"Have a Plan B"

My violist daughter sent me this recently. As a non-musician, I don’t understand all of them, but I think the last two are relevant to this discussion -

34 Inevitable Day-to-Day Thoughts Of A Music Major

Vidita Kanniks in Humor on Oct 20, 2015

  1. I need to practice so much today.
  2. I am so going to be ready for my lesson this week.
  3. Werk.
  4. Ugh, I love being a musician.
  5. OK, yes, parallel fifths and octaves result in dead kittens, I get it.
  6. But also like when am I actually going to use the knowledge of 12-tone serialism or neapolitan chords in my actual career?
  7. Am I even going to have a career?
  8. I'm scared.
  9. It'll all work out. Maybe.
  10. Worst case, I'll be a barista. Or a bartender. While I'm gigging around. And teaching lessons. To pay for my master's degree. And then everything will all work out.
  11. Maybe.
  12. Rehearsal in 30 minutes -- MUST WARM UP.
  13. I'd better get a practice room.
  14. And there are no practice rooms. Expected.
  15. These pianists literally stay in there for hours like what do you even do in there, pianists?
  16. Classic stairwell warmup, let's go.
  17. This rehearsal is going to be so long.
  18. Why is my stomach literally talking right now.
  19. Ah, that's right. I didn't have time for lunch today.
  20. I need a nap.
  21. Actually I need $4,000 and some cupcakes right now TBH.
  22. How is there so much repertoire out there in this world?
  23. I wish I could go to sleep with a bunch of scores under my pillow and just know them all the next morning.
  24. Bassoons kind of sound like frogs. But in the best way possible.
  25. 'Fixed Do' is the worst omg why? WHY?!
  26. Seriously, is everything Maria Von Trapp taught me an absolute lie? My childhood was a lie.
  27. Sightsingingsightsingingsightsingingyasyasyas
  28. TBH, I probably will never be as good at playing the piano as this four-year-old Korean girl playing at Carnegie Hall.
  29. Playing for my teacher during my lesson, OK, cool.
  30. Playing for my teacher AND my peers during studio class = an entirely different and frightening experience.
  31. Breathe, self. Breathe. Inhale, Exhale. Deep, low breaths. Ugh but now I’m thinking about technique again.
  32. I am exhausted.
  33. But also so unbelievably lucky to be here.
  34. Doing the very thing I love, because I literally can’t picture myself doing anything else.

@othermusicdad:

OMG, I spit coffee all over my monitor, people at work were looking at me strangely, I was laughing at it so hard. @5 is hysterical, parallel 5ths was one of Bach’s rules I believe, and it is used all over the place in rock and pop music.

“The ability to think and work on the fly, network, problem solve, improvise, and run yourself as a business are all solid skills. It may be that kids on the classical side aren’t as accustomed to hustling but in any other genre that’s how it goes.”

This is true of classical music students too, at least those who are going to make it as musicians, those that think they are going to graduate and become a hot shot soloist or get that gig in a major orchestra that pays 6 figures with benefits are in for a rude awakening… classical musicians do all kinds of gig work, they create their own opportunities by forming their own ensembles/unique niches, they have to problem solve like how to find the time to practice while doing gigs all over the place and teaching and such. The 4 year old Korean girl on piano @othermusicdad when she grows up might have problems, because her whole time in music her parents and teachers decide what she does, how she does it, and then gets out in the world and doesn’t have a clue…

“My S has no other marketable skills and, as a mom, I worry about that. I know a little about music and I believe in his talent. I worry just the same.” I think every music parent or arts parent worries about this, as do parents who have kids majoring in history or english or foreign language literature or linguistics et al.

The other side of that view is that a lot of college degrees don’t endow their graduates with great skills. An English Lit major may be able to read a ‘great work’ of English lit, and analyze it, break down the language, tell you the period, what it means, but does that translate into a career in marketing or comp sci or accounting or technical management particularly? Even with business administration, which some see as a valid degree, there isn’t all that much direct transfer into the ‘real world’. When you go into an entry level job, I don’t care what it is, it is likely that a graduate doesn’t know that much that is directly relevant to the job, even with tech jobs unless a kid has done a lot of programming outside the core curricula for cs, it is likely they have a lot to learn (in terms of cs), the practical versus school is a fairly big gap to fill, both technically and also in other knowledge.

Okay, so then what marketable skills do music students have? This has been talked about ad infinitum on here, but it is a lot, that other disciplines don’t have. Music students learn to work with other musicians, in ensembles, and learn to deal with difficult people (like how do you deliver criticism to a member of your performing group without getting them upset?). They learn time scheduling, how to fit things into a busy day, they learn multi tasking, they learn to make things happen when resources are limited (for example, in school, where practice rooms are limited, finding times and places to practice). They learn to be self driven and self scheduled, there is no formula for how to much to practice, what to practice, there is no syllabus for music students for the music side of things, they have to figure it out. They learn to analyze difficult things (music theory and music analysis IMO is a lot more difficult than for example the kinds of analysis you learn in finance courses and the like, which are mostly plug in the blank numbers). Music kids learn to deal with ambiguity, when you are in academic studies it is mostly “get this paper done on time, do this to get a good grade, study for the test, regurgitate what the teacher wants, get a good grade” do this and you get into a good college, get good grades there, get the internships or whatever, you likely will get a good job if you hustle on the interviews, music is a world full of nebulous auditions and not really knowing what ‘it takes’ to achieve your goals, or even knowing what the goals are:).

I can tell you that employers don’t look at music majors as being dumb or unskilled (put it this way, you will be better off going in for an entry level job with a music performance degree than a degree in business administration, which these days is seen as what frat boys major in to get through college with a ‘marketable’ degree, without having to work), a lot of hiring managers know how hard music is, even Goldman Sachs, which are notorious for their hiring policies when it comes to bankers (basically, you don’t come out of a Wharton or the like, forget it), recently were looking for non traditional applicants and they specifically mentioned music performance majors as one of the type of thing they were looking for, as opposed to what the article quoted the Goldman Sachs rep as saying, ‘the cookie cutter follow the crowd students’. Among other things, music kids tend to be pretty bright, and are seen as such, that much I can tell you.

That made my day @othermusicdad. Thanks for that!

I love #26!

There is another rule about all this, as evidenced by this post and its obvious humor, don’t forget to look at it with humor, if you can’t laugh at the absurdity of it at times, at the fact that music appears to be something that takes so much effort and so many resources yet appears to offer the least in terms of return, the egos, the silliness, the politics, you name it (much the same way that boaters can laugh at themselves, calling a boat a hole in the water you throw money into), if you take it so seriously that you can’t see the absurdity, too, going to make it very hard to deal with the ups and downs (and as parents, the anxiety:)

@othermusicdad thank you for that!

  1. Classic stairwell warmup, let's go!

@musicprnt is right about seeing the absurdity of this. I can laugh with other music parents about all this while my non-music-kid friends just look at us like “what’s the big deal”.

Many thoughtful posts in this thread, but also many imponderables. I get that music is a highly competitive, very difficult path, and that one has to be realistic about whether one has a chance of making a career in it. But how and when do you decide whether it’s realistic? Do you have to be at “that most-amazing-high-school-player-I’ve-ever-seen kind of level” in high school? My son was always a good musician, but in high school he wasn’t getting into the “elite” programs that culled out the handful of the “most amazing” type high school musicians. Fast forward four years and he’s playing regularly with the kids who were getting into those programs. As well as with some pretty well known older professional musicians. He’s never really cared about where he ranked. He only cares about the enjoyment he gets from playing and the drive to continually improve.

If you had asked me when he was in high school whether it was realistic for him to think he could make a career in music, I would have said, I have no idea. If you were to ask me now, I would say, it doesn’t matter what I think. He’s an adult and his music is who and what he is. Fortunately, he’s had enough successes at this point that yes, I do think it’s realistic for him to think he can make a career in music. But I also think that, at some point, as a parent you have no choice but to let go and let your child find his/her own path, and trust that they will find the path that’s right for them.

@jazzpianodad:
You are right about that, with music the decision came down to my son and his decisions, after a certain point we were not driving the process, he was, he was the one who decided he wanted to go into music performance in middle school in a serious way, and in the process of where to go it was his show, we simply supported him. You don’t know with music, what a parent thinks and the reality may be very different thing (like the parents who assume that music school is like academic admits these days, it is all grades and SAT’s and EC’s and whatnot, and get indignant to find out those may not matter that much, if at all).

However, you also raise a point, and it is a good one, that not all music is the same. Jazz is a funny beast, like with pop music and folk music and rock music and so forth, while there are kids who go to the university programs that mirror the classical music path, there isn’t quite the rigidity that exists in classical music,each form of music is different. My son was fortunate that the private school he went to had a music program, and they had a jazz teacher who was a professional jazz musician, a pretty well known one in the NYC area, and he went a more traditional path with Jazz, he didn’t go to music school as far as I know, he did it the old fashioned way, he was exposed to it, learned to play and that drove him.

Classical is very different, and there are different answers there. These days you won’t find many self taught, if any, classical musicians, in large part because the level of playing, the technical precision, is such that no amount of passion, no amount of drive, is going to make up for the lack of that training. 30, 40, 50 years ago, you would see musicians in things like broadway pit orchestras and other such gig work, who were not the graduates of big music programs, or some who were self taught, these days the people doing those kind of jobs in general are graduates of big music schools. The competition is such to get into this level of program that that good high school musician, even if they get into that decent but not top level program, may be likely not to catch up, because the level is so high (and that depends on the instrument, it is much, much more of a gap with violin or piano then it might be with let’s say some of the brass or woodwinds, for factors like brass and woodwind students start later, they cannot practice as much, so the difference between the ‘elite’ and the ‘good’ may not be so great.

Those kind of factors do play into the realism of doing something and what makes it tricky. If a kid came to me and said they started playing violin at 14, had private lessons with a local teacher, maybe played in some local youth orchestra, and said they had the goal of becoming a violinist in a major orchestra or be a soloist at any level, I could tell them how highly unlikely that goal would be given where they started, where they were, and what they faced, though I also might point out if that goal is not achievable, maybe another one would be, where they could still do music in college, take lessons, play, and that at the very least they could play with amateur ensembles, or maybe do something interesting like play violin with a rock group or a folk group or something, alternate paths. While no one can really know the future, if you know something about the chosen arena they wanted to go into, you can give an idea of realism, not going to a big music program, or one at all, can work out in Jazz, whereas in classical with a certain traditional path in mind, that would likely not work, it all depends.