed off on me because I heard myself say, as if I'd already formed the idea, “I should do a multi-venue Piano Crawl.” 

A series of mini-concerts, maybe 20 minutes each, the repertoire tailored to each piano’s strengths, with the audience moving from place to place, or attending just the program(s) of their choice. My assistant Gideon reached out to all the parties with this idea, and amazingly managed quickly to zero in on a date only a few months away that would work for everyone. So we’re on! October 20, starting with an early matinee at Robinson Elementary, while the kids are still in school, and moving on from there. There’s even talk of a food truck. Watch the email updates for more info as it comes into focus.

Fact-checked! or, Try this in a small town

A couple of months ago I had a lovely conversation with a reporter who writes for travel magazines. Yesterday I got an “URGENT: Fact-checking” email from AAA Explorer—mostly the kind  of questions I’d expect: when did I start my tour, how long will it take, do I travel in my EV, did Rachmaninoff really play the piano in little Plymouth Vermont. One stood out:

Is it true that not every town has a performance-ready grand piano?

I don’t recall, but I must have said that as a wry understatement. This snippet of my 252-gig spreadsheet should serve to answer:

Sharon write-up

The Sharon write-up is posted. I’ll expand the “about the piano” section when I get some additional information.

Our most common venue categories are churches, Granges, and schools. As I explain in the write-up, the Seven Stars Arts Center has been all three, giving it a special place in the project. It was also an automotive shop at one point, making this our first garage concert. 

I posted lots of clips, including the impromptu singalong tribute to Pete Sutherland, who was in hospice at the time. It was unprepared, so a bit bumpy, but as I wrote Pete’s music is pretty robust, and the audience’s engagement and appreciation were too great not to share. We miss you, Pete!

How to book 251 concerts, part 7: browsing, cruising, and crowdsourcing

At each concert (and online, and in conversation) I ask people if they know of places with a nice—or anyhow playable—piano in as-yet-unscheduled towns. I don’t get tons of suggestions from any one concert, and many end up recommending the same few good but also fairly obvious venues in larger towns. Overall, though, crowdsourcing is a significant source of bookings.

Then there’s browsing and cruising. Browsing is mostly online (Google maps is some kind of wonder). Cruising involves trying, in the face of life’s many counter-pressures, to leave early enough to have time en route to concerts to peer into church windows,* go out of our way to the off-route villages, or talk to general storekeepers, librarians, or the person weeding the flower bed in front of the town hall, all while flipping through the Vermont Atlas and Gazetteer (also a wonder). 

Sometimes these modes converge in delightful serendipity. Yesterday, on our way to the First Unitarian Church of Chester, we passed an astonishing number of markers for Coolidge sites—Coolidge State Forest, Coolidge State Park, Coolidge Range—and eventually one for the Calvin Coolidge Historic Site. “I should play the Plymouth concert on Grace Coolidge’s 1895 piano!” I exclaimed. “Grace Coolidge had an 1895 piano?” my wife asked. I admitted I did not actually know this. But I figured that as an educated turn-of-the-century upper-middle-class woman, she played. I wasn’t unserious—I really did plan to follow up—but I wasn’t confident of the odds that the homestead had kept the hypothetical family piano, let alone maintained it.

A couple of hours later I was making my usual appeal for venues at the Chester concert. Less than 24 hours after that, concert attendee Judie Raffety sent me this:

The Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site in Plymouth Notch has a beautiful piano owned by Grace Coolidge who was a pianist. In the museum there, it is located in a lovely performance room (with terrific acoustics) overlooking the mountains. The site is closed now until May, but I'm sure they would be delighted to host one of your concerts during their Centennial Year in 2023.

The Coolidge Historic Site refers to the instrument as “the famous Grace Coolidge piano” and it turns out it’s a cut above the old family upright I had imagined. But I won’t divulge any more just now, so as not to spoil the eventual “about the piano” feature for the Plymouth concert write-up.

*“I really need to print some business cards”, I said to myself around the third time someone asked “can I help you?” with some combination of sincerity and suspicion.

How to book 251 concerts, part 6: Have help. Pay them.

I haven’t said much here about my team of crack assistants, all undergrad Music Technology and Business majors at UVM: Elizabeth Indorato, Brady Jalili, and Willow Phoenix. Elizabeth and Willow run the Facebook and Instagram sites, respectively (Reason #17 for geezers to keep young people around, though honestly they’re a bit young for Facebook) while Brady helps coordinate publicity with the various presenters for each concert.

They also assist with booking. To be brutally honest, the reason I didn’t mention them earlier in this context is that we only recently passed the crossover point where their help in this regard actually saves me time. It can at first take longer to explain how to do something than to do it oneself, all the more so because not only were they not very experienced with this—neither was I, so I was figuring out how to do it at the same time that I was figuring our how to ask for help.

But now we’ve progressed to this magic place where one of them will message me and tell me I’ve got a gig on this date, in this town, on this kind of piano. Sometimes I was involved along the way, but increasingly it just gets sprung on me. It’s an amazing experience for someone who has never had management.

Side note: as a typical performer/composer type, I’ve always seen promotion and advance work as a grind, and done it only begrudgingly (and minimally). It is odd to me that my team of music business majors are actually glad for the experience! 

Though of course I pay them. On this Labor Day, I feel compelled to opine that unpaid internships should not exist. They devalue not only the worker but the work, lowering the market value of the labor of others doing similar work for a living. And they make internships a privilege not affordable to students who need to earn, helping to perpetuate inequities.

How to book 251 concerts, part 3: Tap into networks

The challenge of this project is not just finding 251 places to play, but wherever possible, places with a playable acoustic piano. To locate them, we’re tapping into various networks.

Piano technicians. The Piano Technicians Guild has a Vermont Chapter. If there’s a piano that’s being taken decent care of, one of the Guild members is probably taking care of it. The President and Secretary couple of Justin and Emily Rose kindly posted a blanket inquiry to the Guild’s listserv that has led to useful tips on where to find pianos in out-of-the-way places, or where the best pianos are in place with several to choose from. In particular, technicians know about pianos in private homes that might not otherwise be easy to discover.

Librarians. Ironically, perhaps, town libraries are a frequently where a decent piano meets a public space. (I’ll play quietly.)

Music educators. Schools often have a piano in a big room, if not an auditorium. Much of Vermont’s population is rural and aging, so most towns belong to consolidated school districts that share a high school, middle school, or even elementary school with several other towns. This gives union school music teachers a central role and bird’s-eye view of the music scene in multiple towns. So far that has proven enormously helpful in getting information about a multi-town region quickly. Also, we are aiming to include collaborations with local musicians wherever possible, and music teachers know the musically active current and past students. The same is true of many church music directors, who may serve in multiple towns, or whose churches may have congregants from a broad area.

Town Clerks. When I started thinking about this project, Freddie Hart, who coordinated the Vermont Symphony’s Project 251 in the 1980s, told me to “talk to the Town Clerks”. That makes sense: in my town of Huntington, long-time Town Clerk Heidi Racht is the person who, put simply, knows everyone and everything. (Actually, she splits the role of omniscient ombudsperson with Linda Pecor, who runs Beaudry’s, the general store.) So far, though, we haven’t reached out to Clerks. I think the fact that one can do an internet text or map search on a town together with likely prospects such as “church” or “library” or “grange” has made the Town Clerks’ living knowledge a less obviously essential starting point. 

You know, as I wrote that last sentence, it felt quite sad and contrary to the community, humanist spirit of the project. Time to close the computer and start calling Clerks!

How to book 251 concerts, Part 1: Tell a simple story

 

This is not a closely-guarded trade secret. Every presenter I’ve ever engaged with has told me each show and recording needs to have an angle, a title, a theme, a hook. Unless you’re pop-star-famous, in which case your theme can be “I’m Yo-Yo Ma.”* Otherwise, without a story, few people will come to your concert.

In this project, though, the theme is central and came first; it’s not the result of a tacked-on branding effort. As a result, I’ve been almost caught off guard by how much the project resonates with people, which I think accounts for the greatest part of their eagerness to sponsor shows and  do even more: suggest venues in nearby towns, help me find local collaborators, pour on the concert publicity, and write or broadcast feature stories.

Actually there are two themes. One is: I’m going to play every town in Vermont. This has immediate appeal to the Vermonter’s characteristic pride in a small-town sense of local place. While Vermont’s communitarian ethos is easily exaggerated and often idealized, like most myths it has a basis in truth. Town Meeting Day is still a thing, the Vermont League of Cities and Towns is active (unprompted by me, they’ve apparently circulated info about my project, which has already led to offers to host concerts), and the state runs a Village Center designation program. It is equally true that the sense of locale is under threat here as everywhere by Dollar General, Netflix, and social media, and that threat makes people even more keen to get behind anything that bolsters the vitality of local centers.

The other theme is the absurdity and unsustainability of long-distance touring. I’ll say right off that I don’t pretend to have the answers. As someone with a day job (university teaching) who does not depend on performing to earn a living, I’m not telling anyone what they should do. That would be in especially poor taste now that streaming services, which pay musicians ridiculously little—Spotify is believed to pay about 1/3 of one cent per stream—have made live music once again the (by far) main source of musical income for performing musicians.

I just know that routine jet travel (among many other things) is incompatible with the survival of civilization, and with the continuation of a great portion of current life on earth. And that staying alive is, you know, an even higher priority than “making a living”. Apparently this strikes a chord with lots of other musicians and audiences. 

We’re all carrying a lot of cognitive dissonance: I don’t fly and I’m vegan, but (like virtually all US-ians) my greenhouse gas emissions are still far higher than the global average, and far above what is estimated to be the maximum for a livable future. (US average = 16 tons CO2 per person per year; current global average 4.5 tons per year; max for livable world, 2 tons.) Still, most people recognize that a lot of things are going to have to change radically, and radically quickly, or the consequences will be even more catastrophic than is already ensured.

Well, that got heavy. The footnote is light-hearted, anyway.

*There’s a great bit from an interview with composer Benjamin Boretz, where he said (something like) “To achieve real commercial success in classical music, you have to be Yo-Yo Ma. And I don’t mean that metaphorically.”

How to book 251 concerts (intro)

The title of this post may be presumptuous. As I write this, I’ve confirmed exactly 3 concerts, or 1.2% of the project total. Maybe it should be “How on earth am I going to book 251 concerts?”

But I’m well into discussion for the next dozen or so dates, and I’m surprised at how eager people are to participate. People have been quick not just to make their venues (and living rooms) available but to seek out others for me, jump on local publicity, and offer lodging. I think I can identify several things making this go more smoothly and handily than I anticipated. So, here’s my advice for booking Vermont expeditiously:

• Tell a simple story with broad appeal
• Charge no money
• Tap into key networks: music educators, piano technicians, town clerks
• Cultivate project publicity
• Have a support team

I’ll expand on each of these in its own post in the coming days.