It’s easy to become disenchanted by weekly discussions, typically made mandatory by participation grades. But here in A&E;, we want to help UCLA students realize that teaching assistants are not only students themselves. Outside the classroom, they are also people with backgrounds ranging from musical festival ring leaders to comic strip satirists.
With the series “arTistic Attention,” A&E; will feature the very people whose office hours we really should go to more, and explore their arts & entertainment-geared interests to find out what really makes them tick.
If you know an artsy TA who deserves to be featured, email us at ae@media.ucla.edu.
– A&E; editors
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Marissa Ochsner has worked with a machine that squirts out pea soup, confiscated a hearing aid from an elderly audience member and picked up one of her musical idols from the airport.
Between her undergraduate and graduate careers, Ochsner spent two years working odd jobs at performance venues and now works in the structured environment of a musicology graduate student and teaching assistant for Music History 68: The Beatles and Music History 7: Film and Music.
Graduating with a bachelor’s degree in music history-literature from the University of Oregon, Ochsner worked for art organizations, including Chamber Music Northwest and Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, when she wasn’t sure what her next step would be post-graduation. She mainly worked the front of house at these locations, dealing with audience members, picking up performers from the airport and making sure that shows ran smoothly.
“In particular I like thinking about institutions and institutional structure. That was a thing that I enjoyed before I started working for arts organizations, and then working for arts organizations only made me more interested in that,” Ochsner said.
Ochsner said while working with David Shifrin, artistic director of Chamber Music Northwest and renowned classical clarinetist, her most memorable experience was picking up composer and author Gunther Schuller from the airport.
“I had written papers that were talking about his work, and I had done a lot of reading it, and I was so interested in it, and I had a million questions,” Ochsner said.
Ochsner said, though, that she had to remain professional during the car ride, and could not ask most of the questions she wanted to about jazz music and some of the ideas he had expressed in his books. She said they ended up having an extensive conversation about radio stations instead.
In addition to driving performers from the airport, Ochsner had to work with audience members at Chamber Music Northwest’s festivals. She said she had to have first-aid training in case she needed to handle health emergencies. Once, a woman’s hearing aid provided disruptive feedback during a performance. Ochsner said she had to run up to the woman and take away her hearing aid for the duration of the show. She said, after the incident, the festival started providing little cards to audience members that explain the problems that hearing aids can pose to sound systems.
Her work at Artists Repertory Theatre, where she was able to form more lasting relationships, gave Ochsner a very different experience.
“It was such a culture shock for me when I first started there,” Ochsner said. “When you’re working with an orchestra, there are a lot of rehearsals leading up to two or three performances … unlike with theater where we would do shows for six weeks.”
Ochsner said that she was amazed at the shows’ schedules, but she formed stronger bonds with the casts because of them.
“That was also really fun because (I) got to know people and saw people coming back to the same show,” Ochsner said. “Hanging out with theater people was really fun.”
At the Artists Repertory Theatre, Ochsner discovered the secret to faking vomit on stage: a little machine that squirts pea soup out of an actor’s hand.
“It was the first show that I worked in a theater, period,” Ochsner said. “I was like, ‘Wow, this does not really happen at a symphony show.'”
Ochsner said she enjoyed working at both performance venues, though, and hopes to find similar work in Los Angeles while she finishes up her graduate career.
“It’s a lot of hurry up and wait,” Ochsner said. “(It) kind of suits my temperament uncomfortably well; running around like a crazy person and then just sitting and chilling … I miss that very much.”
In the structured environment of a graduate program, Ochsner said her experiences at Chamber Music Northwest and Artists Repertory Theatre increased her interest in studying the behind-the-scenes aspects of the music industry, which she tries to emphasize during her discussions with students as a teaching assistant.
After completing her graduate degree, Ochsner said she hopes to become an archivist. She said, as an archivist, she could explore other people’s research about music.
“I don’t want to sit in an office all day writing books,” Ochsner said.