7 minute read
Backstage Pass
BACKSTAGE PASS Behind every great orchestra is a team of people who work to make sure everything is note perfect. Daniela Elser meets three of the MSO’s unsung heroes.
Photography SHARYN CAIRNS
LUKE SPEEDY-HUTTON Orchestra Library Manager
When audiences watch the musicians of the MSO take to the stage, they see dedicated and passionate professionals, committed to giving the best performance they can. What they don’t see is the equally dedicated army of people working behind the scenes, people who play an integral role in bringing the Orchestra’s repertoire to life. Here, meet three other members of the MSO family.
Luke Speedy-Hutton
Orchestra Library Manager
When the Orchestra plays those first wonderful notes on stage, the hundreds and hundreds of pages of sheet music on the stage are the result of the hard work of Library Manager Luke Speedy-Hutton and his team.
While that might sound straightforward, the reality can be anything but. The process begins with SpeedyHutton diving into the research necessary to source the specific music for every show. (While the MSO library holds some music, the majority comes from the centralised Symphony Services International or is hired.)
This means taking into account whether “the conductor has certain preferences for different editions, what edition they want to use, if they’re doing any cuts or changes and working out exactly what we need to do in order to prepare music,” Speedy-Hutton says.
It is also the library’s job to go through the scores and to work out how many players and which instruments are needed, at which point Speedy-Hutton tells the Orchestra Manager so they can book the necessary players. “That means, especially if it’s newer music that isn’t known as well, you have to get the physical score and open it and look through and make sure we just count all of the instruments and what type. Sometimes if it’s not very well edited, there’ll be hidden instruments that aren’t properly marked. You have to be very thorough and pedantic,” he says.
Once the actual music arrives, then it’s time for “the conveyor belt”, as Speedy-Hutton and his team call the “really long bench” where they keep the music for the whole Orchestra for a number of upcoming performances. When one batch of music is ready – that is, marked up and put in folders and ready to go to the musicians – it goes into a trunk and is then delivered to the concert hall. At that point, all the waiting music on the “conveyor belt” slides one place along to the left and the process starts again.
“Keeping that conveyor belt moving is basically
Building the Future
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SHANNON TOYNE Senior Manager, Sales and Customer Experience
our main job. You can’t ever really just focus on a single concert because there’s so much happening at once.”
Speedy-Hutton joined the MSO in 2018 as Assistant Librarian and was officially appointed to his current role in June last year. Having studied composing at university, “I get a lot of satisfaction from having to open up scores and look through them and work out exactly what’s going on.”
The library’s work is crucial for the smooth running of the Orchestra, because, as Speedy-Hutton explains, “what we do both gives the players that music to practise and rehearse and it saves time in rehearsal. All of those markings stop them from having to stop and ask a question.
“I’ll sit in on rehearsals... and bring my laptop and do some work while I’m listening to them, which is often more rewarding for me, to see how a conductor works and how the players work.”
Shannon Toyne
Senior Manager, Sales and Customer Experience
When it comes to Shannon Toyne’s role, the numbers are nothing short of impressive. As Senior Manager, Sales and Customer Experience, her job involves managing the tens of thousands of tickets sold across the more than 150 concerts performed annually. (And that’s before you get to the live recordings, live streams, regional touring, open rehearsals and other special events on the schedule.)
Getting that veritable army of patrons into their seats – be they dedicated attendees who never miss a performance or someone enjoying a special outing – falls to Toyne, who joined the MSO in April last year.
“There’s just so much going on and I think looking in from the outside, you wouldn’t realise that,” she says.
Her job has been made that much more complex by Covid-related lockdowns and restrictions, which has seen much of her time spent overseeing ticket refunds and exchanges. Looking to the future, the biggest challenge, she says, is “trying to predict sales trends and what the audience landscape looks like for the year ahead. It’s an unknown for everyone and there’s no real markers to base trends on. It’s a lot of guesswork.”
However, she finds the zeal and dedication of the entire MSO infectious, which Toyne says “helps drive my passion for doing my best and [making sure] I’m getting the best results for the Orchestra”.
After a nine-year career in arts management including working with the Perth International Comedy Festival and the Australian Ballet, “I really enjoy how diverse it all is, the performances and the concerts. It’s all very dynamic, fast-paced and exciting.”
Steele Foster
Production Manager
The key to what Production Manager Steele Foster and his MSO team do is simple: their job is for the audience to never notice them. “There is the really visible stuff like packing the trucks, building the stage, doing the stage moves,” he says. “There’s stuff that’s probably a little less visible such as pre-production work like scheduling, designing the stage layout so that it works [for all the musicians], and creating freight lists so all the right gear is in the right place.
“Then there’s the stuff that hopefully is relatively invisible to people, which is the most enjoyable part,” he says. For example, if in a piece “the percussion section would really benefit by being on the floor closer to the wind section, that’s possible but it does then mean that you’re running the risk of creating noise issues or you might be squishing other people.
“With 80-plus musicians on stage, in a confined space,” Foster says, “they’ve all got different needs. It’s a joyous challenge, but it’s trying to find that balance for everyone to be able to give their best.”
Performing this particular balancing act is one that Foster has plenty of experience in, having worked with bands in high school and later, on a volunteer basis, with community music groups. After completing a performance degree studying music, Foster moved into a role with the Melbourne Youth Orchestra before joining the MSO in 2013. He moved into a full-time position in 2015, became the Production Manager in March 2020, and will join the Learning, Engagement and Innovation team this year.
“It’s wonderful. Even on the hardest days it’s still rewarding. Everyone is pulling in the same direction to make sure we give the best performance we can.” ■
STEELE FOSTER Production Manager
