Am I Fulfilled With My Current Bay Area Freelance Musician Life?
I always wonder if what I'm doing at the present moment in life is fulfilling enough. I seem to always be seeking more. I think many others feel this way, too. This is particularly true for me because as a professional freelance musician, I have so many niches that I enjoy working in. These include:
🎼 teaching private lessons
🎼 playing keyboards in the pit orchestra for musicals
🎼 music directing musicals and shows
🎼 conducting musicals with baton, or keys-conducting (from the keyboard)
🎼 playing auditions/callbacks for theatre companies
🎼 accompanying choirs and choruses, whether community choruses or middle school/high school choirs
🎼 accompanying vocalists and instrumentalists for a variety of reasons, from evaluations to recitals
🎼 arranging and transcribing music
🎼 playing piano or organ for churches
🎼 playing piano for weddings, funerals, and private parties
And I'm sure that list isn't complete, ha. There's just so many things one can do in the music industry, especially with piano and conducting. My favorite thing to do is to play musicals, and still to this day I'd love to pursue a career playing musicals on Broadway in New York City.
After I graduated college in December 2012, I continued teaching in my own private studio, and throughout all of 2013 and 2014 I had a fairly active piano studio, with some 25-30 students. Teaching was at least 2/3 of my livelihood. Then, in late-2014, I branched into music directing and also playing a lot more shows, which took me into 2015 where I played FIVE (5) shows that had an 85-90 mile commute per show, each way. Yes. I'm insane. This included playing keys 1 for "Tommy" in Sonoma (November 2014), being Assistant Music Director for "Home Street Home" in San Francisco (January-March 2015), keys 2 for "Hairspray" in Berkeley (April-May 2015), keys-conductor for "The Cable Car Nymphomaniac" in San Francisco (May-June 2015), and keys 2 for "Avenue Q" in Berkeley (September-October 2015). It is a RELIEF that I was able to move to Concord--60 miles closer to San Francisco--on November 28, 2015. I just hit six (6) months of living with my apartment-mate, Derek flybirdfly. The time has FLOWN BY!
I've done lots of shows throughout the Bay Area even still, but with all of the above musical edeavors, my private piano studio dwindled. I currently teach about 7-8 students as frequently as I can, and they live in Antioch, Brentwood, and Stockton.
This summer, I'll be playing for a Vacation Bible School for a church in Danville, then I have 4 weeks of work at American Conservatory Theatre (ACT) in San Francisco July 11-August 5, playing for a high school theatre arts intensive (I did this last year too), so those will be fun! I've got an opera recital coming up (accompanying 5 opera singers), will be going to Las Vegas with my Mom at some point this month (super excited!), and I've got various other projects that I'm working on. Oh, those and church on Sundays, of course, as well as teaching as many students as I can, scheduling permitting. However, I also substitute all the time for various theatre companies for rehearsals, so I take those as they come at me.
But am I content? I always want more. The future may be drastically changing for me, so more on that in the future...! ;-)
-Christopher