🔒In the courtroom and concert hall, Marjorie Shansky’s double life of (not) leisure

Some professional people moonlight as musicians. Professional flutist Marjorie Shansky moonlights, too.

As a lawyer.

Or perhaps we should say “sunlights,” since much of Shansky’s legal work takes place during daytime hours at venues such as the U.S. District Courthouse. Meanwhile, many of her musical duties — such as concerts by the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, where she is assistant principal flutist — are performed during evening hours at venues such as Woolsey Hall.

There’s an old English proverb: An idle brain is the devil’s workshop. Marjorie Shansky doesn’t have to worry. “I work all the time,” she says.

In addition to being a cruel mistress, the law is a pretty demanding profession. First, you have to go to college for three extra years, then you have to pass the bar exam — not exactly a piece of cake.

But that pales before the demands placed on professional musicians who work in classical music and opera. And unless you’re Isaac Stern or Luciano Pavarotti, it’s not exactly lucrative: There are only a few hundred full-time symphony jobs in the entire country. To achieve that level of technical and artistic mastery, instrumentalists go to school forever and they practice ceaselessly.

Marjorie Shansky’s approach to the double-career conundrum? Go for the best of both worlds.

It was music, not the law, that was Shansky’s first love. But she came to it relatively late — beginning piano lessons at age eight, but not touching a flute until she was 12.

“I had a very deep reason for wanting to learn an instrument other than piano,” recalls Shansky, who grew up in Milwaukee. “The junior-high band at my school wore red capes, and I wanted a red cape. So this was really a fashion choice.”

But why flute? “I had braces at the time, and my orthodontist wouldn’t let me put anything in my mouth.” Unlike, say, a reed instrument such as a clarinet, a flute rests against the lower lip and produces sound when the player blows across an embouchure hole.

Shansky attended the School of Music at Northwestern in Evanston, Ill., earning a bachelor’s in music education before coming east to attend the Yale School of Music, where she earned a master’s in music, and then was named a Fulbright Scholar in music after Yale. She studied in Europe and then returned to the U.S. to launch her music career in earnest.

Part of that career was a regular gig with the New Haven Symphony Orchestra. Shansky joined the NHSO in 1972 as a grad student at Yale, and is today the group’s longest-tenured member. The 2019-20 season is her 48th with the group.

Why did she choose a career in music? “I think that music chooses you,” Shansky replies. “My orientation to the planet is as a musician.”

But only a handful of major U.S. symphony orchestras offer their players full-time employment. Instrumentalists in such world-class ensembles earn six-figure salaries — but their number is tiny. At the NHSO level, musicians are paid a fixed union-scale fee per “service” — rehearsal or performance. It is not enough money to sustain a career, or a satisfactory lifestyle.

So Shansky chose a second path — the law.

Why the law? Shansky recalls as a girl leafing through the Milwaukee phone book. “I saw Atty.’ after people’s names. I wanted that.” Just like wanting the red cape drew her to the flute. Beyond that, Shansky acknowledges she has “an overdeveloped sense of justice.”

She attended UConn law school and traded in 18-hour days of practicing and performing music for 18-hour days studying torts and contracts as a first-year law student car-pooling from New Haven to West Hartford. She earned her JD in 1985.

Shansky’s law practice concentrates on real estate, including land use and zoning matters. “When one goes to law school,” she observes, “the world pulsates with liability.”

Shansky works out of an office in her Fair Haven Heights home — so there’s little escape from the professional challenges at hand, whether they be municipal statutes or Mozart.

“The thing about being a lawyer and being a musician is that you have to be comfortable spending a lot of time alone in a room plying your craft.”

A lot. Oh, and she also has a third job: Shansky is a lecturer at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, where she teaches a course in land-use law and environmental planning.

She is very clear about the significance of her two professions. The law “has relevance to people’s lives and some kind of real meaning,” she says. Performing great music, on the other hand, is to take part in “a really important cultural experience that absolutely sews civilization together.”