On Saying Yes

It's great when people ask you to a gig, recording, rehearsal, anything. It's nice to be asked. It becomes a problem when you already have quite a lot of work, but you think you can manage just this one thing more. And that other thing. And surely you have time for the third if you skip lunch.

It really is very nice to be asked, so yes.

Yes, I'll play the thing.

Yes, I'll learn this in two days.

Yes, of course I'll travel 18 hours for the gig.

Yes, I'll tap dance while playing. Yes, sure.

You have to say yes, or otherwise they will never ask you again and you will die alone and unhappy. You have to say yes, because musicians are supposed to work all day, every day teaching, practicing, performing, marketing, networking, improving, smiling. This is what it is to be a freelancer, it's hard work. If you stop, if you don't keep pushing, you'll be cast aside, forgotten. You're supposed to be stressed all the time and burn out before you're 30.

How great, guys, being a musician is so cool.

The reason I'm ranting about this yes-business is that I am a person who needs holidays. I need time for other things than music Every Single Week in order to remain a functioning human being. I get tired, both of music and of people, and I want to have a life that includes peace and quiet, and things that are not work. So this year I'm learning to say no.

No, I can't come.

No, I need the time to learn all the other things that I've said yes to.

No, I can't transpose this a tritone down just because the key better suits your mood today.

No, I can't do this for so little money. If I spend all my time working for free or for a pittance, I can't pay my rent or buy food.

No, I can't play for a hundred hours without break because my hands and brain need to rest every once in a while. I have already injured my hand once because I didn't have the courage to say when I wanted a break, everyone else seeming fine with the workload.

When I say that I can't/won't do something, I'm often told about all the other pianists who can and will do the thing I've said no to. They can play twenty three hours without stopping - they play every single note from the piece you think requires five hands (and they can do it with just seven fingers) - they never complain about money because they don't care about material comfort, and they sure as hell can sightread every vocal music piece on the planet. And transpose them to any key they like. While reciting a poem in Latin.

I'd love to meet these people. They sound awesome.

To those of you that aren't superheroes, a word of advice: Work the amount that feels right for you, and don't compare. You have to know how much you can cope with, what you're willing to do and for what price, and once you've set your limits, stick with them no matter what other people say. Then go and have days off. Breathe and notice the life outside music - it's worth seeing, I promise you.

On Better People

Better People^TM can play the piano really well. They know all the quick things and the slow things and the flashy things. But they're not just playing machines - they've soldiered through intense drama with a broken wrist/family/relationship, so now their musical interpretation has depths you can't even begin to grasp. To support these yogic guru -depth emotions, Better People^TM read a lot of serious books and watch serious series. This helps them be better than the people who read and watch the normal shit. The serious stuff has helped them grow as persons, and by now they've reached towering heights.

Better People^TM have their own chamber music festival, a concert series or at least an opera house. They know how to write grant applications in ways that make cultural foundations send truckloads of money to their direction - the projects Better People^TM do are so new, so now, so inspiring that the foundations compete for their support. Press is charmed to write lovely things, and the festival/concert/thing will continue next year with more money and prestige.

Better People^TM also practice regularly and take care of their physical and mental health. They have a balanced diet, but in parties they can be relaxed about food because they're not uptight, just annoyingly Better. Probably they shit rainbows. And because they're balanced, they don't burn out. They have a lot of work, but not too much, and they don't stress and worry and panic because music is really about being in harmony with your soul. Somehow they're in harmony with their wallets as well, and they make a decent living out of music while you starve.

Look around you. They're everywhere, these Better People^TM, taking over the world while you struggle in the dark and envy their things. They're your colleagues, your friends, and oops, it looks like you're one of them. Because there's someone somewhere thinking, oh how can she get all those nice things - her life looks so easy and polished and lovely. I wish I had that.

'I wish I had that' is good because it makes you aspire to things, it makes you work and hope and reach for something new. But it turns toxic when envy gets involved. In the music world - this tiny bubble we all try to work in - it's so easy to see others doing great, and so, so easy to see the jobs other people got and you didn't. And it's easy to forget the jobs you already have. The gigs you got, the projects you did. How proud you could be of this corner you've cleaned for yourself, this career that you've nurtured and fretted over. 'I wish I had that' could be replaced with 'I'm glad I've got this' and the Better People^TM would start looking more like normal ones.

Of course I might be wrong - there might really be people out there who shit rainbows.

Well. I'd pay to see that.

Photoshoot, a Recipe

Smile, the photographer said.

Preparation time: Hours - Years

Cooking time: A couple of hours

Ingredients:

• One pianist
• One photographer
• 2 - 3 outfits ...of which you'll end up using only one. You took the others with you because you thought that's what models do. (You have absolutely no idea of what models do.)

• Shoes
• Bunch of jewelery - you've seen singers carry a selection wherever they go. After the shoot you'll wonder why.

• Stuff for the face and the hair - the amount of products depends on your personal level of dedication and enthusiasm. (I envy people who know how to do things with products, and who can be bothered to spend time on their face in the morning. I can't even find the motivation to put butter on my toast every time, but that's just me.)

• A piano
• A camera
• A couple of bright lights - you have to look at them without blinking, the photographer tells you. In 174 pictures you will blink.

• Wine

Instructions:

1. Panic and worry, preferably years in advance to build up a good amount of adrenaline.
2. Pack your things, paint your face and meet the photographer at an inspiring location.
3. Forget to shave your armpits and be crazy scared to move your arms.
4. Articulate your artistic vision of what you'd like the outcome to be, and then listen to the photographer list all the reasons why it won't work.
5. Insist it worked for Alicia Keyes.
6. Drink half of the wine for courage. (Also works as instant blush, if you forgot your makeup.)
7. Listen carefully to the instructions of the photographer, then look like a deranged otter trying to live up to his expectations.
8. Laugh. It's not that serious.
9. Go through the first batch of pictures and realize your hair looks all funny. Take a sip of wine, forget to smile, and start over.
10. Try to look professional this time and end up looking desperate and exhausted, which is kind of the same thing.
11. Look through the second batch of pictures. Realize that if you're not smiling, everyone will see the psychopath you really are.
12. Repeat phases 7 - 11 ad nauseam until the photographer tells you to go away, or until the wine has run out.

Later:

Going through the pictures you'll notice that towards the end of the shoot you start looking more and more relaxed, but also drunk. In the end you'll settle with a picture in the happy middle of somewhat stiff and somewhat sober.

On Things That Never Will Be Music

Emails

There are so many emails. Imagine you're trying to arrange concerts, for example. First you have to email the possible venues to ask if they want you. Most don't. Staring at the negative answers you curse the day people stopped appreciating music and wallow in self-pity - and then send more emails. The venues that do want you require a lot more emailing back and forth. Agreeing on the details takes time, typing, and scanning.

Pro tip: If you don't have a printer/scanner at home, find friends who do, and then ruthlessly abuse their patience and machinery.

Texts, Messenger, Whatsapp...

Booking rehearsals. Booking meetings in which to discuss future projects. Booking rehearsals for aforementioned future projects. Endless group chats in which there's always 1) A person who doesn't use the app in question and has to be informed via smoke signals 2) Another who never answers anything, except to tell they're unavailable at the exact time everyone else has laboriously managed to agree on 3) A member who'll post all sorts of unrelated spam that you have to read every time the phone beeps because the one time you didn't it was real news. 

You send pictures of outfits to match them to others, you send cvs and biographies, promotional pictures, scores, tax cards, id numbers, bank details, drafts for program notes and grant applications and hundreds of thousands of things that are not and never will be music. You just sit in front of your computer and/or phone and click, click away while your life passes you by and all your creativity slowly withers and dies in the corner. Then the phone rings:

Calls

It's a gig! ...not. It is a salesman offering you a magazine subscription, an insurance, or cheaper electricity. Every week someone vomits their sales pitch on your hopes and dreams. You have to answer, because every call from an unknown number is like that lottery ticket you bought in order to win gazillion euros. And who knows? Next time it really could be work. 

Pro tip: Always, always when the electricity guy calls gasp in bewilderment: "Electricity? For me? What on earth would I need that for?"

Facebook

Leaving Facebook is a thing, because Facebook is evil. I'm not disagreeing, but I'm not leaving either. I follow a couple of groups that actively post things about work - people looking for substitutes,  links to new job openings and grants to apply for, events looking for music and students looking for teachers. 97% of the posts are not relevant to me, but it's the 3% that I'm interested in. I've actually got work like that, by reacting to a post, so I know it can happen. You just have to spend some time scrolling through stuff including cute animals and your friends' doings. (Okay, things could be worse.)

Websites

"What if they google me? They won't, but what if they will?" You have a website because of this. There might be other reasons, but this is the real one. When someone somewhere wants to know who you are, they'll find information you yourself have edited and polished, instead of mildly embarrassing ancient facebook history or random concert posts and articles. It takes time to maintain, however - unless you want people to see only the concerts from before 2014, you've got to keep regularly updating the site. You will not want to do this, but you'll force yourself. You will develop whole new ranges of methods of procrastination during the process.

Instagram

You should have Instagram because "everyone's there". As a pianist working with singers the important thing is not to let the singers forget you exist, so you should try to post something every once in a while. You're not really into Instagram, you're just using it as a tool. Only when someone confronts you about the relevance of seagulls or food to your work, you notice the machine is now controlling you - you've already been tagged, you've been caught in the net of arbitrary gratification, and not knowing how it happened you find yourself compulsively checking for likes and scrolling through air in your sleep - walking around seeing not objects and events but a continuous stream of hashtags and filters.

Pro tip: Watch out. It's scary business.

Teaching

A whole new world of more messages. A concert time change? No big deal. Just 22 texts. Then the replies: "What concert? Where? We have a soccer game and jazz ballet and could it be 47,6 minutes later and earlier and at the same time? Maybe on another planet? Could it have subtitles in Sanskrit?" The answers to these questions: 138 more texts. Sick on a Monday? 10 texts. A teachers' meeting? 17 texts. Students playing together with other students? What a lovely idea. 58 texts. Students playing together with other students in a concert? 18.229 texts and possible carpal tunnel syndrome.

Conclusion

Being a freelance person and teacher means you are your own pr manager and secretary, and that is a lot of work. Know it. Accept it. Embrace it. 

Pro tip: Rant about it to colleagues. Always helps.

On CVs (directors cut)

Basic info

Name, age, phone number, email, etc. 

...and all the other communication channels I'll be checking five times a day while waiting to hear from you.

Short introduction

Jenna Ristilä is one of the most important people in the world. This season she performs in all the right places, and teaches future Richters. Ristilä is also working on multi-dimentional cross-over projects that will reinvent music. This job/grant would help her unleash her true potential.

Actually Jenna Ristilä works on enough things to pay most of her rent, but if you would give her this job/grant, she'd pay all of it.

Education

The highest possible grade from all the things. I was in schools, took courses, performed and generally kicked ass. 

Let's skip my music history grades. And the second theory course. And why the graduating took so long. Focus on the positive? Right? 

Attended several summer courses by highly prestigious professors and learned so much about music and technique. 

Yes, attended several summer courses; met awesome people and drank cheap red with them, tried to explain Finnish sauna culture to foreigners, had a teenage crush or two, and sang Der hölle Rache as a drunken karaoke chorus version. Oh yes, and went to some piano lessons. 

Work 

Ristilä has performed around Europe. In Finland she is one of the most sought-after lied pianists of her generation.

Alright, Ristilä has once sung karaoke in Berlin, and sometimes singers need her for things.

She loves teaching, and has developed a variety of experimental methods that include finger yoga, vlogging, continuous self-assessment and holistic personal growth. 

She does love teaching and she tries her best not to traumatize her students. 

Other interests

Raw organic power smoothies, volunteering in a soup kitchen, learning Japanese, and pilates. 

In order of importance: sleeping, eating, books, wine. 

Editing

Choose a font that captures the essence of your identity. Serif or sans serif, that is the question. I'm warning you though - this is one of the hardest parts of making a cv and could take hours. (After trying out tons of cool things, you'll return, exhausted, to Times New Roman. But you have tried.) 

The picture

Do you have folder after folder full of pretty pictures of your face? Great! Just pick one and slap it on the cv, and you're done! If, however, you do not have this get out of jail free card and you're forced to consider a photo shoot instead - then you should definitely read my next blog post. It'll tell you all you need to know.

On Fear

​Dear reader, I'm scared. Worried, stressed, and anxious about The Career Of A Freelance Musician. I live with a man who has a Nice Normal Job, and while he sleeps peacefully, I lie awake thinking about how nobody will ever hire me again.

You know the feeling when you're wide awake, it's way too much o'clock, and you have super constructive thoughts on failing at life? Night is obviously the worst time to think, so I'd strongly recommend you to sleep instead if you can. If you can't, here's two things to do instead: play solitare (there's an app for that, no need for actual playing cards. Very handy if you want to stay in bed while someone next to you is sleeping and would little appreciate lights being switched on) - or read a book. No time to think when doing either. I've tried the Constructive Method of writing my worries down, but that creates an uncomfortable paper trail - read in daylight, all those very serious concerns and fears look more like ramblings of a delusional half-wit.

When there's a quieter period in my calendar, it easily feels like the quiet will last forever. That's when I'm most worried, anyway. Busy is good, even if it sometimes gets close to burnout. (No more of that, now. That's a whole other blog post.) So, ladies and gentlemen. In order for you to feel better about your  saner selves, I'll share some of my delusional ramblings with you. Here are some thoughts that, after midnight, have entered my drama queen of a head:

1. Oh no, I don't have almost anything this ________(insert the current time of year)! I have done my last concerts in life and I'll never get to perform again.

2. They have finally caught me out: I suck at teaching, and I'll soon be fired if all my students won't quit first.

3. People practice and work insane hours and never get tired, and they still go to the gym, only eat beans and have calm, enlightened minds. I'm the only musician who feels worn out after teaching, and who doesn't always (usually) have the energy to excercise and socialize, and who eats popcorn for breakfast.

4. X years ago in that project I  ________________(insert a thing you should've done different), and now everyone that was there hates me and thinks I'm an incompetent nitwit.

5. Next year I can't be a pianist any more because nobody wants to play with me, and I'll probably end up working as a cleaner or cashier except they won't hire me because I'm too lazy and I'll die alone and unemployed. 

6. Everyone else has so many fancy gigs - they all work from morning till night and then party like crazy. I must be the only person in the entire music industry who has days off and watches Netflix.

Don't get me wrong - a lot of the time I'm optimistic about the future, grateful for the projects I've already done, and happy with the stuff I'm currently working on. I know very well that some have more and fancier stuff, and others less. I also know that You Should Not Compare Your Life With Other People's. But seriously, who doesn't? Another wisdom I've heard is Just Work Hard And Things Will Happen. No Need To Worry, Regret, Anything.

Bullshit, I tell you. I exist, therefore I worry. 

Conclusion: A part of being a freelance musician (for me) is being awake on some nights playing solitare on my phone, whilst posting only happy stuff to Instagram. And somehow life just happens to continue, and there just happens to be new mornings, opportunities, and ideas. And new exciting games in Google Play for the sleepless nights to come.

On Stupid Feedback

Writing in 2019 feels like a struggle, so just to get going again I'm coughing up a short text on feedback. I know I already wrote about critique, but this is also about positive things (I promise!). Here goes...

As you all know, we get a lot of feedback, and a lot of it is stupid in my opinion. For me, stupid feedback means comments that are vague, jumping to conclusions, and therefore unhelpful. I don't think people give such feedback on purpose – but we have a tendency to forget that our thoughts aren't audible to other people. Just our words. Also I think music being Great Art creates the need to be all poetic and soulful when commenting on it. Feedback easily slides to the Higher Realms of interpretation, emotions, expressions et cetera, instead of the lowly ways the pianists, for example, choose to push the wooden keys with their mundane little fingers. And one more thing leading the commentators astray: we see other people through our own unique experiences, tending to interpret their behaviour as if they were like us. So if someone acts in a way you would act if you were feeling shy, you probably think that they're feeling shy as well. If they really are feeling shy, then that's great, well observed you! But if they're not shy after all, and instead this is their concentrated face or their tired face, then oops. You go and tell them there's no need for shyness here, and you'll baffle them for sure.

Anyhow, my purpose of writing this is to call for more simplicity, and I seem to be doing the very opposite here. So I'd better move on to some examples now.

Stupid feedback: ”You should express yourself more freely.”

Great feedback: ”To me it sounds like your playing lacks dynamic range and agogics – why not try to exaggerate the dynamic differences and rubatos to make the music less rigid?”

***

Stupid feedback: ”The melody should sing more.”

Great feedback: ”Your legato isn't ideal, because you're interrupting it with unnecessary hand movements. Here's how you could try to move your hand...”

***

Stupid feedback: ”Such a sensitive accompanist!”

Great feedback: ”What a good accompanist – he matched his dynamics so well with the singer, and played with such clever rubatos that it sounded like they were really breathing together.”

***

Stupid feedback: ”You need to be more together!”

Great feedback: ”More eye contact! When you look at each other more often, it makes you look like a team.”

Maybe it's just me, but I'd prefer the latter any day. So what do you think? What is good feedback to you?