While I understand the musician telling the kids to have a plan B, I don’t necessarily agree that means, for example, doing a dual degree or dual major (if in a BA/BA situation, for example). Kids do need to go into this with their eyes wide open, they need to understand the reality, how competitive it is, how hard it is to make a living as a musician , all the things we talk about on here. I saw plenty of kids like that, talented, who had this vision that they were going to become the next Joshua Bell or Hillary Hahn, that was their focus, and for the most part they were kidding themselves, as good as they were, I doubt very much they would make it as soloists…and they needed a reality check.
It also doesn’t hurt to think about what you might do if music doesn’t work out, but the problem with the ‘plan B’, especially a dual degree, is like others I think that creates a self fulfilling prophesy, both because the kid already has a big seed of doubt planted (hearing “better get a useful skill, musicians starve” all the time doesn’t help), and if they pursue a dual degree or major, the time it takes to get the other degree, the demands, take away from the one thing performance students generally don’t have enough of, time, and also takes away from focus as well. It is one thing to think “if music doesn’t work out, what path can I have at that point, what might I want to do”, and another to try and hedge bets at the same time. One of the ironies is that I have seen kids doing dual degrees where the second degree was a liberal arts degree (English, History, Business Administration) that in terms of job skills, probably wouldn’t be seen by employers as more employable than a BM degree. Even with things like comp sci degrees, I know plenty of musicians who work as programmers who did training later, you don’t need a comp sci or engineering degree to work as a programmer or network security analyst or other IT fields. One thing to avoid is the common perception, that the best route is to get a music ed degree, so if you need to, you can teach. Unless you have a passion for teaching, don’t go that route, there are a lot of music teachers who are frustrated performer wannabees IME, and they tend to be terrible teachers…not to mention that getting a job as a music teacher in a public school is not so guaranteed a path either.
The other thing wrong with that message is it sends the word that a music degree is ‘worthless’, that if you get a BM degree if you want to go to grad school, or get a job requiring a college degree, that a BM degree isn’t a ‘real’ degree, and that is utterly wrong. A lot of people who get music degrees, including most of the kids who graduate from Juilliard et al, end up doing things either within music outside performance, or the majority, doing other things and that degree was there for them. Speaking as a hiring manager, I would rather see someone for an entry level job who had a music degree than someone who got a business administration degree, because I personally thing business administration degrees aren’t particularly rigorous or more importantly, will have the skill set I would be looking for, and this was true long before my S got into music. and others have similar views among hiring managers I know.
And yes, the arts can be a hard one, because they take a lot of time to establish oneself, and then you can find that the lifestyle you are able to achieve works okay as 20 something, but won’t work if you want to settle down and have a family. Actors face the same thing, it can take a while to establish yourself, and there comes a point where they have to find other alternates, too. Dance is a bit different, in that with Ballet by the time you are 20, or maybe 18, you pretty much know whether you have a chance or not. On the other hand, voice students develop slowly, and they may not even be ready to see how good they are until they are nearing 30…it is why arts require a very different focus than let’s say going into engineering or IT or medicine or whatnot, you kind of have to recognize it is a lot harder to figure out if you are ‘successful’, and it is simply nebulous about how you even can achieve that, it is why people say if you can see yourself doing anything else, you may want to do it, you kind of have to go full steam ahead with it, focus on it IMO, and assume that it won’t be the same thing as establishing a career in another field.
There are also other paths besides going the BM route, but the people I have seen make that work with music (where for example they get a bachelor’s in let’s say engineering, study privately, then maybe pursue a master’s degree) tend to be people when they enter college, they already are playing at a very high level, I have seen plenty of kids come out of Juilliard pre college, CIM prep, SF conservatory prep, etc, where they are already strong musicians, get an academic degree, then end up getting an MM,but they already were solid, so studying privately worked for them (and obviously, this is all my experience, it certainly isn’t gospel).
One thing to avoid is the common idea that if you want to be a musician, get a music ed degree, then if performing doesn’t work out, you can always ‘get a job as a teacher’. Unless you have a passion for teaching, and see it as something you would enjoy doing as well as performing, don’t go that route, there are a lot of music teachers out there who are frustrated performers, and they generally are horrible teachers because they had to ‘settle’ for teaching (and that is in their view, not mine). Not to mention that music ed is no guarantee of employment these days, lot of schools have dropped music, and others hire part time music teachers, who teach at several schools, and therefore don’t get benefits and such…so it may not be such a hedge.
