We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Clare Armenante. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Clare below.
Clare, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Earning a full time living from one’s creative career can be incredibly difficult. Have you been able to do so and if so, can you share some of the key parts of your journey and any important advice or lessons that might help creatives who haven’t been able to yet?
This year is the first time I have been able to make a living solely as a performer. I joined the first National Tour of Hadestown in October of 2022 and I am on the road full time now. It has definitely been a journey to get here though. I was one of the many musicians that graduated from conservatory without work immediately lined up and with the idea drilled into me that I either had to win a major orchestra job or find a professional string quartet residency at a university to find any kind of success.
The reality of having to pay rent in San Francisco and needing to find work quickly meant that I started out with a teaching position at a tiny music school, a bluegrass band, and a few wedding gigs mostly provided from my ties to the conservatory. In the background, I was practicing to start taking orchestra auditions and I took a few. But after six years of studying classical music with a grueling competitive atmosphere, I had forgotten that improvising and fiddling had made me very happy as a kid. That little bluegrass band that I joined right out of school ended up changing the entire trajectory of my career. It made me feel good about how I sounded and brought back some of the self confidence I had lost in school. It allowed me to meet more people and friends outside of the conservatory bubble, and that turned into more bluegrass bands.
Eventually I had enough fiddle gigs and enough part-time teaching positions to be financially stable in the Bay Area. It is interesting, I don’t think I made a conscious decision to stop auditioning for orchestras. I think I just realized that I loved practicing and transcribing fiddle music, and I started to gain hope that I could make a career out of playing music that I like to listen to. I had always had a bit of imposter syndrome with symphonic music because I did not grow up listening to it and it never quite became a passion of mine. It was something I was supposed to do and had been required of me for a long time.
I started practicing fiddle and improvising almost exclusively every day and I improved a lot. My bands were improving and performing at better venues also. What I did not expect was that without having to win a job or audition, the orchestras were calling me back.
At the risk of getting sidetracked, the one thing I could have done better to speed up my career was network. I learned that as long as you know the right people and you practice and come into work prepared, you will receive more work. Even though classical music was no longer my main focus, I gained a reputation for being a reliable orchestra substitute and started gaining work in that area. I had also taken for granted the power those institutions held for networking as a string player.
I think the moment I became fully established in both the fiddle and classical communities of the Bay Area, I had finally met enough people with influence to realize that I was one of the few people around that could play multiple genres well and had a familiarity with sound gear. As a result, I got asked to play more pop arena shows and finally someone recommended me to play one of the touring Broadway shows downtown that required a fiddle player.
In February of 2020, I played Sting’s Broadway musical, “The Last Ship.” This show officially put me on the theater contractors list, and by the end of 2022 I had played “The 50th Anniversary Tour of Jesus Christ Superstar,” “Hadestown,” and “Oklahoma! (2019).” These shows were starting to take up more and more of my time. I had to pull back from teaching and unfortunately my bands, but each show I played guaranteed me work for months at a time.
Finally, I was given a wonderful choice to make. I had impressed the tour of “Hadestown” enough that they asked me to come on tour with them full time. My dream as a musician was always to experience living and performing on the road and traveling full time, so I jumped at the opportunity. I am having such a lovely time at my new dream job.
Ultimately I believe that by meeting the right people sooner and networking more, I could have gotten to this place faster. The other conclusion I have come to, however, is that I could not have skipped those years of fiddle practice. With the number of excellent musicians there are in the world, there is no doubt that someone else talented could be doing my job right now, but what ultimately mattered was that when I met the right person and was given my shot, I was prepared to take it and I am grateful for that chance.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I currently work as the violinist and fiddler for the First National Tour of “Hadestown” the Broadway musical. I am on tour full time and I have been on the road since October, 2022. This job is a dream come true for me, and I have always wanted to travel full time as a performer. I also love the people I perform with as they are some of the most talented artists I have ever worked with and everyone is very supportive of each other too. We see each other every day so I have no doubt that when it is time for me to leave this job, I will have close friends and connections for life.
Sometimes it still feels strange to have this stability and only have one source of income as a musician, though. For the last seven years, I lived San Francisco as a freelancer and although my work was less stable and more patchwork, I also enjoyed having a very large range of musical projects to work on. I actually get a few months vacation from the show this summer to return to my freelance life for a bit and I am looking forward to it.
I think what makes me stand out from other violinists is the wide range of genres I am able to play reliably and my flexibility as an artist. To play “Hadestown,” I have to be able to fit into the idioms of folk and jazz music comfortably, be able to improvise, be comfortable with the structures of musical theater (looped measures, vocal cues, following very quick conductor cues sometimes with little visibility), and comfortable with sound gear.
My past work as a freelancer has definitely helped me prepare for my current position. I was fiddling and singing in a bluegrass band called The High Water Line that I recorded some albums with and toured with. We had just made the finals in both the Telluride and Rockygrass bluegrass festival band competitions the summer of 2022, and we recorded an album before I left that is currently in the mixing stage. I also played and sang in a country-swing band called the Vivants, and another band called the Dream Weavers that specialized in folk music from other parts of the world (Balkan, Brazilian, Swedish, etc.)
I also have a lot of experience working in theater. I’ve always enjoyed playing and watching musicals. My family went to New York to see Broadway shows a lot when I was a kid, and my friends in high school were all theater students. I started playing in pit orchestras when I was a teenager and frequently listened to soundtracks of shows I had seen or played in the car. When I moved to San Francisco, I did a few community productions before finally receiving the opportunity to be called to play the Broadway tours that came through. I have subbed on Sting’s “The Last Ship”, “Jesus Christ Superstar the 50th Anniversary Tour”, and “Oklahoma! (2019).”
Another style of art that I never pictured myself performing was circus. In 2019, I was approached by a circus artist named Felicity Hesed to be a part of a two-person show called “Cara Vita: A Clown Concerto.” The music that underscored the show was all solo violin music that she and I collaborated on through many rehearsals. She chose the music and I would arrange it and bend it to fit what she was doing on stage. I particularly like being an onstage musician for theater and circus productions because I get to be more engaged with the actors. “Cara Vita” required me to react to Felicity, move around the stage, and I had to memorize a lot of blocking. We took this show to the Asheville Fringe Festival and the London Vault Festival in 2020. I also worked on “Circus Popups! with Hesed as music director. This project paired musicians and circus artists together to perform in free outdoor shows during the pandemic. Because of this work, I will get to perform with Circus Bella this summer back in San Francisco.
My background and training mostly started in classical music. Although that style of music is less of a focus for me these days, it definitely taught me the skills to pursue any genre I wanted. Classical music definitely pushes the limits technically of what is possible for the violin, and it helped trained my ears and attention for details as well.
I’m glad that I have gotten to work in so many different musical genres so far, and it gives me continued hope for the future of my career as it means I will never stop learning and evolving. It also makes life interesting for me as my job changes a lot.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
Although it can be difficult at times, I think it is the drive and self-reflection to constantly be improving, changing, and learning. I can often be very hard on myself when I practice and perform, but sometimes I like to think about when I am 80 and have spent a lifetime problem-solving in the practice room, adding thousands of songs and pieces to the list of music that I have learned, and how fulfilling that is going to be. There will always be more to learn at my job and I love it.
On a similar note, my job also requires me to change who I am working with frequently, so I also find it rewarding to get to meet and learn from so many different artists.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
The early years of the Covid pandemic were definitely the hardest of my life, as it was for so many people. I lost most of my performance work, and the sad reality was that I stopped practicing violin for a period of time during it too. It is hard for me to look back and see much positivity, but each phase of the pandemic actually brought unique ways in which I had to pivot and change the way I was working.
First, I had to adapt to teaching my violin students online through video lessons. It was hard to hear and see with the video quality and connection, and the delay made it hard to play together. Also a lot of my students were very young, so if a string broke or the violin went horribly out of tune, I needed their parents to help fix it. Many of their parents worked full time too so we had to learn to be flexible on both ends of the screen. Because of all these issues, the immediate way I had to adapt was coming up with new ways to keep the kids focused and engaged. In the absence of recitals and duets, I created recording projects in which they would send me a recording of them playing their piece, and I would record a full band in GarageBand to help back them up and send it back as a final project. I also recognized that they had been on screens all day before our lessons even began, so I carved out more time for them to just talk to me about whatever they wanted to talk about before jumping right into playing. It meant we played for slightly less time, but I feel like the time spent playing was more focused afterwards. I also got to know my students better and learn more about their interests.
Another way I had to pivot was performing with a mask on. For violin specifically, it affected my visibility for being able to see my bow, and mentally an adjustment that I took for granted as well. It changed the way I held the violin. I went through a phase where I had started locking my jaw in a way I hadn’t before, and it changed the way I breathed when I played. I forgot how much it had affected me until it stopped being mandatory.
The inability to perform live meant that I bought recording gear and started learning how to edit recordings to be creative, and that was also the new way of collaborating with my peers instead of rehearsals. It was also interesting to adapt to the slow changes in performance guidelines as shows were being allowed again. I had to adapt to being able to play outside a lot more, sometimes in colder, damper weather. For a while in San Francisco, many venues were also not hiring bands with singers, so I learned a much larger library of instrumental tunes than I normally would have.
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1- Scott Peterson Productions 2- McCall Moody Production and Photography 3- Steve Gregson 4- N/A