Archives for 2011

I learned something new last night during an interview about boychoirs for VoiceBox, the weekly public radio program on KALW 91.7 FM, podcast series and website which I host and produce all about the vocal arts:

My in-studio guest for the show, Kevin Fox, the founder and director of the Pacific BoyChoir Academy in Oakland, said that in the UK, people talk about boys’ voices “breaking”, whereas in the US, they talk about the voices “changing.”

Why should this apparently subtle difference in semantics matter any more than the contrast between referring to the back storage compartment of a car as a “boot” or “trunk” or the pedestrian walkway of a street as a “pavement” or “sidewalk”?

According to Kevin, there’s a world of difference between referring to the male voice as being in a state of “breaking” or “changing.” More than a semantic distinction, it explains a difference in attitude towards boys’ voices between the two vocal traditions.

Apparently, in the UK boychoir scene, boys are generally sopranos. They typically do not get trained as altos. Those parts are handled by grown male countertenors. The word “break” acknowledges this dramatic shift from soprano into the adult vocal terrain.

In the States, however, boys typically perform both as sopranos and altos. Grown males sing tenor and bass. As a result, choral instructors see the development of the voice downwards as a process that happens over time, rather than a sudden inability to sing a high part effectively. It’s not uncommon for boys move between several different parts until their voices settle. Hence “change” rather than “break.”

I wonder if this difference in word choice speaks in more profound ways about the contrasts between Anglo and American culture?

There are many interesting things to say about The Trip, Michael Winterbottom’s luminous and positively-reviewed film starring the British comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. Commentators have praised the movie for such qualities as the blurred line between reality and fiction (Brydon and Coogan play characters who are a lot like themselves) and the actors’ frequent and hilarious lapses into doing impressions of celebrities.

What interests me about The Trip primarily though is the way in which the film appears to be extremely quirky and unconventional — e.g. in addition to those aspects mentioned above, it centers on an inconsequential little scenario which sees Brydon and Coogan meandering around the north of England in Coogan’s Range Rover, sampling tasting menus at a bunch of very fancy restaurants — and yet at heart, The Trip conveys a very traditional message: At the end of the day, love and family ties are more important than fame and money.

As such, the film epitomizes the concept of ‘old wine in new bottles.’ So for the many artists and thinkers who believe that there are no new ideas but only new ways of packaging old ideas, the film makes for critical viewing.

PS RIP Amy Winehouse.

Generally, it’s easy to find out the run-time of a performance. Just ask the box-office or an usher. If you’re not enjoying yourself at the theatre, you can either leave (if it’s feasible to do so) or at least know exactly how long you’re going to have to sit there before the curtain comes down and you can escape.

But what if nobody, not even the actors, has a clue when the play will finish?

Such was the case at last night’s performance of Act One, Scene Two, the intriguingly-planned (if awkwardly executed in the case of last night) latest project of the Un-Scripted Theater Company, a San Francisco-based improv troupe.

The concept behind the show is very interesting: For every night during the six-week run (which goes through August 20) the company has asked a different playwright to create the opening scene for a play. A bunch of talented local dramatists is participating in the endeavor including Lauren Yee, Daniel Heath, Dan Wilson and Tom Bauer. At the start of the show, the playwright comes on stage and talks about his or her playwriting vision, both as it relates to the scene devised for this project and to their work as a whole. Then the actors perform the opening scene before continuing onwards with their own fully improvised development of the plot, characters and themes started by the dramatist.

Last night, Yee, the talented young playwright behind Impact Theatre’s Ching Chong Chinaman among other works, delivered a scene set in an airport terminal in which a woman, one Karen Zhang, is being repeatedly paged over the airport’s intercomm system to no avail. Yee was in Philadelphia for the performance, so the eight-strong cast (which included sound and light improvisors) screened a video interview conducted with the playwright a few days ago for the audience.

I was engrossed by this bit of “process-in-motion” as I watched and listened to Yee talking about her various dramaturgical interests. Her preoccupations included creating multiple roles for individual actors, working with a non-linear structure, working towards a pay-off at the end etc.

The cast managed to absorb a lot of this information quite cleverly. The first half of the subsequent play they performed, starting with Yee’s script (which none of them, we were told, had seen before they arrived at the theatre last night) and then continuing on “blind”, featured a few flashes of inspiration. Actors did fulfill on the playwright’s wishes, playing multiple parts and presenting a couple of scenes in flashback and fast-forward mode. One scene, in which a seven-year-old boy with OCD or autism or some similar affliction was visited by his future self, was particularly captivating. The grown-up version of the boy kept producing useless objects from his pockets and insisting the importance of these objects (a laser pointer, a santa hat etc) to the boy’s future happiness. This was wonderfully off-beat and I hoped that the actors would run with this idea in future scenes.

Alas, as the play dragged its way onwards, the only thing they ran on with was time. Scene after stagnant scene passed before our eyes, each one promising a potential ending, but never delivering. The actors had no idea how to finish what Yee had started and it was torture for the audience as a result. Awkward silences prevailed. A gun was produced at one point (hooray, I thought, this must be the climax) only to be withdrawn. At another point, several audience members clapped. But again this proved to be a false hope. The whole thing spluttered out eventually, when one of the several disembodied intercomm voices heard throughout the drama finally called the performers forwards for a curtain call as an air steward might summon a passenger to their take-off gate.

In short, never has a playwright’s demand for a big pay-off been so poorly compensated!

I don’t want to be too rude about Act One, Scene 2, though. It’s a bold concept and the actors clearly have good improv chops. Plus, Yee didn’t provide them with material that was all that inspiring to begin with. By saying that the work was predominantly a drama rather than a comedy (as Yee did in the video at the start of the show) Yee inadvertently threw a curveball at the performers: Improv tends to work much better in a comic rather than dramatic format. There’s a reason, after all, why Who’s Line Is It Anyway? works. Still, it was brave of the troupe to stick so diligently to seriousness.

It’s interesting when two forces of good in a community find themselves in direct conflict with one another. How does the community judge which “good” gets precedent?

I’ve been cogitating on this issue ever since I heard the news from a friend about the city’s plans to build a new park in The Mission in a space currently occupied by a parking lot.

Replacing ugly grey concrete and car fumes for grass, trees and wooden benches has got to be a good thing, right?

The only tricky issue is that this particular parking lot is adjacent to the ODC theatre and school — one of the premiere organizations devoted to dance in the Bay Area. If the parking lot is removed, some 25,000 audience members, 13,000 dance class attendees and dozens of ODC staffers will have a much more difficult job parking anywhere near the ODC facilities.

The BART station isn’t far away, so perhaps the new park will encourage more people to take public transport to ODC, which is a positive development from health and environmental perspectives. But the walk from the 16th Street BART station to ODC isn’t a lot of fun: the neighborhood is sketchy and not very walkable, especially at night.

The Mission is a rather industrial area of town. It needs green space. But I’m a little concerned about how the change will affect ODC.

I’m not sure if the park plans have been passed by local government and are definitely going ahead. But if they do, I hope the city acts fast. It’ll be frustrating for the community as a whole if the parking lot is closed down promptly but the green space doesn’t appear in its place for several years while the city spins its wheels on organizing and carrying out demolition and construction at the site.

Just finished reading Wendy Lesser’s luminous book about Shostakovich’s string quartets, Music for Silenced Voices. I recommend this to anyone who wants a starting point into the composer’s life and work.

Lesser, who is the founding editor of the journal The Threepenny Review and lives in Berkeley, is not a professional musicologist and approaches the subject partly as a layperson who’s simply caught the bug for Shostakovich’s music and partly as a reporter/researcher, delving into archives to dig up information on the composer and interviewing a wide range of people who are familiar with his string quartets and other works. She often quizzes the members of string quartets that play the works for their input. Comments from the members of the Emerson, Alexander and other great contemporary quartets are one of the great delights of reading the volume.

As such, the book is very accessible as doesn’t get bogged down in technical stuff about chord progressions and so on. When Lesser includes information about the music itself, she writes from a point of how she absorbs it as a careful listener, using everyday words. Here she is, for instance, on the Twelfth Quartet:

“The feeling of dissonance and dark, harmonically ambiguous tunelessness that Shostakovich uses elsewhere is present, but although it is not entirely pleasurable, it somehow feels less anxiety-ridden than in the earlier quartets.”

If there’s one overriding thesis that runs through the book, it’s the simple yet compelling idea that the quartets provide a more powerful insight into the composer’s life and approach to composition than perhaps any other of his works because they flew under the authorities’ radar so weren’t scrutinized as carefully. While Shostakovich’s symphonies and opera (Lady Macbeth) were dissected and sometimes condemned in a very public way, Lesser argues that the quartets could be a more honest reflection of the composer’s thoughts and feelings and more musically experimental because no one besides a few insiders was paying attention to these “minor” works.

Here is Lesser on one of the “anti-Soviet” jazz elements present in the Ninth Quartet:

“It is hard to say precisely why this plucked chord sounds so jazzy…but it is so noticeably a jazz moment that it stops the ear every time…What is astonishing is that the Party watchdogs missed it. But that, for Shostakovich, was the beauty of the string quartet medium. He could toy with cacophony, immerse himself in irony, indulge in all his darkest, least acceptable moods, and not be called unpatriotic, because nobody who cared about such labels was listening to these compositions.”

Like many studies of Shostakovich’s music, the author spends a lot of time trying to connect what she’s hearing in the quartets to theories about the composer’s life. Refreshingly, however, Lesser doesn’t prescribe to too much loose theorizing about what the composer may or may not have been going through in his life at the time of writing a particular quartet. She alludes to the well-trodden history of “hidden meanings” that musicologists have unearthed in Shostakovich’s works but often lays out competing theories or writes with a note of skepticism, which makes the book feel balanced.

I suspect that some hard-bitten Shostakovich aficionados may find failings in Music for Silenced Voices — that it perhaps doesn’t say anything new about the composer that they haven’t heard already. But as a warm and clear entry-point guide to a body of Shostakovich’s work that doesn’t get a great deal of attention, it’s wonderful.

On another note, the intellectually-astute and completely wacky comedian Will Franken sent me a link to a video made at one of his recent stand-up shows. It features the artist engaging in his own inimitable way with the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Violin Sonata. Watch Will and Ludwig in action here.

Just returned from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where I spent five days singing Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 with the Festival Chorale of the Grand Teton Music Festival, hiking, biking, swimming and generally enjoying what must be one of the most beautiful places in the world.

I have a massive backlog of blog post ideas to catch up with, but I wanted to start with a few words about my experience there.

The Festival is 50 years old. It’s led by Donald Runnicles, the former music director of the San Francisco Opera, which explains why so many top-tier Bay Area-based musicians and choral singers make their way up each summer. Though the orchestra members and singers come from all over the country, the largest contingent for the Mahler came from San Francisco and nearby owing to already-established relationships with Runnicles and chorus director Ian Robertson (who also runs the San Francisco opera Chorus and San Francisco Boys Chorus) and have been performing at the Festival for a number of years.

I only managed to catch one concert other than the one I was performing in while I was there. But it strikes me from looking at the festival program and catching a glimpse of it in person, that the Grand Teton Music Festival is a gem of a summer music event.

The standard of the musicianship is very high. Another asset is the variety of the chamber music programming: Where else can you hear Bach’s Suite No 2 in D minor for Unaccompanied Cello on the same program as Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman? The chamber music concerts are one of the greatest delights of the festival. In the single concert I saw, I heard two of the Festival orchestra’s percussionists giving a lickety-split performance of Steve Reich’s Nagoya Marimbas, a quirky world premiere by David Vayo (a setting of the Robert Grave poem “Welsh Incident” for trombone, French horn and two unseen, amplified narrators), Bohuslav Martinu’s Duo for Violin and Cello No 1, a passionate song cycle by Fernando Obradors (Canciones Clasicas Espanolas) performed beautifully by soprano Leah Crocetto (one of my favorite up and coming opera stars and the soprano soloist for the Mahler 2) and pianist Adelle Eslinger, and Sergei Prokofiev’s Quintet in G minor Op 39 for the unusual grouping of violin, viola, double bass, clarinet and oboe. I particularly appreciated this little-performed quintet for its sinister sense of humor. However, I could have done without the long introductory notes given by the bassist, who insisted on telling us her group’s ‘interpretation’ of the work. Her attempt to make the audience listen to Prokofiev’s piece in a programmatic way — she said it was all about different goings on at a circus — was annoying and unnecessary. Still, the playing was lovely.

The Mahler itself went pretty well. It’s a formidable piece. I’ve sat in a Mahler orchestra before as an oboist, but this was the first time I’ve ever sung in one of the composer’s works. It was so much fun sitting behind the horns and trumpets and watching them go wild.

On the downside, schlepping to Wyoming to sing what amounted to about 10 minutes of music — most of it very quiet and contained — seemed like a lot of effort for relatively little musical reward. With so many great singers hauling ass from all over the country to sing the Mahler, why not have a special choral concert to showcase their talents? I gather this has happened in previous years, but I still don’t know why the chorus was so under-used this time around. Also, the Walk Festival Hall, the 700-seat space where the concerts take place throughout the festival, is drab. It reminds me of a high school gym. It’s tolerable for chamber music concerts, and even quite fun if you sit in the front row as I did where you are about a foot away from the musicians (there is no pit or raised stage). But it’s way too poky for big orchestral works.

On a final note, it’s easy to see why musicians and singers make space in their calendars to travel to Jackson Hole in the summer. Not only is the landscape spectacularly beautiful, but going there under the auspices of the Festival is like a free(ish) vacation. Even though choristers pay their own way to Wyoming, the accommodation, in well-appointed ski homes at the Teton Village resort, is provided at no cost. The musicians, some of whom come for the duration of the seven-week event while others come and go for parts of it, are paid an allowance, and receive the chance to play some wonderful music and be among different colleagues for a while. Everyone can bring their families and friends. It’s really a giant music camp for adults, though I’m grateful to violinist Holly Mulcahy for pointing out that the term “summer camp for adults” isn’t quite fair because the musicians are all professionals and prepare their music at the same standards expected in our home professional orchestras.

I’ll go again, if I get the chance. Rumor has it that we’ll be doing Verdi’s Requiem next time around which’ll mean less sitting on hard wooden risers and more singing. Hooray.

P.S. I’ve been receiving some rather heated comments in response to this blog post. I should stress the following as my words seem to have been misunderstood or taken in a very extreme way:

1. I had a great time at the Festival and enjoyed singing in the chorus immensely.

2. When I say that there was “little musical reward” I’m not criticizing the work itself (which is magical) or the festival’s interpretation of it, which was good. I even shed a few tears during the final movement on the second night, I was so moved. I enjoy singing all kinds of music at all volume levels, quiet music included. I do not think that music has to be loud and bombastic to be enjoyable to sing. I just think that relative to the amount of travel and time that most people in the chorus put into preparing and performing the work, the payoff was quite small. For the orchestra, Mahler 2 is an achievement. For the chorus, not so much.

3. I stand by my words about Walk Hall. And a bunch of people I chatted with at the festival agreed with me so I know I’m not the only person who thinks the place needs an overhaul.

On Monday, myself and my regular group of theatre salonistas (Mark Jackson, Rob Avila and John and Kimball Wilkins, and Beth Wilmurt) produced the latest in our ongoing series of “theatre salons” at Z Space in San Francisco. We’ve been doing these ad hoc salons every few months since 2007 as a way to bring artists and others from the Bay Area performing arts community together together to eat, drink and talk in-depth about some theatre-related subject. We pick the topic, date and location and ask our guests to bring themselves, possibly a friend, and definitely a bottle of twine. The topic for Monday was “violence.”

Mark captured my feelings about the soiree in a long, reflective email about it which he sent out to our group yesterday: “No matter how we organize or disorganize it, the event always seems to turn out pretty well in the end, serving as a rare non-networking gathering of people with differing points of view and a shared interest in theater as something worth talking about.”

I was very much against the topic of violence when it was suggested months ago. I was worried that the theme was too diffuse and would end up being like an undergraduate social studies seminar. But it actually turned out to be one of the best salons we’ve held to date.

The diffuse nature of the subject actually ended up being its biggest asset. Instead of spending most of the evening trying to define the topic (this is what happened at the last salon when we attempted to parse “realism”) participants explored violence in all kinds of ways. Some of the talk was practical (how do you sever a hand on stage effectively?), some was political (how does the violence we perceive in the world feed into our work as theatre artists?) and some was rhetorical (does a critic violate an artist with a negative review?)

There was an element of boring / uninspiring banter as there often is during the course of our salons. But I was also completely absorbed by a few of the ideas that circulated.

The line-of-discussion that stood out the most for me centered on the fine line between simulating violence on stage (e.g. one actor pretending to stick needles into another actor) versus actually committing a real act of violence on stage (the same action actually performed before the audience’s eyes using real needles and real piercing.) The latter is normally the terrain of S&M sex clubs. But if you bring this into the theatre and place it within the context of a play (as one or two of the guests at the salon who are involved with a particular experimental theatre company in town do on a regular basis,) it takes on a very different meaning.

The topic for the next salon is apparently going to be criticism. Date to be determined. Once again, I’ll probably object. Once again, I’ll have those objections soundly dashed by my cohorts. And once again, it’ll all probably be a blast.

P.S. The image above depicts Rob (a fellow theatre critic and salon organizer) after I smashed a cream pie in his face. Theatre critics are a violent bunch.

A smattering of brief thoughts regarding a weekend’s culture-vulturing in San Francisco before I head off to deepest, darkest Wyoming for a week for the Grand Tetons Music Festival…

1. BAN6 at YBCA:Yerba Buena Center for the Arts launched the sixth iteration of its triennial exhibition, Bay Area Now, (BAN6) with a party showcasing the work of 18 local artists and collectives working across an array of disciplines. The place was a clusterfuck. Thousands of interestingly-dressed people (most of them young) crammed into the YBCA galleries, hallways, reception areas and outdoor spaces to both check out the work on display and each other. It was exciting to see so many art lovers, though things felt a little squished in comparison to the Big Ideas parties I’ve been to in the past at YBCA which included the use of the Novellus Theatre as a welcome space to breathe and dance. The exhibition didn’t make a huge impression on me. It was very zeitgeisty with its Makers Fair aesthetic. It seemed like every other piece involved quilting or wood-working. A kitsch aesthetic otherwise dominated, epitomized by the theatrically garish photographic portraits by Tammy Rae Carland. The only two groups of works that truly caught my attention were Sean McFarland’s murky C-prints depicting shadowy woodland landscapes (I found myself disappearing into the shadows) and Weston Teruya’s half-dismantled architectural models depicting urban landscapes in a state of disarray. The recent havoc wreaked on Japan in Teruya’s “Time is Out of Joint” crystallized in the plasticky contours of those wrecked models.

2. Opera Academy of California Summer Program Recital at Old First Concerts: I went along to the recital of the inaugural season of this educational summer school for aspiring and on-their-way opera singers. The event was a bit stiff, there were too many Mozart arias and most of the participants were sopranos. But there was some sit-up-and-listen talent on display. I was particularly taken with mezzo-soprano Sophie Delphis’ lively and lustrous take on the balsy page’s aria from “Romeo and Juliette” by Charles Gounod, “Que fais-tu blanche tourterelle.” In general, the mezzo’s picked more interesting repertoire than the sopranos. One thing that I thought was strange was the way in which the recital was programmed: The singers all appeared in alphabetical order. I assume this must have been in the interests of impartiality. It’s a “fair” way to arrange a schedule, I guess. But it pays no attention to the artistic arc of a performance. And as a result of this system, we had to endure Mozart arias or arias of a similar quality in immediate succession. Plus, one shouldn’t be penalized and placed at the end of a program or at the start just because of the accident of the spelling of one’s last name! The Academy has an impressive lineup of teachers and events. Masterclasses over the last three weeks have been given by the likes of Dolora Zajick and Sheri Greenawald and the participants (who are mostly undergrads and masters students from schools like the New England Conservatory, The San Francisco Conservatory and The Manhattan School of Music etc) get to appear in three fully-staged opera productions in the coming weeks. It’s quite an intensive bootcamp that will hopefully gather traction in the coming years.

3. David Wax Museum at Amnesia: When I turned up at Amnesia, a bar in the Mission district of San Francisco, David Wax and Suze Slezak, the core members of The David Wax Museum, a joyous Americana-Mexicana band, were standing on the bar whipping the tightly-packed audience into a state of excitement with a rousing song on guitar and violin. When they jumped off the bar and returned to the stage, they sustained the level of glee with some jaunty tracks incorporating Slezak’s percussive skills on the “jawbone.” At one point they had us join in, at another, they came into the center of the audience and Slezak took the lead vocal on a quiet and slow, un-amplified love song that had us all craning ourselves inwards to listen. In short, the duo had us in thrall. They live on the East Coast and were only in town because some friends of theirs were getting married. The whole concert felt like a family affair in fact. I hope they come back again soon.

4. The Verona Project at California Shakespeare Theatre: I wrote a review about Amanda Dehnert’s world premiere musical theatre adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Two Gentlemen of Verona” for The Bay Citizen. Image from the production featured above. You can read about what I thought about the show here or on the Bay Area website.

In many musical partnerships, there’s clearly a frontman or woman. But in the case of the collaboration between Americana singer-songwriter-instrumentalists Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, the partnership is a true blend of equals.

So it’s strange to me that the duo generally goes by the name of only half of its membership – Gillian Welch. One time, the two toured as the “Dave Rawlings Machine,” but generally speaking they use only Welch’s name.

At one level, it’s obvious why they do this: In the concert I witnessed last night at The Warfield in San Francisco, Welch did most of the lead singing and Rawlings provided most of the harmonies, only leading the charge on one spiraling song (“Sweet Tooth.”) When the duo toured as the “Dave Rawlings Machine,” Rawlings apparently took on most of the lead vocals.

The switching of names is playful. But it’s also an act of denial. For it seems to me, though I’ve admittedly only experienced one live concert featuring the two performers, that Welch and Rawlings complement each other entirely. Their tight-knit sound is so deeply enmeshed in the dance between their voices and instruments (a combination of guitars, banjos, harmonica and body percussion) that it’s difficult to imagine them existing as solo artists in anything near as profound a way.

The “Welch and Rawlings Machine” is a bit of a mouthful, I’ll admit. But maybe it’s time for the two musicians to come up with a new name for themselves which captures the spirit of their deep collaboration.

It’s amazing what great theatre artists can manage to pack into a mere 75 minutes of stage action.

Mark Jackson’s tightly-wound and deeply affecting production of David Farr and Gisli Orn Gardarsson’s adaptation of Kafka’s Metamorphosis delivers such an experience. The show is like a mosquito: it’s fast and it bites.

From the moment the play opens, with an iridescent, insect-wing-like greenish light shining subtly on Gregor Samsa’s polished black shoes to the moment it ends with the dead Gregor’s newly-“civilized” family striding out into a bold and shiny future, we are caught in a web of moral conundrums. Gregor’s death through the neglect and horror of his family is horrific yet at the same time justifiable in terms of forging their independence. His demise leads to the self-improvement of the people he loves. This is uncomfortable.

The toxicity of the moral framework of Kafka’s tale is eloquently brought out in Jackson’s staging, which makes the most of The Aurora Theatre‘s compact deep-thrust performance space. Nina Ball’s vertiginous set design with its steep rake and tiered floor, which forces Alexander Crowther’s Gregor to crawl and easily fall, makes explicit the idea that it is the environment that’s to blame for the problems that these characters encounter. They try their best to navigate the bumpy terrain physically and spiritually and ultimately fail.

Yesterday, while awaiting breakfast in a Tahoe City cafe, I was gazing up at a television screen on which a variety of young men with chiseled torsos were undertaking daredevil activities on dirt bikes and other extreme sports paraphernalia.

What was interesting about the film was how much attention was paid to the act of filming. Many scenes showed guys setting up and fussing about with cameras. In one shot, a bloke on what looked like a rope swung valiantly on a rope or zipline between trees in the background with a camera in front of him, shooting one of his buddies performing a big stunt on a bike in the foreground. Perhaps the most “poetic” shot of the 15 minutes or so that I sat watching the screen involved three men squatting behind cameras as the sun went down on a sandy beach.

My initial reaction to all of this was to scoff a bit at the nonsense of all these egomaniacal men showing off their camera and bike skills. “You wouldn’t see that in the arts world,” I thought. “Artists film their process, sure, but they would never dream of being so narcissistic about it!”

But then, when I thought some more, I realized that there really isn’t all that much difference between these kinds of sports films and films made by artists. They’re both made in service of showing off an aspect of the work that doesn’t typically get seen by people outside the closed community in which they operate. Dirt bike racing tends to happen down secluded mountain roads which are inaccessible to most people.

By making these films, the bikers reveal something of their world, a world that’s normally hidden from view.

The only real difference when it comes down to it, is to do with financing. While all kinds of extreme sports brands sponsor the dirt bikers’ movie (the slogans of a number of companies were plastered all over the credits at the end of the sequence) few films about artists’ processes attract major sponsorship deals.

What fealty does a freelance (arts) journalist owe to her media clients? What does an editor working from within a media organization owe a trusted freelancer?

The media industry is changing fast and these relationships desperately need to be re-thought.

It used to be that a freelancer was a hired gun with no real need for loyalty to a media organization beyond fulfilling the professional obligations set out in each individual assignment. This standard cut both ways. Staffers were expected to pick up all the slack in terms of doing “extra” tasks like representing the media organization on panels and at conferences, blogging etc.

But now that media entities are relying increasingly on freelancers for content and more, the dynamic seems to be shifting.

It seems to me that media organizations are expecting the same level of buy-in and loyalty from freelancers as they do from staffers. But they are not in the main providing the freelancer with any reasons to be loyal.

There have been occasions in the past when I have felt OK about behaving like a staffer, even though I’ve not been receiving the same benefits or steady paycheck as an employee. If I’m getting regular work from a media organization, am being well remunerated for each assignment and there is mutual respect on both sides, then sometimes I don’t mind going the extra mile for an editor. For example, I’ll run off a quick list every week of “Critic’s Picks” events listings for the organization’s website, post to facebook and tweet about articles, attend staff meetings at the editor’s office and act as a sounding board for his or her ideas.

But I’m much less willing to do more than the bare minimum (ie the basic assignment in return for a set fee) if I feel like I’m being treated with little respect and am not being compensated adequately for my hard work and expertise.

Here are some ways in which those in charge of working with freelancers can maintain positive relationships and thereby help to keep their organizations, which depend so strongly on outside help these days, ticking along:

1) If a freelancer takes time to send you a personal note with a story idea, don’t let it sit on your desk. It might be a story that you really want. Take a quick look and respond promptly to the inquiry with ‘yes,’ ‘no’ or ‘please send me more information.’

2) Don’t expect freelancers to take on ANYTHING beyond the parameters of the agreed assignment for free. If you want additional assistance from them like help with social media or extra web content etc, then you should pay them for it. Even a small add-on amount is a sign of respect for their work. If you really can’t afford to pay them anything extra, then find some other way to show that you’re grateful to them for their added contribution.

3) Pay your freelance contributors punctually.

4) If you say you’re going to call a freelancer on Thursday afternoon to discuss an idea or some other matter, then do it. If you get busy, then send an email saying you need to postpone the call.

5) In general, don’t make promises you can’t keep.

6) If you have an issue with a freelancer, it’s best to discuss it in person. Or if you can’t meet them in person, pick up the phone and have a discussion about it. Email is a third less desirable option. But even email is better than not talking to them at all about it.

7) Do not assign an idea that a freelancer has pitched you to another journalist.

9) Pay freelancers’ travel expenses. If you can’t afford to pay these expenses, then it’s crass to forbid your freelancers from going on junkets or accepting offers for help with travel and accommodation from sources. A new system really needs to be developed to solve this enormous “ethical” problem, which extends way beyond the parameters of this blog post.

To conclude: Editors are not the only people with deadlines to meet and businesses to run. Pissing freelancers off is a bad idea. You might think that they’re “two-a-penny” to hire, but the good ones are worth their weight in gold.