Preface

This is a self-indulgent post, a chronicle of a normal and mundane, if fortunate, series of events in a normal and mundane, if fortunate, human life, and as such there’s really nothing about it that ought to interest anyone but me, the person who recently lived it. But for me it is so vivid, so powerful, so meaningful, so motivating, that I want to write about it and just maybe someone reading will find something to enjoy.

I’ll be tooting my own horn here: The topic is meaningful to me because it bears witness to multiple accomplishments, personal and musical, and I’m proud of those accomplishments, probably more than is warranted. Yet more reasons I don’t expect my post will interest anyone but me.

On top of all that, what I did just has a lot of euphoria built in. Playing a small but important part in a big, powerful performing collaboration is just not equaled by anything else I’ve ever done. So that’s another element of the power of this experience. If you’ve sung in a big, skilled chorus or played in a fine-sounding symphony orchestra you know what I mean. It is a gas like nothing else to be a cog in the engine driving someone’s thundering, velvet hand.

I’ll try to put the nerdy musical navel-gazing and inside baseball at the end, how about that?

What I Did and Why It Mattered to Me

I played accordion in the pit orchestra for Broadway Sacramento’s 2024 production of Fiddler on the Roof, part of their Broadway at Music Circus series. The show ended July 14, 2024 and I’ve been sketching and re-sketching this summary of what it was like for me, because it was hardest gig I’ve ever done as a musician and at the same time a really positive experience. It was ten days of tightly focused concentration on one mission, forsaking everything else.

For adults, the opportunity to set aside quotidian responsibilities and really concentrate single-mindedly for days at a time, like a privileged full-time student or a well supported startup founder, is rare and precious. I feel lucky with every opportunity like this, and even among such opportunities this one was special.

I didn’t knock it out of the park but I delivered adequate performance in a situation that was well outside my wheelhouse, a context and project that required a lot of hard work, drew on skills where I’m rusty and inexperienced, and where I ran a very real risk of failure.

In case you think I might sell myself short with the phrase “adequate performance,” know that I’m actually bragging. Adequate performance means functioning effectively and professionally as a peer to my counterparts in the orchestra, Broadway-seasoned and Grammy-nominated counterparts for whom pit orchestra work is routine, counterparts who are masters at controlling their instruments, counterparts who are long-time university music faculty and symphony, opera, and ballet orchestra players. Counterparts whose books for this show were almost all thinner than mine and some of which were easier than mine to play.

Rising to a demanding musical challenge in unfamiliar conditions is good, but I’m also proud that for the first time in my life as a performing musician I coped with my insecurity, apprehension, and deer-in-the-headlights panic without doing or saying anything I regret. I’ve felt insecure as a musician on plenty of projects in the past, and on each of those occasions there’s been an incident or two where I look back and see that my insecurity got the better of me: Either I said something snarky or whiny or unkind, or I let myself marinate in dejection and self-pity because I felt my musical skills or contributions didn’t measure up. This time I kept my attitude and my approach positive the whole time, even when the obstacles seemed really high.

I also feel a lot of gratitude toward my fellow orchestra players and our conductor for their support and kindness. Even when I was afraid I would be fired for underperforming and even when, as I later learned, the contractor and probably the conductor were afraid I would quit in frustration, I got nothing but kindness and support from everyone. (I also learned that yes, they have had to fire musicians before when the demands of the job were too much.) The conductor spent extra time with me, going over problem sections in the score and showing me how I could expect him to conduct passages where I struggled in rehearsal. It meant the world that they all thought I could succeed and were so eager to encourage and help me without ever condescending. They knew it was hard, they knew there was no way forward except to work my ass off at the job, they trusted me to do exactly that, and they trusted that I had the skill and discernment to work effectively and focus on the right priorities.

For me those human parts of the accomplishment are bigger than the already big musical part. But really, it all works in concert: If I had been less musically ready, the stress would have been more and I might not have held the humanity side of it together quite so well.

I feel glad to look back and know that I prepared the best I could beforehand, and that I worked hard every possible waking moment once rehearsals began. I can honestly say I did my best and I’m pleased with the definitely imperfect but definitely good results.

So that’s it. That’s the story. If you’ve made it this far for some reason, maybe you will enjoy the nerdy bits below, presented in FAQ format for your amusement and my ease of organizing.

FAQ

Q: What were the stakes?

We did a run of eight ticketed performances and two dress rehearsals at Sacramento’s Music Circus, a 2200-seat theater in the round. Ticket prices were $85 to $225 or so per seat. That’s a lot of people hoping the cast and orchestra won’t mess up, so I really tried hard not to mess up.

Q: How did you get the job?

It’s a classic story of “You’re always auditioning.” I was invited to sit in for fun with a local band in San Francisco, and quite often there is nothing easier for me than stepping into an already-functioning jazz or pop group and joining their musical conversation. I had fun with the entire band, and at least one person in that group must have liked what I was doing because he recommended me to the Broadway Sacramento contractor (the person who hires all the musicians) for the Fiddler accordionist role.

When the contractor called me I was surprised because my sitting-in situation hadn’t included any reading nor any real tests of my technical mastery of the instrument. But when I asked the contractor whether I was being offered an audition or the job, he said I had the job if I wanted it. I know I have acceptable reading skills and I believed that with effort I could work at a professional level in the pit orchestra. But my recommender cannot have known those things. I think he asked around a bit before recommending me, but still he can’t have really known. Scary, right?

Q: You’re a good musician, and I heard you had some time to prepare with the score ahead of the first orchestra rehearsals. So why was this a hard job?

When I was offered the job, I knew it would be challenging. But I also knew it wouldn’t feel completely foreign: I had acted and sung in musicals, I had performed in choruses under conductors, and I knew quite a few of the big hit songs from Fiddler. And yes, I definitely bring some musical strengths to the table. Amid all that, the job turned out to be harder than I predicted at first. Not impossible, but it was a big stretch beyond the big stretch I expected when I signed on.

Some of the added difficulty grew clearer before rehearsals began: In May the production company sent me a score for the accordion part in the orchestra, and it wasn’t enormous but it presented some challenging passages and it needed some editorial work to reconcile mistakes and inconsistencies. Not over the top, but more advance preparation would be needed than I predicted before I saw the score. My opportunity to prepare ahead of time turned out to be crucial.

When the company had sent me the score in May, they told me it wasn’t the score we would use for the show. That initial score was from the 17-player orchestration used on Broadway in 1964, and we would be using a 12-player orchestration developed more recently. For some reason the company didn’t have access to that 12-person score yet in May.

In mid-June the 12-player score arrived and with it some added challenges. On my first read-through it was clear some of it simply couldn’t be played on the instrument regardless of the player’s skill level, and it wasn’t just a question of shifting registrations to get the right pitch range for the indicated notes. Some of the material added to the accordion part in reducing the orchestration from seventeen players to twelve seemed written for a piano-style synthesizer keyboard programmed to sound like an accordion, not for a real accordion. On top of that, some of it would have required three hands to play on any keyboard just because of the reach and the number of simultaneous notes.

Setting aside the parts that don’t fit on the instrument, even the playable parts presented real technical challenges. A lifelong accordion player with deep facility would probably have an easy time with most of them, but virtuosity is not at the top of my list of musical strengths. I work hard to improve my technique but I’ve been serious about accordion only since late 2018 when I joined Mission Hot Club. By now I know my way around the instrument very well, but I still have ample work to do.

Finally, where the 17-person score has the accordion resting much of the time, adding color and accents and ornamentation at intervals, the 12-person accordion score is a thick book and the accordion plays almost constantly throughout its 186 pages.

In June via e-mail I mentioned my concern about the unplayability of parts of the accordion score to the contractor who had hired me, and he pulled the conductor and music supervisor into the conversation. To my relief they were very open to my questions and their input was entirely pragmatic and no-nonsense: They told me to use my judgment, simplify as needed, and be prepared to make adjustments once the full orchestra was playing together. In some areas I could see pretty clearly what I would do and in others I knew I had questions that would have to wait until we met for rehearsals.

Moreover, the contractor reassured me that I wasn’t the first to raise these concerns about this accordion book. Learning that, I thought back to conversations with my friend Dallas Vietty, a great accordionist who played in a different Fiddler pit and had shared some of the challenges with me before anyone knew I would play Fiddler. I particularly recalled his saying the part seemed to be scored for a piano keyboard, not for Stradella accordion, and I remember realizing that if he had found it challenging I would not be able to take anything for granted. He is such a strong player that if something is hard for him on accordion it’s going to be hard for anyone. I’m not certain but it seems like a safe bet that the score he worked with was the same as the 12-player score I had.

So I did what I could to prepare, and of course when we started rehearsals I saw I had made some off-base guesses about how to spend my prep time. That’s just the nature of the beast, fully expected. Rehearsing with the orchestra and hearing our parts together dramatically improved my understanding of where my playing was exposed, what tempos to expect, which would be the best editorial choices in reducing the unplayable score to playability, and where there were mistakes in the score.

Rehearsing with the orchestra grew my appreciation of another challenge, too: Where to put my attention. I had to read my score because I couldn’t come close to memorizing all 186 pages of my part, but I also couldn’t afford to look away from the conductor at crucial and sometimes unpredictable times when he needed to pace the music according to the action on stage (which nobody in the orchestra but him could see) or according to his artistic interpretation. I got steadily better at managing this split-attention aspect of the job as I got more practice at it but it remained a challenge.

A last important ingredient applies to the whole company: The Broadway Sacramento rehearsal schedule is compressed. We had our first orchestra read-through of the score on Friday, Act I rehearsal with cast and tech Saturday afternoon, Act II rehearsal with cast and tech Saturday evening, dress rehearsal Sunday evening, dress rehearsal with an audience of invited guests Monday evening, and opening night Tuesday. As a basis for comparison, the contractor told me a typical Broadway rehearsal schedule for the orchestra is four weeks.

And I got nervous sometimes. Every performing musician has had to cope with feeling nervous in live performance: Low stakes or high stakes, you have just this one chance to get it right for this audience. Nerves don’t get to me very often in my day-to-day gigging and recording life, but everyone has their limit and I was definitely outside my comfort zone. Nerves make everything worse. The easiest, most routine movements become sloppy, simple passages turn suddenly perilous, sweaty hands can’t be depended upon, and quite often those hands aren’t where you think they are on the instrument. It can be a gutting vicious cycle. I avoided musical and personal CFIT and meltdown through core confidence hard-won over the decades, but nerves definitely set my playing back some on this gig. Paying audience members heard me blow it a few times, and my musical colleagues surely noticed far more of my stumbles.

Q: Would you do something like this again?

Almost certainly yes.

Q: How do you explain being able to be a better human this time than with prior big musical challenges that made you feel insecure?

Confidence in myself, many different kinds of confidence. Confidence makes it easier for me to be humble, easier for me to share my uncertainty, easier for me to ask for and welcome help, easier for me to avoid panic, knowing I have the tools I need to improve.

I was well into adulthood, with a lot of musical experience performing and recording in professional situations, before I really seriously started to address some important issues around disciplined musical practice. I’m talking about issues that lots of other musicians confront and learn to manage in adolescence or early adulthood: How to discipline and structure practice time. How to be honest about what needs work so you don’t skip fixing easy problems. How to accept that even with the best practice, some specific skills just take a lot of disciplined, slow, self-aware repetition before mastery comes.

So late-blooming improvements in my basic approach have led to late-blooming improvements in my confidence as I’ve seen better practice give me better musicianship on a very consistent basis, and I still do every day and every week. Not only am I the best musician I’ve ever been, but I think I’m improving faster than I ever have.

Further, a mantra crucial and still rather new to me is this: My skill level, my musicality, my artistry, my ability to contribute, whatever is the value of my musicianship, simply does not depend on what anyone — I or anyone else — thinks it is. It has an objective, changeable but steady existence entirely its own, outside the realm of opinion, bound only ever so lightly to how well I acquit myself in any particular moment. The big picture is bigger than one audition or one performance or one person’s perception. It is knowable but it isn’t fast-moving so no one day’s good or bad surprise really ought to shake my estimation much. This understanding has calmed me greatly about what people think of my playing and has led me to a place where I have nothing to hide.

Another element of confidence has come from making an ever-deepening peace with the notion that the journey doesn’t end with any feeling of arrival. When I made my first album I felt proud but I also struggled with knowing I hadn’t been able to play as well as I’d have liked during the recording session, and I recognized that that feeling equally permeated a lot of my performing experience. I struggled, too, with knowing many of my musical colleagues had mastered aspects of our music where I wasn’t so consistent. Now through disciplined work I have mastered some of those elements and I feel much more comfortable about knowing I’m always going to surround myself with people who can do things I can’t do. This is how I learn, and how I motivate myself to work at improving. As that acceptance has come, so has a deep confidence that there is much I really can do, much music that I have to offer and that others at even the highest levels of musical accomplishment can welcome, enjoy, appreciate, respect, and admire.

If you are a musician struggling with confidence, with perhaps too much of your self-worth wrapped up, like mine is still, in your estimation of what other accomplished musicians think of you and your work, maybe you’ll find a lot of what I’ve said about myself is true for you, too. Maybe you’ll find you can humbly grow your own confidence along with your musicianship like I seem to have been doing. Of course I worry the growth isn’t real, that it might all evaporate tomorrow. But that’s just the inner dialogue, the monkey mind chattering away. It is real for me and I think it can be real for anyone.