Contemplating art and life . . . what does it take?

College Majors Music Major
1

<p>The recent DD & D thread got me thinking more so I decided I'd put it out there as a kind of cleansing exercise. My son has been contemplating that overlap place between art and money and finding an audience. He has been doing a lot of sounding out mentors about how they "made it" (whatever that means) while pursuing their musical passions.</p>

<p>As recently quotes numbers suggest, not every student who attend a highly selective program achieves what the outside world might call measurable success. Of course many who don't matriculate from those institutions do find happiness/work/fulfillment in the arts. So there must be something more than just the talent to get in or be recognized with awards. Beyond talent and, as Professor McGonagall would say, sheer dumb luck what other things help a young artist to find their way? </p>

<p>Jazz/Shreddermom alluded to the aspect of personality. So much of music involves getting along with people in combos and bands, being the one who gets the call because you're flexible and easy to work with and pleasant to be around (in addition to talented). It involves making friends and listening to peers and mentors to soak up knowledge and advice. It involves being musically flexible. It involves humility. It involves being a fixer, a match maker and listening to who needs what and setting them up with buddies who can help. It involves both soloing and comping in more ways than one. I think that it takes a certain optimistic spirit.</p>

<p>It seems to take an entrepreneurial bent - a willingness to have a life dominated by 'side projects' and a tolerance for the unknown. I would love to hear from others about what they have found or noticed or see in their own young artist. What other external and internal circumstances and/or attributes help to lift up a talented artist to realize a satisfying (chosen with intention) life in the arts?</p>

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<p>Thanks for this. You sure said it better than I could. I would only add that sometimes it is about process not product and personal development can parallel musical development in all kinds of ways :)</p>

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<p>I imagine that there are many motivations for pursuing music and the motivation may impact one’s level of satisfaction as things unfold. People pursue music for all sorts of reasons (not in any special order or combination): for fame or notoriety, to be the best at something, because they enjoy performing or entertaining, because they enjoy playing for their own satisfaction, because they want to create something new using music as a medium, because their parent made them practice as a kid and it got to be a habit, because they want to share emotion with others, because they just have to in order to feel whole from an internal drive, etc etc. How satisfied a musician is through their career (or not) and whether or not they stick with it might be a reflection of what those motivations were/are. Not every musician actually feeds off performance. Not every artist dreams of “fame” in the classic sense. Not every talented technician has all the intangibles, charisma, or whatever it takes to make a ripple that extends much beyond their immediate sphere. Just musing here but would be interested in others’ take.</p>

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<p>saintfan,
I can’t speak for the classical world. But I know that in the Jazz world, personality can play a huge role in getting gigs. My youngest son embodies what you write about in the second paragraph. He is a very social kid and has always had a large friend group. On the other hand one reason he is liked is that he is not the sort of person to force himself into the spotlight and self promote. He is perfectly happy supporting the star and not being the center of attention. But he is also very social and good at talking on a wide range of subjects. And he has this giant “smile” that endears him to many people.</p>

<p>He has a good friend who he has known since he was little. The two are at the same conservatory. That friend is by many measures is a better musician. He is very talented. But he is not that social and does not like to hang with his peers. The two are both having success as future musicians but their success if very different. Our son gets tons of gigs and is involved with many different projects with his classmates. THe other boy has a lot of respect from his seniors and continues to move into the upper ranks of those on his instrument at the conservatory. </p>

<p>There is no doubt in my mind that both are going to find a career in music. But I suspect their careers are going to look very different. Our son’s friend might end up in academia. My son might end up being a successful back-up musician. Both fantasize about writing their own music and performing and being successful and known for their work as individuals, as all musicians do. But neither are delusional and they both realize that those careers I mentioned will allow them to continue to work doing something they love.</p>

<p>Speaking of personality……my son got a call during the BIG US FREEZE….to sub for a well known teacher (at Berklee and NEC) on a gig. Our son took the gig. DH joked that the only reason our son got the gig was because nobody else wanted to venture out that night as it was ridiculously cold. That gig ended up being a great opportunity and the other night the drummer called our son for another gig. So being willing to say “YES” is a HUGE piece as well. I think a lot of people might have turned down that gig that night. Certainly it would have taken a lot to get me to go outside that night.</p>

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<p>Great info! My son has a very similar personality. Recently one of his idols/mentors who was a Berklee grad (I think grad anyway, but attended :wink: ) gave him that same advice about not turning anything down. One thing leads to another.</p>

<p>I was thinking about a bio that I read of Glen Gould. At first he was made to play (mom as piano teacher). He was a great technician and won competitions. He had an internal feel and response to music and sound in general that came through in such a profound way when he played that audiences found him charismatic and compelling. Ultimately he realized that he hated to perform - that it felt like a blood sport to him - and he created a new niche in sound editing etc.</p>

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<p>Whether a student pursues engineering, medicine, business, optometry, or music, I can promise you that none of us know what our children’s careers will look like. As I have mentioned before, my D currently has her little career in music. It has taken her places that I could never imagine. She has supported herself solely with music since leaving school. She has several friends who continue to support themselves in music alone. The only thing that they share in common are talent,an extraordinary work ethic ,a certain kind of tunnel vision and the belief that they have their own voice as musicians. DDD? Not so much.</p>

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<p>I like the idea of believing that they have their own voice. In any genre I think it would be possible to fall into a rut of feeling like a “cover band” - as it were.</p>

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<p>And as far as personality goes…I would love to think that friendliness, respect, kindness, charisma and just the ability to get along with others are important aspects to a successful musicians personality. But honestly this does not seem to be the case as we have encountered more than our share successful artists who have the personality of a rusty cheese grater. Go figure.</p>

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<p>it is a very interesting topic,. and the initial thoughts in many ways mirror my own. It really depends on a notion of success to determine what that is. </p>

<p>Kids get into music for a lot of reasons, and not all of them are particularly conducive towards "making it’ in music. The kid whose parent was a musician and is living vicariously through them, to be the next big thing, is likely no matter how hard they work, to really want to be doing it, and it will show. The kid who sees music as a hierarchy and thinks the only thing is to be a great soloist, and sees everything else as inferior, is going to run into problems, because in many cases they a)don’t work well with others and b)also often come off on stage the way you would expect, as an arrogant jerk, and it torpedoes them. Lots of winners of the major competitions end up making a living as teachers, selling to parents who make a big deal out of competitions they can turn their kids into ‘great artists’, because they won some competition X…which is their living, and is a form of making it…</p>

<p>Okay, so what are the attributes I think any musician to be needs to make it, no matter their motivation?</p>

<p>-A thick skin, by the time they get through their training they likely have had to deal with heavy criticism and probably nastiness (still a lot of the Galamians and such out there, in spirit, who think the way you train a musician is to beat them down), some chamber coaches can be brutal (famous true quote: You all are very musical,but outside of that, there is absolutely nothing there in your playing). If you are easily put aback by criticism and such, you aren’t going to get far.</p>

<p>-a passion for something. I would hope it is the music, but even if it is to become a ‘hotshot soloist’ or CM of the NY Phil and make 500k a year, it has to be something, in part because of the above.</p>

<p>-persistance, keep trying in the face of everything else. Whether it is because they love music or because they are afraid to fail and face their parents, something has to make them keep trying, otherwise they will drop the instrument. </p>

<p>-flexibility. Even for the person with the big dreams of making it as a soloist, they need to be flexible and realize the reality. David Kim, the CM of the Philadelphia, talked about his attempt to be a soloist, and realized when he was getting gigs like soloing at some small orchestra in Georgia, it wasn’t happening, and he was invited to audition for the CM spot in Philly…and realized it was a great gig, that also included some soloing.The person who thought only being a soloist, spent all the time in competitions and concerto competitions and the like, can find a career as a teacher (though IMO, would be the last person I would want my S studying with, but whatever)…</p>

<p>In terms of making it as performing artist when they aren’t a soloist, besides the above:</p>

<p>-entrepeneurship, being able to find and make opportunities, not just get them passed to them.</p>

<p>-the ability to work with others. Yeah, there are exceptions, there are chamber musicians in famous groups who are first class pains in the you know what, there are orchestral players that others would love to hang by their heels…but in reality, those are the exceptions. Talk to working musicians, and they will tell you the personality types need to be d*mn good to get away with that kind of attitude, the kind of person with the skills of a soloist or maybe a CM…on the other hand, having been around working musicians in NYC, the one thing they all say is that a lot of the kids coming out of Juilliard et al, who think they are hot stuff, soon find out no one wants to work with them, that as good as they are, it isn’t worth dealing with them…</p>

<p>-Networking, which goes along with the above. Many gigs come about from this, and if you are an egotistical person, or difficult, or don’t follow through, or refuse to put the effort in because you are ‘slumming’, you won’t get many calls.</p>

<p>-Personality music wise. I realize this is controversial, but even among soloists technical prowess might please critics and music teachers, but technicians rarely wow audiences. In Chamber groups, in orchestras, there are personalities to the group, dynamics, and the incredible technicians who sits there playing as if they have no passion, is not going to add to that IMO. Itzak Perlman wrote an article about this a while ago, talking about how he felt that music teachers and programs wanted to homogenize playing, that in ensembles there is room for the individual personality, and that is what makes for a great orchestra. An orchestra playing with precision but with the emotion of a dried turnip root isn’t going to be a great experience. </p>

<p>-Loving the music. As I said, there is a lot of reasons people go into music, but those who do so to be famous, those who do so with an idea of hierarchy being the most important things, those doing it to please a parent, to be famous, to make a lot of money, aren’t likely to do well, and this applies across the board. Art requires passion and yes, love, and if you aren’t doing it for the music, you are doing the wrong thing IMO…</p>

<p>In the end, I have come to believe it is a feedback circuit, that the passion and love for the music feeds into what happens, and that if it isn’t there, it is extremely difficult to impossible to make it, and it doesn’t matter what kind of music you are talking about. Yeah, I know, pop music has performers with lack of talent, but the passion there is the producers and engineers, I can guarantee that, someone has to be in it for it to work.</p>

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<p>The trick is to simultaneously develop the “thick skin” you need to handle all that putting yourself on the line and possibly facing rejection…and maintaining your “sensitive openness” that allows you to share the music with the audience. It’s a difficult balance that shifts with the individual personality and to some extent the life path chosen.</p>

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<p>I am really enjoying your responses! Thank you for taking so much time to share really insightful observations. I have hunches and the most basic knowledge, but no real grounding yet. If you didn’t already figure it out I am just embarking on this ‘parent of music person’ thing in terms of coming to grips with the idea that it is the real plan forward and not just a side thing. It is reassuring that I’m not completely deluding myself when I say to friends and family (since he is at that age when everyone asks now) that he is planning on a music major and that I believe that he has the attributes to make a go of it if anyone does (talent aside for the moment). Kid #1 had a pretty straight forward search and application process in that we had more hard numbers than we could shake a stick at and we had a pretty good idea of what we would get out the other side in terms of acceptances and merit $$$. This, of course, is a whole different animal.</p>

<p>musicprnt - I love your distinction of the idea that some people go into music thinking of it as a hierarchical pursuit. There is so much of that promoted in term of contest and battles of the bands etc. and of course kids are competing for chair placements all through. I remember over the years having those momma bear feelings at multi-band events and realizing that they’re all kids and another kid having a nice set doesn’t detract from my own kid having a nice set. The kids never seemed to think that way but the parents often had this overlay of competition. That brings the thinking back around to the idea of creative spirit and “sensitive openness” as stradmom put it. The whole notion of an artist’s colony even exists because creativity tends to beget more creativity. It isn’t a zero sum game.</p>

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<p>I’m bringing this thread back because I found that what I wanted to say about money seemed to fit better here. More and more I have been thinking of music as a calling . . . like going into the priesthood. It isn’t easy to “give” your child to it willingly because it could impact their livelihood in way that feels generational or counter to the American Dream. Aren’t they supposed to make more than us? Buy a bigger house? Have 3.5 kids and live within 20 minutes from us so I can see my grandkids regularly? I pretty much constantly fight against the urge to limit DS because you never know what might happen if you throw yourself into the unknown. Somehow the priesthood sounds more noble and people understand it better than giving yourself over to art. I can’t sit here and grieve for fantasy grandkids who don’t exist and aren’t actually lost to possibility anyway or picket fences that my kid might never own. We are not The House of Windsor or anything and his life is his own.</p>

<p>I just don’t see my kid writing code during the day to make ends meet. Forget that he doesn’t have a clue HOW to write code and wouldn’t want to if he could . . . when I hear a moving performance my first emotion is gratitude that there are people in the world who do that - who went out on that limb so that we could have beauty in the world. </p>

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<p>“It seems to take an entrepreneurial bent - a willingness to have a life dominated by ‘side projects’ and a tolerance for the unknown.”</p>

<p>This is a good description. One of my closest friends in my major (music eng/tech) is practically the personification of these qualities. He’s frankly awful at schoolwork and his grades are mediocre at best, but he’s exceptionally personable, reliable, and above all adaptive and entrepreneurial. He’s been working as an unpaid intern at a fairly well-known recording studio- odd hours, mindless busywork, the usual- but he’s made such an impression that they’ve offered him a paid position next summer (an absolute rarity in the industry) that could potentially turn into a job when he graduates. That’s the sort of deal that people in our field would kill for, and honestly, I’m not surprised at all that he earned it.</p>

<p>And hey, don’t discount the ability of writing code to help create a beautifully moving musical performance…that’s my area! ;)</p>

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<p>Ha! Not discounting code at all . . . actually giving credit where credit is due. To me it falls into the same category as medicine where if writing code or going into medicine is supposed to be your fall back maybe you need to rethink your life. :stuck_out_tongue: They seem to me to be pursuits that take equal skill and genius but just in different arenas which isn’t very comforting to me. :-" </p>

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<p>Going into the arts has always been difficult, just look at painting, where with some exceptions (Renoir, Picasso come to mind), we mostly hear of the starving artist in the garret who doesn’t ‘make it’ until they die…</p>

<p>A lot of this depends on what we value. I think almost any parent has a wish that their kid has a comfortable life where they aren’t living hand to mouth all the time, or struggling, but for a lot of parents this translates into something different, where the big thing often is to achieve their notions of success, where it becomes that success is the big house or the flashy car or whatnot, and often things like passion or finding their own way takes backseat quite honestly to gross materialism and such. It is funny how someone writing 160 years ago had it nailed, when Thoreau wrote of most people living lives of quiet desperation, in large part I think he grasped that people reach for things they think they should be doing, rather than what they want to do. I don’t agree with Thoreau’s prescription, but I think as an assessment of a lot of society this is true, that people satisfice rather than go for what they would otherwise want to (put it this way, look around at people you know, relatives, friends, family, schoolmates, how many of them describe their lives as one of passion? ). Some people do, they find their passion and some people end up seemingly to have their passion and the ‘success’ people often dream of, people like Musk (Tesla, Space-X) come to mind, some teachers are like that and so forth, but how many people do you know whose work might be fulfilling in that it pays the bills and so forth, but otherwise doesn’t exactly get the juices going?</p>

<p>I think the problem is that people are so used to the concept that what you do for a living is a compromise with their passions they don’t really see that going for your passion can lead to very unexpected results. What they don’t see is that even if a musician doesn’t go the route of being a professional musician, based on the ex music types I have worked with, they all seemed to have gotten special from trying. We are so caught up in the end game, we forget that as in the old (Buddhist?) idea, that the path is often more important than the end of the journey. A couple of years ago I was reading about this church in NYC, it is an anomaly, a mega church of sorts with a lot of young people as members. They interviewed the minister who founded the church, and he said that they have a lot of young people of Asian background, who had been raised with the very strong notions of material success, of getting into the right profession to make a lot of money and so forth, and he said that the young people who wander in seem to be looking for something, and for the first time in their lives are being exposed to the concept that there is a lot more to life than material success, that how you work towards goals often matters more than the goals and so forth (I think the article said the church was roughly 40% Asian in ethnic background). </p>

<p>I have been asked with my son why we have been so supportive of him attempting to go into music, in a field that isn’t exactly going to bring arena tours and a lot of money (well, okay, maybe he could be the next David Garrett <em>lol</em>), that seems like so much work, effort for so little easily tangible results. The answer I usually give is I think that in his attempts to make it in music, that in feeding what is a big passion for him, was driven by himself, that what he discovers along the way in trying to feed that passion is going to shape him into a special person, one who if music doesn’t work out as a direct vocation, will make him someone who could do other things and find a passion in that as well as whatever music will continue to do for him. Will he graduate from an ivy league college, get an MBA from Harvard, and go work at Goldman Sachs starting in the 6 figure range +? No. Do I think that if music doesn’t work out, that if he finds it isn’t workable or simply doesn’t want to do it, that he will find something else? I truly hope so, but more importantly, I believe in him enough that I think he will. I also want him to find that passion to be inside him, no matter what he ends up doing, and I think Music will always be his core, even if he doesn’t become a musician, I don’t want him leading a life where that doesn’t exist, I see it in too many people including myself not to wish it for him.</p>