Ep. 45: Melissa Dunphy On What They Don't Teach You In School

Melissa Dunphy, welcome to the show.

How are you doing?

I’m doing well.

So happy to be here.

Thanks for talking to me.

I appreciate it.

You’re someone I followed for a while.

We have a lot of mutual friends in the choral world, and there was even a phase there where my mom and I were binging your Bog House podcast, which we’ll get to later.

But my parents live in Delaware, so they’re in Philadelphia a lot, and my mom works for a geological, not a geological, my mom works for a historical society.

So she has some interest in that kind of thing.

I wanted to talk to you frankly, because you have a lot of rants online that I agree with, and I think you articulate things really well.

And so I suppose I could just sort of turn things over and let you talk and cover all of those.

But I’m going to try and not ask you just the same old questions you always get asked.

Well, even if you did, I’m very passionate about a lot of these things.

So you ask the questions, and my brain will just stop pinging on all the opinions that I have.

Yes.

I’d like to start with this idea of marketability.

Yeah.

Because you often do things that in the quote unquote conventional wisdom would make it difficult to market your music.

You know, you’re writing in classical styles, you’re writing political music, you’re writing music that’s not easy, you know, and so on and so on.

So when are you thinking about marketability and when are you not?

How does that play into your process?

Okay, I mean, at a very base level, I think if an idea excites me personally, like really excites me, then I am not such a unique and special snowflake that there’s going to be nobody else out there in the world who it excites, you know, in the same way.

So, you know, I rely on my gut a lot when I’m thinking about a new work, or what I want to write, or, you know, exploring texts to set to music, because I’m primarily a choral and vocal composer.

If I’m excited about it, if I’m really excited about it, it’s like always check in with that gut, then A, there are going to be other people out there who are excited about it, and B, it’s going to be kind of an easier job for me to find those people to do the hard work of marketing, because I’m already excited.

It’s not like, you know, I don’t know, I’m marketing some product that I don’t give a crap about.

I really do care about it.

I’m really excited about it.

So that’s sort of, you know, at a base level, it’s like, does that mean you’re thinking about marketability?

I mean, I guess, but it’s also it’s an artistic decision.

It’s a decision about interest and passion and who you are as an artist.

Well, I mean, I know some people that are like, we’re not going to have the tenor sing a G because then not as many choirs will buy it, you know, and so they’re like getting so like, yeah, these little nitty gritty things.

I don’t see, I’m, we already exist in a niche, like fields, right?

It’s like, we’re already in a niche.

And so yes, you, I think you do have to understand choices that you make as an artist when you create something that is going to limit who is going to be able to perform this music.

You know, if you write something that, you know, only something somewhat of the caliber of what, just aid or roomful of teeth or something like that are going to be able to perform really well, then you’ve got a much smaller pool of performers that you can pitch this to.

And so, yeah, I definitely feel like as I’m writing, but it’s, you’re making decisions about who is going to be the performer, but do I, do I necessarily, you know, say, well, I’m going to make this piece as easy as possible so I can make a ton of money?

You know, I’m not sure that that’s the right question.

The question is, you know, what serves the music?

Like what kind of a piece am I trying to write?

Maybe it is the kind of piece that you want to have performed by a lot of people.

Maybe it’s on a political topic that you think needs a wide reach, or maybe you think it’s a piece that a lot of people will enjoy.

Then you have to make some of those decisions about making it as singable by a wide range of people.

But I do think about, since the very beginning of my career, this question of if I’m writing about social justice topics, if I’m writing about political topics, if I’m writing about topics that are going to push some people’s buttons because they’re topics that I feel really strongly about.

And the conventional wisdom, as you said, is like, don’t do that because you’re going to limit some of your audience.

And I push back against that because to me, the end result of always thinking about that is to produce music that’s like super bland and beige like just the blandest, most flavorless porridge you’ve ever tasted in your life.

Like just nothing, like like eating glue.

You know, the point is that if you write music that is designed not to piss anyone off, then your music is going to end up kind of boring.

Sorry to say, but it’s sort of true.

You know, yes, there is some beautiful music that is about very unobjectionable topics.

You know, I always bring out the examples like, oh, it’s yet another piece about like, flowers are beautiful and the sky is big and star, the universe is vast.

Like yet another piece.

Yes, of course, some of that stuff is going to be really beautiful.

But if you’re writing about a topic that really excites people, I think that that is something that, you know, vocal music particularly is so designed to do.

It was like central to the development of vocal music in prehistory.

I was just going to say that that almost seems like a vocal specific problem, you know, not that you can’t write, you know, orchestral music on political topics.

But I don’t know, it’s a lot harder to piss people off when there’s no words.

Yeah, I mean, it can happen.

But I do think it’s the most overt in vocal music because you’ve got these words going on.

But it totally, you know, yes, it totally happens in orchestral music.

Although a lot of the time that’s also because of words, like, you know, you think of things that people title pieces, you know, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima or something, it becomes a political piece.

And of course, you know, the famous story about that is like, he titled it after he’d written it or something.

So it wasn’t written specifically with that in mind.

So was that a marketing decision, you know?

Well, right.

And that’s exactly the kind of stuff I wanted to pick your brain on because, like, you can draw people to your music or you can push them away from it, you know, intentionally or unintentionally.

How important do you think it is for composers to sort of put themselves in a box?

You know, I’m a choral composer or I’m a political composer or I’m a this or that or whatever, you know, because again, sort of the conventional wisdom is what you need to find your niche within the niche and really drill down on that.

You know, I’m going to be the best darn solo saxophone composer there ever was, and that’s how I’m going to break through, you know?

Yeah.

But you write a lot of different kind of music.

I mean, you have solo works, chamber works, you’ve written operas, all this stuff.

It seems like you’ve managed to get away with not putting yourself in such a specific box anyway.

I feel like I am lucky that I have been given the opportunity by commissioners to explore different parts of who I am as an artist, you know?

I get a lot of commissions where the commissioner will say, you have free reign, just give us a Melissa Dunphy piece.

And, you know, no-

Boy, that would be nice.

Isn’t it?

It’s actually amazing.

Like, and it surprises me.

I think part of the reason that I get that freedom is because I’m known as a person who has made sort of out-of-the-box decisions on what to set and what to do and sort of followed my own heart that way.

I think that people who respond to me-

You’ve developed the brand.

Yeah, I guess.

Yeah, you know, it’s so funny.

You know, when I was in grad school, I actually enrolled in a branding course at Wharton, and I lasted one class and worked out and was like, every artist knows this instinctively.

I am learning nothing in this entire course and was like, no quitting going to do something else.

You know, it’s funny.

I took an MBA level entrepreneurship class for my master’s degree.

They were like, let’s have the music students go learn about entrepreneurship.

I’m like, this is great.

You know, this is the kind of stuff we need.

And then they spent the whole semester arguing about like, when is it time to step down as CEO?

And when do you cash out?

When do you all this stuff?

I’m like, this is not…

Are you serious?

Like, this is not for us.

Yeah, that’s not a thing that we get to do.

When do I go public as an artist?

Can I sell box in my soul?

It was all these like case studies of like CEOs that are like founders that stayed on too long, you know, and then the company started to suffer.

And I’m like, listen, I think the final assignment of that branding class was create a five-minute video for a major corporation offering them a rebrand.

So you were like, you had to pick a major corporation like Coca-Cola or McDonald’s and prepare a little presentation that was like, I am pitching to rebrand you like this.

And yours is like, you should piss people off.

I know, I was like, oh, can I be funny?

And they’re basically like, no, you have to treat it like you’re a genuine brand marketer who’s like, you know, tweaking one tiny aspect of the brand.

And I’m like, no, think about it, man.

I’m like, goth McDonald’s, think about it.

But this brings up a real point, and that is, composers, we don’t really get taught this stuff in school.

Yeah, it’s true.

And one of the biggest advantages I find in my career is that I came to composition late.

And so I had this experience out in, quote unquote, the real world doing other kinds of things, which meant that I was six or seven years older than everyone else in my undergrad class.

And I had a chip on my shoulder about that.

As I approached 30, there was at least one time that I broke down crying in a corridor and had to run into the women’s room because I was like, I’m so old.

But what it did for me was I had an understanding of this ecosystem of thinking about, not only am I creating art, but I’m creating something for an audience.

I mean, I think that’s inherent.

You’re creating something for an audience.

And in the business world, the audience are the customers, essentially.

I do these workshops now for composers where I tell them to think about their audience in three different parts.

This is just kind of like basic, practical stuff.

There’s the thing that everybody first thinks of when they think of audience, which is the end listener, right?

So that’s a big chunk of your audience.

But actually, I think for composers who put dots on lines, composers who write sheet music, your primary audience that you’re interacting with are the performers who are programming and commissioning you.

They are actually an audience of yours.

Yes, they’re collaborators, but they’re also a really important part of your audience.

And then the third rung of the audience stool, if you like, I call them amplifiers, whether you want to think of those as music critics and journalists who write about music in publications, or on websites, or on blogs, or, God forbid, social media influencers.

But those can also be people who love classical music as much as you do, but have a reach or a platform one way or another.

And they are a big part of your audience as well, an important part of your audience, because they can help you reach that elusive first part, those end listeners.

You know, it’s basically impossible, like very difficult for an individual artist to directly interface with those end listeners without building a following among those other two groups, the performers and the people with a platform, essentially.

Or you can work really hard and get lucky and win the lottery and have your own platform.

But that’s not something that every artist in the world can do particularly early in their career, which is usually when they need the most financial help.

But you did, right?

Because you dropped this giant Gonzalez Cantata on everybody, like right out the gate.

I got really lucky.

I got really lucky, but without thinking about this strategy, I mentioned I do workshops now for composers who are trying to figure out how to think about getting their stuff out there.

And it wasn’t quite this codified, but I was doing that when I was getting ready to produce the Gonzalez Cantata myself.

And the reason I understood, particularly that third rung I mentioned, how to reach people who write about music, is because I used to work in TV news.

And my husband used to work at the York Daily record in Central Pennsylvania newspaper.

So just that, I’m not a veteran at news media or anything, but just that contact with news media was like, okay, I understand that journalists are people.

I understand the kind of nerdy things that journalists who went to journalism school, a lot of them are interested in things that they would find exciting angles that they would find interesting.

So when we created the Gonzales Cantata website way back then, I basically cooked up the idea, what if it’s a parody of the Drudge Report, this political website, which most of America probably doesn’t visit or know what it looks like.

But 99 percent of journalists who work in politics are extremely familiar with it, whether you’re on the left or the right.

And it’s famous for having really terrible design.

So I basically was like, if we make the website look like this, political journalists are going to click on it and they’re going to laugh their heads off and they’re going to go, okay, this is different.

This is like a very different form of marketing a classical music piece.

So I think, yeah, it’s like, do I market, I don’t market every single piece I write to the extent that I marketed the Gonzalez Cantata with its own website and working for six months full time pitching at journalists.

But when you have an idea that you believe will have that kind of reach and get people excited the way you were excited to write it, then I will sort of take time out and be like, and really work at that for those pieces.

But isn’t that also because just at a basic level, like it’s a major work, it’s an opera, it’s 40 minutes long, and those kinds of pieces require a different approach in marketing?

I do think so, yeah.

And also, yeah, also you spend-

Or am I wrong?

I mean, music is music, but I feel like, again, the marketability thing, it’s like you don’t have as many people that can perform an opera, and so you have to think differently about how you put that music out there, because you can’t just throw it on YouTube and hope for the best, right?

There’s definitely sort of a drive within me as an artist where it’s like, if I’m gonna spend a year writing a piece, then people better listen to it, you know what I mean?

Like, I don’t want to spend a year working on a piece and like, four people know what it is.

Well, and I think that’s like everybody’s deepest fear, right?

Because I think all composers have sort of somewhere in them like this desire to write a huge major work, you know, and some of them do, and that happens.

It only gets heard by four people, and some of them choose not to even try because of that reason.

Right.

But I also think, you know, you can get a lot of attention with a very short choral work, you know, if it hits the right way, or it is sung by the right choir, I guess, finds the right platform or whatever.

You know, you can get, okay, wait, back up.

I’m going to tell the story real quick.

So right at the beginning of my career, I definitely had an idea in my head, like I want to write a lot of orchestral music, because I’ve grown up my whole life playing in orchestras.

I tell people all the time, the best orchestration lessons I ever got in my life was sitting in the back of a viola section.

When I first switched to viola, I had no idea what I was playing.

I could barely read alto clef, but I was in the belly of the beast, and there would be times I would stop playing and just start crying because the brass and the wind are all in my ears.

And I’m in love with orchestral music, right?

Then, very quickly, during my undergraduate degree and certainly in grad school, I realized the orchestral world does not want new music.

Like, they don’t want it.

They are very uninterested in commissioning you, unknown young composer, to write them a work of music.

They are certainly uninterested in like large scale.

They’re not commissioning a symphony from you.

If they’re going to commission anything, you know, five to ten minute concert opener, it better be quick.

It better be like fast tempos, so that they can get it over and done with real quick, and then move on to the Beethoven or the Shostakovich, or whatever the hell people are actually there to see.

Like, if you send scores out to orchestras, they will throw them in the trash.

They do not care for you.

And so, I basically, I wrote my last, you know, so like just orchestra alone piece in 2010 or 11, my gosh, when I was still in grad school.

And then I realized like they don’t want me.

I like I can write all the orchestral music in the world.

It can be brilliant and no one will play it.

So I stopped writing orchestra music.

And I found my way in choir.

I also I love writing choral music.

And I wrote my first choral piece and like, like Chanticleer is singing it.

And I’m like, oh, okay, this is different.

This is cool.

This is amazing.

Choral people want to sing new music.

They want to like try something new.

This is amazing.

But an interesting thing I found that has happened is that focused on choral music all this time.

And my star has risen, so to speak.

And in the last two or three years, I’m starting to get fish bait nibbles from orchestras who have heard of me, because the choirs can’t stop talking about me, because I got excited about choir music.

And like, for example, the Richmond Symphony reached out to me a couple of years ago, and we’re like, we saw on your website, you have this orchestra piece, Overdrive, and we want to play it.

And I’m there freaking out, going like, I wrote that in 2011 when I was in grad school.

I just opened the Sibelius file and it looks like trash.

And so I’m going to have to put them off while I re-edit this whole piece.

And oh my God.

But you know, But isn’t it funny how like the perception, like the music is exactly the same, but it’s just the perception of you suddenly makes it totally different to everybody.

Oh, I feel like, yeah, a hundred percent.

Yeah, it’s, you know, but that’s art, you know?

That’s art and that’s growth and that’s all of that together.

That also sounds like brand and marketing and a bunch of business stuff we don’t care about, right?

Yeah, of course, but like, you know, I think about all that brand and marketing stuff, it’s just context and isn’t context everything.

I mean, I, you know, it’s like the word networking, right?

Which when I, I remember in my 20s-

How dare you?

Networking, oh my God, it’s so dirty, right?

It’s disgusting.

Like, what are you, what are you a sociopath?

How dare you talk about networking?

Like, and when I was in my 20s, the word networking for me inspires images of like American psycho, like Patrick Bateman, like, is that his name?

What’s his name?

You know who I’m talking about, the main character in the book, who is like totally insincere and just meeting people and shaking hands and sucking up to people because they want something from you, right?

And they go to these awful corporate events to quote unquote network, and it’s just people rubbing each other’s backs or something, figuratively speaking, with business deals.

And in the business world, maybe that is what it’s like.

I don’t know.

I walked out of that Wharton class, so I never got to learn.

But I feel like to me, networking is just making friends in your field.

Like when I go to a choral conference, it doesn’t feel like that corporate world at all.

It feels like I’m meeting old friends and making new ones.

I remember the very first EDA national I went to, I knew nobody.

I’m walking around with a rolling briefcase full of scores, and I know no one.

But I was hanging out in the hotel cafeteria thing, and just talking to the dude next to me, who’s clearly from the same choral conference, because it’s like 15,000 people descending on small city, and talking about my stuff, and meeting people, and I still have people that I met at that very first ACDA, who are like dear friends of mine.

And some of those people, who I met when they were grad school conductors visiting ACDA on a school trip, are now in a position to commission me to write music for their choirs that they conduct because they’re like faculty, or they conduct their own semi-pro choir, or whatever.

And I’m like, that is successful networking, really.

But what was it really?

It was just, I made friends with people.

I found the people in my field that I get on with, who my personality clicks with, who share my goals and my dreams for the industry, and who I would like to work with because I like them.

That is networking.

And so it’s like, why is networking a dirty word?

Because people think it’s this mercenary act, that you’re only networking with people because you’re trying to squeeze them for precious dollars or clout or something.

That $1.50 per score, right?

Yeah, right.

You squeeze it out of them.

Got to get my $30 when their choir buys my scores.

Even I’ve made friends with people and it’s not a monetary relationship.

It’s not like, okay, we’ve been friends for six years, now you must commission me.

Where’s my $6,000?

Otherwise, I’m never speaking to you again.

No, I speak to them because I like them.

Because I think what they’re doing is cool, because they’re good at what they do, and because we click.

There are people out there who are amazing musicians, who I don’t click with at all, like get in a ring with them, and you can tell it’s like oil and water.

It’s like, oh no, okay.

We’re not going to work together because our personalities don’t gel.

More power to the people who gel with you.

We are never working together, and that’s fine.

But you find the people that you want to.

That’s networking.

So, you know, I sort of feel like, yeah, a lot of these things have been given a bad name.

But as artists, we do all of this anyway.

It’s just a matter of, you know, thinking about it as a thing that can help you find that audience by networking with people who also want you to find that audience and also have an audience that they are trying to find.

Yeah.

But I also think on the other hand, you do see people that show up to those conferences with the briefcase full of music and they don’t know how to present themselves.

Yeah.

That’s hard.

It’s hard to figure that out, especially when you’re getting started.

Absolutely.

We’re an introverted bunch, composers tend to be.

I’m actually an introverted heart.

I put on an extrovert mask really well, but I am a natural introvert.

You could just put me in a cave and never, I was an only child.

I didn’t want sisters and brothers.

I was never lonely.

But there is absolutely an art to figuring your way past the social anxiety of being in a room full of strangers.

Practice, I think, can help with that.

Well, I think we’re uncomfortable talking about our art.

I think we’re uncomfortable talking about music.

I feel like most people could go to one of those conventions and make friends, but being able to talk about their music also is hard.

I never talk about my music when I go to those conferences, though.

I never do.

Actually, I do get really uncomfortable when people are like, okay, let me tell you, let’s measure for measure, go through one of your songs here in the cafeteria.

No, that’s not a thing.

Does that happen?

Sort of, to some degree.

But people are really nice, and they want to say nice things to me about my music.

And I’m just sort of there.

Like, I get that.

I get really awkward when people like, compliment me to my face.

I’m not real good at like, accepting the compliments.

I always want to undermine this.

You know, which is my own, you know, I’ll take it to therapy.

But I don’t talk about my music as an opening statement when I go to those conferences.

When I initiate conversations, I am far more likely to talk to people.

I tell people I’m from Philly and then they always say, well, where in Philly are you from?

And then, you know, if you’ve listened to my podcast, this is literally how I start the podcast is talking about how I get asked that question and my heart sinks because now I have to tell them like a 45-minute story.

And, but, you know, as much as I complained about telling that story over and over and over again, it is a perfect icebreaker for me at conferences, because then I start talking about like how I do this archaeology thing.

I’ve talked about that way more than opening a conversation with like, I’m a composer and perhaps you would like to check out some of my sheet music.

I happen to have it here in this brick case already for you with your name on it, you know.

So I just tell people, yeah, talk about your dogs, talk about your cat, talk about, you know, what you did for work last week.

Don’t just launch into a pitch.

At the same time, you do need to be able to talk about your music.

I mean, okay, back up.

There are situations where you are expected to talk about your music as a composer and you need to be prepared for those.

Like if you’re renting a booth at one of these things and you’re sitting there with your scores all over and someone comes up and asks you about your music, like you need to be able to talk about it.

And I think one of the hardest things to do, and this is something I’ve asked several guests on this show, because it’s so hard for me to make my music sound interesting.

Oh, like in an elevator pitch?

Like, oh, I just wrote a new piece and it’s got, we’re using flutes this time.

I don’t know, it just sounds like every other piece.

Like it’s hard to, even though I’m really excited by it personally, it’s hard to make it sound different to, especially non-musicians.

If I’m talking to friends, I’m like, well, I wrote this new piece, but this time I had it in thirds, you know, like whatever.

Right, right, right.

There’s this kind of musical jargon, I think, that gets in the way sometimes.

Elevator pitch, imagining an elevator pitch for your music that is comprehensible to lay people, that is an important skill, which sometimes is like, it’s like academia or having multiple degrees is going to destroy the part of your brain that can speak regular human.

You know, suddenly you’re talking about like hexachords or some bullshit where it’s like, okay, nobody knows what that means.

Like, you know, back in the day, like, let’s, you know, it’s like sometimes when I read program notes for composers, which is in complete grad school gobbledygook, I’m like, I can, I barely understand what this means.

Or blurbs on people’s websites, you know?

Like the product descriptions.

It’s just like, I don’t think anyone reads them because I think they’ve all developed this reputation for being so awful.

And then I think, you know, here I am going to give you another compliment after how awkward you made it seem.

But, you know, like, but then they go to something like the Gonzalez Cantatas, where they have this whole like elaborate like presentation or even just other pieces where you’re like, this is what it’s about.

Boom, boom, boom.

And it’s like, oh.

Sure.

I mean, I think that it is a skill.

It’s a way to make you stand out.

And I guess, I guess it’s a non musical thing that makes you stand out.

And that’s hard for a lot of people.

Yeah.

But I mean, you know, I always say if you’re a vocal composer, you’ve got this built in because of the text, right?

Like, I’m assuming you picked the text, not just because you, like, randomly flipped open a 500 year old, 500 years of poetry or something and just pointed at something.

I need something public domain.

Exactly.

That’s free.

I’ll take that one.

You know, I assume you had a reason for setting that particular text.

Or even if a choir comes to you and says, we want you to set this poem, I’m assuming that you said yes, not just because, you know, you needed some money, but because the poem was interesting and agreeable to you, you know, in some way.

Um, so, you know, if you are excited about that poem, you should be able to talk about that poem in a way that demonstrates your excitement and potentially excites other people.

Um, as, you know, as you can tell, I’m an excitable person.

I get really excited about things.

And, uh, I’ve been told multiple times, it’s like when I get into, um, right into my excitement, other people get excited by it because they can see how excited I am, and they want to be as excited as I am about things.

Um, so, you know, part of me is like, if you’re struggling as a composer to think about how to pitch this to other people, you know, find the thing in there that other people can understand that was super exciting to you before you get into, like, super grad school speak, you know?

Like, like, break it down.

Imagine you’re talking to a child.

How do you get them excited about the music that you’ve just written?

You know, what is it about that that would excite a very young listener?

Um, and maybe part of it is because I used to work in children’s theater at one-

in one of my former lives, and, um, hardest job I ever had.

Um, multiple mornings when I would wake up and like pray that a fire alarm would go off because I was so tired, because children are the hardest audience.

They are blisteringly honest.

They will never lie to you.

They will never be nice to you just to, like, get you through the performance.

If you suck, they, you know, by looking at their faces.

Yep.

Yep.

They’ll tell you exactly what’s on your mind when it’s question time.

If they raise their hand and you ask them what they want to say, and they say, you look old, they mean that and you do look old and you just have to accept it, right?

So, like, but, you know, I think interfacing with that audience was actually really useful for me in a lot of ways.

Because if I can excite them, then I know how to get in, you know, get past my own grad school nonsense vocabulary and reach someone who was a blank slate for that kind of information.

All right.

I have another taboo topic to broach with you.

Go ahead.

So for those of you listening at home, I don’t know what the edit sounded like, but there was a point in the middle where we lost power because I was in the middle of a thunderstorm right now.

And I got an email 30 seconds later from Melissa’s assistant, like, don’t worry, she’s standing by.

So as a composer, how do you find help like that?

How do you get a team to do the non-music stuff?

At what point do you need it?

How do you work with them?

Like, explain everything.

Okay, fabulous.

I love this because this was life changing for me.

In 2020 to 2021, I actually at the beginning of the pandemic, I expected my career to take a huge hit and have a big lull.

And surprisingly, very surprisingly to me, unexpectedly, the opposite kind of happened.

I think a lot of choirs still had this budget in their financial year that they had to use in some way, and they couldn’t do concerts or anything.

So they were like, let’s commission something.

And so I got a ton of commissions in 2020 and 2021, which it’s a bit of a humble brag.

I was not expecting it genuinely.

But at some point towards in 2021, I suddenly realized that it was unsustainable for me as a sole proprietor, freelance artist, to be doing all the admin and all the composing and all the engraving and all of the, everything that I was doing on my own prior to that moment.

I remember having this moment where I was like, okay, I have 70 emails in my inbox that need attending to.

I don’t write emails that quickly.

So if I spend half an hour on each email, that’s 35 hours of work that I’m supposed to be doing.

And there is only 24 hours in this day.

And I’m also supposed to be writing a piece of music.

So how am I balancing that?

And excavating your basement.

Yeah.

And having a relationship with my husband.

It’s not sustainable, right?

One of the things that my husband and I say to each other all the time, art doesn’t scale.

Unless you’re Leonardo da Vinci or Hans Zimmer or Dale Ciccioli and can hire a workshop of minimum wage composers and artists or whatever to create stuff and then just stamp your name on it, which is not something that really interests me as an artist.

Unless you’re doing that, art doesn’t scale.

You can’t just be like, okay, pay me 10 times as much and I will write 10 times as much music.

That doesn’t work.

So I basically reached a point where I realized I had some money because I was bringing in money.

I was getting a lot of work.

But I had, as I put it, more money than mental health.

I was going absolutely crazy.

And I lasted a few months in this grind of having more money than mental health and then suddenly I went, okay, you had a bonze.

I think it was right after I did my taxes.

Like after April, I looked at my budget and was like, wow, I had a really bump a year last year.

I was making like decent commission money.

This is great.

And then I went, would you sacrifice like 50 percent of that money to be happy right now because you are miserable.

You are burned out and you are way too busy and you are miserable.

And I went, yeah, I would.

I would gladly take 50 percent of that money and throw it at people if it meant that I was happy.

So I’m not spending like 50 percent of my income on assistance, but this was like the metric in my head.

Okay, so once I made the decision, I need to find an assistant.

What’s the first thing I did?

Purely chance meeting, I went down to my local hardware store and ran into someone I had not seen in donkey’s years, in like a decade, who used to be a stage manager working in theater around Philadelphia.

She was the stage manager back when I was acting in Shakespeare plays.

And she’s one of the best stage managers I ever worked with.

But the theater industry is really, man, if you think music is like low-paid and predatory, you should check out the theater world sometime.

It’s way worse.

So the reason I don’t act anymore, I was like, nope, nope, nope, I get treated so much better and paid so much better as a composer.

Anyway, so Dina, my friend Dina, was now a manager at the Home Depot.

Like she had quit theater because it didn’t pay enough, and she was miserable there.

And I asked her how she was doing, and she said, I really want to get back into something creative.

Like I’ve been working this to some time.

I need to get back into the art somehow because my soul is rotting.

How are you doing?

And I said, I really need to hire someone to stage manage my life?

Holy crap.

Can I hire you?

And she said yes.

And two weeks later, she quit her job at the Depot and came to work for me.

So my first part of my first advice that I give to composers or any artists, I suppose, looking for someone to hire.

Do you know any stage managers or do you know any theater people who can put you in touch with stage managers?

I’m laughing because my wife is a stage manager.

Continue.

They are the best.

I mean, genuinely, I’m like, having worked in theater, stage managers, a good stage manager is worth their weight in gold.

Like they make or break a show.

They are the most important person in the show.

They are more important than the director.

They are more important than the lead actor.

I genuinely believe this.

When Dina, stage manager Rosa Gonzalez Cantata way back in 2009 for me, I hired her to stage manage that show.

And I paid her like three times what I paid myself, because I was like, this is, you are holding the show together.

You are doing such a great job.

So, you know, if you can find a stage manager, and odds are you might be able to do that.

Because like I said, the theater industry kind of sucks.

And there are a lot of young stage managers who are looking for part-time work that they can fit in around their freelance theater schedule.

So if you can find a stage manager who’s like early career or just needs some part-time work, that’s the ideal person.

Stage managers can already do all the organizational things that you need help with.

Guaranteed, they’re better at it than you.

They are so good at it.

They can write your emails.

They’re not afraid to email people.

They’re not afraid to call people, which sometimes introverted composers are.

She would literally sit next to me and zoom in five and I’d say, thank you, five.

And literally, it was the perfect relationship in terms of the help that I needed.

So I could concentrate more on the things that I couldn’t hire people to do, i.e.

write the music.

So I eventually lost her.

She got a job as an operations manager at the Marriott Hotel here in downtown Philadelphia.

So I’m like, yeah, she came to me and she was like, I’m really sorry, I got this full time job.

And I was like, I knew I was going to lose you because you’re too good for me, right?

So the next best thing, if you can’t find your own stage manager to hire, is to look for younger composers, right?

Students or early career composers who need a part-time job, and also want some experience doing the professional thing.

I’m assuming if you’re a composer who’s thinking about this, that you’re successful enough that you’ve been doing all of this yourself for a while.

This is who I’m talking to right now.

If you’re a composer who’s like, I’ve never done any of that and I want to hire a manager, that’s a totally separate thing.

I have no experience with that.

I’ve heard horror stories, I’ve heard some good stories.

For me, the assistant is the real work that I need, the real help that I need.

So you get a younger composer or a student composer and you train them in some of the administrative stuff that you need help for.

Because a lot of it is not complicated and a student can definitely take that stuff off your plate and give you the time and space and mental health that you need.

Then it’s a win-win for them because they are getting real world experience in what it means to be a freelance composer.

If that’s a path that they are looking to take, eventually, to me, it’s invaluable for them because also they can see both the good and the bad things about being a freelance artist.

If they decide that it sucks and they want nothing to do with that, that’s also valid and thank goodness they’re seeing it now, rather than after they’ve invested 10 years in the business.

That’s really great.

I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me and to be on the show.

It’s really great to pick your brain on a lot of these issues.

Before we go, I wanted to give our listeners the chance to get to know your music a little better, give them more context to the things we’ve been talking about.

We’ve got two recordings to play for y’all listening.

Melissa, if you would just go ahead and give us a short intro of each of them, and then we’ll edit in the audio later.

Okay.

The first one is a piece that I wrote.

It’s actually the second movement from a set of three songs that I wrote for a little TTBB chorus called Contus that some of you might have heard of.

This was the first work that they commissioned from me, and I was so excited to write for them.

I referred to them for many years as my boys.

This one is called N400 An Oratia.

It’s poetry by Laurel Chen, and it’s taken from an Oratia poem, which is a form of poetry where you take a pre-existing document and you use usually a Sharpie or something like that and blackout words to create a brand new poem from the text of the document that’s there.

It’s usually in juxtaposition to that document.

The document in this case is the N400 application for naturalization to the United States, which all three of the poets who created this Oratia poetry, myself included, I guess, if I could call myself a poet, had to fill out this form in order to become United States citizens.

And this second movement is, well, you’ll understand the mood of it from, I think, the music.

So I’m just going to let that speak for itself.

One that has been doing the rounds, and I’m pretty pleased about that.

It was commissioned by Votges8, who is a group that I networked with at an ACDA conference several years prior to this.

And was there a thought in the back of my mind that one day I would literally give one of my precious limbs to be able to write for them?

Of course, there was that thought.

But did I push it at them?

Not really, I just waited my turn and showed them what I had in bits and pieces and made friends with them.

And they are the loveliest group of people if you ever get the chance to meet them.

So over COVID, they asked me to write a song for their holiday concert, their Christmas concert.

And when I had finished screaming and slowed my heart rate down to something normal, I said, yes, of course.

And then I realized that there wasn’t, this is at the height of the pandemic, we were all traumatized and terrified hiding in our homes.

Plus it was the middle of July when they asked me this.

So it is the least Christmasy atmosphere that you can imagine possible.

It’s like 100 degrees.

And I am so sad and scared.

And now can you write some heartwarming holiday music?

Can you do that, please?

For a group that is like one of your dream groups to write for.

But I remembered thinking about, let me write a Christmas song for this moment.

Let me write a holiday song for this moment.

One of my points of inspiration was, have yourself a Merry Little Christmas from Meet Me in St.

Louis.

But the original version, not the changed lyric version that they put on all the albums, the version which talks about being separated and how poignant that is.

The one in the musical is, I like it so much better than the commercial version.

So I wanted to evoke that feeling of loving your loved ones from afar and yearning for a time when you will be back together with them.

My lyricist is Jackie Goldfinger, who I’ve collaborated with many times, and she whipped me up a text and I set it to music, and then had this surreal experience of crying at home while I watched Watchers 8 sing it.

It was picked up and published by Edition Peters and is available for them.

This particular performance is by one of my favorite people on the planet, Anna Lapwood.

Who is a British organist.

You’ve probably seen her viral TikToks on Playing the Organ.

Also a choral conductor, and also has a member of the British Empire now, even though she’s like 26.

Can you believe it?

It makes me feel extremely elderly.

So she conducted this with her choir in Cambridge and released it on their Christmas album at the choirs of Pembroke College.

Enjoy.

And back to the studio with you, Garrett.

Okay, where can our listeners find you and your music?

How can they go and give you all their money?

I’m really easy to find online.

If you Google Melissa Dunphy, there, 99% of the time, you’re gonna land on me.

There’s also a younger blonde cub reporter up in Canada called Melissa Dunphy, but I think you’ll be able to tell the difference because she is genuinely Irish, of Irish heritage, and I am not.

So go to melissadunphy.com, and you can find all of my music there.

There are recordings, there’s sheet music available for you to download for free.

If you’ve listened to any of my rants about that, you’ll know the whole story behind why that is available.

And of course, you can also find, I have my own podcast that I do with my husband called The Bog House, which is a podcast about how we bought a magic theater from a pedophile and discovered treasure underneath it and became citizen archaeologists.

And nowadays, I just got back from an archaeology conference last week.

I get invited to speak at archaeology conferences almost as much as I do at music conferences.

Like it’s weird.

And they pay me more, which is weird too.

It’s not what my degree is.

Putting that one out there for all of the conference organizers listening.

I’m just saying, archaeologists complain about not getting paid enough all the time.

And I’m like, oh, I’m an artist.

I think you get paid just fine.

But this is just one other piece of advice, last piece of advice for composers and artists of all stripes.

Do other stuff aside from make art.

Because to me, the number one job of an artist is to live in the world as a human, not just to be technically perfect at an art, you know?

Like, how do you have something to say if you’re not living life and experiencing things and getting involved in society or in some aspect of the world around you?

If all you do is compose all day or sit in a practice room all day or whatever, you haven’t lived, I don’t think you have anything to say.

So, so much of my inspiration from my art comes from the things that I’m passionate about when I’m not sitting at my computer putting the dots on the lines.

And that sustains me, but I also think it makes me a better artist in the long run.

Through this work that I’ve been doing, digging into the soil of my block and pulling like 250 year old artifacts out of human poop, I have become more interested in history, in our place in the world, in the social movements within the city of Philadelphia, which extrapolate to the country of the United States of America, the environment, thinking about our stewardship of the land that we live on and the land that we quote unquote own.

And all of the history around that, and it just makes me want to tell people about that in the music that I’m creating.

And I’ve started to do that a lot more.

You know, I’m writing several pieces that are directly inspired by the work I’ve been doing in that field.

And yeah, it’s just, you know, flowers are beautiful and the stars are timeless and vast, but I think this is a much more interesting thing for me personally to write about, you know.

So your next song is going to be about digging through poop.

Yeah, actually.

I wrote a whole opera about digging and poop with lots of swear words.

And you heard it here, folks, breaking news.

It’s true.

There’s, you know, every opera company and university opera theater that does it is like, this is the first time that we have said the word shit this many times in a libretto.

Like, this is amazing.

I’m like, that’s just what it is.

That’s how we talk in the archaeology world.

But I also just wrote a work for Cor Leone up in vancouver, which I’ll be the premiere is in May of this year, 2024.

And it’s a work about how things buried in the ground last forever.

So it’s sort of comparing old objects and what they say about humans of the past to things that we’re leaving behind in the earth and what that says about us.

And that’s purely born of all of this archaeology.

I would not have had that idea, if not for, you know, buying a magic theater from a pedophile and digging for treasure by accident underneath.

So yeah, if you want to listen to more about that, if you’re like, why does she keep saying, buying a magic theater from a pedophile, what does it even mean?

Go listen to The Bog House, like dog house, but with a B.

It’s an 18th century slang term for a toilet, which will all make itself clear.

You can find it anywhere you download podcasts.

Perfect.

Well, thank you again and best of luck with all your musical endeavors and premieres and everything else coming up.

Thank you for listening to me rant and ramble.

Have a good one.

You too, bye.