NYC Sentinel

Jane Hunt playing the violin at the US Open. Photo courtesy of Jane Hunt

By Clare O’Connor

It’s drizzling on the first Friday of Fashion Week, New York’s annual celebration of clothes and their designers. Jane Hunt arrives mid-afternoon by minibus for a high-end couture fashion show at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. She’s damp and tired, having commuted an hour door-to-door from the US Open tennis tournament in Queens.

Hunt isn’t a model, although she is strikingly pretty—blond, with aquiline features and a tiny frame. She’s not a tennis player either, although she’s spent much of this, the second week of September, at Arthur Ashe Stadium. She’s a classically trained violinist, but these days she spends far more time on catwalks or at sports matches than she does on the stage at Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center. This evening, after hours spent performing as a courtside musician for the United States Tennis Association, she’ll play her violin as models sashay past her at Chilean gown designer Ruben Campos’ show.

For Hunt, surviving as a classical musician means being willing to go where the money is. She has played concerts on cruise ships as far afield as Mexico, Antarctica and Greece. She has performed as a warm-up act for film star Nicole Kidman at a Glamour Magazine event honoring military spouses. She regularly crosses time zones and rarely sees her boyfriend, with whom she shares a midtown apartment. She has abandoned what many classical musicians see as the ideal career path: Juilliard, auditions, composing, teaching, orchestras, Philharmonic.

Hunt, 26, does have Juilliard training; she spent her summers at the renowned Manhattan conservatory while at music college in her hometown of Manchester, England. But she realizes that to make any money with her violin, she must be savvy. Rather than resign herself to a precarious and often financially risky life of constant auditions for orchestras, she has taken a modern, populist approach to classical performance: marketing, networking, publicizing.

Even graduates from one of the most elite, technical, traditional schools on earth – Juilliard – have had to face up to the recession, taking jobs that they’d have sniffed at in decades past. Carrie Feiner from the class of 1981 has noticed more and more classically trained musicians following Jane Hunt’s lead, and forgoing the traditional performance path for event work. Feiner herself was a piano major at Juilliard but now works as a concert manager, promoting classical pianist Sara Beuchner and arranging her tour schedule. Feiner sees marketing as paramount, even for talented performers like Beuchner, who has been profiled in the New York Times.

“Being in the music field is not all about practicing anymore, it is about selling yourself,” Feiner said in an email interview from her Westchester home. “I think most Juilliard grads want jobs with orchestras. Unfortunately there are not that many openings, and I am afraid that many of them will be very disappointed. It is important to market yourself – get on the phones.”

Jane Hunt has her own website, ViolinVenus.com. She carries around little plastic cards for talent bookers, journalists and new fans, with codes offering free downloads of her music. This year, she formed a company called Venus Artists – a sort of collective, as she describes it, of young classical musicians pooling their resources for marketing purposes. “It’s more difficult when you’re starting off to get out there,” she said, sitting on the rooftop of her Amsterdam Avenue building after a rare day off. “We come up with ways to reach people and we go to conferences. It’s been quite lucrative, actually, in the gigs that we’ve pulled in.”

Even corporate party gigs, where classically-trained musicians provide background noise for money, have dried up, according to Clara Park, a Juilliard piano graduate from the class of 1997, now a senior director at classical music publicists Jay K. Hoffman & Associates. “I can tell you that even jobs in the weddings have dried up from what I understand,” she said. “People are now hoping to get their wedding or cocktail music from their own iPods. It’s free.”

Park’s old Juilliard classmates are doing what they can to pay the bills – everything from playing in the background on Beyonce’s tour to moonlighting for Broadway shows. Broadway orchestra gigs are very competitive, she says, but not at all prestigious.

Park wonders whether the onus of preparing classical musicians for today’s economy lies with the conservatories. “Do we train the next generation of musicians and performers to understand what it is that they’ll be facing?” she asked. “Job markets, interview questions, how to put a resume together? Or do we blatantly ignore that and forge ahead with our ‘classical’ training?”

For Juilliard’s part, the school acknowledges the difficulty its graduates will face when they leave the relative safety of their concrete Lincoln Center compound and enter the working world. Last week, the conservatory held a workshop on resume-building with their in-house PR guru, long-time communications head Janet Kessin. Her tips included the importance of building a website and advice on how to “convey your image as a performing artist”.

Jane Hunt is busy building her own public image this week. She’s at a conference in Virginia, where she is pitching her violin show to talent bookers. She’s just been sent some photographs by The United States Tennis Association, showing her magnified image broadcast on the oversized screen of the Arthur Ashe Stadium jumbotron, playing her violin for thousands of tennis fans.