Highway Musician
Ongoing project-
The highway keeps moving.
The music stays.
1
The stage of classical music appears effortless. What makes it possible is invisible: countless hours of training, and an extraordinary amount of driving. This project grew out of my life as the spouse of an orchestral musician. Through her, I entered this world and discovered a reality most audiences never see. Regional musicians often drive remarkable distances, sometimes seven hours from Virginia, just to reach a rehearsal or performance in Cleveland or Columbus, Ohio.
Most regional concerts end by 10:00 PM. After the audience leaves, another performance begins, one that no one attends. Alone on the highway, instrument resting in the backseat, the musician drives back into the dark. People who gathered from different states to create something extraordinary together suddenly scatter, each returning to solitude until the next rehearsal calls them back.
Like long-haul truckers, these musicians cross state lines carrying not cargo, but Bach. The real shift begins when the performance ends. This rhythm of gathering and dispersing is what first drew me in. It reveals a kind of labor classical music rarely admits to: invisible, repetitive, and freely chosen. Knowing the performance is fleeting and the drive is long, they still get behind the wheel the following week. This project is about the dignity and quiet perseverance found within that cycle.
The photographs presented here focus on the spaces around the performance: the empty concert hall before the audience arrives, the practice room lit only by late afternoon sun, the dashboard glowing on a dark road home. I am less interested in the moment of playing than in what surrounds it, the waiting, the traveling, the solitude that makes the performance possible.
These ten images were made through direct observation, and they form the emotional ground of the project. But observation alone has its limits. It can show me the empty hall, the dashboard, the road, but it cannot fully reach what each musician carries inside that solitude, the specific fatigue, the specific memory, the specific reason they keep driving. To reach that, I am beginning to construct scenes with the musicians themselves, staged moments built from their own accounts of the road. The documentary work asks what this life looks like from the outside. The constructed work asks what it feels like from within. Both are necessary to tell the full story.
07/14/2026 at Cleveland, OH