About Me — Lucinda J. Ellert
Crashing On (and off) the Podium
Mid-stream in my career as a performing musician I began to study conducting — a dream I’d been nurturing for several years. I studied and attended Master Classes and Workshops, took lessons with Important People, and did thousands of flight hours with my local community band. I had more fun than I’d ever had in my life.
After a while, I snagged a “real job.” It was another community band, but it paid real money, and for me, at the time it was like driving a race car after years of coaxing along the old Model T. Wow! What a ride!
Our first July 4 performance — the biggest event of the year and the one that formally introduced me as their new conductor to the world— I was so excited I could hardly contain myself. We assembled on the town common and waited for the pre-pubescent girls in barely appropriate spangle-y costumes to finish dancing around with batons and pom-poms to extremely loud music. Our audience was huge — well over a thousand people, many very young children dancing their own impressions on the grass.
We were the main event. The show would end after the fire department raised a ginormous American flag on a ladder truck behind the band as we played Stars and Strips Forever.
We played well. The band was very responsive. I had 65 avid amateur and professional musicians in front of me and over 1000 listeners behind me, not counting the children who were surely absorbing something in the way of culture through all their running around. At the end of the first set, my usual routine is to jump off the podium in a somewhat showy way, run to the side, motion for the band to stand as a unit, and take a bow.
I leaped. I ran. Right into and over the monitor that someone* had put not five feet directly to stage left of the podium.
Dead silence while I thrashed around in the grass, trying to get back to my feet as quickly as possible so that no one would notice what had just happened. Embarrassed as I was, and smarting from a twisted ankle, my thoughts were racing: Well, sez I to myself, I hadn’t intended this to be a comedy routine, but there you have it. I limped back to the podium, winked at the band, and turned to the audience. “Boy, I have really fallen for this band.”
Ok, lame. But it got a laugh and everyone relaxed and we went to on the second half of the performance.
Being creative is building on what you already know, and by that time in my career, I knew a lot but also knew I had to know a lot more. And that, in a phrase, is me: non-sequiturs combined with a dollop of wisdom.
I started my performing arts career in high school, way back in the late 1960’s. I was not a stellar performer, not by a long shot. My real refrain should be: We’ve No Business in Show Business, but the quick-thinking it takes to engage in self-deprecation is part of the act.
But that’s just my style. This is really about creation and re-creation. Because as one of the hundreds of thousands of foot soldiers in the arts, my career life, which is my life, I can impart ab experientia consilium: advice from experience.
To you foot soldiers in the arts:
- Champion your success more than your failures, because rejection is an unending part of our existence. Keep those successes as the bright shiny object that you can attempt to meditate upon if you can stay focused.
- Stay flexible in your work options, but never lose sight of what you’re really here to do. Ives sold insurance, Moussorgsky was a postman, we’ve all waited tables to survive (I think there’s a song lyric here).
- Put aside the fear that if you go into career areas that are adjacent to your dreams (i.e. you’ve trained as a composer, but you also teach) you are giving up. In other words, be realistic about your potential to the extent that you can survive, but keep the faith that there could be something greater for you out there. That’s not admitting you’ll never make it “big,” but it’s really nice to eat.
- Don’t beat yourself up when things change. They always will. My conducting career was decimated by the pandemic. Those old days have evaporated. So, I’m using my creative spark to work out new ways to be myself. Do I miss conducting? Yeah, with all my heart and soul. But it ain’t over till it’s over. Damn it.
- Keep as your mantra: there is nothing new under the sun. If you think you’re going to create something so unique and so rare that the world has never seen, cut the crap. Admit that you won’t be the single most important creator that ever existed. Not admitting from the get-go that you stand on many generations of shoulders is unnecessarily narcissistic** and you’ll damage your changes of getting ahead.
So, that tells you a lot about how I’ve built and maintained my career. Here are a few other bits that I don’t mind sharing:
- I’m an educator, keenly interested in how music is learned right down to the synaptic level. Neurolinguistics is critical to what makes us human, and reading (words and music) gives us the stuff upon which culture is built.
- I’m intensely interested in our own musical culture, its history and development, its currency and diversity and its future to us as a country. That is to say that while I love the European imports (i.e. dead white male composers), what we have created in our own country is the key to who we are and where we could be if we could just discipline ourselves to get there.
- I’m a practicing Christian of a very blue and liberal hue. (I associate the word “liberal” with the same root of “library” and “liberty.” Freedom and growth are the derivatives from the original Latin). That said, I also am very conservative in terms of how I use my time and build my own recognizance. I was raised, after all, by one Lutheran and one Dutch Reformed parent, so work is its own reward, can’t help it. Bottom line: I’m Christian because the basic teachings are good. I could just as well be Buddhist or Muslim. All the organized religion crap as it distorts and exploits teachings to gain hypocritical ends can go to hell if it’s not there already.
- My biggest frustration in a life of many frustrations is when I get in my own way. My dyslexia has made learning to read music extremely difficult (but also gave rise to my study of how to read music). My distractibility and twitchiness has made working in conventional environment almost impossible (but has also required me to be very creative in establishing a career). I fight every day the undertow of negativism and hopelessness, but my sense that there is something greater than myself that will guide me if I just shut up and listen. All this has taught me the value of patience which I am to a fault.
- I’ve managed to cobble together a pretty decent career. I am a Director of Music Ministries at a Congregational Church, I have a couple teaching gigs, I pick up other gigs as I can doing theatre pit gigs and summer concerts (pre-pandemic). I’m a Conductor At Liberty. (That means I’m available.) And I’m a crack engraver — even earned the title of Master Engraver from one publisher I’ve worked for. (That sheet music you buy has to get into print somehow.)
- I’m very handy with a paintbrush, a hammer, scrapers and heatgun, and cans of stripper, stain, paint, and finish. I have restored tons of antiques and now I’m working on my biggest antique of all: my pre-1820 house in Central Massachusetts.
- On our six-acre farmlet I have a huge garden that I keep my goats and chickens out of. I’m a very good cook and could almost be happy just pottering around the house doing projects, cooking, and gardening.
- I have too many degrees, but I wouldn’t give up a single second of my education. All my various college and conservatory and Master Class accomplishments have formed me as much, if not more than, my own parents did.
- Music is my life.
When I said at the beginning that being creative means building on what is already known, I was handing over my calling card. The header at the top of that virtual card reads: Creative Poise Creates the Artist. As an artist, one rule I’ve learned is to work with what I have and develop what I don’t. That gives me a sense of balance — walking a narrow beam between reality and dream.
Creative Poise gives me my sense of humor, my tool to fight the blues, my knowledge of how small I am, and yet my capacity to design something greater than I am. It lets me see both sides of a complicated world while still walking a solid foundation, and it allows me to think in ways that combine the best of both sides: creative and critical thinking. I wish that for everyone, because wouldn’t that make the world a better place?
*Thereafter the monitor was reliably placed forward of the podium in its place to the left of same.
*All artists are narcissists by definition. There is such a thing as healthy narcissism if it is in service to others and given freely with self-awareness and a healthy sense of humor.
My Stories
I’m a newbie to Medium, and I’ve started blogging as much to release the frustration, sadness, and inertia from watching my performing career collapse during the pandemic. I realized that I have a lot of pent-up stuff I want to talk about, particularly about American music culture, education, religion, and stuff. If you like my style, help me keep going! Here’s what I have so far:
De-Googling Bach: https://towardsdatascience.com/de-googling-bach-counterpointing-bachs-rules-of-the-road-with-american-populist-music-ccbaa27a149f
Digging into Trench Warfare: https://medium.com/@lucindajellert/digging-into-trench-warfare-773f70645cb9
If Reading Were Taught Like Choir is Taught: https://medium.com/@lucindajellert/edit-post-a6a36e09c8ce
As a learner in this, er, Medium, I’m still sorting out the twisting roads of lists and the rocky shoals of subscriptions. All I really want is followers to keep me active. Every new follower is my hero! Thanks!
