San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
‘I’m an optimist by nature’
Susan Wulff ’s life was profoundly impacted when the San Diego Symphony had to cancel its 2020 spring, summer and fall concert seasons because of the coronavirus pandemic. Her annual salary as the orchestra’s associate principal bassist was cut by nearly 48 percent, while the symphony’s other members took pay cuts of varying sizes. “I’m grateful to have any salary at all, and to have any health benefits, especially since I have my 13-year-old son to take care of,” said Wulff, who joined the symphony in 2004. “We used to go out to restaurants a few times a week. Now, we only cook at home. If we don’t really need something, we don’t get it.”
She has kept her spirits up by keeping busy exploring new creative vistas, in particular video editing. She is doing so on her own and with her son, Cameron, an eighth-grader who is now distance learning from their North Park home.
“I’m an optimist by nature,” said Wulff, a divorced single mother.
“It’s very easy to slip into the dark side and look at all the things that are wrong,” she continued. “But I don’t find that to be very productive.
My son and I both volunteer hundreds of hours for the symphony because we’re very passionate about our organization. Now, people have seen the work we’ve done and are hiring us to do some editing projects. Cameron is using part of the money he’s been earning from these video projects to create and build a new computer.”
A Sacramento native, Wulff was in grade school when she began playing bass in The Wulff Pack, a
Top 40 and rock oldies band that also featured her brother and two sisters. She joined the San Diego Symphony 16 years ago, after earning a double bachelor’s degree in bass and vocal performance at California State University Sacramento and a Master of Music and Advanced Studies degree at USC.
The pandemic-fueled shutdown of concerts has provided her with time to learn new repertoire for the bass. But watching the symphony and most orchestras around the world come to a near-standstill has been gut-wrenching.
“My heart was aching because I understood that live performances would not happen for quite some time,” she said. “It really brought into focus that the arts need a lot of help right now. You can’t have an arts organization thrive without the organization doing what it does. And we do concerts.
“So if we can’t put on concerts, how do we survive?”
In contrast with some of her symphony colleagues, she does not earn a side income teaching music. Like San Diego Symphony
Music Director Rafael Payare and CEO Martha Gilmer, Wulff is hopeful The Shell — the orchestra’s yet-to-open $45 million outdoor concert venue — will give it a major advantage in adapting to safe, socially distanced performances. The venue can accommodate audiences of up to 10,000.
“I know the symphony has been looking into ways to do smaller-scale performances and be socially distanced. One of our saving graces will be The Shell, because — being in San Diego — you can perform outside there nearly every month,” Wulff said.
“The Shell has the capacity to hold enough people that, even if you socially distance the audience, it can still be a decent size. I played a solo at The Shell two weeks before the pandemic hit for a promotional video, and the acoustics were stunning. The main thing will be operating costs, and we won’t know what they are until we can move forward and utilize the venue. But I do know The Shell was built at the perfect time.”
In the interim, Wulff is doing her best to help keep the orchestra visible.
“I’m on the symphony’s social media team, which has been curating projects and putting them together to keep us valid and in the public eye,” she said.
“We did a video this spring of Lucy A. Warner’s children’s book ‘Zap! Boom! Pow! Superheroes of Music,’ which is on Youtube. It has 12 chapters, each dedicated to a different composer. We got musicians from the symphony to record the pieces. Nuvi Mehta, our special projects director, narrated it, and I edited it.”
Assisted by her son, Wulff subsequently produced and edited an equally ambitious video featuring performances by bassists from 16 U.S. orchestras, including her. Titled #Beanartshero #DAWNACT, it was created to fuel support for the grassroots Defend Arts Workers Now. The proposed $43.85 billion government relief fund would provide financial assistance to operators, employees and artists of live venues, recording venues, cultural spaces and related businesses.
“My idea with the video was: ‘What if we reached out with each of us playing our basses in our closed concert halls?’ ” Wulff explained.
“The video has been shared over 20,000 times on different sites, so I’m happy the message is getting out. I want to help remind people of the joy music brings to their lives and also give them a platform to help arts organizations of all sizes.”
“My heart was aching because I understood that live performances would not happen for quite some time.”
Susan Wulff