One of our 3 daughters is a 7th grade member of the Junior High School band in our town. She plays the flute...She been asked to perform in a District Solo and Ensemble Adjudicated Concert in April.

Friday she brings home a form explaining that for every solo and/or trio she performs in the concert with...she will be expected to pay a fee.

Solo's are $10.00 each...
Trio's are $ 4.34 each...

If she needs an accompianist, she's to add another $5.00 to the tab...

So, for the one solo and two trios she's in...we're looking at almost $30 for her to participate.

I'm only 44 years old...I went to plenty of District, Regional and even State type concerts when I was in school and never paid a dime.

Have you ever heard of such a thing?

I'll be speaking with the director later today. I'm guessing this is somehow effected by a union thing perhaps...

Anything like this happening in your neck of the woods?

Bill in Dayton

That makes me really angry. What kind of musical education should it be? Wouldn't it be better to assist the young musician instead of to slow him down?
Imho investing the money in private musical education would be a better choice.


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Greetings from Frankfurt (Germany),
Sheriff ;-)

Just got off the phone with the director for the school. She explains that the fees cover the cost of the judges, hired piano players, as well as some help to cover costs or the hosting school.

The piano players are hired for the entire day (8 hours) and will play 18-20 solos each. Each solo is paid at a rate of $20.00. So the day is close to $360-400 dollars for the day. They also include an additional meeting with the kids for rehearsals.

So, my tab comes to $23.68...which isn't the point. There's been no fundraisers in band this year...and it occurs to me that most of our Junior high & High school music teachers should be able to play the charts for a bunch of 7th & 8th graders.

This seems to be the easy way out-just pass the cost off to the parents. We alreayd pay almost $100.00 per kid (we have 3) annually for "school fees". Plus, every local school levy that has ever been on the ballot has been passed with massive local support.

Its a case study (albeit, a small town one) in mismanagement, IMO...

Bill in dayton

Now, that just takes the cake. At least, she does have a music program available to her. That's nuts, though. Reminds me of a song I wrote about music dying out.

bill,this may sound a bit cheeky but,maybe you should say that musicians are entitled to be paid to perform,example the piano player,so why not my daughter,mike

Well I dunno... I used to arrange and record entire school musicals - things like "The Wiz" and "Godspell". I would have to arrange and record the individual songs for each particulat student's singing key and do the full orchestration. It used to take me a full week to do a score and I would get paid $800-$1000 for my time, which was raised by the students doing car washes, candy sales etc. The musicals in turn were performed at competitions and in concerts by the students. And this was 20 years ago - I had the only synth-studio in the area so I wound up doing a lot of work for a lot of schools.

I also used to do the same thing for beauty pageant contestents - arrange & record the backing for their singing portions of the competitions in the required key. These kind of projects used to run around $200 a song, paid by the parent (that sounds like a lot of money for just one song, until you realize how much they spend on their wardrobe). I also did this for talent show contestants.

And as a final example - in my last trio the leader of the band used to book our group for private parties and then promise to learn a whole host of special songs for that party - we'd wind up with several weeks worth of work just to cover one gig because the leader had obligated us to do it. I put a stop to it and instituted a $100/song fee if we had to learn anything that wasn't part of our normal songlist to cover music purchase and rehearsal time. This cut the "special requests" down to one or two or zero. A lot of other bands picked up on this idea and started doing the same.

The time of a professional musician is how they feed their family... as long as the fees are going to that effect then I see nothing wrong with paying it. In all of the cases I cited above, some substitute music or amateur musicians could have been used but the results would not have been as good as hiring a professional to do the job the right way. Your (Bill's) situation sound similar to many I've run into in the past in different forms.

[This message has been edited by The Pro (edited 03-01-2005).]

Jim-

The kind of scenario you describe seems different to me. This isn't any kind of production but rather a simple performing of a song.

I've also discovered today the following. The music teachers pick out the songs for the students to play. From our 7th grader asking a few upper classmen about the songs, it turns out the same tunes are selected every year. Also, for the most part, the same piano players are rehired every year.

I'm the last guy to say a piano is making too much money, but $20 per song they already know seems absurd to me.

At that rate, I'd charge $360 - $400 an hour, lol...

I just think this could have been handled better...

Bill

Jim
I'm not saying you're wrong for doing that as I had been burned that way a number of times ... but this is another reason why DJs get work ... the songs ALWAYS sound just like the record, and all they have to do is BUY it ... Although now, if necessary, one can always purchase a midi file as a backing track ... How I miss the days when a band could play all the top hits in THEIR OWN style and people enjoyed it because they liked the BAND !!! ...
t.