Behind the Scenes

I’m sure it’s clear to anyone reading these posts that I love this life of the traveling music teacher. I recognize both the privilege and the blessing of it and take comfort that as much happiness it gives to me, its purpose is to give inspiration and affirmation to others. The feeling in the room in the workshops, the shared reflections of the participants and little testimonies written to me post-workshop in e-mails confirm that it indeed offers something worthy to others and that only increases the pleasure of it all. 

 

But lest anyone feel a touch of envy, there is so much behind the scenes that’s needed to set up these opportunities, so many details I need to attend to in order to make it possible, so many ways I have to make sure all the moving parts are aligned and then effectively closed  before proceeding to the next. And so much of it is getting maddeningly harder and harder to do. 

 

There has always been the countless back-and-forth via e-mail with the organizers, the travel arrangements, the workshop planning and teaching, the preparing the post-workshop notes, but in today’s world, it is reaching the limit of my patience and skills. For example, consider this trip to Singapore.

 

Back in the golden years, I stumbled on a fabulous travel agent (forever thanks to Connie Dahlstet!) who would take any complex itinerary I sent her way and work her magic. She retired right around the pandemic and then passed away and her profession feels obsolete today. So I handle all my own travel and in this multi-city trip, it’s a complex maze to work through, especially dealing with multiple airlines, each with their own ap to download and different routes to actually get your ticket downloaded. Including needing a code sent to your phone to get through the next gate of the process, but not able to receive phone messages without paying being outside of the U.S..

 

I’m somewhat aware of which countries require official visas and that is its own nightmare labyrinth of bureaucracy. But lately, many places ask now for some kind of “visa-light” entry card. I was suckered into paying $85 for one to get into Singapore and later found it that it was supposed to be free. Flying to Bangkok today, I have to check all over again.  

 

Meanwhile, there's arranging schedules with two different international schools and one government school organization, all asking me to fill out different forms to get the needed permissions to work, all asking for different workshop themes in different spaces with different numbers of participants and different instruments available. Usually hosts take care of the hotels, but this time I was asked to do so myself, having to find two different hotels in two different parts of the city. Usually I’m picked up at the airport by the host, but this time I was expected to find my own way to the hotel until I asked for help and one host arranged a meet and greet driver. 

 

Most maddening of all is how unnecessarily complicated it has become to get paid for my work. Each institution with their own complex web of forms, their own timetable (often waiting one or two months to finally pay me), their ridiculous little details that make no sense (like requiring a paper version of a bank statement with the bank logo on it in an era where my bank pressured me to change to online banking and doesn’t have any such thing in their online version). In the good old days, I did the work, my host handed me a check or cash at the end of the workshop and we were done. While today’s institutions take their merry old time honoring their part of the transaction, I have to keep track of who owes me what and often remind them to “show me the money!” 

 

If I was a lawyer charging billable hours for the time it takes to wade through all these forms and writing them to remind them to pay and such, I would earn three times as much as the actual workshop! In short, I love the work itself, but the growing maze of paperwork to make it all happen has me wondering how much longer I can do it. 

 

So amidst all the gushing about the pleasure and the wonder of teaching like this, these are just some of the maddening behind-the-scenes details that are getting increasingly complicated and needlessly so. Maybe I should actually retire and just play golf. But hey, they probably now require three forms of identification, forms filled out from a QR code, proof of insurance and more before they let me on the golf course. 

 

Ah, this modern world.