Part 3: Community Building

In November of 2008 I moved to New York City. I'd been working in local, regional theatre and tours for over ten years and I was determined to get a job playing keyboards on Broadway. This is part three of a five part series. For the full story, visit the series home page:

How I Became a Broadway Musician

My First Apartment

An actor friend of mine knew an actor who knew an actor who knew an actor who needed to sublet his apartment in Queens. I was at the end of a regional theater contract and I jumped on the offer. $600/mo for one bedroom in a two bedroom apartment in Queens.

When I moved to New York in November of 2008 I thought I had all kinds of connections in “the city”. After all, nearly everyone I had worked with on tours and regional theaters lived in New York. Even some of the musicians I worked with on cruise ships were here. It’d be easy to get a gig, right?

It turns out I had a lot of great friends, but I didn’t really have many connections that could get me any work. I knew actors, directors, choreographers, stage managers – but very few of them seemed to have any connections to piano/keyboard/MD work.

I learned that it would be other music directors that would recommend me for the work they couldn’t take themselves. This taught me a very valuable lesson – If I want to work in New York City as a music director, I have to know other music directors.

The reason I didn’t know any MDs stemmed from one of the peculiarities of working as a music director: Especially outside of New York City, there’s typically only one music director on each gig. So we rarely meet each other.

Ok, so it turned out that I didn’t have any connections in New York City. Woops. What now?

It Can Be a Tough City…

Things didn’t go very well in New York at first. Not only did I misjudge the number of connections I had, it was also November of 2008 – right at the beginning, you probably remember, of the worst recession in generations. AIG had failed 3 months prior and 2 months later 11 Broadway shows closed – taking 150 musician jobs with them.

It was – to put it nicely – not a good time to try to break into the scene.

I lived off unemployment checks for 5 months. I found a few gigs here and there, but nothing that paid very much.

Very soon I was dead broke. It was the middle of winter in New York City. My apartment had rats and cockroaches that would shift and crawl through the walls at night. My friends were telling me to move back home.

For many months I tried very hard to get a day job. But it was hopeless – the unemployment rate in NYC was almost 10% at that time. In a city of 9 million people that’s a lot of unemployed workers. I was competing for temp jobs with Wall Street execs with Yale degrees. I kept sending out my (day job) resume, but I just never heard anything back. It was very frustrating.

I kept thinking...what else can I do? How can I turn this around?

Creating Connections

Ok, so I had this one really glaring problem: I had no connections. But what are connections, really? What does it mean to be connected?

Being connected means to be part of a community. It means that you have friends that you help and that help you, too. It means you go out to drinks and tell stories and have a good time. And when gigs come along you and your friends hire each other.

What I needed was a community of music directors that I could be a part of. I either needed to find that community – or build my own from the ground up.

So I did both. I began contacting the existing keyboard community and I started to build my own.

Contact the Existing Community

Step one, I emailed every single musician that was currently playing keyboards (or conducting, or contracting, or anything related) on Broadway.

I made a spreadsheet that listed every show on Broadway. Next to each show’s name were columns for:

• Music Contractor
• In-house Contractor
• Conductor/Music Director
• Key 1
• Key 2
• Key 3
• Key 4
• Synth Programmer
• Copyist

I went to ibdb.com, a website that lists all of the personnel of each Broadway show, and filled in the names of every position on every show.

Then, using the union directory (See? I knew that union membership would come in handy eventually), I found all of the email addresses I could.

Then I sent an email to each musician.

Here is an example of the kind of emails I would write:

Dear [Name of Musician],

My name is Dave, I’m a pianist and keyboardist originally from Chicago. I’ve worked primarily in theatre for the past 14 years. I’ve been an accompanist, conductor, keyboardist, copyist – you name it. I studied jazz piano, I worked on cruise ships, MD’d the Wonderful Town national tour and worked as a consultant for Hal Leonard. My resume, bio, recordings and photo are all at http://www.davidjhahn.org.

I moved to NYC a few months ago and I’m looking for work. I’m certain you often receive emails to that effect, but I thought it wouldn’t hurt to write you anyway. I’m a member of the 802 and I found your name and contact through them.

I wonder if you are in need of any subs for [show the musician plays on]. Also, if you have any advice for me about getting rehearsal and audition accompanist work in the area, I would be very, very grateful.

Thank you for your time -
Dave

***********************************************
DAVID J. HAHN
Piano, Conducting & Keyboards
(630) 740-9274 | WWW.DAVIDJHAHN.ORG

The emails followed a basic formula that I still use today:

1. Who I Am – Of course, you have to always assume that no one knows who you are. Obviously, at this point in the story, that was a pretty safe assumption.
2. What I’ve Done – I like to list credits in threes – as in, I list three things I’ve done in one sentence. It’s powerful. The example above doesn’t show this very well – do you see I listed 4 things? Like this:
   

   I studied jazz and classical, I worked on cruise ships, MD’d the Wonderful Town national tour and worked as a consultant for Hal Leonard.

   Three things would have been better. Like this:

   I studied jazz piano at Northern Illinois University, I worked on cruise ships in Europe and conducted the Wonderful Town national tour.

   I got better at this as I went along.

3. What Do I Want? – People often skip this part when they write introductory emails. You can’t expect strangers to read your mind – you have to ask for things. It can be done politely:
   

   I wonder if you are in need of any subs for [show the musician plays on]. Also, if you have any advice for me about getting rehearsal and audition accompanist work in the area, I would be very, very grateful.

When I wrote someone I would highlight their name in yellow. If they wrote back I would highlight it in blue. If they told me they couldn’t help (aka “stop bugging me”) I would highlight their name in red.

Then I would write back the names in blue. I’d ask if we could meet for coffee. If they said yes I would highlight their names in green and set up a meeting.

I don’t know how many people I wrote. Dozens. A lot of them wrote back – maybe half of them. They all said they couldn’t help, but 3-4 of them agreed to meet me for coffee. One said I could come sit in the pit for Wicked (YES).

I didn’t do this just once. I kept up with the scene. As shows closed I would move them to another spreadsheet called “CLOSED”. As new shows opened I would add them, and all of their personnel, to the spreadsheet. I spread out emails so I wouldn’t annoy anyone – no more than one every three months.

Eventually I started to understand which shows I would be best for, and which ones were probably not right. For instance, if the keyboard player also doubled on the zither, it probably wasn’t worth bothering that guy.

Build a New Community

Step two, I used the internet to try and help create a music director community. Cameron and I had launched MusicianWages about a month before I came to New York, and we’d already started to see traffic from like-minded musicians. So I used the site to help with the community building.

I started writing articles about Broadway, the union, music directing and anything else for which musicians like me might be searching Google. If someone on Broadway emailed me back I would ask them if I could interview them for the website. I would post their interviews.

I was hoping that all the writing might attract people like me – you know, other music directors, etc. It worked pretty well, really. Try it – go to Google and look up “broadway music director”. You’ll find my articles.

Then I started a private email list for music directors. I started a Facebook group and a Twitter group (that I later closed – try @MusicTheatreMD now). I used MusicianWages to let people know about the groups.

After I had a little email list I put together a meet-up in NYC. There was another MD in the group who was much better than me at event planning and I asked her if she’d help me find a place to have it. She took care of the venue and I worked on getting people to come. I wrote, again, to every player on Broadway, as well as every music director I’d found, and every contractor in town.

It was a good event. A few dozen music directors came to a small restaurant in the theatre district and we had a good time. We exchanged business cards and soon after we all started trading work between ourselves. The great Broadway contractor John Miller even came to the party and let us ask him questions about how to get a Broadway gig.

Little By Little

Little by little things started to get a little better at this point. I started to find a little work. I moved to a cleaner, cheaper (but smaller) apartment in Harlem. I was still dead broke all the time – but I had work, so I wasn’t feeling so desperate.

I’d found a way to turn things around and finally started moving in the right direction in NYC. But it would be another two years before I’d play on Broadway.

At this point I had spent years building my resume and my community and, in hindsight, I was more than half-way to my goal. The next step was to build a combination of experience, reputation and more community.

Come back tomorrow (or subscribe through email or RSS) and I’ll continue the story.