Bruce Dukov, LA Recording Artist Concertmaster

WILLIAM: Hi, and welcome to the MusiShare Young Artist Program Series Viewpoint. Today, I have the honor and pleasure to talk with Bruce Dukov. Bruce is someone I've known for a long time, and he's a native New Yorker. He was trained at the Juilliard School of Music, where he studied with the renowned Dorothy DeLay. Among his numerous awards, he received a U.S. Government Fulbright grant for overseas study in England, the Kosciusko Foundation Wieniawski Prize,. And first prize in the 1973 National Young Artist Competition in America. In 1974, he settled in London, where he performed in famous halls, such as the Concertgebouw, and recorded radio recitals for most of the major BBC stations in England, Scotland, Wales, RTE England, Avril Haaland, NBR Germany, NRK Norway, and Istanbul Radio. His television appearances were also frequent in England, on BBC One, Two, LWT, Tim's TV, and Yorkshire TV, returning to America to live in 1985. Bruce chose to settle in Los Angeles, which offered him the perfect opportunity to participate in the studio recording industry, where he is highly sought as concertmaster. To date, he has recorded in over 1850 feature motion picture soundtracks. That's quite a large number. Welcome to Viewpoint. So listen, with that in mind, what do you consider the most difficult part of recording in the studios?

BRUCE: What happens in the studios, it draws on a number of. Skill sets that you really have to develop to a very high level in order to function properly in the studio. Because, for the most part, you're sight-reading. You're not giving the music in advance. When you're in an orchestra which plays either standard repertory or. New music, at least they give you the music beforehand to prepare, so in the first rehearsal everybody knows what they're going to be playing and they play it. In the studios, you don't have that advantage. You come in and the music is there and you're singing for the first time, and you have to be very, very rhythmically secure. You have to have a great ability to look at the music, understand the complex rhythms, if there are complicated rhythms to be played, you have to be able to catch it right away. You have to have a very, very strong sense of the beat. Although we all wear what's called a click, we have a little headphone that, you know, much of them go along all the time, which is our God, seriously. Because sometimes you have a conductor who thinks he's conducting us, but really we're just listening to him. And if he screws up, he goes, oh no, I have to do that again, I screwed up. I always say to him, no, yeah, but nobody can hear you. But the point is that it is important to have a conductor, because when it is complicated and the meters change, like 5, 4, 3, 4, 2, 4, sometimes you do need to see where the downbeat is to know where you are in music. So that's the second thing. You have to be very strong sense of keeping the tempo without rushing or lagging behind. And then you have to have a super secure left hand to be able to find notes that. You know, as I say, you haven't practiced the part, so you have to be able to start reading notes when you have to hit a high A that you're going to be able to just hit it.

WILLIAM: A lot of these parts aren't written necessarily with the violinist hand in mind.

BRUCE: Exactly, right. Very few composers actually take that into account. They use their musical sense of what they want to impart to the score and. If there's a run that's a very difficult run for the violin, sometimes it's more of an effect rather than the you're worried about the accuracy of how you're going to play it. It's sort of like, in de-vulture, you know, a lot of people, if you had to play individually and hear everybody playing separately,. Playing every note and everything that's happening there. So, I mean, there will be some people that are, but not every single bar is going to be perfect. But as a whole group of 26 violins, say, or 30 violins, it's a blend, you know, and it all gives the effect of this incredible tornado going on.

WILLIAM: Has it ever occurred that you've gone to a conductor or someone and said, you know. Perhaps if there were an A sharp rather than a B. Oh, yes, absolutely.

BRUCE: You know, enharmonics are it's a real skill set for the music copyists because sometimes they have to understand they're reading vertically from what the composer's intent is with the chord. So let's say it's the keys F sharp major, right? And they're writing the F sharp because it's in the key of what he's done but in our run that happens to be happening a G flat might be more useful for our sight reading lives or vice versa usually it's the other way around we don't like the flats we like the sharps you know as violinists but I just wanted to go back a second about the sight reading part because when I started off in the studios which was back in 1977 in London. And going right through to the early 90s here, most of the music was handwritten by a very skilled group of copyists who, for the most part, were writing very neatly, but hand-copied parts. There wasn't the digital printing that we have now. And so you just pray that you had a good copyist, because many times you had some people that were a little sloppy and their ledger lines were like little semi-circles. Sometimes a three ledger line F would be higher than a four ledger line A. Very frustrating. But then there was the advent of Finale, which is a music program with Sibelius and. These are programs where you can print the music and it comes out like it's engraved. You can even have a font that looks like somebody's hand-written it, which I don't like. But anyway, you have good music to read from, but you still have to come in and cite the parts. In the past couple, three years I would say, the copies have become very, very kind to us, and they make PDF copies of the music that they copy, and they can post it online a day or two before sometimes. So we have access sometimes to look at the music before we're going to play it, if you have the time to look at it, or the inclination to. Sometimes I like to challenge, because I'm old school,. I like the challenge of coming in and inside reading. I think that's just my M.O. I enjoy that, the adrenaline rush.

WILLIAM: So, okay. All of what you're doing right now had to start somewhere. And I know you studied with Ms. DeLay, as we were in Juilliard and Aspen around the same time. But who came before? Who was the teacher? How did you start with the violin?

BRUCE: Okay, it's an interesting... not really interesting, but you're asking me, so I'll tell you. I grew up in a very musical family, actually. My father was a violinist, and my mother was a fantastic accordion player and pianist. Now, in the 1950s, I'm a child of the 50s, and it was a golden era, you know. When you think about it, I was a farmer at the end of my street, and I lived in Queens. I mean, it was very rural. It was an area called Kew Gardens Hills, which is in between Kew Gardens and Forest Hills. But there was one postal district called Flushing in those days, and Flushing encompassed a whole group of those towns. Anyway, at the end of my street, 70th Avenue, there was a farm with cows. I remember growing up with that. I mean, then, of course, the 10 years into the 50s, everything was thrown down, and they started building apartment buildings, and now it's unrecognizable. So anyway, it was a very musical and my mother was an accordionist, as I said, which was a hugely popular instrument in the 1950s. She was a very, very busy teacher. We had a studio in the house where she would be teaching. And she and my father had a musical duo that toured all over the world. And she did these great arrangements of classical pieces like Romanian Rhapsody and old Carmen and all this kind of stuff. And then also popular tunes. And my father was a very natural violinist. He had to leave home at a very young age. He had an abusive father. This is in the Depression era now, I'm talking, 1920s. So he had a hard life. And he never really was able to go to a conservatory. But he had a tremendous natural talent on the. So he and my mother, they met up when they were in their late teens, and they fell in love, and they became this duo. And through the 1940s, they toured and did all this fantastic stuff. And then when the children, myself and my sister, were born, my mother realized that it wasn't a life for us to have the parents touring around all the time. They wanted to have something secure to be in the area where their family was. And we had a large family in New York City. So my mother figured out that she'd be teaching, and then on the weekends, she and my father would go do their gigs. And sometimes they would drive as far as Cleveland, Ohio, and go to different areas, but they would be doing this stuff on the weekends only. And then in the summer times, we had a house up in the Catskill Mountains, where my parents were really big in the Borscht Belt. And they went around, you know, Grossinger's and the Concord Hotel and all these other big areas. And there were so many of them. And they would entertain every weekend. And my father would get up at four in the morning on Monday and drive back to his day job, which he had at Eastman Kodak. That's another story. Anyway, the point was that my father was a violinist and I grew up in a household with a lot of violinists. I was a cut-up kid and I probably had what they call ADHD now, but they didn't diagnose it in those days. I couldn't sit still. My mother used to call me Mr. Fidget's. So I think she read the room with me pretty well that I wasn't going to fight if they started me at five or six on the highland I wasn't going to take to it. But I had a toy violin that I was playing all the time and they saw that I had some ability. On my eighth birthday they started. So I started at age eight and I went to a place called the Henry Street Settlement. Which my father attended when he was his child. So 30 years later, here I am in the Henry Street Settlement. And I had an old Hungarian teacher who was very, very based on, you know, from all these scales and all that kind of stuff. And that's how I learned to play. And in the first year or two, I made tremendous progress. I'm not saying I was a prodigy by any standards. But I made good progress, and I was playing, you know, impressively well for a ten-year-old lady. Not under today's standards. I saw the seven-year-old Japanese girl playing the other day, and I was just completely like, this is impossible. How is she seven years old and playing this way? Seven years old. I remember Sarah Chang, at eight, playing the Paganini. So I recognize that the kid was seven, a Japanese girl, with. Anyway, so I was 10 and my father was a hi-fi fanatic and every couple of years he'd buy another tape recorder. You know, he had these big giant, he had Marantz and a Macintosh amplifier and all this really aficionado stuff. And every couple of years he'd want to change his recorder because they kept coming out with better models. So one year he gave me one of his old tape recorders and I thought, huh, what if I record myself playing the violin for 10 minutes? And then just keep playing it back. And my grandmother, who lived with us at the time, while my mother was teaching in the studio, when I came home from school, and I was supposed to practice for an hour, I'd sit up in the room and play my tape recorder. I'd sit in the room and read the Mad magazine. Until one day, she came up and thought, oh, Bruce is practicing really well. She opens the door, here's the violin, and there's no Bruce. And we're in the bathroom. So, I mean, I was fooling myself. I could have easily made some great progress, but I didn't. And then the next year, the Beatles came out. First of all, I wasn't cool at school for playing the violin, but I taught myself the guitar. And because of the theory training that I had to have, of course, in Henry speech settlement, I went to theory class, which was actually, it was agony while I was doing it, but man, it did me a great service for like. It really did help. It also helped me because I was able to listen to the Beatles music and analyze the chords and know what they were playing and because of the dexterity that I had from the violin I was able to move around on the guitar fairly well so I became like a lead guitarist. And all these little fledgling groups wanted me to be their lead guitarist. So for two or three years, until I was 13 maybe, I never practiced the violin. I'd go for a weekly lesson, I'd do the old sight-read-the-lesson stuff, and the teacher would tell my father, and he'd be tearing his hair out, and she'd be tearing his feet, could be so talented, and I just didn't make any progress. But I was cool in school. When I still, by osmosis, I guess, still developed on the violin, not very well. And then when I was 15, it was time for high school. And my mother realized that if I stayed in the area in Queens with the kids that were my peers at the time, I'd probably end up being a grocery clerk and not develop any skills on the violin or anything like that. And there's a high school of music and art in New York City. The movie Fame back in the 80s. Exactly. And now it actually is that way, the school, it's the LaGuardia School of the Arts and Women in the Center and it encompasses dance and art and music. In those days, this was music and art and there was a separate school downtown named Performing Arts that was a sister school for dance. Anyway, so I went to music and art and that changed my life. Because I was all of a sudden better than most of the other kids. I wasn't still very good, but I was better than most of the other kids in the school. Now, mind you, the school still had some great stars. I mean, the first year I came in there, Joel Swernoff became the first violinist at the Juilliard Quartet. He was the concertmaster of the senior orchestra. And Bobby Zelnick was his stand partner. Remember Bobby Zelnick? And then Gene Drucker was sitting behind him. And Eugene, of course, from the Emerson. And I was principal second, I remember that. And then the next year, Eugene was concertmaster of the Senior Orchestra, and I was sitting behind him. And then the next year, when I was senior, I was concertmaster of the Senior Orchestra. And they gave me the Rondo Capriccioso to play the solo, and that's when I realized I could actually be a violinist, because I was playing that piece on a level of. You know, basically anybody playing it out there. Not the great artists, not on that level, but certainly technically on the level. So, DeLay, who I just had started to study with.

WILLIAM: How'd that happen? How did you meet her?

BRUCE: Well, I went to a music camp called Red Fox. I don't know if you ever heard of it. It was in New Marlboro, Massachusetts. And the owner of the camp, Isabelle Sant'Ambrosio,. Whose son John Sant'Ambrogio was a cellist at the Boston Symphony, who was the father of Sarah Sant'Ambrogio, who was a fabulous cellist in the Erolica. I wrote an arrangement of the Stars and Stripes for their trio, the Erolica trio, and when they perform it, Sarah makes a little announcement like this, you know, the arranger of this piece for us is seeing me naked. Yeah, because I remember there's a little baby crawling around naked in there. Wonderful band, because they had all the principal players from the Boston Symphony. Johnny would ask them to come out and run out the concerto before they play it there. So we had Jules Eskin, who was the principal cellist. He came and ran the Saint-Saens concerto with us. We had Joey Silverstein, who came and played the Brahms with us. We had Roger Sherman, who was a great violinist of the inception there, played the Beethoven with us. I mean, when I say with us, I was in the orchestra at Merritt Fox. And there was a girl named Barbara Gersh who was talking about this woman named Ms. DeLay. And she was saying, Ms. DeLay this, Ms. DeLay that, and she's really brilliant. She teaches so well. And I was thinking, what's so wonderful about her? Well, have you ever heard of this guy, Itzhak Perlman? Of course, because he had just won the Levin trip or whatever at that time. And she said, she's his teacher. I said, no, I thought he studied with Galamian, who was famous. And she said, yes, he does, but she's really his teacher. She sees him all the time, which is, you and I know the truth of that, right? She was like, every minute. And she was in the shadow of Galamian, and that's one of the reasons she finally split, because she was always pushed down and not given the credit. So she taught me about it, and I was studying with the conductor,. Of the orchestra in Red Fox at the time. His name was Jules Hedgie. He was a very fine violinist, Jules, and also a conductor. A very keen chamber musician and a very good sense of humor. He was a good guy. And he opened my eyes up to the Flesh violin system, scale system. And he said, you know, when you master this system, everything is written out for you in every key and every sort of possibility of what you're going to be doing on the violin. He said, you master that system,. And it's gonna be amazing for you.". I started thinking, wow, you know, these double harmonics and tents and everything's written out already for me. I don't have to think about figuring it out myself. I asked him, do you ever hear this woman, Dorothy DeLay? And he said, yes, of course I've heard of her. And I said, well, I'm thinking, would it be a good idea for me to study with her? He says, I think it'd be wonderful for you. I said, I need a letter of recommendation to write for the pre-college division to get in. So he wrote me this letter,. And I got into the pre-college division, which was a year or two before I went to the main school. So I had to study with her. She was wonderful. You know how kind and sweet she was. And I didn't understand a thing she was telling me. I mean, I was a natural violinist, but I had no idea what the hell she's talking about. I go parallel to the bridge and the finger up like this on the bow. She's so patient and so kind and she would talk about the sounding point and everything and I started understanding it but I entered Juilliard there as the real lonely on the totem pole because there were people like and Bobby Zelnick for example Arturo Delmoni you know these guys were like wow unbelievable players and I was like I don't even know how they do what they do but I started to. Get it in my head. In my first year, Julia was a tough year, and my mother passed away, which was very sad at the end of May 1970. And just at that time, a teacher who I'd studied with in a previous summer at Blue Hill, I went to Keisel Hall at Blue Hill, and there was a, I hadn't actually studied with him, but he was one of the artists in residence they named Charles Traitor. Now this man was not only just a great violinist. Really cool guy. He was a fun man, a lot of, you know, he just was a very entertaining person, but he also was excited about the violin and he was just so wonderful. He was the first American to win the Wieniawski Prize in Poland. He'd never been an American before that. And he recognized some ability that I had, although I didn't study with him that summer. And he became the. Solo violinist with the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society, which had just been formed in 1969-70. And they were performing at Tully Hall all the time, and so I would sneak in and see them and go backstage and see Charles. When he approached me in May, just after my mother died actually, and he said, I've got an opportunity to take a violinist out with me on full scholarship to Aspen. Would you like to come? I was all set to go to Meadowmount that summer, I think. And, of course, that was not on scholarship. And I said, you know what, I'm going to talk to my father and see how we feel about it. And he was all behind me. And that summer of 1970 revolutionized my entire violin playing career. Charles Traeger was responsible for actually making me understand how to play the violin. Without being tied up in knots of pushing my arm and not looking parallel to the bridge. And the golden words that he said to me were, of course, anybody listening to this, it's going to be important that you understand what the words are, but you have to also understand what a sound on a violin should sound like, because otherwise the words are meaningless. He said,. The ear is the lowest common denominator. Listen with your ear, and if you're making the right sound on the violin, the tone that you want to create, you'll be doing the right things, and don't worry about the physical action that's causing it. Golden, right? Because if you're thinking, it's like, when people actually, you have a pain in your shoulder, and somebody gives you some ointment to rub on it. Okay, it's rubbing and it's taking some of the pain away, but it's not curing what's causing the pain in your shoulder. You have to find out what the originating pain is in there, all right? So in a way, the bad sound I was making, whatever it was, I was so tied up in knots trying to figure out if my bow is parallel to the bridge and if my finger's in the right position and my pinky's doing this and everything, that I didn't realize if I just listened to the sound I'm creating. And as I said, the main point is that you have to know what a good sound I'm about. You have to understand that in your head. And when you hear it, you'll automatically be doing the right things. Which is why the great violinists like Milstein or the other people, they were doing unorthodox things, but it all sounded great. Just because of what the sound is. Recognizing what the right sound is will make you do the right things as you play.

WILLIAM: OK, I'm going to ask you another question. And I'm sure you've heard this question thousands, thousands of times. Okay. Okay. You are a young violinist and you've come to LA and you want to just make it and do the studios.

BRUCE: Okay. All right. That's a very good question. Now, because here's an example of something. And I was very, very lucky because I had the experience in England already. There's something about the studio scene, particularly in New York and Los Angeles, but Los Angeles I can speak to with more knowledge. It's a very, especially when I moved here in the eighties, it's a very closed in business and people are very, very protective of their positions in it because it is after all freelance. So there's no contract. There's no guarantee that you're going to be called for something. And in the days when I came in here, there was a kind of an old good boy network, you know, with your friends who you'd like to have in there, whether they were really good or not. If they were your friend or they gave you work, you know, you scratch my back, I'll scratch your kind of thing. Oh, getting back to asking what it's like to first come in this place. Now, I had the advantage of, in England, having the eight or nine years that I was there in the studios, learning how to play in the studios. I was not good at it in the beginning. Because, and I'm so embarrassed about this, I was a noodler. A noodler is the worst thing you can do when you're in a studio. Actually the worst thing you can do in an orchestra. It's playing your solos loud and doing them to show off. In the studio, but just practicing. You know, when you're warming up and you're practicing, nobody really wants to hear you do that. Either you're rubbing their nose in your playing and saying, look how great I am, or you're just obnoxious. I was both of those. So mortified that I was like that. And it was only to the credit of my friend who stood. Behind me and say, oh, I'd love to hear him play. Let him play. He was the head of the session. He said, no, come on, I want to hear him. Play that passage again. I want to see how you did that. You know, but it was wrong because it was encouraging. I learned. Don't do it. There's a cute couple of guys on the internet called TwoSet Violin. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. They have one thing about noodling. I think one of their episodes is about showing off or playing. It's a big no-no. So to anybody listening out there and thinking of going into the studios or any situation, even an orchestra, don't play. Practice a passage in the music you're going to be playing and do it softly. It's not a good thing. I'm lucky I survived it, but I don't think many people can. When I moved to LA, let me just explain something to you. I already set up in advance because of Glenn Dictoro, you know, as well. When I played, you know, I did that birthday variations in the style of Paganini for two violins, which I played for Milstein's birthday in New York in 1983. Yeah. And Glenn was there. And he asked me, what am I doing in London? Why am I wasting my time there? He said, go out to LA, you can become one of the number one guys. And I was already fed up with the money in England and the high taxation and the weather. And I said to the composers, I already mentioned this earlier in the interview just now about, could you ask for me if I moved to LA? And they were like, as I said, Bruce Broughton and then Bill Conti was another, and John Barry. There was a number of them. So I knew that when I came here, I'd be able to have some people ask me if they were working, but that's not enough. So Glenn put me in touch with some contractors here. And one of them was named Sid Sharp. He was a very, very big record date guy. In those days, it was so much work here that there were almost three different groups of people working that never did other things. Sid Sharp, big record date guy. That's all he did was record dates. Sessions for, you know, all these top groups. And then there was another group of people that just did the television shows, and another group of people that just did motion pictures. It was quite extraordinary. So Sid Sharp is one of these guys who loves the violin also, much like my friend David Katz in England. He always appreciated good violin playing. So I got in contact with him, and I thought, I'm going to just send Sid something every time I do something in London. Of course, I couldn't send a video in those days, not like you can now. But I could send the soundtrack on a cassette of what I'd done. And I would send him these things every now and then. Little did I know that he's playing, he said, listen to this guy. Listen to this guy, he's pulling all my colleagues that he has in the record, you know, all this thing to him because he's a big guy here. Listen to this guy play. He's coming here. He set me up here. When I moved here, I was like the new fast gun in town and everyone was sussing. The studios here and they were all scared of me and a lot of them didn't want me and the best way they could undermine me if they had a chance to do it would be say yeah he's a phenomenal violinist yeah he's really great but just know how to play in the studio because that's a big we've all seen people like that i mean they just can't blame but i had those years of experience in london that taught me how to play in the studios so i never put a foot out of place and never played a note out of place i didn't even. When I tuned the violin, that was it. You didn't even hear me blow my fingers up. Nobody heard me play except when I got up to play solo, which I did many times in the beginning when I moved here. So little by little, I established myself without having to do it by noodling. Exactly. Well, anyway, the most important thing is that I learned the etiquette, the studio etiquette, which is what actually saved me here, because they couldn't say I wasn't capable of playing in the studio, even though I wasn't playing for five minutes. Little by little, I was accepted here, and then became concertmaster. The interesting part about studios is, when I was growing up, my father, he loved to listen to an easy music station called WTFM, I remember. And they used to play a lot of Percy Faith, Frank Shacksfield, Ronnie Aldridge, you know, Montavani. All that kind of music, which is really well-crafted, well-played music. We call it elevated elevator music. Now elevated music. In those days it was a lot of Percy Faith, particularly. He had some great arrangements and a very big success in selling records. And my father loved that kind of music. You know the famous pieces like A Summer Place. You know, some theme music from some big film, Love is a Many Splendid Thing, blah, blah, blah. And my father would say to me, because I'd be listening to these with him, do you hear that violin solo? Did you hear that, country? That guy can play anything. You put a piece of music in front of him he's never seen before, and he'd be able to play it perfectly. And I thought to myself, wow, there are people that can do that. He said these guys could be at any orchestra they want, but they didn't want to be at any orchestra. They just wanted to be freelance and do what they wanted to do. It's called studio musicians. That was in the back of my mind, and little did I know that I would come to fruition and be one of those guys who can do all that stuff. Which is, you know, it's a skill set, it's not for everybody, and working freelance is also not for everybody, because there's no steady paycheck. So, you have to be prepared for times when you're not going to be working at all, and then times when you'll be so busy you don't know when you want to clone yourself. I think my biggest advantage that happened to me here in Los Angeles was the formation of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. You were concertmaster of the Bowl Orchestra for...? The whole time that I... yeah, the whole time Malcheri was there. 16 years, actually 18 years, because I had stayed on a couple of years after that. But Malcheri, John Malcheri, was an interesting and talented conductor. And they... We formed the orchestra of the Hollywood Bowl Symphony, which was from the 1950s, and under the auspices of the LA Phil, we formed to take the pressure off of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the summertime from playing the Pops thing. So the LA Phil could concentrate on Tuesday and Thursday concerts, and worry about Thursday, and we'd take every weekend and do the Pops. We became so popular doing that, and for me it was playing music from the movies and shows,. I have a great respect for this music, and I don't look down my nose at it at all. It's well-crafted music, what you're expecting to play on the violin is written from the violin well, and it reflects what the violin should be used for. I mean, one of my big dreads is when I do a film score, and there's some leotoric stuff, and we're playing behind the bridge, and scratching, you know, playing colonials, and it's not doing musical things that the violins are presented. But anyway, so in the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra,. Playing all that kind of music that I really enjoy playing. And we had a five CD a year contract with Phillips. So for the first five years, we were putting out so many CDs. It was backwards, actually. Normally an orchestra establishes itself by its performances, and then because they played the repertoire, then they record it. We did the opposite. We went in there sight-reading the music to record, and then we'd be playing it in the summertime.

WILLIAM: Yeah. Yeah. But, OK, so again, you're this young student who has just gotten his master's from USC or Juilliard, but you want to play in the studios. Where do they start? OK.

BRUCE: Getting the connections and getting the studio itself is another thing. That's a whole machine. Of social networking, I believe. Nowadays it's a lot easier than it was because you have only advantages of Facebook friends and getting in contact with people a little easier than it was when you just got a telephone number. You could call somebody, which is very difficult to do, or send a snail mail or something if they may not even open. You never know whether they'll do this long or not. So, it is a little easier making contacts now, but I'm approached by a lot. And the problem with the business at the moment is that it's not healthy. Not only are we crippled by this pandemic, which has completely shut down all productions of movies and television shows, so there's no product that we're going to be putting the music to. But even before that happened, the market became very, very globalized. And what I mean by that is that. It used to be a center like London, New York, Los Angeles, major three places to record movies. That was in the 1970s and 80s. That changed drastically with the internet and the capability of recording over what they used to call EdNet in the 90s, now it's something else. It's live in the studio and I'm doing it all the time now. Advantage to that is that they don't have to worry about paying to go somewhere. It's not quite the same as being in the room. So let's say they do want to go, well they found that Bratislava and Prague and Moscow and a lot of Eastern European cities have a much cheaper way to pay the musicians and not have to worry about paying the residual. We have what's known as a secondary markets payment here, which is paid to musicians who work on a. A union-scored film, which gives us a share of the adjusted gross profits. I don't even know, it's not a lot of money compared to what they get, but it's a lot of money to us because if you multiply the number of films you do it, it's a little amount of money. But the important thing is that we have a good base of doing a lot of movies. I would average about 60 movies a year in the beginning when I stopped working. And as it became, and London was always competition, I have to say. London came out with a buyout rate, which was more money up front for the movie studios to pay, but then they didn't have to worry about paying us forever after. So no residuals, yeah. So people would go to London, and then London had their own fears. They were threatened by Hungary and Czechoslovakia and Poland, who had offered musicians that had slave labor. And so they were threatened by that. And that's how the market became so diffused, where people were able to go and record a movie somewhere else. It wasn't a union requirement. If the movie wasn't made in the union, they could just go wherever they want to go. So we lost a lot of work there. So the business is not as healthy as it was when I entered it 35 years ago. And I would eventually say that of course the pandemic has made. So it's not a very rosy picture I would paint for someone who wants to come in. Also, as I said, it's a protected area where there's a group of people that are doing it, and that's all they do. So the more people that come in, the more chance of them not being called or something. Unless you're in a prominent position, I'm fortunate enough to be one of those people where I know. I'll be asked for a question. It's a bit of security, if you can call it security, not knowing what you're going to do or something. But knowing that if there is something, you'll probably become afraid. But in the beginning stages, it's not the case at all. And so you have to have the financial security, but you're not going to be sitting there fretting that this is the only way you're going to have money. You can say whatever you call it, or even think about it. Also, as I said,. There was a misconception that playing in studios is playing hold-ups all the time. I have a thick file, a music cabinet there, of cues that I take home from a session where I've had difficulty sight reading and doing it. I said, OK, somebody comes to play for me, and they want to show me how good they are, and then I take a cue out like this and say, I want you to look at this for about a minute, and then I want you to play it. And here's the tempo. And, you know, most of them are like, here are the headlights, because they don't expect that at all to be playing in the studios. Yeah, right, uh-huh. Also you have to have, we're doing a lot of animated stuff, like right now we're working on these tiny tunes, Animaniacs, which was a series that we did 30 years ago, that got resuscitated again. And playing this cartoon music is the original god of compositional cartoon music is called Stalling. You know that from all the Warner Brothers cartoons in the 1950s. You know, falling down the stairs is always a xylophone or a piano gliss. But the violin parts are very challenging, and you've got to have a really good mastery of chromatic scales, and what I call a diminished seventh scale, or an octatonic scale, which is the one where it's a half step, half step, half step, half step, half step. Da da da... and you must know how to do it. And then the NLR's come into it, where you screw with your head if you're playing a C-flat or a B-natural, and of course, to a violinist, that makes a difference in the fingering. D-flat, you think of, you're gonna play with your second finger, and the B-natural, you're gonna play with your first finger on the A string, right? And you had mentioned that earlier, and I said that's an art for the copyist to be able to, and harmonically, write something that's violinistic for us. Many times, I remember with the Hollywood Bowl one time, we were playing a piece called Might As Well Be Spring. It was from the Rogers and Hermansen show. And it was Jubilant Sykes, he was a great singer. I don't know if you know him, but he was a great guy. And he was singing this song, and they had it written in. Deep flat for us, and these runs were very, it was just so complicated, I said to the copyist, because I have a copyist on staff here, he said, do you think you could possibly input this and change this section to F sharp major for us? And he said, well, it's instantly readable. Wow. Because the enharmonics have just made our fingering sensible. I mean, it's just one of those things where, violinistically, you have to be very flexible. But sometimes, if somebody writes an E flat going to an F sharp, you're not going to play it as quietly as you play an E flat going to a G flat. It would be more logical in your head, as D sharp going to G flat would not work for you, right? D sharp to G flat, G sharp to F sharp. It works. Now, on the violin, you play intonation lines. It's true, we do play an F-sharp differently than a G-flat. That's just our general. But when you're sight reading something and playing, and it goes by quickly enough, it won't make a difference. With that minor adjustment of the F-sharp or the G-flat. We play an F-sharp higher than a G-flat, right? But if you play it in the passage, it may not make a difference. But it will make a difference mentally when we're setting up our hand with the fingering.

WILLIAM: Well, Bruce, I would just love to sit here and continue talking about C-sharps and D-flats and all of this. But it has been just a pleasure to hear of your journey. This is really remarkable.

BRUCE: I would just say thank you for the opportunity. I just want to say to anybody out there that is considering or wants to know that there is a life in the studio. It definitely is, but I'm saying it's a little more difficult nowadays because of the dearth of work, and the fact that there's a larger pool of people that want to be doing it, and getting into something like that is more difficult because people are protecting their work position in the actual studio world. So it's a long slog, and it's not something that's going to be easy to do, but it's a rewarding career if you like living on the edge. Being terrified every time you come into Blesingley that you've never seen before.

WILLIAM: Worrying about playing that G flat. Well, thank you, sir. Thank you so very, very much.

BRUCE: Pleasure. Thank you for the wonderful questions and the patience for listening to the answers.

WILLIAM: No, no, no, no. It was my pleasure, our pleasure. Thanks, Bruce.

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