Erich Stem put something very well in his presentation at the DePauw symposium I spoke at. (See my last post.) He asked whether classical music faced death — or a paradigm shift? I’m sure it’s the latter. And part of the new paradigm would be all sorts of non-conventional performances, string quartets in clubs, new music groups (there seem to be more of them every day), exploding numbers of releases on indie classical record labels, and much, much more.
But there’s one big question about the new paradigm (or, if you like post-classical performances, or alternative classical performances). How will classical musicians make a living? The old paradigm gives you ways to do that (playing in an orchestra, for instance), even though there aren’t enough jobs for everyone who graduates from music school. But the new paradigm doesn’t seem to offer much. I’ve talked about this with an artists’ manager at one of the big managements, who’s certainly in a position to know how musicians support themselves. He’s also one of the few people (though I think their numbers are growing) in big-time managements who really love alternative performances. And he vociferously thinks that the new performances can’t support the musicians who play in them.
I always want to learn more about how this works, so at DePauw I asked the musicians in eighth blackbird and the Bang on a Can All-Stars how they make their living. For eighth blackbird, as I’ve already said, the answer was simple. They get hired for university residencies. In this way, they’re not different from chamber music groups that (unlike eighth blackbird) don’t specialize in new music. A detailed study commissioned some years ago by Chamber Music America found that musicians in chamber groups — apart from a few of the biggest ones — have no chance to make a living from their playing if their group doesn’t have a paying residency somewhere. eighth blackbird, then — just as its flutist Tim Munro insisted — isn’t really a post-classical ensemble, because it makes its living from the classical music mainstream (university division). Merely playing concerts wouldn’t keep the group alive.
The Bang on a Can players, meanwhile, present a different picture. They’re truly post-classical. They never get university residencies (and might not be likely to, because they play pieces written in a far more colloquial style than the new music favored in academia). Only one of them has any university connection, and that’s hardly in classical music: He leads a gamelan ensemble at MIT. The others more or less make their living by their wits, playing freelance classical and non-classical gigs, or teaching privately (and not necessarily with students who only play classical music). So they, too, can’t survive simply from their Bang on a Can tours. They said the All-Stars might play 10 weeks out of every year, which (here’s the half full glass) is more than I might have expected, but (here’s the half-empty glass) isn’t enough to support them. I should have asked how many weeks they’d have to tour to make a living from touring, but I didn’t think to.
I’m reasonably sure that anyone in the alternative classical world (or whatever we want to call it) would report more or less the same thing. A year or so ago I asked Todd Reynolds, a new-music violinist who was one of the founders of Ethel (the new music string quartet that lives in more or less the same aesthetic world as the Bang on a Can All-Stars) whether he thought many people could make a living playing that style of music. He got very serious, and said the financial problems could be crushing. And I remember meeting another Ethel musician (Todd, by the way, doesn’t play with the group any more) in the West Palm Beach airport, her mission in West Palm Beach being to play with a pops orchestra, which was one of the things she had to do, if she wanted to survive.
The emerging new classical world is full of promise, at least musically. How it’s going to support classical musicians — in anything like the numbers of people making a living from classical music now — we don’t yet know.
Hi Greg
Maybe we just can’t, per se. Which would be sad for musicians, but quite plausible.
[Maybe we just have to learn to build and invest as much by way of savings/income that we can in the hope that eventually we will have other sources of finance to rely on. And take as many other extra gigs as can be coped with in the meantime. Do they teach financial planning at music conservatoires yet?]
I think you should examine what’s going on in other fields, for example in photography, where microstock photography is ruining traditional stock photographers’ income levels. I’m sure there are other examples in other fields.
This question arises: once technology / available knowledge becomes so cheap that it eliminates much of the difficulty of acquiring basic technical skill, how does that affect the role of the artist, and the value of their work?
Of course, technology is never going to eliminate the need for high-level technical skill, particularly with musical instruments, where we all know how difficult it is to really master how to play (not to mention all the other things over and above technical skill that it takes to create something truly unique and interesting or artistic). But when skills are far more readily available or easier to come by, and the knowledge and awareness of the general public/consumer continues to rise, surely their value goes down? Individual artistic value becomes much more important.
An aside:
***People often talk about how standards of instrument-playing skyrocketed in the last 50 years. That’s never going to decline. Moore’s Law etc! (leads on to: ‘would Heifetz have been noticed today’, ‘are technically-skilled prodigies remarkable any more’, etc etc). As technical perfection becomes more and more of a ‘given’, we have an OPPORTUNITY to look beyond, for a new plateau of possibility… ***
If what was exceptional 50 years ago is common today, doesn’t supply and demand necessitate a change in emphasis for those who are ‘professional’ musicians, to a kind of role that is wide enough to cater for the unique individual experiences demanded by Audience 2.0? (forgive my misappropriation of Web 2.0, but I think it’s apt!) To discover a way of operating that is more than just, although of course centered around, ‘delivering performances’? I think that is where the idea of a portfolio set of activities begins to become relevant not just for financial reasons, but also because of its relevance to the development of social culture that we’re seeing (as to how that fits with artisic aims — maybe that’s up to each individual, perhaps?).
To clarify: Yes, the demand for an incredible ‘experience’ will always be there, which is why concert-giving has a great future. But there’s always a route (preparation, context, structure, presentation) to the point of delivery (moment of musical experience) that must be taken, and surely that has to remain relevant to audiences too – hence the changes that are taking place and why we’re all worrying about context etc. Because of the way in which society has changed (Burger King: Have it YOUR way! / Time person of the year: YOU!) – the infinitely customizable, longtailable process of individualization is now all-important (especially to my under-30 facebook generation!), and if we don’t allow people the possibility to relate to what we’re doing on their own terms, they’ll walk away.
Dropping two to three hour concerts that take up your entire evening with an overture, concerto and symphony would be a start. I haven’t been to a full concert like that since I was at conservatoire and most commonly leave at the interval or only go for the second half. To have the fullest listening experience I prefer to give 100% attention to the music then go and socialize somewhere nice afterwards, rather than give 60% concentration to the music (who can concentrate 100% for 2-3 hours straight as a passive listener?) and spend the rest of the time feeling that I’m at an elaborately engineered social event. That might work if you’re 50/60+ years old but my generation neither expects, nor needs, nor wants, nor will put up with that – nor do we have the attention span, because there are so many different outlets of media competing for our attention. [though it’s important not to reed quantity as a lack of quality when talking about ‘attention spans of young people’!]. I think there’s great mileage for the next 20 years or so in that kind of traditional programme, but after that there will be a rapid collapse of that format once the pre-computer/internet generation dies.) [– ps apologies to older people who are not internet dinosaurs, for my sweeping generalizations!]. Sure, there will always be a place for big symphonic concerts and opera, of course. I don’t imagine the BBC Proms or the big opera houses or major urban symphony concert series will be affected. But maybe such concerts will become less common – I hope so, it would make them more special! Nothing so disappointing as a ‘routine’ symphony concert.
I guess a lot of that therefore points to the question: To what extent does our professiona/artistic route to the musical point of delivery reflect the broader culture around us?
Leading on from that – have you considered what is happening in journalism? I’m sure there are interesting parallels here. Particularly now we are all ‘citizen journalists’ with cameraphones and blogs and facebook etc, writers and reporters are becoming more like guides and filter systems than just plain newsgatherers. The whole way that news is presented is going through a paradigm shift towards the whole 2.0 consumer-driven way of doing things. The ‘professionals’ remain crucially important, but their modus operandi, and to an extent their purpose, is being forced to change. Yet all the time publishers have to cope with a reduction in revenue from print productions, and the fact that digital publications are ?usually less lucrative because they can’t charge such highly inflated rates for display ads [?haven’t properly checked this]. But – Same problem, different skin?
I think it’s telling that a channel like Sky News is a loss leader – has never made a profit, and never will. Neither have many orchestras of course, so perhaps future solutions for individual musicians might need to draw more on the kind of principles that work at organization-level.
Where value judgements come into that and who makes them is probably a very difficult question too. Perhaps it’s futile to speculate on value if there’s never going to be congruence between artistic value and financial value anyway.
Sorry this turned into such a long message. I hope some of it was worth reading!
And we still hear from the blogcranks who tell us that the necessary paradigm is to play for free and to make money off of outside merchandising. To which I suggest that they can only credibly make that suggestion when they make a living selling t-shirts to fans of their Java code 🙂
We’re starting to see cracks in the Hollywood edifice as writers work together to get paid appropriately. I wonder what the effects will be on other creative arts.
Isn’t this an unfortunate aspect of doing something new and solely artistically-based in the music field? Many of the great composers have struggled financially while doing something revolutionary with their music. This doesn’t make today’s situation acceptable, but I think it indicates that we are facing a problem that has almost always plagued musicians.
I think this problem will be very hard to solve, as the dollar seems to reward the proven product, not the untested new idea. But isn’t the same true for any upstart business? Perhaps looking to successful new businesses as a model would be helpful.
As a career counselor with The Actors Work Program of The Actors Fund, I work with many professional musicians, who discover creative ways to generate income from meaningful non-industry work and entrepreneurial endeavors that give them the financial freedom to continue investing time and resources in creating and performing their music. As a national program, we are a free resource to all musicians who want to investigate alternative career management plans.
Great post about a very serious issue.
There is ONE group I can think of that has actually managed to support themselves without ever having a residency: Kronos Quartet. They’re the exception (read: model) in so many ways, but it is worth noting that in any given year, a good percentage (and often over 50%) of their engagements are not in the US, so it could be said that they might not be able to support themselves with just touring in the US.
It’s also worth noting that a fair percentage of the Bang on a Can People (Evan Ziporyn and Robert Black, at least) support themselves through academic residencies, just not ones that are really connected to their work in BoaC.
Kind of like making a living in arts writing nowadays…
Ten years ago I was teaching a course at Oberlin that was designed to help conservatory students think about the variety of career streams they would need to undertake in order to earn a living as a musician. The concept that they might need to prepare for maintaining performing lives in a multiplicity of genres or settings was certainly not something that many, if any, of them were hearing from their studio faculty. My message was simple: some would be diverse by choice, but most would be diverse by necessity.
I may be one of the very few who thinks that musicians taking on multiple roles within the community (orchestral performer, teacher, new music performer, chamber musician, back-up-band for a pop singer) is a GOOD thing — in fact, a GREAT thing. Variety keeps musicians fresh, and the musical ecosystem is able to thrive when all the various segments are being served.
The “crisis” in Classical music in the U.S. is in large part attributable, I believe, to the narrow self-labeling in which many classically-trained performers engaged for decades. Even your post buys in to it — “[she]play(s) with a pops orchestra, which was one of the things she had to do, if she wanted to survive.” What the heck is wrong with playing in a Pops orchestra?
The irony, of course, is that we (the musical community) created these distinctions. We continue to be uncomfortable with musicians who, for love or money or both, “cross over” between genres. Much is written when Billy Joel or Paul McCartney or Elvis Costello write a symphony; the “purists” scoffed when Domingo did some beautiful duets with John Denver and others; Dawn Upshaw is poo-poohed in some circles because she does opera –and art song — and Broadway — and contemporary music — and whatever else she wants to do. And it is all stunning.
I am now the artistic manager of Red {an orchestra}, whose mission is to bring new audiences to classical music and classical music to audiences in new ways. The members of the orchestra enthusiastically perform the widest possible variety of music, in settings from concert halls to shopping centers, because our audiences enjoy ALL of it — without the labels.
Sincerely,
Laura Kuennen-Poper
Artistic Manager
Red {an orchestra}
Cleveland, OH
The following arrived as an e-mail from violinist Gil Morgenstern. I’m posting it here with his permission:
The key to a flourishing classical culture is state subsidy. Classical music is still going strong in Finland and Denmark, and even the people who don’t much care for the music don’t object to the use of their taxes for cultural funding. I imagine the situation is smilar in France; do any of the mainstream political parties there feel any need to do away with IRCAM, for example?
You in the U.S. don’t have a decent system of state subsidies, which might doom your classical scene, but since it is from precisely Denmark, Finland, and France that my favourite composers hail, I’ll still be content for at least some years to come.
American classical performers and fans have done a terrible job of lobbying for more state funding. Do they just think they don’t have a chance, or do they just lack the energy?
While you’re discussing making a living, you and others here might be interested in Jason Heath’s series on that subject. Perhaps the easiest way to find it is to start at http://doublebassblog.org/articles and then read the “Road Warrior Without an Expense Account” series.
Also in that vein and speaking directly to the matter of using teaching as an adjunct to performing is an article Drew McManus and I wrote at http://www.pegasuscom.com/aar/model7.html
While Drew wrote the column, I did the associated, downloadable simulation model that people can explore. No, I’m not against teaching, but it seemed to us that there’s the potential for an interesting and unfortunate dynamic in the current situation: musicians earn less from their music than they’d want because there’s an imbalance in supply and demand, they begin teaching to augment their income, they interest increasing numbers of young people in music, leading eventually to increased numbers of professional musicians, making the supply and demand equation still worse, leading to increased pressure to teach, …. The model says it better than I do here; check it out.
I can’t remember the date when it actually occurred to me, but it was a transcendental moment when I realized that musicians could now make a living playing in symphony orchestras.
There had been some exceptions, I guess, but musicians were hired for eight sessions a week, for twenty-or-so weeks per year, to play for the symphony. For that, they got a paltry sum that would in no way supply a living wage.
So, they scrounged around for other jobs. Taking pupils was a given. Summer work at outdoor venues was another. Two musicians with the St. Louis SO owned a music store. Stuff like that.
Many musicians played in the symphony because it was an avocation. The SLSO got a first trumpet who came from a well-paying gig with the Radio City Music Hall orchestra because he was “tired of playing the Egmont Overture 16 times a week and wanted to play real music.” It got its first trombone from a touring ballet company and playing with Woody Herman but who wanted to play with a symphony.
And they got no respect. The story of the famous pianist who was hired to play at some society event. The hostess asked, “What is your fee.” The musicians said [I forget the actual amount, so I’ll make one up] “10,000.” The hostess said, “Fine, but you understand you are not to mingle with the guests.” “Oh, in that case,” said the musician, “my fee will be $9,000.”
But the union fought and clawed and gouged until it got a living wage for the major orchestras. It was able to do that because there were people in many communities who, through a combination of civic pride and love of music, were willing to fight and claw and gouge to get the necessary money.
Now, when we’ve got the greatest orchestras that ever existed playing in halls that are adequate or better, we’re saying, “Gee, well maybe we oughta . . .”
Well, if that’s the case — if even we who profess to be music lovers — are coming up with these “oughta’s” — then what we really oughta do is do away with symphony orchestras.
We simply do not deserve them any more.
Paul Alter
A lot of good comments. I can only add that it is my opinion that music should no longer be offered as a major. Think of all the students out there borrowing $10 or $20K/year to finish their schooling and then try to pay off a boatload of debt by making a living from music. Why not music only as part of a double major – Accounting and Music, Engineering and Music, etc. Schools are working harder and harder to bring in students because tuition costs keep going up and up. A concession to reality from the university seems only ethical.
In any case, I wonder if we are reaching the point in history when musical ability is a virtue and no longer a profession?
Thanks for mentioning my Road Warrior Without an Expense Account series, Bill!
I think many, many classical musicians have exactly the same kind of challenges making a living as the “post classical” musicians. As Greg says, most chamber music specialists can’t make a living from that, so they do other things, too. Many orchestra musicians patch together a living from lots of gigs in various styles, plus (as others have pointed out) teaching, writing, and other work. Even people with full-time orchestra jobs have to play pops concerts as part of the season. Here in L.A., a musician may play all kinds of live and recorded music in a week (although here the endagered music is studio music, which used to provide incomes to far more musicians). Aside from famous pop acts, musicians who want to play pop music also do all kinds of work–maybe musical, maybe not–to pay the rent. Of course some classical musicians make a full-time living playing classical music, and classical stars may make lots of money, but far more classical musicians are patching together a living by doing lots of different things. (Maybe this has always been true: musicians earn their livings by doing whatever they can do, and if they’re lucky some of the work is to play the music they especially like to play.) Becoming post-classical won’t require a change in work habits.
In its glory days, Radio City Music Hall supported a symphony orchestra. I can’t say from first-hand knowledge (never having been to a show at that time), but an article in the New Yorker describes the orchestra rising from the pit, playing some concert piece(s), and then descending back into the pit to back the dancing robots.
The orchestra, led by Erno Rapee, also played concerts on either the NBC or CBS radio network on Sunday morning. It was on this show that they did a Mahler cycle that, although only partial, included the 8th.
This was during the period when Grace Moore, Lily Pons, Rise Stevens, Charles Kullman, Jose Iturbi, Helen Traubel, Lauritz Melchior, Leopold Stokowski, and such were starring in and/or appearing in motion pictures produced by leading Hollywood studios.
Those were the days when Chico Marx could announce, “We will now play the sextet from ‘Lichi Nuts’,” and get a laugh. Ed Wynn had a weekly radio show on which, as a running gag, he promised a performance of “Carmen,” including its theme song “She’ll Be Carmen ’round the Mountain When She Carms.”
Earlier, a staple in vaudeville had been burlesque versions of arias from operas, which blue collar audiences of the time appreciated.
Remember Charlie Chan, the great Chinese detective? One of the films in the series was “Charlie Chan at the Opera,” for which Oscar Levant wrote several scenes for the opera being produced in the film.
There was a Technicolor extravaganza, a fictionalized biography
of Chopin. Another film was about Margery Lawrence, an erstwhile important singer whose career was interrupted by polio. These were meant for mainstream audiences.
Yes, the attitude toward concert music was different in those days. It was a “try it, you’ll like it” era, as opposed to today.
————–
Oh, and another thing. Even the musicians of the NBC SO were not totally supported by their service in the orchestra. The real purpose of the NBC SO was to provide a pool of musicians from which to draw players for the orchestras on the various other shows — musical, dramatic, et al.
Paul
I run Icebreaker, the new music group in England that plays a lot of similar music to Bang On A Can. As far as we are concerned, it was always the case that Icebreaker musicians earned their leaving from a variety of sources, including teaching, with playing Andrew Lloyd Webber perhaps the most lucrative, but I don’t think, from a UK perspective, that seemed in any way a compromise.
However, if Icebreaker is part of a ‘post-classical’ environment, the other question is how the group survives – it is much more difficult to keep an ensemble going than to survive as an individual musician. In the UK we have in some ways the worst of both funding models – much less state funding than mainland Europe, but very limited private sponsorship, along US lines.
So I think within that context, altho Icebreaker is certainly dependent to a large extent on well-funded European festivals, it is increasingly a question of finding more popular models, and trying to build projects which are going to have wider appeal, without losing sight of artistic ideals. I think it is this which is going to determine what the future shape of any sort of ‘classical’ music is, or whether the concept continues to exist – and (outside of a museum culture) I don’t think it’s really a choice between ‘classical’ music continuing with its own clear cut identity, or dramatically dying, it’s more a question of it morphing into something which may or may not be referred to as classical, but which offers an alternative challenging take on a wider musical culture. Icebreaker (and Bang On A Can) have always fought shy of being identified with a classical label, despite the fact that we are of course classical – but then again in other senses we are also not classical, not in the conventional sense anyway…
re: The NBC SO
Toscanini did not know about it until a rehearsal ran overtime and a bassoon player, who had to get work on a different show, tried to crawl out, trusting to T’s notoriously bad eyesight to get out unnoticed. But Tosky did, found out the truth, blew up, and — shortly afterward — retired.
Minor correction: the musicians did not just play for light music shows. They were also a vital part of dramatic shows, playing the intro theme and the background scores, comedy shows, quiz shows, news shows, commercials, et al. It was all live music. (Don’t forget that Bubbles Silverman, aka Beverly Sills, did the “Rinso White” commercial time after time after time.)
But they also had some serious music gigs. For example, Frank Black and the NBC String Orchestra had a Sunday morning (the “Cultural Graveyard”) show that developed my love for the sonorities of the the string orchestra.
Then, during the rest of the week, there were shows like Donald Voorhees/The Telephone Hour, Alfred Wallenstein/Howard Barlow/The Firestone Hour, et al that played shorter serious pieces and movements from longer pieces.
Paul
“Where Can We Work? A Report on Workspace Availability for New York City Musicians” will be on http://www.nycPASpaces.org by mid-January. In the report, we look specifically at the impact of workspace on NYC musicians’ productivity and propose feasible solutions.
Following my own investigation, millions of persons all over the world receive the home loans at different banks. Hence, there is great possibilities to get a bank loan in any country.