When I arrived in Chicago, my hometown, to present a solo recital, I did not know a single local accompanist. Where to turn? To Collaborative Works, a new company formed by three coaches for hire. I sat down with Shannon McGinnis, Jerad Mosbey, and Nicholas Hutchinson in a coffee shop near their downtown Chicago studio to pick their brains on musical camaraderie and entrepreneurship.
Classical Singer: I’ve been telling people you’re like the “Babysitters Club” of accompanists. Is that accurate?
Shannon McGinnis: That’s really cute. We are very good friends, and we all met in graduate school, and this idea came about because of that. It sort of came out as just a joke. We were all thinking of moving to Chicago individually, and we were just like, “We should all join forces and take over the world as our own accompanist conglomerate.”
That was the summer of 2005, so we spent that summer just brainstorming with each other, sending e-mails back and forth that were just pages and pages: “We could do this, and we could do that, and here’s why this is great!” and talking to some of our mentors in the field about how they thought this might work. And then we literally spent the next year making plans for how we could come here. Jerad was in charge of finding space for us, and Nick was in charge of numbers.
Jerad Mosbey: We all have complimented each other’s personalities and brain types with the whole process. Even with the work now in our office, we each have taken certain responsibilities to make sure it all comes together as one, and it was the same way when we were putting everything together.
How’s it been going with getting the word out?
Nicholas Hutchinson: It’s been good, I have to say. The first year—we’re told by everyone who’s freelanced anywhere—is always the hardest. We’ve done a lot of printing out [of] flyers and sending out [of] letters, and when it comes right down to it, it really seems like it depends very much on personal contacts. I think most of the business we’ve gotten now has been from people we knew before we moved here, or friends of those people, and now it seems like we’ve met enough people in town that things are starting to take off.
How did you go about establishing contacts in Chicago after moving here?
SM: Each of us had contacts in the city. Our teacher, Martin Katz at the University of Michigan, also has a lot of contacts in the city. When he was at Ravinia this summer, he made sure to talk to people, and we actually got a few random hits to our website from that . . . I’m teaching adjunct right now at Roosevelt University, so we’ve gotten some singers through that, and from a friend of Jerad’s.
NH: And it seems like it’s been to our advantage, too, that three accompanists working together is unusual enough that once one person notices that we’re here, they tell all their friends, because it’s not just, “another pianist is in town,” but “these people are doing something strange that I’ve never heard of before.” So I’ve met total strangers that have heard about us through singer friends. It’s been an unexpected plus, just the novelty of it.
Who did the website?
SM: We did hire a professional company, and that was one of our very first difficult financial decisions to make, because we had budgeted a certain amount. Then, when we were looking around at what we could get for that amount, I stumbled across this company that was not quite that amount. It was a lot more than that, but they did such really great work, and really tailored their sites to the nature of different businesses. But in terms of the content, the writing of that, I wrote all of that, and we each wrote our own bios, of course.
NH: And we’ve had such a wonderful reception from everybody that has looked at the website. I think it’s really been a great tool for us.
Where did your initial budget come from?
NH: We all agreed to contribute an equal amount of money. It was hard at first, because we were really just guessing how much certain things would cost—rent, utilities, piano moving, insurance, all of those things. So we contributed the initial amount of money and came up with a hypothetical budget that changed wildly, but really, you decide what your priorities are and you can make it work.
When a gig comes in, how do you decide which one of you gets it?
JM: Well, we have a couple different ways. We’ve started a phone rotation. If somebody has called up and not requested one of us specifically, then whoever’s next in line gets the opportunity to take that gig.
SM: We also use repertoire sometimes as a determining factor. So if someone calls and Jerad just played a program of the exact same repertoire, it makes more sense for him to do that. Availability is also an issue. So those practical considerations are always there, but we definitely have a rotation and we try to keep that equitable between us.
It’s a nice thing about the three of us too, that that works very well. We never are fighting over things, or anything like that, because we really want the business to succeed. We put that in front of any sort of competitive streak.
How do you divide costs?
NH: We pay a fixed percentage of what we earn to the company. Technically speaking, we turn everything over to the company and then the company pays us whatever is left after expenses.
The thing I think is interesting and inspiring about your setup is that most of us, when we have friends who do the same thing we do, we’re in competition with that person. Whereas you guys have found a way to work together, instead of against each other.
SM: Yes! It’s great that you mention that because that is something that was really important to us from the beginning . . . Our teacher [at the University of Michigan] did such a wonderful job of promoting this camaraderie, and instead of it being competitive, we wanted to do well because our colleagues did well, and we inspired each other to do well . . . I remember very distinctly in a studio class one day that he said that that was so important to him because we would never have that again. As free-lance pianists, especially as collaborative pianists, you’re the only one around . . . it can be very lonely, and you’re competing for work, and we didn’t want that at all.
NH: I get a lot of comfort out of the fact that I have two people working in close proximity, that if I have a question about anything—how I’m playing my instrument, or how I can help a singer, or how I can help a student of mine, any kind of issue that pops up—I can use not just what’s inside my head, but I have two people that I totally trust, and I can draw on their knowledge and their experience. Our personal experiences have been different enough that we have all sorts of different specialties. Even though we did the same program, we’re not carbon copies of each other.
JM: I don’t think a day goes by that we don’t ask each other some question about diction, or style, or interpretation.
SM: And coming from the same training makes a difference about that because we know that we’re reinforcing our values. In the collaborative piano world those schools of thought can be very distinct, so we all know what our ideology is and what we’re trying to achieve together.
Do you have plans to expand and take on more pianists as you get more business?
NH: We’ve certainly discussed that, more in the hypothetical stage of things than being confronted with the reality of “the now.” We really want to be sure we’re established first. But I have to say that just in the experience of the first few months—knowing that we’ve encountered opportunities that none of the three of us can take on already—that it certainly seems like it would be realistic in the future to take on a fourth pianist. I don’t think it could expand to be too big because there isn’t going to be that big a body of work, but even if it was just collaborative works in another city, just to have a network of people, that would be beneficial too.
SM: One of the challenges of what we’re doing is that there’s no real existing business model for it, so we’re sort of making it up as we go along. Obviously this idea of moving to other cities or anything, that necessitates a specific model, which I think we’re all thinking about all the time. But we’ve only been here a few months! (We feel like we’ve been here forever.) So we’re happy when, every few weeks, we’re really busy. So we can’t think too far ahead, but long-term plans are good.
How long did it take you to start making a profit?
JM: All three of us had some events lined up when we moved to Chicago, so from the beginning we were already preparing for work.
Did you wire those events to go through the company?
NH: We had to meet about that and really decide and we just came to an agreement that whatever we did musically was going to end up getting channeled through CW.
JM: Right after we moved in—and since that point things have picked up naturally, so the income has started to come in now.
Do you mostly work with instrumentalists, or vocalists, or all across the board?
JM: It’s definitely all across the board. We’ve all been trained in a way that encompasses basically everything. I think, specifically, so far we’ve worked with more singers since we’ve moved here, but all of us have a few instrumental recitals coming up in the near future. It just depends on what’s walking through the door next.
NH: I feel open to doing a lot of things, and my feeling is that that’s a good thing to do in the beginning of being in a new place. I’ve always had this idea that after a year or two it’s going to be clear where there’s a need for certain things, and just from the kind of work that we get we may end up specializing in singers or instrumentalists, and we may end up having different sorts of specialties, too—but that’ll just evolve naturally after we’ve been here for a while. It’s a little limiting to arrive and say, “I only play with violinists,” or “I only want to work with male singers.” So it seems like it’s better to be versatile.
JM: And I think that’s one of the greatest things about what we do, that there’s so much variety in what we do, going from an opera rehearsal, to a violin recital, to a vocal recital. It keeps things really interesting and it’s great to be able to see how it all connects, keeping the same sort of ideas that go all across the board.
SM: Nick is finishing his doctorate . . . I finished a few years ago and had an academic position. Jerad went and did other things—he was working with Houston Opera Studio. So we did the things you’re supposed to do when you finish the collaborative degree: “I did this, I’m done, now I’m going to pursue ‘X’ that is an established thing out there.”
I can only speak for myself, but I wasn’t satisfied with what I had chosen to do. I felt limited by it in a lot of ways. I was at a wonderful school, I was getting to do a lot of playing, but I was still limited in terms of where I thought my career could go, and I think a lot of musicians find this. We’re only just now beginning to talk about this in universities, and conservatories, and colleges, about what to do once you have a music degree. . . . Singers, especially, are faced with this issue. It’s not like you just go out and get a job being a soprano, right? So you have to do other things. . . .
One of the things I’m really excited about is how [doing other things] relates to this idea of music entrepreneurship and marketing yourself. If the environment does not exist for you to do what you want to do, create the environment that allows you to do exactly what you want to do. . . . There is a way for you to do what you want to do, that feeds your musical soul, that eventually will pay the bills. There’s not always one way to do everything.
Learn more at www.collaborativeworks.org.
