Entrepreneurs in Music — and Don’t Forget about Mozart!

How I became an entrepreneur and put together what is amazingly a full-time music career!

I was very talented and loved playing, but my parents said I did not practice enough and I would not become a major violin soloist. So I went to a liberal arts college, studied biology, played in the college orchestra, taught myself folk guitar, and sang harmony with my friends. It was clear that grad or medical school was not for me, and in the early 70s I went to Berkeley CA to live in a commune and explore the hippie world.

I started playing my violin again, taught myself some folk and bluegrass tunes, and sang with other musicians I met. I supported myself working in a restaurant and a motorcycle shop. I kept up my chops by playing Asst. Concertmaster with a good amateur orchestra and at the back of the 2nds in a professional chamber orchestra. One day a lady guitar player walked into the bike shop and said if I learned 40 songs, she’d pay me $40 for the gig next week. I got the recordings, I worked hard, I did the gig, I LOVED it, and I never looked back.

From love of music and performing, and being extremely well organized with a head for business, I slowly became a band leader and music arranger. I always understood the importance of publicity, timely following up with inquiries for gigs, and comfort with talking about money.

Over the next few years I played in several bands with amplified violin, and listened to jazz, blues, swing and rock. I worked out chord changes on piano and guitar. I copped violin lines as well as clarinet, trumpet and sax licks. The bass player in my first band (my future husband) helped me play electric guitar. I fell in love with pop music of all kinds and began to think it might be possible to have a full-time music career.

That same bass player and I moved back East and became leaders of a full time 4-piece disco/rock dance band in CT. I learned to write charts, tunes for the wedding scene, reacquainted myself with classics playing chamber music for fun, began to teach private lessons, and fit in private vocal, jazz improvisation and ear training lessons. We got a mortgage for our first little house based on our band earnings! On the road for a year, I decided to come home, start a family, and explore gigs that did not take me into the bars – “sit down,” “legit” gigs. I had no idea if I could do this – I just plunged ahead!

Two kids later (we also put my husband through law school), I had learned enough tunes to be a strolling violinist. Often I learned by singing to myself on the way to gigs (no other time). I played solo or with ensembles in country clubs, restaurants, general business gigs, singing, playing whenever I could make a decent wage. And I began to get orchestra and musical show gigs, and never told them I had not seen a conductor in 20 years.

I started writing arrangements for violin, viola, cello trio when the other violinist in the for-fun quartet got ill. Other players liked them and encouraged me. When someone wanted a specific tune, I always said “YES” and then wrote the arrangement. Since then I have been writing instrumental and vocal arrangements for all my ensembles, and some original music. I got the Finale program in 1994 and a new violin in 1996, and both changed my life. Check out my OBrien Strings website!

My rule has always been – learn what to play for the gigs available, and enjoy it! At times I have supplemented my performing income as Librarian and am currently Personnel Manager of the Greater Bridgeport Symphony. I continue to maintain a home studio of students two afternoons and one morning a week, and perform regularly with a school performance group (Themselves), a Violin Guitar duo, and a 1940s style jazz trio, Moxie.

I never tire of rehearsing or performing. I never thought I could make it this far in the music business and now I hope to go all the way and just keel over dead at my last gig.