Catering industry vs. Classical musicians

OK, not Classical Musicians... Classical Musicians and Early Musicians alike... 

I have a part-time job at a restaurant in the outskirts of Tilburg. No, I am not a perky waitress, neither helping out in the kitchen. I am on the bottom of the hierarchy: I am one of the dishwashers. Heavy physical work, but if you do it right it can bring your body some benefit (it is like a complete work out). I work here since Easter last year, and though doing the dishes doesn't match with my profession, it is good to  keep my financial basis firm and on the other hand the schedule is flexible. There's not such a high salary that would pay enough to give up such flexibility. As a musician you need this flexibility, because the amount of commissions and concerts are not frequent enough to provide you enough money to make a living. 

I am sure many of you have done this kind of job before, but comparing to other restaurants, this one is different in many ways. First of all you cannot order a meal a la carte, because they don't have a menu card. They are specialized on parties, events, catering, feasts, birthdays, weddings, receptions, etc. Three halls, a bar, and two smaller independent buildings give place to these events, and there are days when all of these are full of people and they even have more than one team going on providing catering service somewhere else. Yes, it is extreme, but I love it. It tears my body apart, because my task is not only doing the dishes, but also cleaning everything up, and put the clean stuff where they belong to (in the kitchen, or on the backroom, or wherever they have to be put). So it is not only physical job, but also requires some smart planning of logistics, fitnesse and effective quickness.

I have spent several months there until now, and I have to say that we, musicians (especially classical and early musicians) have what to learn from these people. Here's a list with some explanation to each point:

1. The customer's No.1 priority

It doesn't matter how much time and energy the chef invested in that particular dish, if it tastes awful, the customer won't pay for it. It is interesting how our audience works, and in many sense we, musicians, can be really grateful for their patience. I mean, nobody would ever let anyone to push some awful tasting food down his/her throat at a restaurant, but our public will clap no matter what we do. But no matter how much time the chef spent with that disgusting stuff, you won't eat it. Isn't this a little upside down? There's one thing in common though with restaurants with horrible food and musicians giving terrible concerts: after a short time they will loose their customers (and not only because nothing lasts forever).

2. Effective teamwork is more important than anything

During parties, dinner events and many more, waiters, waitresses, chefs and everyone in this restaurant are working in such an effective and cooperative way that the result works as a well-oiled machine and all the guests have a great time there. But when the guests are going home, this team continue to work on preparing the other day’s event, and they are helping eachother in order to finish as soon as possible. This is definitly something I am always amazed about, whenever I see it. They either learned or they behave by nature in this certain way, because they know that being an obstacle cause them nothing but trouble and misfortune (not immediate, but long-term trouble and misfortune). There is this joke about the waitress and her friend are having a conversation about a night out in town:

- Sooo... Can you make it tonight to go out in town?

- I don’t know, I have to work from 16:00 o’clock.

- And when will your shift finish?

- Finish? My shift doesn’t have an end-time...

There is no definite end-time of the shift: it finishes when the job is done.

On the level of musicians teamwork (in best cases) works until the final cadence of the concert, and then they are just looking for their own benefit. I may be wrong (I've already said that I'm not right, neither I possess the truth – nobody does actually) but musicians can be really an obstacle in eachothers development and success (more often on purpose than unintended, unfortunately). They call it competition, which is OK, if two ensembles are competing with eachother on the market, but this occurs too often among the members of an ensemble and in my point of view, that's just simply pointless and stupid. Being an obstacle in your fellow musician’s way is the same thing when a waitress’ priority is not being part of the team, but seeking her own good. Musicians and singers don’t do this because they are bad or evil people, they are doing so, because they are so busy with being an artist and with the music they are performing (especially with the interpretation they imagined behind the notes) that they are just completely clueless when it comes to behave like a human being. People (and this applies on everyone in general, this is just human nature) don’t think about long-term solutions. For some reason they are also happy with temporarly pleasures and their selfishness only brings them misery, bitterness and loneliness. They are choosing for the short-term pleasures, because long-term solutions require sacrifices, and because these sacrifices don’t pay-off immediately, and because people are impatient in general, they won’t take the risk of giving away something small for something bigger (which pays off at an unexpected and unpredictable time).
NB: Dear Singers, I have really bad news for ya... Being a singer means to take these risks and make these lesser (sometimes even seemingly bigger) sacrifices if you would like to do your thing right. Good news: it always pays off quite nicely and your reward will also stay for a life-time (if you are smart enough).

3. If the customer is happy, we are happy

This seems to be the same thing as the first one, but this actually rather points out that if you make your customer happy, it will make you (as the provider of this happines) also feel good about it. Positive feedback and positive emotions are just as important for someone who works in the catering industry as it is for you, dear performing musicians. I hear many people complaining about how they cannot make a living as a musician or as a singer (nevertheless, comparing to the Middle Ages, when musicians were the outcast of society, you can be happy about being considered as an equal human being, protected by the law as anyone else). Well, it is because you know what would make your audience happy, but you are just refusing to satisfy their needs. Of course they won’t want to listen to your mindf*cked ideas, if you don’t serve it in such way that it would get them in the mood of eating it. It’s like having sex with someone without any foreplay: a quickie can be exciting and pleasuresome from time to time, but invade your partner with only quickies and having only one-night-stands will only fuck-up your emotional life. The opposite also applies: if you serve your a little-bit of perverted ideas in an „edable”-way, even a mindf*ck will spice up your relationship with your audience. You just need to put these ideas in context and be really clear about communicating them.

 

Among this list, and to refer to someone else’s words proving we need to change our mindset about concert and/or music concepts, there you go: a really interesting, recently published article. Those, who follow my posts on Facebook, might have already seen me sharing this article, saying: I firmly believe that if one begins to think differently and voices his/her opinion, things may change things for good. (Partly that’s the reason why I am writing this blog, and also because I’m a hopeless exhibitionist craving for your attention – like every performing artist is). I had the luck to meet Brendan Walsh (the author of this article), and I was also attending his lectures Cultural entrepreneurship at the Fontys Conservatory in Tilburg. To be honest I didn’t want to go to his lectures, and I had one simple reason: in my experience, though Fontys Conservatory is an innovative institution willing to improve education with great lecture ideas, their business-related lessons during my Bachelor years were simply a disaster (guest speakers without any clue about music industry or the manners of the classical musician world). So I thought he will be just the same as his predecessors, but I was wrong. Maybe the most remarkable memory from his lectures regarding the subject of this entry when he stated something I had never imagined a performing musician would ever admit: the new generation of musicians is a threat for the generation before them. When I’ve heard him saying that I was silently applausing and rejoicing in myself, and with this statement he became (in my eyes, at least) from an entertaining teacher and presenter to someone worths pay attention to. So there it goes, a shout-out for his article: Classical Music is dead... Long live Classical Music!
NB: He mentiones a few recent attempts to make classical music a product which sells better, by putting classical music performances in new context (regarding location, dancing to classical music and such), which is (in my opinion, again) a good way to point out we need change, but until our attitude won't change, none of the results (good or bad) will hold - nevertheless, we need these pointing fingers.