Klarinet Archive - Posting 000170.txt from 1994/02

From: "Dan Leeson: LEESON@-----.EDU>
Subj: Well, since we're confessing ...
Date: Mon, 14 Feb 1994 23:32:10 -0500

I think that I should mention that, while I have been playing
professionally since I was 16 (my first gig being in Minsky's
burlesque theatre in Newark, NJ and I fell in love with Candy
Barr, but that's a different story), I only became a reasonably
fully time player quite recently.

I spent fully 30 years as a full time, serious, heavy-duty,
money-making businessman with a large company. My interest was
in playing, to be sure, but I wanted a comfortable life divorced
from the vaguaries of a full time musician's uncertainty about
his or her income. So I worked and, when possible, played.
If I had to visit a customer in Idaho, I found out when the Univ.
of Idaho was having a band rehearsal, call the band director, ask
him if I could play with him on a certain date, and then schedule
my trip to coincide with that. It did not always work that way,
but most of the time it did.

I also played with the NJ symphony and would get the schedule at
the beginning of the year and work my business trips around that.
When I lived in Paris, that was difficult, because, as a foreigner
I could not get any serious work, and it was tough to find people
who wanted to do serious chamber music. It wasn't that I needed
the money, it was that I had to play with good players.

But I was never a full time pro until recently on my retirement
from a business career, a retirement I should add that was done
quite early. I could have gone on for another 10 years before
really needing to retire because of my age.

But let me share with you the fact that a really serious player's
life is incompatible with doing much else. When I would be in
Europe on business and travelling (and did not have a clarinet
with me to practice on), I knew that I had lost powers when I
got home and tried to toungue rapidly. That was always the
first thing to go and the hardest to get back again.

So when I get a paycheck on a regualar basis from an important
west coast symphony, I am a lot more grateful for it and happy
to get it than someone who did this thing for his or her entire
life. I also add that, during the years when I was not able to
play full time, I studied to become an important Mozart scholar,
and my work in this arena has been very pleasing to me.

Do you remember the movie that was the sequel to the "Hustler"
when Paul Newman said, "Money won is far more sweet than money
earned."? Well, in my case, and in the case of the many
competent players who chose to do something else for a living,
"Money earned playing is far more sweet than money earned any
other way."

Now, as for Candy Barr ...

====================================
Dan Leeson, Los Altos, California
(leeson@-----.edu)
====================================