In Part VIII of Road Warrior Without an Expense Account, the topic of freelancer burnout was discussed. This is a depressing and all-too-frequent result of engaging in this type of work, and the solution to this situation is quite complicated.

Actually, this whole topic becomes quite depressing, and the more one thinks about it, the more depressing it becomes.

  • Student likes playing music
  • Student studies with teacher (likely a freelancer)
  • Teacher tells student that they can “make it” and get an orchestra job
  • Student decides to audition for music school
  • Teacher tells student to audition for the “best schools”
  • Student auditions and is accepted at one of the “best schools”
  • Student plunks down $43,000 (or more) for each year of school
  • Student finishes school with a lot of chops, $172,000 of debt, and no prospects
  • Teacher tells student to go to grad school (but only at one of the “best schools”)
  • Student goes to graduate school for another $43,000 a year
  • Student graduates
  • Student takes auditions ($800-2000 a pop)
  • Student maxes out credit card on auditions
  • Student’s educational debt rivals medical school graduates
  • Student gets notice in mail: TIME TO PAY LOANS
  • Student takes:

-Job at coffee shop or bookstore

-What freelance jobs they can get

  • Student weeps quietly on bathroom floor at night, clutching stacks of past due notices and loan consolidation offers, lying atop yet another International Musician devoid of auditions for their instrument
  • Student starts private teaching, gets their first talented student, says, “Hey, you should go into music…”

And the cycle repeats itself.

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Loan balances rivaling those of medical students.

Multiple degrees with vague practical application.

Overeducated and underemployed.

Bitter and angry.

Broke and desperate.

Is this the way it has to be? No! There is another path, another orientation, a healthier way to approach the pursuit of a professional life in music performance.

What is that solution?

It’s simple. In order to succeed in the contemporary musical landscape, classical music performers need to become businessmen as much as performers, promoters as much as practicers, and innovators as much as reproducers.

They need to become entrepreneurs.

If one looks back in time before the era of the full-time orchestra (pre-1960), one quickly realizes that the concept of musician as entrepreneur has existed since there were musicians. Musicians of yesteryear existed professionally as freelancers, weaving a combination of playing jobs with other musical activities such as teaching, accompanying, conducting, and arranging to create the tapestry of their musical lives.

Classical musicians need to think of themselves as independent contractors, as small businesses servicing a wide variety of musical needs. This is the most likely scenario for professional musicians looking into the future.

Opportunity abounds for the intrepid musician. When I look around this vibrant city of Chicago, I see possibilities everywhere. Without a doubt, we musicians CAN succeed and prosper in the music world. We just need to refocus and change our outlook.

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In order to refocus, we need to attack the problem at its core. The biggest problem facing classical musicians today is that, with rare exceptions, our music conservatory system does a reprehensible job preparing music students for today’s professional landscape. The core music curriculum at schools today, while provided a path to individual instrumental prowess and a general and theoretical understanding of the underpinning of our art form, gives us virtually no training in HOW to make a career in this business.

The inadequate professional training provided by music schools is understandable when one delves into the background of most university instrumental faculty. If they are full-time members of professional symphony orchestras, they are one of the lucky 1/10 of one percent who made it through the audition process into a full-time orchestra gig. What is the advice that these people dole out?

“If I made it, so can you!”

This is advice that is at best extremely irresponsible, and at worst subliminally malicious and disastrous to the naïve student. As a musician, you are trained your whole life to do one thing—listen to your teacher! When your teacher says “go for it!”, you go for it.

Even if that “going for it” has a price tag of $43,000 each year (plus room and board).

Fast-forward four years and $172,000 later (plus room and board). You get a pat on the back, a handshake, and a degree.

What do you do now? Hit the audition scene, right? It will cost the bass player somewhere between $800 and $2000 to take a typical orchestra audition.

You open the American Federation of Musicians monthly paper and page through the job ads. Where are the jobs? You page through again, your heart racing. There aren’t any auditions!

No job, no prospects, no money, and over a hundred thousand dollars in debt, trained to do only one thing: take and win auditions that are statistically unwinnable and quite infrequent.

Thanks, music school!

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Few can dispute the effectiveness of the modern conservatory/music department system in producing high quality performers. Standards have risen in the last 50 years on virtually every instrument—what was considered to be extraordinary technical acumen in the early 20th century is now par for the course at most music schools. More music students competing for fewer positions have undoubtedly helped to raise technical standards worldwide.

One can certainly make a case for music schools emphasizing technical mastery over true musical expression. Assessing progress in technical mastery is more cut-and-dried than measuring depth of musical development, and music schools join many other disciplines in rewarding cognitive and mechanical progress while ignoring affective maturation and development—but that’s a discussion for another series of articles.

Music schools, then, are doing a good job (despite the above concern in program emphasis) of producing graduates who are great performers, but a rotten job producing graduates with applicable job skills in today’s musical environment

It’s like producing soldiers with no army for them to serve in, teachers with no schools for them to teach in, or business school graduates with no companies for them to work in. Training musicians to become great performers of symphonic literature but not providing them with any extra-musical skills for success in today’s challenging employment market is irresponsible, shortsighted, and just plain lazy on the part of our academic institutions.

It is certainly easier to train musicians in traditional music school disciplines (theory, aural skills, applied lessons, ensembles, chamber music), add a smattering of pedagogy classes and some liberal arts trim, and send them out into the world with a pat on the back and a massive loan bill in the mail. The predominant curriculum for music performance majors fosters general musicianship, instrumental excellence, ensemble skills, and a degree of pedagogical knowledge but rarely requires coursework to teach the successful application of these skills.

Is there another way?

Yes—and a few music schools (most notably the Eastman School with their Orchestral Studies Diploma) are beginning to change course and offer an education more suited to today’s challenging musical environment. What is needed is a redefinition of the music performance degree, a complete reorientation at the institutional level of what it means to be a performer and what sort of preparation and skill set development is necessary for a successful career as a performing entrepreneur. Some schools, like Eastman, are enacting progressive curriculum change in response to this evolving musical landscape. Most schools are not. This is a disservice to the students, the faculty, the industry, and the art itself. Training vast numbers of musicians for a career with a 5% success rate is a huge disservice to the other 95% of the student body. Would we tolerate a system where only 5% of graduating lawyers find employment in their field? How about 5% of graduating teachers, or business school graduates? Why should music be any different?

Notice the phrase from the previous paragraph: performing entrepreneur. This is the crux of it—if music students can be trained to generate their own opportunities and use their talent, enthusiasm, and young energy and spirit to create something new and propel the art forward, we may in fact have a sunny musical future. Opportunities abound in this field for those with the right skills and business acumen to generate their own opportunities and success. Academic institutions have a responsibility to their music performance students to ensure that these skills are a required part of their curricula.

While attending countless professional auditions over the last decade, I would frequently despair at all of the youthful energy and effort that is channeled into the orchestral audition scene. If only people could take that energy and use it to create their own opportunities rather than try to fit into the employment structure created by our forefathers. Think of the possibilities!

This is the problem! We aren’t taught in music school to be entrepreneurs—we’re taught to be lemmings. Even soloists are taught in this way. We are taught to become highly polished little cogs to fit into these giant decaying machines, musical industrial plants belching out the same tired old claptrap.

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What, then, are some alternatives to this current situation?

Before outlining alternatives, it is important to stress that creating a music school curriculum into one that has relevance and applicability to the contemporary employment landscape should not happen at the expense of musical and technical standards. Think of it as instrument smarts and street smarts. Music schools predominantly teach the former, and they need to teach both, but in doing so they should not make a slide towards street smarts at the expanse of instrumental smarts. Without an excellent musical product to offer, we all become snake oil salesmen, foisting a shabby product on the public, and devaluing our art in the process. We must not allow music conservatories to produce graduates with great business and marketing acumen but questionable musical skills. If the musical skills aren’t there, the performance degree should not be awarded.

Also, these curriculum changes should be imposed only on the undergraduate music performance degree and should not affect masters or doctoral degrees in music performance. Studying music performance in and of itself has a great deal of value and merit, and these degrees are very useful for acquiring additional training and study on one’s primary instrument as well as training a musician for a symphonic job or music performance university faculty position. But, much as medical students need to go through an undergraduate degree before attending medical school, music performance majors should receive a firm grounding in the practical skill set required to survive and adapt as a musician. Any graduate study of music performance would thereby be conducted with a firm grounding in the practical application of performance skills.

One final point to note—I do not believe that these curriculum changes should be imposed on music education students or musicology/theory/history students. This may be a point of contention, but music education curriculums already provide a clear path to employment, and musicologists, music theorists, and music historians are on a path to university academia that does not require as great a practical skill set as performers require.

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Degrees awarded by institutions of higher education (colleges, universities, conservatories, trade schools) fall into two basic categories: theoretical and practical. Theoretical degrees include mathematics, history, linguistics, philosophy, and other such disciplines without a defined non-academic career path at the conclusion of the degree. Traditional liberal arts degrees are theoretical degrees intended to give the student knowledge of a broad spectrum of topics and comprehensive knowledge of one particular theoretical discipline. Although there may be several fields in which a recipient of a theoretical degree can successfully seek employment, there is not a specific career path tied to these jobs in the non-academic world.

Practical degrees include business, education, computer science, engineering, nursing, air conditioner repair, and other such disciplines with a set of specific jobs tied to that program of study. Go to nursing school, become a nurse; go to engineering school, become an engineer; go to air conditioner repair school, become an air conditioner repairman. While coursework for a practical degree may be quite theoretical in nature, the acquisition of that degree makes the graduate an attractive candidate for employment in one or more job fields.

There is always an academic career path to any field of study—one can study history, mathematics, or philosophy with the intent of teaching one of these subjects at a university. The very fact that it is possible to study a particular subject at the university level means that there is a path to employment for teaching that subject. The circular career path of academic careers exists for every field, so it shall be ignored for the purposes of this article—every subject that exists by nature of its existence provides a career path toward the teaching of that subject.

Many music degrees clearly fit into either the practical or theoretical categories. Music education degrees, music technology, and music business degrees are practical degrees, while music theory, music history, the bachelor of the arts degree, or musicology degrees are theoretical degrees.

Music performance degrees are purported to be practical degrees, training the recipient to be a successful “doer” in the arts. These degrees are billed as practical degrees to incoming students but the skill set taught within the traditional music performance degree curriculum is entirely theoretical in nature. There is therefore a huge disconnect between what is taught in the classroom and what happens in the real world. Music performance students think that they are getting a practical degree—go to school, get a job playing music—when in reality they are getting a theoretical degree.

Selling a theoretical degree as a practical degree does a huge disservice to students, and this practice creates a vicious cycle of qualified performers without opportunities, and without the skill set to easily create their own opportunities. Creating their own performance organizations and setting up as a not-for-profit, writing grants, taking care of marketing and publicity, working with government agencies and arts advocacy agencies at the local, county, state, and federal level, booking and managing tours, contracting, internet-based aspects of the music business, working with outlets to sell your own recordings, setting up supplementary businesses relating to your art…

You get the idea. Opportunity abounds in the correct set of skills are taught to harness this opportunity. Why aren’t music performance majors being taught these skills? Click any of the links below to view a typical example of a current music performance curriculum:

This situation needs to be changed—now. See below:

In its current form, the music performance undergraduate degree is of dubious value, and it must be replaced by a more relevant and applicable degree. Undergraduate music performance degrees must incorporate elements of the current music performance curriculum with training in business, accounting, marketing, negotiating, public relations, and communications to create a new degree:

Practical Music Performance

This subject will be more fully addressed in Road Warrior Without an Expense Account Part X—Refocusing (musical entrepreneurship)

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References and Resources:

  • Chicago College of Performing Arts Orchestral Studies Program (example of a school enacting some progressive curriculum changes, but without adding the business classes like the Eastman program): http://ccpa.roosevelt.edu/music/orch-bm.htm

Further Reading:

Read the complete series:

Addendum I: The Real Cost of Driving to Gigs for the Freelance Musician
Addendum II: Tainting the Academic Waters with Pay-Per-Student Teaching

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