Life in the orchestra pit at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion

I just got through playing the glass armonica part in Elliot Goldenthal’s ballet Othello at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion in L.A. This is a whole different world, and I thought you might find it interesting:

There are ‘permanent’ orchestras—like the L.A. Philharmonic. And there are ‘pick up’ orchestras that are assembled for a given gig. This ballet is being performed by the American Ballet Theater, touring the country, and it’s simply cost-prohibitive to shuttle an entire orchestra around the country. So a ‘music contractor’ is engaged in each city to hire the orchestra players. Over time, music contractors accumulate a rolodex of good players whom they know and trust, and so the same people tend to play together on an ongoing basis. But that depends on everyone’s availability. And the needs of a given gig will vary also—one gig may need Wagner tubas (like this one)—or even a glass armonica! The next—who knows. Even still, orchestras are enormously expensive.

This was a 66 piece orchestra. Just for one rehearsal, if each player is paid $150 (low), that adds up to about $10,000 for one rehearsal. So the orchestra gets ONE rehearsal on its own. We all show up on Wednesday at 10am. The ballet is about 1.5 hours of music, the rehearsal will be 6 hours altogether (with a lunch break). The sheet music is waiting for all of us. They DON’T get it to you ahead of time—the logistics of that are too daunting. Some players have performed this piece before, others (like myself) have not. But the musicians in this business (‘session players’) are monster readers. The same goes for film scores. When you listen to the film score of, say, Harry Potter, that orchestra is sight-reading all that music.

Typically they might get one run-through where the conductor fixes balance issues and such (“horns—louder in bar 774 please; oboes—make those staccatos a little shorter in bar 219″) and then they record it and move on to the next cue. There simply isn’t the time or money to be messing around. On the other hand, the conductor has to know the score frontwards and backwards. For one thing, particularly in modern music like this piece, there are constant meter changes (from 3/4 to 4/4 to 5/4 to 2/4) and tempo changes. There are specific patterns conductors use with their right hand for each meter—the left hand is free for cueing players (it’s REALLY helpful after counting 79 bars of rest with constant meter changes to have the conductor point at you when you’re supposed to play). Whether playing or counting rests, we’re all watching that right hand with our peripheral vision to keep in sync.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch—I have cues in the 1st and 3rd acts—none in the 2nd act. The conductor is kind enough to rehearse the 1st then the 3rd acts so I can leave early. (THANX!) Basically I have three solos of about 8 bars each during which pretty much no one but me is playing. (Otherwise I’d be drowned out, although they do put a microphone on me and a few other players like the harp to give us just a little boost.) And I get to play the very last chord of the whole piece—it ends with just a glass armonica chord, so I get the very last word! Dress rehearsal is on Friday at 2pm; first performance that night at 7:30. The dress rehearsal is where EVERYTHING is put together just like the real show—dancers in costume, lights, orchestra, the works.

There are always little kinks to work out. For example: there is also a ‘stage manager’ who is, amongst other things, sort of the ‘conductor’ behind the curtain. They too know the piece frontwards and backwards; they know who is supposed to enter when, what the scene changes are supposed to be, all of that. There’s a red light on the conductor’s music desk that the stage manager can turn on and off. For example, as the audience is being seated, the red light is ON; the stage manager turns the light OFF to let the conductor know that they’re all ready behind the curtain, and the conductor starts the overture.

In another place there’s a big change taking place behind the curtain and the orchestra is supposed to ‘vamp’ (repeat the same two bars) until they’re ready—again the stage manager turns that light on while they’re doing the change, the conductor keeps the orchestra vamping, then the stage manager turns the light off when the music can exit the vamp and continue. In other places there’s a change at the end of a movement, and the conductor can do things like hold the last chord extra long to help cover the change. (TOO much silence is bad.) At the dress rehearsal all of this gets a run through. At the dress we all get our security badges as well—they don’t want anyone sneaking in for performances through the artist entrance. And there’s an awful lot of expensive equipment—not to mention our musical instruments! So they run a tight ship. Those of us with large instruments leave them for the duration of the show—I figure my armonica is actually safer in the pit than it is in the back of my van. On a regular basis you see the guards doing their rounds.

The ‘Green Room’

Every theater has what is officially called the ‘green room’. This is where the performers hang out when they’re not on stage. (They’re never green—why they’re called the ‘green room’ is lost in history.) They’re invariably furnished with lots of Goodwill-type sofas. (It’s where I’ll hang out during the second act—a great opportunity to take a Power Nap!) They invariably have a video monitor showing the stage and the sound piped in so you can see and hear what’s happening on stage. (Thus the performers know when it’s time to get ready to go on stage.) The sound is also piped into the dressing rooms and the rest rooms. And the stage manager has a microphone that is piped into the green room and environs. The performance is at 7:30pm; at 7:00 we hear the stage manager intone over the green room PA “thirty minutes”. By this time I’ve already double-checked my instrument; I have power and the motor is working; sheet-music is in place; water bowl is filled. And at 7:15 we hear “15 minutes!” Time for me to go scrub with my Lava soap so I’m ready to play. We musicians ascend into the pit:

Places, everyone!

At 7:30 we’re all in place. The conductor walks in, the audience applauds, he waits for the red light to go off, and we start. Standing in the middle of an orchestra is simply an amazing sound. It’s not deafening at all; just a feeling of being completely immersed and enveloped in a wonderful sound. There are four performances altogether—one on Friday night, a 2pm and 7:30pm on Saturday, and a 2pm on Sunday.

All goes without a hitch—except on Saturday night between the 2nd and 3rd acts we’re in the green room and hear the stage manager over the P.A.: “All dancers: emergency rehearsal on stage RIGHT NOW!” We musicians look at each other and say: “this can’t be good” and it’s not—one of the dancers has badly sprained her ankle. And here she is—one of the ballet staff helps her hobble into the green room and gets ice for her ankle. Meanwhile, on stage behind the curtain, while the audience is enjoying the intermission, the dancers are working out how they will replace her. Finally, the finale of the final performance on Sunday afternoon. I’m the last musician to leave due to taking down the armonica. And the stage crew swoops in, tearing everything down; putting everything away. The ballet company has to be on the bus in a couple hours, off to San Diego to do “Sleeping Beauty”.

Trip To Hong Kong

I was hired by 711 Production Limited to give five performances in the New Town Plaza in Hong Kong to play for “Golden Week”. (711 Production’s link is here, but to see it properly you must use Internet Explorer.) Golden Week is a week-long shopping holiday, and shopping malls hire entertainers to attract shoppers—it is huge. (Apparently they have ‘Golden Week’ several times a year.)

Here is the stage they built for me, and my ‘back-up band’ rehearsing before my arrival:

Backup-Band rehearsing before William Zeitler’s arrival

Here is the poster advertising the event (click image for larger version):

Poster advertising William Zeitler’s glass armonica concerts. (Click for higher resolution)

“Glass Armonica Concert” “During the mid-Autumn Festival, the world’s famous international Glass Armonica performer William Zeitler will appear at New Town Plaza. He will lead you into a tranquil music world to enjoy the rare sound from heaven.” The remaining text is about date/time/location/etc. (Translation courtesy of Yanan Wu)

William Flies To Hong Kong (10/2/2006)

So, how do you fly with a glass armonica and a set of musical glasses? It’s not easy!

First of all, the musical glasses. Particularly on international flights, the size and weight of your luggage is critical to the airlines. Reducing the number of glasses reduces the size of the musical glasses case. My “flying musical glasses” are what I call “semi-chromatic”: all the “white keys” plus the F#s and Bbs. Leaving out the C#s, D#s and G#s reduces the number of glasses by 25%, but I can still play almost any popular tune on my 15 glasses (one and a half octaves). The glasses go into a heavily padded case and are checked in:

Flight case for William Zeitler’s musical glasses

Although I’ve flown with the glass armonica many times before, this is the first time flying with the musical glasses. And since I have to hand carry the armonica glasses, I have to check in the musical glasses. They should get there OK—even if a few get broken I can still play around the missing glasses. We’ll see what happens…

The armonica glasses go into a case that I carry on the plane. I’ve worked out an Escher-esque set of spindles so all the glasses fit in an airline regulation carry-on sized case:

Flight case for William Zeitler’s glass armonica glasses

The rest of the armonica—cabinet, motor, etc.—goes into two other cases that are checked in.

William Flies to Hong Kong (Tues. 10/3/2006)

Ed Dilks accompanies me as my fearless road manager. Flying with two glass musical instruments, and the complexity of the show would be impossible without his assistance. We’ve decided to call our trip
“Bill and Ed’s Excellent Adventure“.

Due to the international date line we essentially lose a day—we leave at 2am on Monday morning and are scheduled to arrive at 7am on Tuesday. Of course that’s not how it worked out. LAX decided to close their ‘long’ runway for construction without telling the airlines. So our flight was delayed (simply because their was one less runway). Also, because we had to use a ‘short’ runway (that’s a comforting thought!) we had to stop in Taipei to refuel, and they left lots of folks luggage behind.

Like ours.

So the flight was yet 2 hours longer—16 hours squeezed in a seat is an experience I’m looking forward to repeating soon! (Wait a minute, I will be in just a few days!)

Here’s what we looked like when we got on the plane in LAX (Ed’s on the left):

Ed & William getting on the plane for Hong Kong

Ed can actually sleep on the plane—I managed to doze a little, but I’m fried. Here’s Ed and I—yippee we’re finally off of that @#$% plane, 16 hours later in Hong Kong:

Ed & William getting off the plane in Hong Kong, 16 hours later

Ed has weathered the ordeal with rather flying colors—me, not so well! Ed is already earning his keep by keeping sharp objects away from me!

In any event, the airline is very apologetic about the delays and the luggage (even though it wasn’t their fault), and they deliver my luggage (including the non-glass armonica parts and the musical glasses) by 5pm on Tuesday. Just in time too, because—surprise!—I need to do four press interviews before the rehearsal! Fortunately they want to film me putting the glass armonica together so I don’t have to be in a rush about that. I actually had to take glasses back off and put them back on in slow-motion so they could get the shots they wanted:

William Zeitler being filmed assembling his glass armonica—for the 6 o’clock news!

Alas, the rehearsal goes amazingly badly. One of those ‘nobody’s fault but everything that can go wrong does go wrong’ situations. Electrical problems. P.A. problems. Even the music arrangements just don’t work. So I stay up most of the night writing new ones in the hotel room. Tomorrow is the big press conference where everything has to be perfect. I finally get to bed at 4:30am—have to be up by 7:00am.

Ed was thoughtful enough to snap this flattering picture of me doing my ‘midnight arranging’. (Thanks, Ed.) Notice the monster voltage converter/transformer to my right (the white metal box about the size of a toaster): Hong Kong uses 220v electricity, so I need the convertor to run my laptop. With Pringles and coffee (to my left) I get the job done.

William doing an “all-nighter” re-arranging music

By the way, the musical glasses all arrived in one piece.

Big Press Conference (Wed. 10/4/2006)

The press conference is at noon. They’ve built a platform just for the press:

Getting ready for William Zeitler’s big glass armonica press conference

They do what they can with makeup, but there’s only so much they can do… <grin!>

They even have six beginning-violinist children dressed up like Mozart playing for the event:

Here I am playing the musical glasses:

William Zeitler playing the musical glasses

Whereas everything went wrong in the rehearsal, everything goes right for the press conference! (Whew!!)

William Zeitler explaining the glass armonica

William Zeitler playing the glass armonica

Here I am being interviewed on Hong Kong TV. I honestly can’t tell you at this point how many interviews I’ve done:

William Zeitler being interviewed on Hong Kong TV about the glass armonica

Lookin’ pretty good for about 3 hours sleep in two days! My MC/Interpreter for the press conference and all the performances, Fok Choi Ling, is on the left talking into the microphone.

Here’s another interviewer and I looking into the camera to our right to say goodbye to the folks in TV-land:

William Zeitler being interviewed some more on Hong Kong TV about the glass armonica

Here I am with the team from 711 Productions Ltd., one of the musicians, and Ed. The press conference could hardly have gone better. We are all really happy and relieved:

Ed and William with the fantastic team from 711 Productions. From left to right we have:

Falcon Luk (with 711 Productions), yours truly, Alan Man (with 711 Productions), Ed the-unstoppable-road-manager Dilks, Ally Lo (with 711 Productions), Gloria Cheng (with 711 Productions) and Keith Poon (our violinist).

We all go to a late lunch. I want to eat one unique Hong Kong delicacy each day—today’s was “fish lips”. (I never thought about fish having lips.) Surprisingly they have a lot of fat. (Fat lips?)

Ed and I go back to the hotel and auger into the pillows.

First Performance (Thurs. 10/5/2006)

First performance is behind us. (Click here for a 880K video snippet.) No more midnight arranging. Three more performances to go, but all is under control.

Here’s the MC/interpreter and I. Notice the big-screen TV above us:

William Zeitler performing on the glass armonica in Hong Kong, with Fok Choi Ling
as his MC/Interpreter

This shopping mall is truly amazing. I’ve never seen anything like it. Fifty (50) restaurants alone! Seven (7) levels, and it just goes on and on. Ed and I get lost on a regular basis trying to find our way around this behemoth.

And clean? You can’t walk more than 100 meters (yards) without seeing yet another cleaning person. There’s someone stationed full time in the restrooms keeping everything gleaming. There is not a speck anywhere. And friendly security everywhere. More than once Ed and I are just standing there, stumped, and a friendly security person comes to us smiling—”Can I help you find something?”

And they take ‘customer service’ to a level unheard of in the U.S. I bought a cheap little alarm clock (forgot to bring one). The clerk took the clock out, put the battery in, set the alarm for one minute later, waited one minute to make sure the alarm worked, then put it all neatly back into the box. Ed bought a tripod at another store—they took the tripod out of the box and made sure that everything was right about it. At yet another store we bought one of those little luggage dollies (like you use on suitcases that don’t have the built-in wheels) and the clerk took the dolly out of the box and made sure that it unfolded and worked correctly.

AND: Ed and I discover that here in Hong Kong ‘happy hour’ goes from 3 to 9!! Our kind of place!

William’s Hong Kong delicacy for the day is “chicken feet”. (Not much meat). Then we go to the ‘Avenue of the Stars’ where we can see the Hong Kong skyline across the harbor (click for a larger view):

Hong Kong skyline from ‘Avenue of the Stars’. (Click for higher-resolution)

Second Performance (Fri. 10/5/2006)

Well, all our efforts to get press coverage did result in some notice. Click here…

There are so many cultural differences—some small, some not so small. Here I am tuning the musical glasses:

William Zeitler tuning his musical glasses

Yes, that precision tuning implement is actually a ‘turkey baster’. I use it to add/remove small amounts of water. I’ve gotten many a laugh in America pretending to be very serious about my ‘precision tuning implement’ which is a cheap kitchen tool found in every American kitchen. I try this same joke on Gloria
(essentially my ‘boss’ from 711 Productions) and she just nods as if I’m serious. I ask her: “you know what this really is, don’t you?” —why no—and come to find out that turkey basters are unheard of in Hong Kong. No one here bastes their turkeys! I’m thinking—I’d better not lose this because I’ll never find
another one here!

This one is a bigger cultural difference:

Poster in downtown Hong Kong advertising TEACHERS!

>

It’s a huge (and thus expensive) billboard in downtown Hong Kong advertising a school’s TEACHERS! Here’s a close up of one of the featured professors (Andy Tse, Biology):

Detail of poster in downtown Hong Kong advertising TEACHERS!

Others are professors of Pure and Applied Mathematics, Economics, Accounting, etc. This is far from unique—I saw many other similar posters and billboards around Hong Kong. Imagine advertising your TEACHERS like we advertise our sports figures! And in the subway there was a poster advertising a Mathematical Statistics Bookstore! In the subway!

William’s delicacy for the day: “jelly fish head & cucumber”! (A little rubbery!)

Third Performance (Fri. 10/5/2006)

Ed has the brilliant idea that we should film a ‘music video’ while we’re here. So now we’re scrambling to make that happen. To get a music video out of this trip is just too good of an idea…

The performance goes well.

William Zeitler performing on the glass armonica in Hong Kong

Here’s Ed, my intrepid road manager, on the prowl for more video:

Delicacy for the day: Ox tongue and curry!

Fourth Performance (Sat. 10/5/2006)

In the morning I dress up in my ‘Elton John’ suit (that’s what we call my gold tuxedo coat with ‘fluffy’ shirts) and we go to the Bird Garden and Flower Market. Owning birds is considered good luck, and there’s a street here called the Bird Garden with nothing but bird vendors. On our way there Ed films me getting on and off the train, going up and down escalators, like that. With his decades of experience on production crews in the film and TV industry in Hollywood, Ed is getting some extraordinary cinematographic effects with my little hand-held video camera!

I check out the birds in the Bird Garden:

And you can buy bags of live crickets to feed your birds:

Here’s a bird on a leash (held down by a cigarette lighter):

Here I am on Flower Street:

Ed also has the great idea of filming me buying flowers and then giving them away to pretty girls passing by:

We just want to get as much interesting video of me walking around Hong Kong all dressed up so when we get back to L.A. we can choose the most interesting footage and edit it down to the song. All total we ended up with about 3 hours of video which we expect to edit down to 4-5 minutes!

The performance goes nearly perfect. And this is the day that the Board of the New Town Plaza decides to come hear the concert! The Board is very happy with how it went, so naturally 711 Productions and I are very happy too.

Here’s Ally (with 711 Productions) having way too much fun putting the food coloring into the musical glasses:

Ally coloring the water in William Zeitler’s musical glasses

Two Hong Kong children had the homework assignment to go to a concert and complete their workbook about it. So they chose ours! (Click to see a closeup of the workbook.) I can’t read a word of Cantonese, but you can see my name spelled in Latin characters among the Cantonese ideographs.

Two Hong Kong children whose workbook assignment is to review a concert.
They chose MINE! (Click to check their work!)

My delicacy for the day: Beef ligaments. Or is it beef tendons? We’re not sure…

Last Day (Mon. 10/9/2006)

Actually, the last useful day—Tuesday is our return flight. This morning we do the most difficult shoot—a ‘guerilla film shoot’ where we’re going to set up the armonica along the Avenue of the Stars—a promenade overlooking the harbor and Hong Kong skyline. We have transportation to get the armonica there, and portable power is supposed to arrive there also. We have to shoot and be done by 10am when security starts rousting people! So we’re up at 5:30am to be at the venue in time to get the job done.

After that we’ve rented a van for the day. 711 Productions has kindly provided one of their staff (Alan) to be our translator. We’ll drop off the armonica at the hotel after the guerrilla film shoot in the morning, and spend the rest of the day visiting as many sites as we can (without the armonica, but me still wearing Elton John) to get more footage.

(Later that day…)

Well, a security fellow told us we had to move down 100 meters (yards) along the
promenade—no problem! And here he is! His name is Tso Kung Kim:

William Zeitler and security person Tso Kung Kim playing the glass armonica four-hands!

And a work crew stops to check me out:

A work-crew takes a break to watch William Zeitler play his glass armonica.

We spend the rest of the day trying to get as much footage of me in Hong Kong
for the music video as we can…

On the ferry across the harbor:

At a Buddhist Temple:

Checking out McDonalds! Notice the scaffolding—it’s made of bamboo! (Better than than steel scaffolds? Probably!)

Fly to Los Angeles (Tues. 10/10/2006)

Due to the International Date Line, we leave at 1:20pm on October 10, and arrive in Los Angeles at 11:35am on October 10—in other words, we arrive before we left! (13 hours later.)

What a trip! Gloria and her 711 Production staff were wonderful; the performances went really well, Hong Kong is magnificent, all the glass instruments made it there and back in one piece—life is good! I can’t wait to go back!