Part I: Adjunct University Teaching
One would have to be crazy to go into music for the money.Dozens of career paths spring to mind (medicine, law, web development, programming, engineering, etc.) that have great salaries and benefits and ample opportunities for employment.Music careers by and large lack these great benefits.Cream-of-the-crop jobs in the world of music (outside of international soloists) pay what would be considered a fairly pedestrian wage in many other fields.
This basic assumption underlies everything else I discuss here. I know that we musicians did not go into this profession for the money, and the purpose of this series is not to carp about how little we all make. My concern is that we musicians are compensated fairly for our work and allowed to earn a living doing what we do. My experience, unfortunately, has been that the hidden costs of the freelance life quickly erode any seeming profit from far too many gigs. Since teaching is a component of nearly every freelance musician’s employment palette, I will analyze a university teaching position I held for the first installment in this series.
Adjunct compensation
In my previous adjunct university position I was compensated at a rate of $35 an hour for each student I taught.This rate is comparable to many other public universities inIllinois, Wisconsin, and Indiana and is somewhat lower than schools in other regions according to my research.Since this figure is a common hourly rate for universities in the Midwest it will serve as an illustrative example for this article.
In addition to the $35/hour, I was paid a $635 retainer fee each semester for recruiting and other activities. This list of activities included doing seminar classes (requiring an extra trip), recruiting in local schools, attending juries, audition days, open houses, and the like. For the purposes of this trip I will assume that two additional days per month were needed to be devoted to these activities, although in reality the number of days was probably higher than that.
The resulting compensation varied from term to term depending on my student load.My student load vacillated between four and ten students during my employment in this position.The resulting compensation (including retainer fee) ranged from $625 to $1050 per month.
Before I go on I would like to note that both the hourly rate and retainer fee never increased during my five years of employment. Tenure track faculty members and lecturers at universities receive yearly cost of living salary increases. Adjunct faculty members do not typically receive any compensation increase. The lack of cost of living increases means that adjunct faculty members actually get paid less each year regardless of their job performance. The only way to increase compensation is to hustle for more students. For more on this ethically dicey subject, please check out my pay-per-student post.
Analyzing the income
I will use a figure of $900 a month in compensation for hourly lessons plus the retainer fee.This is on the upper end of what I was paid monthly for this university position.If I were to make one trip per week to teach this would break down to $225 per day of teaching—not bad.This boils down to about 6.5 hours of teaching if I could line up the students back to back.In reality, however, it was impossible to get all of those students lined up one after another, so my time spent on the job was closer to 8.5 hours, lowering my average hourly compensation to $26.50.
Now comes the kicker—mileage. I lived 93 miles from this particular institution, making my round trip daily commute 186 miles. Much of this was on two lane highway, putting my commute time at a minimum of two hours on each leg of the trip (four hours total per day).
Adding those four additional commute hours put my weekly commitment at 12.5 hours, thus lowering my hourly compensation to $18 per hour.Considerably lower than the original $35/hour figure (which is a fairly low compensation figure to begin with).
Figuring in my mileage….oh wait, I got no mileage! 44.5 cents per mile must therefore be taken off of that $900 monthly compensation figure. Years of brake jobs, oil changes, blown tires, cracked windshields and the like has taught me that the federal mileage rate really is what it costs you in the long run to drive to gigs.
186 miles/trip x .445 = $82.77 mileage/trip
$82.77 mileage/trip x 4 trips/month = $331.08 mileage/month
$900 – $331.08 mileage/month = $568.92 monthly compensation after mileage
Ouch! Mileage takes quite a bite out of your earnings, doesn’t it? Driving is what really destroys the earnings of freelancers. I have driven 40,000-50,000 miles per year for the past seven years working sometimes in six states each year to earn a living. My pre-expenses income has been pretty handsome some years, but when actual costs are figured the earnings always plummet to coffee shop employee levels (if not worse).
Let’s break it down a little further:
If I were to travel only once a week (four trips per month):
$568.92 divided by 4 = $142.23 per day
$142.23 divided by 12.5 hours = $11.38 per hour
Note that this does not include those extra trips to fulfill the requirements of the adjunct retainer fee. If I did only one extra trip per month:
$568.92 divided by 5 = $113.78 per day
$113.78 divided by 12.5 hours = $9.10 per hour
If I made two extra trips per month (a more realistic assessment of the requirements of teaching, seminars, juries, audition days, and recruiting activities):
$568.92 divided by 6 = $94.82 per day
$94.82 divided by 12.5 hours = $7.59 per hour
These figures do not count any preparation hours and are also a low estimate of what it took to technically fulfill the adjunct retainer fee. Making $8-10 an hour (with no benefits, no raises….ever) is a lowly income for anybody in any field. I made more than this doing paperwork in a law office in 1994.
Ouch!
Remember, this is pre-tax and has no pension contribution or any other benefit. Also, this figure assumes that I earned $900 monthly from this job. I frequently earned less, but my commuting costs remained the same. This is another unfair drawback to pay-per-student teaching—when a student quits (or fails), your hourly wage drops a dollar or two, putting pressure on the pay-per-student adjunct teacher to lower their standards and pass unqualified students to keep the wage from dropping from coffee shop worker scale to dishwasher scale.
This low figure is more disturbing given the required advanced degrees an applicant is expected to have just to get an interview for an adjunct teaching position.When I applied for this position I had two music performance degrees from NorthwesternUniversity and had taken nearly $40,000 in loans (not counting what my parents had to pay) which I was just staring to pay back.
The sad reality of the state of this profession is even more telling when looking at the highly qualified pool of applicants interesting in filling my previous position. I was told by my colleagues at the university that this particular adjunct teaching position had received the most number of applicants for any adjunct position in this institution’s history. People with doctoral degrees and people with significant ISCOM orchestra experience were among the applicants.
Why would one take this work?
One may criticize my decision for accepting employment at an institution that was so far from my home. It is true that the compensation increases if I lived closer to this institution. It is, however, the only significant double bass university teaching position to open over the past seven years in this area, and I consider myself lucky to have gotten the job. Also, my mileage was actually less than some other faculty members from this institution, and my student load (and thus my compensation) was higher than most adjunct faculty members. Driving 50-80 miles one way for a job like this is very common here in the metropolitan Chicago area, and my cost/benefit breakdown thus serves as a representative model of the true cost of this kind of employment.
The next installment in this series will focus on the cost/benefit analysis of some freelance orchestral positions I have held in the Chicago metropolitan area. A topic I will also discuss in future installments to this series is the skill set a freelancer must develop to determine the cost/benefit of any freelance job.
Part II – Realities of Professional Freelancing
Before I continue, I would like to note that there are many different types of freelance careers. In fact, most professional musicians do some degree of freelance work whether or not they have a full-time orchestra or university job. For example, here in Chicago a significant number of Chicago Symphony Orchestra musicians play in the freelance ensembles Music of the Baroque or the Ars Viva Symphony Orchestra, and members of the Lyric Opera of Chicago perform in a variety of other freelance ensembles as well. Members of the Northwestern University School of Music faculty also play a variety of freelance jobs in the Chicago metropolitan area. Nearly all professional musicians are also freelancers to some extent.
This article will cover some topics that people who are attempting to pursue orchestral freelancing should consider. A future article will cover “jobbing” (weddings, parties, receptions, church jobs), which has a very different set of parameters than orchestral freelance work and some of the specifics of working in regional orchestras. This information is specific to the United States, but musicians in other countries may find value in this material as well. Also, when I refer to “professional orchestra musicians”, I am referring to musicians with full-time orchestra positions. I know that freelancers are also professionals, but I call them professional freelancers here to highlight the difference between musicians with a full-time job and musicians with no major single stream of income.
Ratio of orchestras to population
With only a couple of exceptions, each city in the United States (large or small) can support a maximum of one full-time symphony orchestra per city. In smaller towns, orchestras may not have any full-time positions. Mid-sized cities often use a core of full-time musicians filled out with part-time per-service musicians. The largest metropolitan areas have completely full-time orchestras, and they on rare occasions also support full-time opera orchestras and ballet orchestras. Most larger metropolitan areas also support one or several universities, some of which may have a music program. Some of these music programs may have full-time instrumental instructors, although most universities do not.
Diminished opportunities
In cities with full-time orchestras, these university positions are often held by the same players holding the professional orchestra jobs in that city, which is a good thing for everybody but the freelancers. I believe that orchestral instrumentalists SHOULD hold these university positions. For young instrumentalists interested in a career in orchestral performance, studying with a top-tier orchestral professional is a must. In the world of the double bass the vast majority of double bassists winning full-time orchestral positions have studied with a professional orchestra player. Feel free to check out my Advice for Aspiring Music Performance Majors for more information regarding this topic. The downside to professional orchestral players holding these positions is that it further reduces the job market in a metropolitan area for freelance musicians. The most desirable (and highest paying) adjunct teaching positions and lecturer positions in instrumental studies are therefore held by people with another primary income stream in the professional music world, squeezing even more water out of the freelance sponge. If one wishes to teach at a university, on must often find an institution so far that it would be undesirable for professional orchestral musician. I can think of dozens of freelancers who commute 60, 80, 100, or more miles each way (without mileage) to hold these adjunct university positions. Click here to read more about some problems associated with these sort of positions, or follow this link to read about some of the ethical problems associated with these adjunct positions.
Even those “undesirable” university positions are often held by full-time orchestra professionals. Many orchestra musicians enjoy teaching, and these positions provide a channel in which the orchestra musician can pass along his or her knowledge and give something back to the music world. This is a good thing. People should be studying with orchestral professionals if they want a job in an orchestra. It is also true, however, that each one of these positions could prove to be the cornerstone of a career for a freelancer were it available.
The same is true for many freelance work in a city. I can list at least a dozen freelance ensembles here in Chicago that are made up predominantly of musicians from the Chicago Symphony and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. This is also, I truly believe, a good thing (please don’t send me hate mail, freelancers–I’m one of you!). If an ensemble has the opportunity to hire and use players of this caliber they would be foolish not to do so. These players are where they are for a reason, and if they want to perform outside of their full-time orchestral job, it is their right to do so. I love playing gigs with players of this caliber, and I know that audiences appreciate knowing that they are watching “players from the __ Symphony Orchestra” rather than random freelancer #3275. As a result, many of the best freelance orchestral playing is done by these same players with full-time orchestral positions, squeezing even more water out of the freelance sponge.
Is this a raw deal for freelancers? I guess it is. Having a full-time orchestral position gives a player legitimacy in the eyes of many people that freelancers do not get, however, and fair or not, this is the reality, and it is something that one should be aware of when considering a freelance career. As a freelancer you are not the first pick, and you simply never will be without being a member of a full-time orchestra.
When one first looks at a major metropolitan area (I will use Chicago as an example), one sees all sorts of orchestral activity and all sorts of orchestral (and university) employment opportunities. The Chicago Symphony and the Lyric Opera of Chicago are both full-time professional ensembles, and the list of freelance orchestras (Chicago Opera Theater, Chicagoland Pops, Music of the Baroque, Chicago Philharmonic), and the list of universities with music programs (Northwestern University, DePaul University, Roosevelt University) goes on and on. When one looks more deeply, however, one realizes that a significant number of those ensembles and institutions are populated by musicians from those two major ensembles.
Analyzing the classical double bass scene in Chicago, one finds nine full-time double bass positions in the Chicago Symphony and six full-time double bass positions in the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Over the past twenty years four double bassists have won positions in these ensembles–three in the Chicago Symphony and one in the Lyric Opera of Chicago, averaging out to one full-time double bass position every five years in this metropolitan area. Don’t even ask what the statistics look like for an instrument like trumpet, harp, or oboe. The only large non-adjunct university position not held by one of these fifteen players is the double bass position at Northwestern University. This position is held by the remarkable double bassist DaXun Zhang.
Let me reiterate this: there is only ONE non-adjunct university position in this metropolitan area of over nine million that is not held by one of these fifteen full-time orchestral bassists! And even this one position is a lecturer position, not a tenure-track professorship. Think about that for a while before investing tens of thousands of dollars and a decade of your life getting a B.M. , M.M., and D.M. in music performance. If you want a tenure track position at the university level and you’re a bassist, don’t plan on moving to Chicago anytime soon.
Classical Double Bass Employment Statistics for Chicago:
size of metropolitan area: nine million
number of jobs: 15
number of jobs/population: one job for every 600,000 people
vacancy rate: one vacancy every five years
Statistically speaking, your odds of becoming mayor of a city like Milwaukee, Wisconsin (population 578,887) are better than your odds of obtaining a full-time double bass position in Chicago.
In addition to those fifteen players there are a handful of double bassists based in Chicago making a full-time living doing freelance orchestral playing and university teaching. A couple of these players manage to work predominantly in Chicago and the nearby suburbs. The rest (like me) drive long miles across multiple states, balancing three, four, or five regional orchestras, maxed out on attendance requirements, staying in hotels or renting apartments in different cities. There is a definite pecking order for the freelance community as well, and young musicians may have a difficult time making any headway in this arena as well. Regardless of what a musician still in college may think, it is NOT easy to just walk into a new community as a freelancer and get good work. The better the work, the more likely players are to hang on to it. Most beginning freelancers, therefore, will have to drive for their dollars.
If one were to put a push pin in the dead center of a metropolitan area and start to draw concentric circles (I call them gig circles) radiating outward, the farther away one gets from that push pin the worse the gig usually gets–the pay gets less, the working conditions get shadier, and the quality of the ensemble decreases. Freelancer income decreases exponentially as they radiate out from that push pin until they run into the gig circles of another metropolitan area. Pay and conditions tend to go up as one approaches the center of the new metropolitan area, but the odometer on the car keeps ticking, and those hidden freelancer expenses start eroding that paycheck. Again, more on that topic in a future installment of this series.
Young musicians focused on a career in orchestral performance need to get some experience performing in orchestras, and the positions that are available tend to be in the furthest reaches of these gig circles. Even these positions can be extremely competitive, but they are more attainable than the work in the closer gig circles. Most freelance musicians seeking to earn a living playing orchestral music must make long commutes in different directions radiating outward from their metropolitan area.
I have been doing this sort of work my entire life. When I lived in Sioux Falls, South Dakota I regularly commuted to Sioux City, Iowa to work. Conversely, many musicians came in from places like Minneapolis, Omaha and other nearby cities to play in the South Dakota Symphony. When I got out of college I started working in various orchestras in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa. This is the norm rather than the exception for freelancers.
The number of freelancers is escalating every year as more students graduate from music school and discover the jarringly low number of professional positions. When I auditioned for the Elgin Symphony in 2000 only a couple of bass players showed up to the audition. The next audition in 2003 brought out 25 bass players, including many with advanced degrees from major universities and players with significant ICSOM orchestra experience. When the Charleston Symphony (S.C.) held auditions for principal bass in 1999 eleven bassists showed up for the audition. In 2002 they held another audition and 75 bassists showed up.
As more and more players enter the freelance scene nationwide, the competitiveness of these jobs rivals the competitiveness of professional jobs from an earlier generation. These part-time gigs have become the “new jobs” of the current generation of music students. The level of experience and education one needs to land a position in the Elgin Symphony, Canton Symphony, or other such job is now in many cases the same as what a full-time major orchestral position requires. The level of education needed for these jobs (most people landing even part-time freelance orchestra positions have at least a B.M. and usually a M.M.) escalates every year as university tuition continues to skyrocket. What used to put one on the path of a full-time orchestral performance career now may not even get one into a part-time regional orchestra.
The disparity in pay between full-time and part-time orchestras can be huge. An orchestra like the Elgin Symphony (one of the best paying gigs in metro Chicago) only pays a section player $8000 or so before taxes. Many of my contracted gigs only pay $1800-2500 for the year. A freelancer must stitch all of these gigs together into a Frankenstein career. Scary and disturbing, but nevertheless alive. The challenges of balancing all of these numerous part-time positions will be the subject of the next installment in this series.
My freelance career! It’s alive!
Part III –The Rise and Fall of the Full-Time Orchestra
The traditional pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for a student pursuing professional instrumental study at a university is a position in a salaried symphony orchestra. Ever since my early teens I was constantly told that I had the goods required to get one of these positions. That may have been the case (and may still be the case), but the number of available full-time orchestral positions has been shrinking yearly at a regular rate, while the number of students seeking these jobs has grown exponentially.
Before I get into the raw statistics, a brief history of the symphony orchestra in the United States is in order. Part IV of this series will focus on the statistical likelihood of obtaining an orchestra position based on the number of total jobs, vacancy rate, and the growing pool of audition candidates.
The golden age of full-time orchestral employment began with the rapid influx of corporate giving in the late 1960s and began to decline slowly but steadily in the early 1980s. Prior to the 1960s, few of the top tier orchestras paid a living wage. Chicago Symphony musicians mowed lawns in the summer to pay their bills in the 1940s, and orchestras with a more modest pedigree (like the Milwaukee Symphony) were often volunteer community orchestras. Most performing classical musicians prior to the 1960s were essentially freelancers, playing in a wide variety of venues. Symphonic work made up only a small percentage of the income of classical musicians in the first half of the 20th century. Vaudeville, musical theater, recordings, radio work, jingles, and other such work presented the performing musician with a plethora of options for employment, and symphonic music was definitely not the highest paying activity. For years the Chicago Union Hall resembled the Chicago Board of Trade as contractors and musicians bustled about, each vying for the other’s services.
The number of music schools offering performance degrees also mushroomed during this time, as did the number of students entering such programs. Again, there are many contributing factors to this trend, but at least part of the reason for this increase in enrollment and number of programs had to do with the new career paths available to professional musicians. Being an orchestral musician was a “respectable” career complete with pension, benefits, regular hours, and the like. The fact that this salary and benefits package was largely funded by corporate giving and not by ticket sales or other such hard transactions did not matter in the minds of most musicians. There were jobs and this next generation of conservatory-trained musicians was coming to get them.
It is interesting to note that, although more people are listening to classical music than ever before, a strong case can be made that classical music had its widest saturation in the public sphere in the 1950s. Leonard Bernstein’s tenure with the New York Philharmonic, the rise of a stable, prosperous, post-World War II middle-class audience, the rise in popularity of the 33 1/3 LP record—these and many other factors contributed to this period as being, if not the only golden age, then certainly one of the golden ages of classical music popularity.
This era is a good decade-and-a-half before the explosion in corporate giving that precipitated the creation of so many orchestral jobs, and it is worth noting that the popularity of this art form did not coincide with the infusion of cash into the infrastructure delivering this art form.
The jobs created by corporate giving in he late 1960s and early 1970s had both positive and negative consequences for the orchestral world. By 1975 most major (1,000,000+ people metro area) had a full-time symphony orchestra. This created many new employment opportunities for classical musicians, which is a good thing, but it also created large bureaucratic organizations whose purpose was self-perpetuation and growth. Again, this is not necessarily a negative development, but it represents a distinct shift in the world of classical music dissemination. American classical music in the 19th and early 20th century was based on a commercial need. Impresarios from these earlier generations would hire musicians for single engagements with the sole purpose of making a buck. If the production turned a profit the impresario would mount another production in a similar vein and continue mining a profit until that stream dried up, at which point he would mount another type of production.
Contemporary Broadway productions are a great example of this sort of entrepreneurial activity today. Believe me, no one mounts ‘The Lion King’ or ‘Wicked’ as a not-for-profit venture. The backers of these shows are out to make a buck, and they do, or the show closes.
This is not to say that a symphony orchestra should be run like this. In fact, it is a pretty bad idea to run a symphony orchestra like this. A lot of the work I do is for modern day impresarios, and the work is often of dubious artistic merit.
The point I would like to emphasize is that music was expected to turn a profit prior to the mid-20th century. Orchestra jobs of these earlier generations didn’t pay much because they didn’t earn much in profit. Many musicians probably considered these orchestra jobs to be a supplement to a full and busy individualistic freelance career.
As these symphonic institutions (The Cleveland Orchestra, The Philadelphia Orchestra—notice the incorporation of “The” into the organizational names) grew, they naturally took on more employees to maintain and increase corporate and individual giving. The percentage of budgetary revenue generated from ticket sales shrank as salaries climbed ever higher for musicians. Orchestras by the early 1980s resembled museums in their structure more than the entrepreneurial one-shot ventures of impresarios of the previous generation.
Symphonic institutions have had differing levels of success depending on region, economy, culture, local corporate and philanthropic entities, and a myriad of other factors. While some have succeeded and some have failed, it is important to note that the number of orchestral playing positions available in these organizations nationwide reached their highest numbers in the late 1970s and have been steadily declining since that time.
Although the United States continues to grow in population, virtually no new professional orchestras with full-time positions have emerged. The opposite has actually occurred. Each economic recession in the United States knocks off a few professional symphony orchestras. The Savannah, Tulsa, Florida Philharmonic, and San Jose Symphonies are a few victims of the most recent recession. These orchestras are gone—defunct, destroyed, disappeared. Over 100 full-time orchestra playing positions also disappeared from the United States with the bankruptcy of these organizations, and believe me, there will not be four new full-time orchestras springing up to take their place.
Other orchestras retrench positions as people retire for budgetary reasons. Several prominent professional orchestras recently eliminated their full-time harp position after the previous player retired, and many orchestras have been playing short in certain string sections (using only 10 instead of 12 cellos) instead of filling these positions at an audition.
Part IV – Rising Tide, Shrinking Pool
As the actual number of full-time playing positions decreases with each passing year, the number of music school graduates seeking these positions increases. It is disturbing to see so much interest in the pursuit of this career coupled with the decline in positions available to these players. Approximately 700 new orchestral position candidates enter the audition circuit fresh out of music school each year. A reasonable estimate based on the orchestras that have folded each year would be that there are 10 fewer orchestral positions in the country than there were the year before.
The orchestras that comprise the International Conference of Symphony and Opera Musicians (ICSOM) employ a little over 4000 full-time professional orchestral musicians in the United States and Canada at the present. The Regional Orchestra Players’ Association (ROPA) consists of a combination of per-service and full-time orchestral musicians. Excluding the members of Canadian orchestras but factoring in the full-time positions of the ROPA conference, one can assume that there are approximately 4500 full-time orchestral positions in the United States.
The ICSOM conference is comprised of 52 orchestras and is made up predominantly of full-time orchestral positions, while the ROPA conference is comprised of 68 orchestras, with the bulk of the positions being per-service.
How often do these positions open up? Many factors come into play, but each full-time orchestra in the United States typically has a few vacancies per season. One may predict 150-200 auditions nationwide for full-time orchestral positions.
Many of these jobs are won by players who already hold a position in another full-time orchestra. It is quite common to see players “step up” through the ranks of full-time orchestras, starting with a full-time ROPA orchestra, moving to a moderately size ISCOM orchestra, and perhaps finally winning a job in a top 10 ICSOM orchestra.
How many new players does this system let in each year? How many hires are fresh faces not previously affiliated with any other full-time ISCOM or ROPA orchestra?
After bouncing some numbers around, I feel relatively safe in saying that there are approximately 100 openings for new faces in these orchestras each year. The actual number of auditions per year is higher than this figure, but many auditions are filled by people already holding another full-time position, so a safe estimate of the number of positions filled by new candidates would be 100 per year. This number is only an estimate, and the calculations that follow are for demonstrative purposes only.
Let’s start this calculation at zero—we’ll pretend that no one but these 700 new faces on the audition scene are looking for a job (yeah, right).
Year 1 – 14% chance of getting a job
700 candidates auditioning
100 available positions
600 unsuccessful candidates
Now year two rolls around. You’ve still got those 600 candidates who haven’t won a job last year. Let’s assume that 300 people on the audition circuit quit looking each year. That would still leave 300 candidates from year one. This number may be low, but it may also be high. Most musicians I know audition for years and years before either quitting or else landing a job.
Year 2 – 10% chance of getting a job
700 new candidates + 300 old candidates = 1000 candidates auditioning
1000 candidates auditioning
100 available positions
900 unsuccessful candidates
Those are still good odds, but watch what happens as time progresses. These figures also don’t consider any additional increase in music graduate numbers and don’t take into account the decline in available positions.
Year 3 – 8% chance of getting a job
700 new candidates + 600 old candidates = 1300 candidates auditioning
1300 candidates auditioning
100 available positions
1200 unsuccessful candidates
Year 4 – 6% chance of getting a job
700 new candidates + 900 old candidates = 1600 candidates auditioning
1600 candidates auditioning
100 available positions
1500 unsuccessful candidates
Year 5 – 5% chance of getting a job
700 new candidates + 1200 old candidates = 1900 candidates auditioning
1900 candidates auditioning
100 available positions
1800 unsuccessful candidates
Year 6 – 4% chance of getting a job
700 new candidates + 1500 old candidates = 2200 candidates auditioning
2200 candidates auditioning
100 available positions
2100 unsuccessful candidates
This pool of unsuccessful applicants continues to grow each year. Here is what things look like after a few more years:
Year 10 – 3% chance of getting a job
700 new candidates + 2700 old candidates = 3400 candidates auditioning
3400 candidates auditioning
100 available positions
3300 unsuccessful candidates
At some point it is likely that more than 300 would quit per year, but I have certainly seen a trend of older and older players staying on the audition scene. Also, this doesn’t take into account and loss of potential positions (and these positions are undoubtedly shrinking).
Why do I bring this up? Why spread gloom and doom? These are tough statistics, but I use them (and the history of the symphony orchestra in the United States) to illustrate what I see happening in the employment outlook for classical musicians. When musicians on the audition circuit can’t get full-time orchestral jobs, they often turn to (and have been turning to in increasing numbers) the regional orchestra world to find employment.
The absence of adequate employment for qualified candidates in full-time orchestras propels more top-notch players into the part-time regional orchestra circuit each year, with both positive and negative implications for both orchestra and player.
Part V – Regional Orchestras
What, exactly, is a “regional” orchestra? For the purposes of this article, regional orchestras will be defined as organizations that employ professional musicians but do not offer a salary and other benefits of full-time employment. The organizational structure is virtually identical to the full-time symphony orchestra and is quite different from the community orchestra. These orchestras usually (but not always) have a collective bargaining agreement through the American Federation of Musicians. When I reference regional orchestras, I am not necessarily referring to all orchestras in the AFM’s Regional Orchestra Players Association conference. One can be a regional orchestra according to this definition and not be in the ROPA conference (and vice-versa). For the purposes of this article, if an orchestra pays a salary, it belongs to the full-time orchestra category.
Many non-musicians are not aware of the difference between a community orchestra and a regional orchestra. Here are the differences between the three different kinds of orchestra:
Community Orchestra – Usually comprised of amateur musicians. There is generally either no pay involved or a small honorarium ($15-25 per service) to cover expenses for the musicians. The conductor of such an organization will typically be the only musician compensated. Players may be auditioned or may be picked to play with no audition at all. There is an understanding (or there should be!) that these players are doing it for the love of it and not as a living, and while they strive for an excellent performance, there is not the expectation of a completely polished product. It’s like being a good golfer versus being on the PGA Tour. These orchestras will sometimes hire professional players as principal players or as ‘ringers’ to fill out the section, and these players will be compensated at a more professional scale. The structure of these organizations is set up with the amateur in mind, with weekly rehearsals, community events, punch and cookies at the breaks, and a general church social kind of feeling to it.
Regional Orchestra – Comprised of professional musicians. The players in this level of orchestra are specialists in their instrument, usually having gone to music school and having demonstrated excellence on their instrument for a long period of time. Think of these orchestras as the minor leagues. There are lots of great players in the minor leagues, and they often move on to the major leagues. The organization of these orchestras usually falls under a collective bargaining agreement, and the bureaucracy of these organizations resembles that of a full-time professional orchestra. These orchestras can pay well per service, but they do not offer full-time employment.
Full-Time Orchestras – These jobs are careers unto themselves, and they have been the traditional employment objective for musicians interested in pursuing an orchestral performance career in the latter half of the 20th century. These organizations provide musicians with a regular salary and benefits.
I am currently a member of the Milwaukee Ballet Orchestra and Elgin Symphony, two regional orchestras that also happen to be included in the American Federation of Musician’s Regional Orchestra Players Conference. Working in these two organizations has provided me with some insight into the benefits and challenges of regional orchestra employment.
My experience with regional orchestras has been that they provide the musician with steady employment and good pay for the week–but only for the week. The typical regional orchestra plays one concert cycle per month (two on a good month). Orchestras like the Elgin Symphony play three concerts per week, which results in a seven service week, while the Milwaukee Ballet Orchestra will do four or more performances in a work week—not bad in either case for the freelance musician.
The compensation for regional orchestras can vary greatly, and it is not always commensurate with the quality of the orchestra. Some regional orchestras pay $375 per week, and some pay $1000 a week or more—it all depends on location, quality of the group, number of services, and other such factors.
Playing in a regional orchestra can, for the weeks in which one is employed, closely represent playing in a full-time orchestra in terms of working conditions, repertoire, and pay, and it can serve as a satisfactory option for musicians looking to pursue a career in orchestral playing.
The problem with this kind of work is that it typically only happens one week per month. Most people can’t pay their bills on one week of work per month, and musicians are no different. Regional orchestra musicians often audition for positions in several different regional orchestras to assemble a patchwork orchestral performance career.
Having a patchwork career can have pluses and minuses. In Part II of this series I wrote about how most full-time orchestral musicians are also freelancers to some extent, and in Part III I discussed how recent the phenomenon of full-time orchestral positions is historically. Many people enjoy the variety that comes with playing with different organizations, and they appreciate not having to depend on a single income stream (if you have a full-time orchestra job and it goes belly-up, you’re in a tight spot).
It is theoretically possible to hold several different regional orchestra jobs with 10 week seasons each and assemble a 38-40 week job out of them. I have come close to achieving this several times. In the last seven years, I was a member in or played significant portions of the season with the following regional orchestras:
Elgin Symphony
IRIS Chamber Orchestra
Milwaukee Ballet Orchestra
Lake Forest Symphony
Chicago Opera Theater
Chicago Philharmonic
Des Moines Metro Opera
Rockford Symphony
Illinois Symphony
Spoleto USA Festival
Racine Symphony
Waukesha Symphony
Present Music
Memphis Symphony
Northwest Indiana Symphony
Chicago Master Singers
Midsummers Music Festival
Music by the Lake
L’Opera Piccola
All of these organizations have a regional orchestra set-up in terms of compensation and schedule. I have played with full-time orchestras like the Lyric Opera of Chicago and community orchestras like the Northbrook Symphony and the Elmhurst Symphony, but these models differ from the regional orchestra model I am discussing here.
Although I currently hold four positions in these types of orchestra, in any given season I often perform with 8-10 regional orchestras on a regular or semi-regular basis. The reason I play with so many different groups can be summed up in one word:
Scheduling
Scheduling is the single biggest problem facing freelance musicians playing in regional orchestras. Along with the better working conditions associated with a regional orchestra job comes minimum service requirements. Most regional orchestras have some sort of policy requiring a musician to play anywhere between 50-95% of all offered services. Again, this figure can vary greatly depending on the particular organization, but there is usually some sort of minimum attendance requirement to remain a member of any regional orchestra.
This would not be a problem if orchestra schedules didn’t conflict with each other. One could hold three or four regional jobs and be working a respectable length season (albeit with no benefits) if the weeks of employment dovetailed with each other. The unfortunate reality is that orchestras tend to book similar weeks. Orchestras don’t usually do subscription concerts during Thanksgiving, Easter, and other holiday weeks, and many have a strange tendency to do concerts the very first week of the month. The result is that a musician who is a member of multiple regional orchestra has constant inter-orchestra conflicts.
As an example, let’s take a musician who is a member of three regional orchestras. Each of these orchestras has ten subscription weeks of work, which in an ideal world would total 30 weeks of work. This idealistic scenario would give the musician approximately eight months of work, which would resemble an ICSOM orchestra that had no summer season. The musician would still typically not have any benefits provided, but 30 weeks of work plus some teaching and other freelance work could easily make for a successful career.
The unfortunate reality is that at least ten of those weeks would conflict with each other, resulting in about 20 weeks of actual employment. Also, the minimum attendance requirements that many regional orchestras maintain begin to cause problems. These conflicting weeks mean that one has to sub out of one orchestra in order to play with the other ones, often putting the musician in the precarious position of being perpetually at the maximum number of allowed absences. This 1/3 reduction of work from the ideal three orchestra schedule not only reduces the musician’s income but locks those remaining 20 weeks down, often preventing the musician from taking any of those remaining weeks off for more lucrative subbing opportunities, auditions, and the like.
I currently hold four contracts with the aforementioned regional orchestras, and I am constantly in danger of being fired from all four of them due to scheduling conflicts. This means that when I get called to sub in a prestigious orchestra I have to weigh the dangers of being fired from my current tenured positions for the prospect of better, but more irregular (and not guaranteed) work.
Part VI – The Vicious Cycle
I often wondered as I entered the classical music freelance world how one could possibly put together an income in this business. Some politically smart auditions I took my last year of graduate school helped me join the Chicago freelance scene fairly smoothly, allowing me to play with the best groups in the area my first year out of school. Watching my colleagues arrive from their suburban homes in their nice cars, I would wonder how on Earth they managed to make ends meet. After all, we played the same gigs, but I was in debt up to my neck, driving a car with 200,000 miles on it, and barely paying my rent.
How can one make it in the freelance business?
In part V of this series, I described the way in which people put together the schedules of various regional orchestras to assemble a career. Although in theory one could assemble three or four part-time orchestra schedules to create a full-time work load (albeit one without the security and benefits of a full-time position), in reality pervasive scheduling conflicts cause one to stretch absence requirements of contract positions and accept part-time work with 8-12 organizations in order to secure a living.
The issue that I will address in this installment is the fundamental lack of job security and the slippery slope toward underemployment that many freelancers find themselves slipping down over the years. This is a problem that manifests itself quite differently in the world of self-employed music making than it does in the world of business.
In many was we musicians operate our own small businesses selling just one product: ourselves. We accept employment opportunities, negotiate rates when possible, and attempt to maximize profitability just like any small business. The big difference between freelance music and supplying paper products (ignoring the artistic differences) is that there is only one of us, and we can only be in one place at one time. Accepting employment with a particular organization for a given length of time also means turning down other concurrent employment offers for that same length of time. We musicians may have some impressive skills, but being in two places at the same time is not one of them.
With rare exceptions, the world of music is full of eager musicians willing to take your place in the gig queue. Say no to a contractor and they will go with the next person in the queue. Say no enough times and you are permanently replaced by that person. Since taking one gig means saying no to another, climbing the gig ladder necessarily means that you will fade from prominence in the eyes of some contractors. Can you re-establish yourself with these former contacts at some future date? Sure. Let’s just hope that the 50 other players in the queue behind you haven’t ingratiated themselves with said contractors.
Another truism about the freelance music business is that the better the work, the less of an obligation the contractor has to you. Better work is almost always less secure work. An example:
You are called to play a month with the Chicago Symphony. This is an offer that few classical freelance musicians in Chicago would turn down. Being a successful musician, you are already booked up with two weeks of regional orchestra work (one contracted position, one substitute position) and three church gigs.
Backing out of your contracted week of work may or may not be a big deal, depending on the organization. The other non-contracted week of work and the three church gigs pose a dilemma, however. With rare exceptions, backing out of these gigs labels you in the minds of contractors as an unreliable resource. When a contractor is hiring for the next gig, the fact that you backed out at the last minute will usually cloud their opinion of you. Do it again and you’re likely to not only lose your place on the list but wind up on the ‘do not call’ list. The church gigs will simply get another name and keep calling that person for the indefinite future (I know—that’s how I got a lot of my regular non-contracted gigs).
Does that mean that you shouldn’t take the month of Chicago Symphony work? Of course not. You’d be crazy not to. There are ramifications to doing so, however, and they can come back to haunt you.
Let’s say you keep getting offered substitute work with the Chicago Symphony. You keep turning down other gigs, working for the best group in town. Life’s good. The next season comes along, however, and the symphony holds an audition for the spot you’ve been subbing for. All of a sudden you are no longer needed. You look at your calendar and discover that there is nothing but white (days with no gigs) for months to come.
This happens to MANY musicians. The work most classical music freelancers want is the top-tier symphonic work such as the Chicago Symphony, Boston Symphony, and Philadelphia Orchestra. When these calls come in musicians often put enormous pressure on themselves to say yes to these calls. These organizations are under no obligation to call you again, however, and you may find yourself high and dry with to work at all after a long spell of regular playing with one of these organizations.
Here’s the main problem—freelance work is a competitive business, and while much of your success comes from your musical ability, a nearly equal amount comes from how savvy you are at balancing commitments, massaging egos, and even just being in the right place at the right time. No matter how good you are, a political mistake (waiting a day to call a contractor back) or a musical mistake (blotching a major entrance) can have negative repercussions for your career across the board.
People talk. They talk about you when you’re good, and they talk about you when you’re bad. And if they aren’t talking about you at all, well… you may be finding yourself with a withering freelance career.
Not everybody succeeds in freelancing, often through no fault of their own. People become a “hot player” in the eyes of contractors, only to find themselves in the middle of the heap a couple of years later. Why? Maybe a new player moved to town who had subbed with a better orchestra than you had. Maybe the contractor finally starts calling that violinist that started carpooling with him to gigs instead of you. Maybe you started subbing in a major orchestra and the church contractors forget about you. Maybe another player starts subbing in a major orchestra and everyone starts calling them, forgetting about you. Maybe your ambition to take major auditions causes you to turn down one gig too many, knocking you down the list.
To sum up, the best work for a freelancer is usually offered inconsistently. Taking top-tier work gives a musician the most satisfaction and is impossible to resist. The dynamic nature of all freelance work often means that removing oneself from the eyes of any contractor can decrease the chances of being hired by that contractor again. Taking a better gig therefore often means losing a worse gig. If that better (but inconsistently offered) gig dries up, the musician can wind up without any gigs. The best players can usually re-establish those contacts, but the large number of available players makes this challenging.
Finally, many contractors are not interested in who is the best, only in who is available and consistent. Say no too many times and you are labeled unavailable. Sub out too many times and you are labeled inconsistent. It doesn’t matter how good you are—you will remove yourself from many contractor’s lists by moving up the gig chain It is unavoidable, unfortunate, and a real hurdle for those pursuing a career in freelance performing.
Part VII – Private Teaching
Most musicians engage in at least some degree of private teaching. The tradition of passing down skills, knowledge, and experience from generation to generation in a one-on-one setting has been happening for hundreds of years. Musicians stretching back in time to J. S. Bach and W. A. Mozart (and earlier) derived a substantial amount of their income from private teaching, and this practice has continued to the present day, with musicians from organizations ranging from the Chicago Symphony to the Southeastern Palatine Symphony engaged in the art and craft of teaching.
Musicians avoid teaching for a myriad of reasons. Inexperience, disinterest, and a lack of consistent availability are among the chief factors in a musician’s choice to not teach privately. More often than not, however, performing musicians choose to teach at least a few students.
Financial considerations aside, private teaching can have a positive effect on both the attitude and psyche of the performing musician. Working with young minds helps to put one’s own technical and musical issues in perspective, and the act of communicating musical and technical concepts to develop and shape young performers can help inspire the teacher as well as the student. Forcing oneself to learn how to teach repertoire to students can help to give clarity to the teacher’s own conceptions of the piece, making lessons a win-win situation for both parties involved.
I don’t want to sugar-coat private teaching. There are lots of students out there who are not exactly founts of inspiration for teachers (and vice-versa), and lessons that don’t have both parties engaged in the activity can be a real drag. The full-time performer can usually cherry-pick their students more than the part-time or freelance performer, allowing for a handful of students that do provide the sort of satisfaction and musical stimulation that good performer/teachers crave.
The whole notion of differentiating between performer/teacher and performer is a somewhat modern notion. I remember poring over the Northwestern University doctoral dissertations during my free time (yes, I am a massive nerd) and being amused at how many were titled:
Domenico Scarlatti: Performer/Teacher – Teacher/Performer
Fernando Sor: Performer/Teacher – Teacher/Performer
Pablo Casals:Performer/Teacher – Teacher/Performer
Most musicians of previous generations were, to some degree, teachers, just like most musicians from these generations would be classified as freelancers today.
Delving into teaching in a series on being a freelance musician is a bit dicey, which is why I wanted to lay out the groundwork at the beginning for the examples that follow. Having a “teaching career” can mean so many things, and there are a myriad of divergent paths for teaching musicians. I will briefly describe some of the various roles that a teaching musician can inhabit before discussing the considerations and challenges of private teaching for the freelance musician.
These categories are fluid, and musicians may inhabit several of them during the course of their careers. Some may straddle the line between two categories or simultaneously work in several separate categories. Generally, however, musicians find themselves predominantly functioning in one or two of the categories described below.
Full-Time Orchestra Musician who teaches
This musician has a primary source of income from a performing job but still engages in some sort of private teaching. This can vary from just having a student or two on the weekend to holding down a university studio with a dozen performance majors. This teacher may be the best kind of instructor for a student interested in obtaining an orchestra job. They are intimately connected with the art of performance and can relate the experiences they are having on the job at that exact moment to the student, allowing for a window into the life of a professional performing musician and lending a great deal of credibility to their advice.
The busy lifestyle associated with holding down a full-time performing job while teaching can make for periods of great stress and difficulty for the teacher. The teacher may be full of relevant and invaluable information but may often struggle to manage time and balance performing and teaching. Many individuals with good scheduling and time-management skills can handle this load without a problem, but it can be a real struggle for others.
Full-time orchestra musicians may sometimes concurrently fill tenure-track positions at universities, but they much more frequently hold adjunct positions at these universities. See the first installment of this series for more about adjunct teaching.
I put musicians with salaried, full-time orchestra jobs in their own category because these musicians rarely view their teaching as their primary source of income. It can be a supplement (sometimes a very nice supplement) to their primary income stream, and these musicians may in fact depend on this income to pay the bills (especially those musicians in orchestra jobs with more modest salaries), but the fact that they have a primary income stream makes them more independent than the freelance musician. Also, the fact that they hold a full-time orchestra position tends to automatically lend a degree of prestige and credibility that the freelance musician lacks. This is a topic that has been analyzed in Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, and it will be explored further in later installments.
Full-Time University Instrumental Instructor
This musician holds a position dedicated (largely or fully) to private teaching. The responsibilities of the teacher vary greatly from university to university. Larger institutions will often employ a teacher solely to teach their instrument and studio class, while smaller institutions will often have their instrumental faculty double as theory, history, and ear training instructors. These teachers may be just as busy as the full-time orchestra musician who also teaches, but their activities are usually more focused around their particular academic institution, and as such they are likely more frequently available and accessible to the student.
For some instruments (and double bass is certainly one of them), the beliefs and approaches of many non-orchestral university faculty do not gel with the beliefs and approaches of the majority of orchestral musicians, and the student must take care when selecting a teacher if they are interested in securing a position in a full-time orchestra. Read my article titled Advice for Aspiring Music Performance Majors for more information on this topic.
It is bad if these beliefs don’t gel? One of the goals of this series (which you have undoubtedly realized if you have read the previous six installments in this series) is to question the wisdom of pursing a job as a member of a full-time orchestra, and this is a subject which will be revisited in future articles.
Part-Time University Instrumental Instructor
People in these jobs make up the dark underbelly of higher education, working deep below the ivory tower of academia in the salt mines, usually earning modest wages and rarely receiving benefits. I have covered life as an adjunct faculty member extensively in Part 1 of this series and in my article titled Tainting the Academic Waters.
K-12 Music Instructor
I won’t spend much time on this career path, as it does not really fall within the scope of private instruction, and it requires qualifications distinct from the other sources of employment described in this article. Many school music teachers do quite a bit of performing, however, and they are thus able to find a great balance between performing and teaching. This career path is a third option for a musician who desires the security (pension, benefits, vacation, sick leave) of a full-time job in the world of the performing/teaching arts.
There is a perception among other music performers that musicians who teach in a K-12 elementary or secondary education position are not good performers. This is an unfortunate perception, but it is a common one nevertheless. One’s musical talent is independent of one’s current employment (some of the best double bassists I know are full-time web developers, for example), and most musicians realize this fact. Anyone who thinks that the life of a full-time freelancer (50,000 miles in 2006 for me, with similar mileage racked up in previous years) provides for more practice time than the life of a schoolteacher is kidding themselves, and combining such a job with regular performing can make for a great musical life.
Private Music School/Music Store Instructor
These teachers are hired through an existing organization to provide instruction to students at their facility. Students usually pay the organization (Music Institute of , The __ Conservatory, etc.) directly, who then pays the teacher after taking a percentage of their earnings (typically 30-50%) for administrative purposes.
The upside to this arrangement is that the teacher usually has to just show up and teach. Managing a large studio is like running a small business (I know—as little as 6 months ago I was teaching 40 students per week plus 2-4 concerts per week), and having someone to take care of these details can often be worth the massive cut these organizations take from one’s earnings.
It can be difficult to make a living just working in one of these teaching jobs (unlike the other jobs on the list) due to the fact that you are often working at half the rate of your other non-institute colleagues. Teachers inhabiting this role are very similar to that of the freelance performer/teacher.
Private Studio Instructor
There is a quiet army of private studio instructors out there in the world, peering out from behind their curtains, cats sitting on the piano, stacks of Suzuki books on every available surface. They teach kids before school, after school, and on the weekends. They may perform in a select few groups, but the vast majority of their income comes from private instruction.
Running one’s own private studio involves inhabiting the roles of both teacher and business manager (as alluded to before), and it is actually a very different trajectory than any of the others described. These people have essentially started their own small business, and their independence from performance income puts them in a very different camp from the freelancer/teacher described below. These teachers usually have much more consistent schedules but without the thrills (and duds) of life as a performer.
Traveling/House Call Teacher
I always remember seeing fleets of Ford Escort wagons double parked, flashers on, all over my former neighborhood in Chicago. One fleet of Escorts was operated by Dial-a-Maid and the other was operated by Music Teachers at Home. Both fleets seemed t be driven by harried-looking individuals (actually, the Dial-a-Maid folks looked more relaxed and happier).
Being a “hobo teacher” has some pluses and some minuses. I do my fair share of this teaching, and I actually don’t mind it. I think of it as a series of ‘mini-gigs’ all in a row, and the little break traveling between people’s places helps to reset my mind and leave me fresh for the next lesson.
The downside? Well, it doesn’t take much for you to start feeling like the maid. You are, after all, hired help to some degree (albeit more like a tutor than a maid), but there is a big difference psychologically (to the teacher, at least) between being in charge of your classroom/studio and being that guy that comes between the paper boy and the lawn maintenance guy.
How These Roles are Inhabited by the Freelance Performer/Teacher
Freelance performers teach under many different circumstances and with many different roles. To me, the freelance performer/teacher uses the type of part-time performing work described in previous installments of this series (regional orchestras, work from contractors, substitute/extra work in major symphonies) as the core of their income, and supplements it with teaching. This reliance on income from freelance/ad hoc performance creates a lifestyle and a set of circumstances quite different from the other teaching roles described above. Adjunct teaching positions typically fall to either full-time orchestra musicians or else to freelance performer/teachers, and as such they make up a piece of the freelance puzzle for many musicians.
The freelance performer/teacher may do some of the work described above (private music school/music store instructor, traveling/house call teacher), adjunct university teaching, teach private lessons in a public school (during or after school hours), teach out of one’s home, or (like me) a combination of all of these types of teaching. The performer/teacher often arranges their private lesson schedule around gigs and other obligations, creating an ad hoc schedule much like their performing schedule.
Benefits of Private Teaching for the Freelance Musician
Stable, reliable income
For many people, teaching can provide a steady stream of income to the freelancer and a financial foundation upon which to build their performing work. This has certainly been the case for me over the past decade. As I look back on previous tax returns for the last several years, I notice that no matter how many gigs take, my income from performance has remained stagnant or only risen modestly. This is in part due to the problems discussed in the second part of his series (Realities of Professional Freelancing) and the fifth part of this series (Regional Orchestras).
My teaching income has risen dramatically over the last five years, largely because of my diversification into adjunct university teaching, house-call teaching, and teaching private lessons in the public schools.
Schedule Control
With so many elements of the freelance musician’s schedule in a state of constant flux, it is nice to have at least one thing under their control. Although many factors dictate when lessons occur (school schedules, availability of facilities), the freelance teacher has at least some degree of control to say when these lessons will take place, often filling a hole that would not normally be taken up with a gig. Making what would otherwise downtime profitable is one of the keys to financial success in the freelance world, and teaching is, for most musicians, one of the main methods of boosting income.
Less Driving
Non-freelancers may not understand why references to driving occur so frequently throughout this series (not to mention this entire blog). Well, for most freelance musicians, the time spent on the road far exceeds the time spent actually working. Many Chicago-area freelance musicians work in many neighboring states. It is not uncommon for a freelance musician to work one week in Illinois, the next week in Wisconsin, the following week in Michigan, and the week after that in Indiana.
Over the years, I have often found myself working in southern Tennessee one night and having to jump in the car and drive all night to make it to Wisconsin for a rehearsal the next day. You can read my stories about that on my post titled Extreme Gigging: All Night Drives. For many freelancers, this kind of wacko thing is a normal part of being a musician. Me? I hate it, and I am convinced that it takes a month off of my life expectancy every time I do it.
Problems with Combining Teaching and Freelance Performing
For the freelance musician, the benefits of teaching far outweigh the drawbacks. Under good circumstances, private teaching can be a very efficient way to double the weekly take home pay of the freelance musician. Intelligent scheduling of students combined with an active gigging lifestyle can make for a stable and satisfying career for many freelance musicians. There are a few problems worth briefly touching upon:
Bad scheduling
One needs to guard against over scheduling or inefficient scheduling when combining freelance performing and teaching. It is very easy to fall into the trap of scheduling people with wide spaces between lessons, making a trip to a distant music school to only teach one or two students, or to otherwise invite complication into the scheduling process. One must be careful to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of accepting students who do not neatly fit into the performer/teacher’s schedule, particularly once the teacher’s studio begins to grow. If one must devote three hours for travel time plus lesson time, one has actually reduced their hourly rate to 1/3 of what it would be were the students back to back in a home studio.
Creating a private teaching schedule is one giant balancing act requiring cajoling, pleading, and compromising, and adding a variable gig schedule into the mix is like throwing a cat into a hamster cage—total chaos.
Inconsistent lesson schedule
I am constantly canceling lessons for gigs. Always. The more students I have, the bigger a problem this becomes. When a musician considers themselves first and foremost a performer, this performance activity usually trumps scheduled teaching obligations. Rescheduling thus becomes a major concern for the freelance performer/teacher.
Constant rescheduling is detrimental to both student and teacher. Having consistent, regular lessons each week is an established method for advancing one’s craft, and having to skip weeks or cram several lessons in a few days apart to make up missed lessons lessens the effectiveness of these lessons.
Bottom line—if you are an active performer, you will be canceling lessons. If you teach at a university or music school which requires x number of lessons per semester, you may be in for some make-up pain. At my former university job 93 miles away from my home, I would sometimes start teaching make-ups at 7 p.m. (after a full day of performing and teaching other students) and teach until midnight, then drive two hours home and be up by 6 a.m. to drive out to he Chicago suburbs and start teaching again.
Zombification
Performing takes time. Teaching takes time. The gigs come in, but inconsistently. The teaching calls come in with their promise of consistent earnings. The teacher’s studio grows.
I know performer/teachers who teach 50, 60, 70 or more private lessons each week in addition to their gig schedule. Approach those sort of numbers for weekly lessons removes virtually all time for personal practice and development, chamber music, and other essential aspects of the creative and professional life of an artist. Some of these teachers manage to handle all of these responsibilities and keep their practicing up, but more often than not these people become “teaching zombies”, wandering the halls of the local high school, eyes red, mouth hanging open, searching for a cup of coffee between lessons, not keeping up their craft, and stagnating or declining musically.
I know that we musicians need to earn a living, and I wouldn’t begrudge anyone’s desire to maximize their earning potential by taking on huge numbers of students. I used to teach 40 students per week and should therefore at least receive an honorable mention in the teaching zombie club. I also believe, however, that if performer/teachers do not keep up their craft, always striving to improve their own playing and further hone their abilities, they have less to offer the student and are acting as a questionable role model for the future performing artist.
Part VIII: Burnout
A good friend of mine told me as I started my freelance career that musicians can only last ten years as freelancers. After ten years, the majority of people pack it up and look for other means of employment.
“Bah!” I said.
I was a tough cookie, able to put in six, seven, or eight hours in the practice room plus play gigs and do other activities. As long as the freelance doors kept opening, I could keep doing this indefinitely. Surely I’d end up with a job before ten years were up, and if not, I could keep up this lifestyle as long as I wanted to.
But here I find myself, just about ten years after having that conversation with my friend, trying like crazy to get out of this freelancing lifestyle.
What a wuss I am, right?
The frenetic pace of musical life
Playing music is not an easy way to make a living. I think that this is a fairly obvious fact. If you want to make some bucks and have a stable life, you are in the wrong profession. This is a given that I presented in the first part of this series, and it is an assumption that I hope people keep in the back of their mind while reading this series.
Given the fact that we musicians are not in it for the money and remain professional musicians despite the financial and lifestyle struggles, what are the trends in this business of which we need to be aware?
Well, the main trend that I am attempting to document in this series is that traditional performance employment opportunities in the world of classical music—primarily orchestral and academic positions, but other positions as well—are shrinking. Full-time orchestras continue to cut back, go bankrupt, and disappear, and they are (with the occasional extremely rare exception) never replaced.
Jobs are disappearing.
Competition is increasing.
Things are getting worse, not better.
I will cover these global realities of the music performance business in the tenth and final part of this series, but I’d just like to bring up this reality to illustrate that the issues facing freelancers will be faced by more and more musicians with each passing year.
Welcome to the club. Here’s a coupon for 10% off your next oil change. You’re gonna need it.
Diminishing gig circles
In the second part of this series I described the various gig circles that exist within most major metropolitan areas, and many times the gig circle you inhabit determines how long you can keep up the freelance lifestyle. People that regularly substitute in their area full-time orchestra, play touring shows, perform in the top area regional orchestra, and are the top call for the area contractors can very easily have the financial stability and artistic satisfaction of a member of a major full-time orchestra (albeit without the stability or benefits that this sort of position confers). They may teach a few students on the side who pay a premium for the expertise of such a player.
For each major metropolitan area, only a select few players on each instrument can inhabit this top gig circle. Everyone else must inhabit different gig circles from this rarified clique, and must deal with the extra driving, lower pay, and less artistically satisfying conditions that these other circles inevitably offer.
Even freelancers in the top gig circles are not immune to the frustrations, conflicts, and perils of all the aspects of freelancing, whether it be problems with balancing regional orchestras, duking it out with full-time orchestra musicians for extra work, massaging the egos of contractors, or squeezing in some private teaching. These are problems that all freelancers face, and as jobs grow ever scarcer and more high-quality performers graduate from music school with nary a job in sight competition for even these top-tier freelance spots will increase, altering the landscape for members of that gig circle. To understand why this competition increases, you can read about the balancing act that freelancers constantly face here.
It’s all about the car
This, ultimately, is what destroys freelancers. That damnable time spent in the vehicle, driving home across state lines, with only truck drivers, deer, and inebriated drivers to keep the musician company. More often than not, the time spent in the car exceeds the time spent on stage rehearsing or performing. It’s like an office worker commuting four hours each way to work for 2 ½ hours.
Freelancers pass those driving hours in various ways. Many long-haul musicians are hardcore Audiobooks fans, (I went through a pretty serious Audiobooks phase myself), gobbling up a couple of unabridged novels each week playing gigs. Others talk on the phone to pass the time. I get many calls around midnight (or later) from colleagues on their way home from who knows what far-flung city, looking for a little company to help pass the hours.
Many people call this type of work “driving for dollars,” and that really is that it ends up becoming. I will see the same haggard faces in central Wisconsin as I did the week before in northern Indiana , and I know that I will be seeing the again the following week in central Illinois and two months later in southern Iowa. I will often find myself on gigs 90 miles from my home in Evanston, with over half of the musicians of the group also residing in Evanston. I joke to these musicians that we should have all saved ourselves the trip and rehearsed in my living room.
But it’s no joke. These drives are unsustainable over the long haul, and they shorten the career of a freelance musician faster than any other element.
I have countless horror stories of commuting all over the country, covering four states in one month, bouncing around the entire country, from South Carolina all the way to Oregon in the space of a couple of months. I am on my fourth car in seven years, having put close to 400,000 miles on these vehicles during that time span.
Actually, “driving for dollars” is too kind a term for this kind of work. Guess how much I have been compensated for that half-million miles? Not much, that’s for sure. I have never once in my freelance career been paid the Federal standard for mileage, with most of my work paying either no mileage or else less than half of the Federal rate. If you want to see some more detailed figures on the impact that this kind of driving has on your bottom line, read Part 1 of this series. Then go bang your head against a concrete piling to ease your depression from seeing these statistics.
I decided to call it quits on this full-time freelance lifestyle during the summer of 2006. A combination of factors player into this decision—my engagement (I am getting married in August of 2007), turning 30, and the slow, creeping realization that I had fallen into a freelance quagmire. I could pay my bills and keep food on the table, but visualizing another decade of 50,000 miles of driving a year, all-night frantic dashes across the country in the dead of winter, and an endless stream of interchangeable pick-up gigs and low-quality community orchestra engagements made me shudder. I am still basically doing this work full-time at present, but I am exploring some other career options at the same time. I have always known that this kind of lifestyle (freelance musician/driver) was not for me, and each passing year only makes this fact clearer.
What may be interesting to readers is what happened to my bottom line when I dropped a lot of my work—it went up! I quit my university jobs and my long-haul drives, and I actually have more money in my pocket than I did when I was working all of these jobs.
Do you know what that means?
It means that much of this physically exhausting, nerve-wracking, highly unsatisfying lifestyle was actually COSTING me money.
I’ll delve deeper into the ramifications of this realization and what I think that freelancers can do to be smarter about their professional commitments in the final part of this series, but I can say that, for me, I was unwittingly performing a form of musical charity with much of my work, giving my money away to the Illinois and Indiana toll system, the oil industry, and countless other institutions. Employers weren’t just getting me at a discount—I was actually PAYING for the “pleasure” of criss-crossing the American Midwest.
If much of my work ended up being this kind of “charity work”, how many other freelancers are in the same boat? A lot, I’ll bet.
This lifestyle is hard. It makes it very difficult to have a family or any semblance of a “normal” life. We musicians choose this lifestyle, of course, and we are therefore ultimately responsible for accepting the resulting conditions as. Too many of us, however, get so caught up chasing our “dream job” in a symphony orchestra that we forsake family friends, and eventually the seeds of what may have made for a much more satisfying life, all for the chance to play in an orchestra.
Is it worth it?
Think about it—is it really worth it?
For many people, it is. They are willing to pay the dues, put in the time, make the sacrifices, do the rounds, and take each and every opportunity to move forward toward their dream. For many people, it works out, and they end up in a fulfilling and meaningful employment situation. For others, they may obtain a position in an orchestra, only to later realize that their organization is deficient in some way—musically, monetarily, or structurally—and they feel trapped, unable to obtain another job due to the rigors of the audition circuit and unwilling to abandon their current job and a life as an orchestral musician. They are miserable and stuck.
Others never land that coveted full-time orchestral position. They continue either to chase after it well into their 40’s and 50’s, settle into a life of freelancing, or get out of music together.
Part IX – Rethinking Music Performance Degrees
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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:
University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana Music Performance Curriculum
University of Wisconsin-Madison Music Performance Curriculum
Northwestern University School of Music
New England Conservatory
The Juilliard School
University of Texas-Austin 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:
Part X—Refocusing (Musical Entrepreneurship)
So where do we go from here? Do we all just turn in our instruments and quit this miserable business? Not me, and not you either, I imagine. We musicians know the value of what we do. We know that our art can change lives, create happiness, inspire greatness in others, and simply make the world a more beautiful place. We would sooner die than give up on this amazing language and means of communication.
But what is happening to this profession? How long can a musician reasonably expect to cobble together a living by playing with six part-time orchestras in four different states, driving 50,000 miles a year, living out of the car, sleeping in rest stops, with no benefits or future prospects and $80,000 in student loans hanging over their heads? This topic was discussed in depth in Part XII (Burnout) of this series.
• Employment in the classical music field necessitates musical study at the collegiate level.
• The cost of higher education has skyrocketed, out pacing even the rise in health care costs.
• Music performance degrees train musicians to do one thing very well.
• The demand for that ‘one thing’ decreases with each year as competition increases.
• Employment prospects: 5%….4%….3%…..2%…….
• Student loans: $50,000…..$60,000……$70,000……
Something has to change.
For starters, we need to change the focus of the music performance degree (as was covered in Part IX of this series) to make it more applicable for contemporary music performance graduates. People no longer train to be telegraph operators or Victrola manufacturers. These businesses evolved. So should we.
In Part IV of this series (Rising Tide, Shrinking Pool), we discussed the ever-greater number of musicians competing for ever-fewer jobs in the orchestral world. Part III of this series (The Rise and Fall of the Full-Time Orchestra) illustrated the reasons why these disappearing jobs are not likely to return in the future. This may be unfortunate—I truly love orchestra playing, and would love to do it full-time in an organization that provided enough compensation to live a reasonable adult life. But those who drive 180 miles for a $70 gig (and more and more music graduates do exactly this every year) are not exactly setting themselves up for a prosperous future.
There’s nothing wrong with paying dues. After all, many professions involve practitioners paying dues before reaping the eventual rewards of their career path. But classical music careers all-too-frequently dead end in that original $70 job. This subject was covered in depth in Part V of this series (Regional Orchestras). You pay dues, only to pay more dues for less money the following year, and even more dues for even less the following year….
Only 5% of music conservatory graduates connect with full-time employment in instrumental performance (and that success rate shrinks with each passing year). What happens to the other 95%?
Many leave the field of music, using their degree as they would any other liberal arts degree (Philosophy, History, or English), entering the 9-to-5 world and pursuing a more traditional career path.
The rest are dumped (like rats in a bucket) into the freelance world, left to fend for themselves with nary a piece of cheese in plain view.
Putting it all Together
I chose this life. I chose to make a career out of music.
I just wish I had known.
I wish I had known how competitive the traditional path to satisfactory employment (a full-time orchestra position) is for the classical musician. Music schools rarely outline realistic employment statistics, prospects, and options for their students, clinging to traditional conservatory education principles from the late nineteenth century. Every other career field changes with and adapts to new circumstances—why not music?
Not adequately preparing music performance students as artist/businessmen is perhaps the greatest crime committed by the music conservatory system.
I wish I had known what I could do besides get a job in a full-time orchestra. There was no formal component in any stage of my musical education (and I went to a well-renowned music school for both of my performance degrees) addressing real options for performing musicians. After years in the freelance business, of course, I can rattle some of them off without batting an eye:
• Full-time orchestral employment (audition circuit)
• Part-time regional orchestra employment (audition circuit)
• Pick-up group orchestral employment (word-of-mouth)
• Church-related employment (contracting or being subcontracted)
• Corporate functions (contracting or being subcontracted)
• Recording work (sessions)
• Educational performance work (in-school performances, children’s concerts)
• University teaching (full-time or adjunct)
• Private teaching (home, music school, within a school system)
• Contracting (orchestras, chamber groups, quartets, quintets, duos, trios)
• Contemporary music ensemble employment
• Summer institute teaching (perform and/or teach at music festival)
• Ballet orchestra employment
• Opera orchestra employment
• Side businesses (reed making, contracting, publishing arrangements, etc.)
These divergent options for generating income as a performer are addressed superficially, if at all, in most academic institutions. I did hear these phrases from time to time during my time as a music student:
“There are recording sessions!”
“There are auditions!”
“You know, sometimes musicians also teach.”
“You should make contacts!”
What is rarely addressed is HOW any of these objectives are accomplished. It’s not rocket science—there ARE clear steps that can be taken to secure employment in any of the aforementioned career sub-paths.
Let’s take one example syllabus for a hypothetical class covering music contracting:
Contracting
- What is contracting?
- Who are the major contractors in musical genre x for community y? (bringing in such figures to guest teach a class at this point would be a very good idea)
- How does one go about setting up a contracting business?
– a. Legal ramifications of contracting/subcontracting
– b. Tax forms and other accounting necessities
– c. AFM union information
– – – i. Scale
– – – ii. Hours
– – – iii. Working conditions
– – – iv. Doubling
– d. Website development
– e. Obtaining engagements
- Ethics and guidelines for contracting
– a. Establishing a list
– b. Finding dependable players
– c. Dealing with egos
– d. Dealing with subs/cancellations
- Networking with other contractors
– a. Same city
– b. Different cities
– c. Booking tours
You get the picture.
Some may say that these are practical skills that have no place in music school curriculum. Others may balk at adding more coursework to the already frenetic load taken by undergraduates.
But something has to change.
On Hollywood and Baseball
The current music conservatory system is hopelessly broken when it comes to providing music performance students with the skills to be successful in today’s employment landscape. A system that has an employment success rate of less than 5% is no success at all. The current system provides a rate of success similar to that of professional actors (and lower than professional athletes), yet most university music programs do not mention these odds or (even worse) brag of effective placement for their graduates to incoming students. Studio teachers also unintentionally feed young students disinformation, relating various success stories regarding their former pupils with pride, conveniently forgetting to mention the dozens (if not hundreds) of former students that never landed any meaningful employment after their studies.
If the odds of becoming a full-time orchestra musician are the same as landing on the silver screen and worse than playing professional baseball, fine—just be honest up front. Music conservatories promise one thing and deliver another. Why? Either be honest, or fix the system and equip students with skills relevant to today’s employment landscape. But no one tells actors that there are these giant organizations in each major city, employing 100 actors each and providing a salary, heath care, vacation time, and a pension. This fiction is sold to music students every day, however.
If the goal of music school is to provide a purely theoretical knowledge of the subject matter, then music schools should make that emphasis clear to incoming students. In subjects like philosophy or history, there is an implicit understanding that practical, non-circular (i.e. teaching philosophy or history) career paths do not exist. If that is the orientation that music schools wish to adopt for music performance degrees, then they should make this fact very clear to incoming students.
However, if the goal is to provide the music performance student with the skills necessary to be successful, active, fully employed performers of music, then curriculum change is critical.
Programs in which the above practical and logistical elements of a music performance career are thoroughly addressed, including sessions with contractors, officials in both governmental (NEA, local government officials) and labor (AFM, ICSOM, ROPA) organizations and practical training in setting up a private teaching studio, private music school, or active and viable chamber music organization would go a long way toward making a music performance degree something that is of benefit to both the degree holder and the musical community at large.
Creating a Scene
If I have one major regret regarding my musical education, it is that I wish I had been taught how to create my own opportunities and build my own diversified musical career in a more logical way. Schools need to address how musicians create a performance organization, organize as a not-for-profit, book venues, and develop educational programs. Strategies on taking advantage of grants and programs (both governmental and non-governmental) for securing funding for future projects is of paramount importance.
Learning how to cooperate and collaborate with both musical organizations and artistic organizations outside of music (theater, dance, music stores, art schools and galleries, civic centers) can create exciting new opportunities for interesting projects. When arts organizations work together creatively, they can engage the public in new and exciting ways, helping to strengthen the individual organizations involved in the project.
Educating performers in how to exist as creators of opportunity as well as art has a positive top-down effect on the entire music business as these people graduate and begin their musical careers. More people creating their own performing organizations, educational programs for schools, summer camps, collaborative musical/visual/theatrical/audiovisual projects, youth orchestra programs, and chamber orchestras result in more opportunity for other performers.
Do more organizations competing for audience time and interest result in a more thinly-spread audience? Not if segments of the population that don’t currently engage in classical music activities are targeted. Recent studies indicate that only 3% of the U.S. population would even consider purchasing a ticket for a classical music concert. That leaves 97% of this country’s population untapped. Rather than going after that 3%, find a way to tap the huge numbers that aren’t currently engaged with classical music at all.
Rather than overwhelming audiences and causing cutthroat competition among arts organizations, increased artistic activity in a community can help really musical organizations with a collaborative and flexible bent. When managed in an enlightened fashion, arts thrive on each other, causing the community to become a draw for audiences, a “scene” that is much more powerful than the sum of its parts. People go to New York City for the “scene”, taking in the Metropolitan Opera, Broadway Shows, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, jazz events, performances at Carnegie Hall, and other events as a total New York City artistic experience. Others check out the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Knitting Factory, and some smaller clubs, venues, and art galleries. While any of the aforementioned organizations and venues could probably succeed and prosper outside of New York City, being part of the scene strengthens all of them.
Chicago, Illinois has a thriving theater scene, with small companies like the Lookingglass Theater and the Neo-Futurarium serving up offerings alongside larger organizations and venues like the Goodman Theatre and the Steppenwolf Theatre. Are these organizations competing for the same eyeballs? Well, yes and no—it depends on how you look at it. What cannot be disputed is that, whether competing or cooperating, these multiple organizations create a Chicago theater scene, a tangible attraction that can draw tourists, folks from the suburbs, and city dwellers of all tastes and income brackets.
In the end, what is most important is not the particular organization but the SCENE surrounding it. A scene that is highly active is perceived as having vitality. A scene with vitality becomes an attraction for tourists, suburbanites, and city dwellers (i.e. potential audience members). A vital artistic city scene enhances other artistic and cultural aspects of that city. Ideally, a more vibrant and diverse concert scene breeds art galleries, which breed fine restaurants, which breed museums, which breed theatres, which breed more concerts. The reputation and draw of a city therefore improves, attracting tourism and business to the area, bringing in conventions (again for the scene), development, and all the other things that most municipalities desire.
Great—so why are the arts either dying or on life support in so many communities?
For most government officials, legislating and budgeting to develop such an artistic scene is like growing orchids in the Arctic—very tricky. Enlightened local leaders may be well aware of the benefits (both economic and cultural) that the arts bring to a community, but setting up the infrastructure for artistic revitalization can be costly and a very hard sell to voters, with no guaranteed return of investment. If the choice is between revitalizing a downtown district to attempt to foster cultural activity in a city or sign off on and zone land for a new casino or big box store, the latter choices almost always win out. Casino gaming brings in quick and easy money for a city. So does sprawling commercial development. Benefits from the arts are only realized over time, and in much more intangible ways than the cold hard cash infusion provided by the aforementioned quick and easy methods.
So how do we artists influence change in our own communities and develop our own artistically vibrant scenes? How can we convince municipalities to invest in the long term high road rather than the quick and dirty low road?
Education and Affecting Change
When was the last time you were in an elementary school general music classroom? Kids love music just as much as they love sports at an early age. Banging enthusiastically on boomwhackers and Orff xylophones, young kids are musical sponges, open and receptive to all sorts of different styles of music.
Over time, however, many kids move on to other activities, and art music becomes, like ballet, a ‘cultural event’ experienced rarely and with great reluctance by the general public.
Perhaps this transformation from starry-eyed youth to uninterested adult is inevitable. Is it possible for 100% of the population to become classical music fans? Probably not. Nothing in this world is loved by 100% of the population, after all. But we can certainly do better than 3% of the population! Increasing the classical music audience size to 6% of the population would double the number of bodies in seats, donors contributing, and people buying albums.
Music performers can affect change by making their art a vital part of the lives of all young people. Most orchestras and chamber ensembles already do youth concerts and participate in the schools, but more needs to be done. Many countries (Venezuela is a prime example) involve students in orchestra programs, making it a point of national pride. We need to do the same.
The Orchestral Employment System is Vanishing
Orchestral music isn’t going anywhere, but its viability in providing a stable income to musicians shrinks with each passing year. Perhaps this is inevitable. After all, this system of full-time orchestra musician employment is a relatively recent development in classical music, having effectively existed for only 50 years. Classical musicians are likely as time passes to assemble their performance careers from many divergent organizations, with only an elite few musicians having a stable, single source of performance income.
I want to see this art form continue to prosper (as, I’m sure, do you). Music opens new avenues of communication between people, avenues that can never be replicated on print, in words, in visual art, or on celluloid.
In order for music to prosper, we have to be willing to let it evolve, and we keep the art form alive and moving forward by always having art happening all around us. Music majors need to go out and create, invent, innovate! They don’t need to be practicing the same stale excerpts for six, seven, or eight hours a day, drilling twenty arbitrary passages from select works of Beethoven and Brahms into the ground, spending their life savings and bankrupting themselves financially, emotionally, creatively, and spiritually for a pie-in-the-sky lie sold to them by the music conservatory system.
The lifestyle and employment prospects for the majority professional classical musicians will resemble those currently found jazz, rock, and other musical styles. No jazz musician (in their right mind) expects a full-time job when graduating from music school these days. They are aware of the challenges and pitfalls of their musical landscape, and they take action accordingly, working hard to make connections, develop their own niche in the market, and start their own projects (albums, club dates, tours, and the like). The same can be said for rock musicians.
This is the way things are headed for the majority of classical musicians as well. If hustling to create your own opportunities is a distasteful prospect for you, then you are entering the wrong profession. As was previously discussed in Part III (The Rise and Fall of the Full-Time Orchestra) of this series, this is the way things were for classical musicians pre-1960, and it is becoming the norm again with each passing year.
What a Waste
In 2006, I took an audition for the Minnesota Orchestra. 150 other double bassists took this audition. Haggard, antsy, nervous, and twitchy, lugging giant white flight cases out of van cabs and into hotel elevators, these bassists came from all corners of the country on their own dime for a shot at playing in a double bass section. Now, I love Minneapolis, but if one were to pull a person over on the street and ask them what city would be their dream town to live in, Minneapolis would not make the cut (I grew up a few hours outside of this city, so I speak from personal experience). Cold frozen plains stretch out for miles in every direction from this northern city.
I started to do the audition math in my head, calculating all of the hours each person spent practicing for this audition, taking lessons, listening to recordings, and all of the money out of their own pocket (no expense account for this line of work, right?) spent on plane tickets, lodging, car rentals, and the like, then multiplying it all by 150.
Think about it:
Activity – Hours or $ Spent x 150 = Total
Practicing – 200 hrs (20 hours/wk for 10 weeks) x 150 = 30,000 hrs
Travel & audition – 72 hrs x 150= 10,800 hrs
Lessons/coaching – $300 (6 coachings at $50/hr) x 150 = $45,000
Plane tickets – $450 ($300 ticket + $150 excess baggage) x 150 = $67,500
Hotel – $450 ($150/night for downtown Minneapolis) x 150 = $67,500
Car rental – $300 x 150 = $45,000
Food – $200 x 150 = $30,000
TOTAL: 40,800 hours (1700 days) and $255,000
A quarter million dollars straight out of everybody’s pocket and 1700 days of time (over 4 ½ years total) spent by these ambitious bass players. Guess how many went home empty-handed?
Cities should hold auditions more often—we’re a massive boon to the food, beverage, hotel, and transportation industry!
Think what creative endeavors could have been accomplished by that quarter million dollars and those 4 ½ years! What sort of new projects could have been started, what kind of new opportunities could those 150 musicians have generated with that kind financial and personal resource expenditure?
We’ll never know.
I took that audition. I spent my hundreds of dollars and countless hours preparing. I played for five minutes. I got cut.
That’s fine—I wasn’t qualified for the job, or for the other 25 auditions I’ve unsuccessfully taken in all corners of the country.. I just wish that my training had prepared me for this reality.
Now let’s see what kind of a toll the audition scene has taken on me—a depressing prospect if ever there was one. Keep in mind that even though 25 auditions seems like a lot, musicians frequently take twice or even three times as many as this before connecting with full-time employment:
Activity – Hours or $ spent x 25 = Total
Practicing – 200 hrs (20 hrs/wk for 10 weeks) x 25 = 5000 hrs
Travel & audition – 72 hrs x 25 = 1800 hrs
Lessons/coaching – $300 (6 coachings at $50/hr) x 25 = $7500
Plane tickets – $450 ($300 ticket + $150 excess baggage) x 25 = $11,250
Hotel – $450 ($150/night) x 25 = $11,250
Car rental – $300 x 25 = $7500
Food – $200 x 25 = $5000
Total: $42,500 and 6800 hours (283 days)
This excludes, of course, the cost of my instruments, bows, and tuition for my two performance degrees, as well as all of the non-audition practicing I have done.
In what other area of life is almost a year of one’s life spent traveling and $42,000 out of pocket for a 0% rate of return acceptable?
Art is always evolving. More artists creating help to create new opportunities and paths to employment for everyone. Artists collaborating and creating in close proximity help to establish a ‘scene’, drawing audiences and creating opportunity for everybody.
The audition circuit is a financial vacuum cleaner, sucking musicians dry and leaving them without the means or creative energy to innovate. 95% of musicians on the audition scene never connect with full time employment, and the massive expense of both music school and the audition circuit can spell permanent financial ruin for the unsuspecting music performance graduate.
One path is uncertain but artistically compelling, with a bright but still undetermined future.
The other path is crystal clear. It just doesn’t lead anywhere for the vast majority except the madhouse and the poorhouse.
The choice is yours.