Glenn Stallcop Composer, Performer
Dodging the Devil’s Workshop
A musician’s life is not the most secure choice. Most musicians live a free-lance feast-or-famine sort of existence. My main source of income has been as a musician in a symphony orchestra, which is a quantum leap above free-lance, but by no means rock solid. My orchestra position has always been susceptible to poor fundraising and bad management not to mention the fickle whims of musical taste. There have been times when my job’s future may have been sketchy, but I always felt I had the ability to get by through gigging, teaching or, as a last resort, finding another job.
But there was never a time like the full scale shut down of the music profession brought on by the Covid pandemic. Nobody was working, period, not free-lancers, not soloists, not stars, not anybody! I was lucky in that I had recently retired, but I was still doing some playing and gigging. Then, all of a sudden, nada! And it lasted for a year and a half.
As a composer, I do most of my work by myself, isolated. So I did quite a bit of writing when the pandemic started but, after a while, I realized that nobody was interested because nobody was working. Some musicians decided it was a good time to do a solo album, and I got two commissions for unaccompanied string pieces.
The title, “Divertimenti” is a reference to pieces dating from the Classical period, which were meant to be performed in social settings like a party. They were literally meant to be diversions or entertainment. I enjoyed the irony of putting together an album of diversions in forced isolation. My diversions are just ways to keep busy or pass the time interspersed with some realities of this rather exotic but intense ordeal. The cover hints at one of my diversions, drawing. I spent most of the pandemic at my cabin near Ash Fork, AZ and had lots of time and things to draw.
I put together a number of albums during the pandemic. Time, as I said, was not in short supply. Only a couple of these albums focus on the pandemic itself, however. Why rub it in? We all went through it. Besides, though a reckoning with ones own mortality can be very worthwhile, there’s only so much we can take. At some point, we’re going to need a diversion.
A musician’s life is not the most secure choice. Most musicians live a free-lance feast-or-famine sort of existence. My main source of income has been as a musician in a symphony orchestra, which is a quantum leap above free-lance, but by no means rock solid. My orchestra position has always been susceptible to poor fundraising and bad management not to mention the fickle whims of musical taste. There have been times when my job’s future may have been sketchy, but I always felt I had the ability to get by through gigging, teaching or, as a last resort, finding another job.
But there was never a time like the full scale shut down of the music profession brought on by the Covid pandemic. Nobody was working, period, not free-lancers, not soloists, not stars, not anybody! I was lucky in that I had recently retired, but I was still doing some playing and gigging. Then, all of a sudden, nada! And it lasted for a year and a half.
As a composer, I do most of my work by myself, isolated. So I did quite a bit of writing when the pandemic started but, after a while, I realized that nobody was interested because nobody was working. Some musicians decided it was a good time to do a solo album, and I got two commissions for unaccompanied string pieces.
The title, “Divertimenti” is a reference to pieces dating from the Classical period, which were meant to be performed in social settings like a party. They were literally meant to be diversions or entertainment. I enjoyed the irony of putting together an album of diversions in forced isolation. My diversions are just ways to keep busy or pass the time interspersed with some realities of this rather exotic but intense ordeal. The cover hints at one of my diversions, drawing. I spent most of the pandemic at my cabin near Ash Fork, AZ and had lots of time and things to draw.
I put together a number of albums during the pandemic. Time, as I said, was not in short supply. Only a couple of these albums focus on the pandemic itself, however. Why rub it in? We all went through it. Besides, though a reckoning with ones own mortality can be very worthwhile, there’s only so much we can take. At some point, we’re going to need a diversion.