There are some wonderful and thoughtful comments now attached to my post last week about the amateur arts. Many seek to define the difference between amateur and professional, with the usual indicators in the mix: paid vs. unpaid, skilled vs. less skilled, creating for the audience vs. creating for the self.
These would be clean and useful distinctions if they were true. But I’m realizing that the distinctions I use to understand the professional/amateur divide aren’t particularly relevant to the real world. What about non-paid artists with professional training and exceptional skill? Are they amateurs or professionals? What about professional artists who choose to create and perform an alternate form of work with their peers for the love of it, rather than for money? What about amateurs without traditional training, and without any interest in being professional, who have an audience focus and a skill level that matches their professional peers?
For example, I helped found a summer project choir here in Madison that performs only once each year, with two weeks of intensive rehearsal. Many of our members are ”professional” singers by most standards (highly trained, earning a portion of their income from their craft). Many of our singers are professionals in other industries with a love and passion for choral performance. None of us is paid for our performance in the choir (in fact, we all chip in to pay the bills). We’re all in it for the love of the challenge and the depth of the repertory we wouldn’t be singing otherwise. Yet, if I dare say, our performance quality is professional-grade, we have a national recording of some merit of contemporary choral works (some of which we commissioned), and we certainly provide a positive audience experience to a packed, paid house every year.
Are we professionals or amateurs? Is our choir professional or community? Does the audience know the difference? Do they care?
In short, are we sure in our arguments about professional and amateur artists that we all agree on the differences? And are the differences really the ones that make a difference?
Let me offer an amusing story based on the varied definitions of “amateur.” I hold no reservation for any of the many definitions since context generally makes it quite clear which meaning is in play. If pressed, out of context, I’ll take the etymological definition as expressed by the character in “Chorus Line” singing “What I Did for Love.” Is this too academic or too romantic? I don’t care. Here’s the story.
Jack, age 4, having inquired about this new word, has been told that amateur means someone who does something because they truly love it. Some days later at a restaurant, Jack’s Mom notes the hair-like remnants of feather stems on her chicken and exclaims, “This chicken must have been plucked by an amateur!”
Jack’s little brow furrows and his Dad takes note. “Something the matter, Jack?”
“Do you mean there are people who LIKE to pluck chickens?”
True story. Jack’s Dad plays tuba in the Virginia Symphony – a professional who loves making music. And that’s perfectly okay!
Having just concluded presenting the fifth International Piano Competition for Outstanding Amateurs produced by the Van Cliburn Foundation,I could go on at great length reiterating the various suggestions made by the competitors over the years concerning criteria to be used for defining an amateur. They include professional education, earlier professional experience, current related occupations, and so forth.
Ultimately, narrowing the criteria invariably leads to making seemingly arbitrary calls. Take education, for instance. Perhaps getting a master’s in piano performance from a conservatory might be viewed as offering an unfair advantage over someone who never attended a music school. Yet, Jon Nakamatsu, the gold medalist of the 1997 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition (for young professionals) never set foot in a music school and had only one piano teacher. What of pre-conservatory professional education such as at the Juilliard pre-school or at Russian special schools for talented children that is then discontinued by the age of 12, by which time a significant amount of musical and technical training has become deeply imbedded?
Is someone who attempted a career and performed several concerts while in their 20’s, then got married, raised children, and returned to the piano 30 years later, to be still considered a professional because she was once had a few concerts?
Can a professional composer, who works all day at a keyboard, but does not perform as a pianist be considered an amateur pianist? Should the concert master of a professional symphony orchestra be considered an amateur pianist considering that his status as a professional musician gives him immeasurably more experience with making music than, say, a medical doctor? But what of a housewife whose children have left the nest and is able to practice eight hours a day and perform the occasional recital in her community and perhaps even teach one or two children? Since the theory professor at the Conservatory does not need to perform as part of his job, could he qualify as an amateur?
These and many more questions have led us to adopt one simple guideline: if you declare yourself to be an amateur, you are to be considered an amateur. No professional with intentions of pursuing a professional career would ever want to have the stigma of the word “amateur” attached to his name. At our competition we also do not accept anyone whose principal livelihood is derived from giving performances or teaching piano.
However, we’re always open to constructive suggestions, which could prove to be viable.
Very interesting comments – I guess it really comes down to marketing – labels are always needed in marketing. Artists are always artists to one another, who share with each other and give the world different attitudes on the same view.
One of the most devastating ways to injure a professional worker in any field is to tell her there is no such thing as a professional worker. (Do I hear the word “union” blowing in the wind somewhere?)
Presumably the artist who is professional works on his or her profession all day, during the day when he’s wide awake and the rest of the world is making money too? Presumably the amateur in any field has another profession in another field in which he “loves” to devote the working hours of the day?
Have you ever tried to work regularly at night as a professional after having worked all day at another job? Not as a student of course, but as a grown person with a family? For years and years? And hear people tell you how nice it is that you have something to do “that you love”?
The arts are many disciplines and each makes widely varied technical demands on people. If an instrumentalist or dancer does not practice daily, the world will soon know it. No choral singer that I know supports their family by singing in a choir all day long. They all have other professions or jobs.
Pro doesn’t mean inspired or genious or great or even deadly boring and without feeling. It doesn’t even mean that you get paid for one or two gigs that you do. The professional is the person who has chosen a daily working path for their lifetime or, like the dancer, until the body wears out and they pass on to students what they learned as performers.
Pros are boring or inspiring according to their talents and their natures like anyone else in a profession. Just as amateurs are, and for the same reasons.
But, if you absolutely need to define a professional objectively from appearances, apart from the fact that their work is their profession, you might be able to say that pros tend to be more reliable workers because it is their full-time job.
Another non-art difference between the two is that the professional must navigate daily all the business sides of his art -marketing, rentals, costume, travel, recording, managing, dealing with long term injuries from their work, the effects of stress, the relationship of the modern world and news on their art, and dealing with others in the field. They tend to know more about all the small bits and pieces of a life in their field that the amateur doesn’t need to know because they only do what they do on the side.
I’d rather hire a pro who has kept their good spirits, to do a longterm job in an orchestra, on a football filed, in a doctor’s office, on stage, design a house -than any amateur of genius! Not because pros are more talented but because they are more likely to be able to handle the mix of relationships, obligations, inspiration, skills and learning on the job in a creative way. Simply, they’ll get the job done better.
If I need a marriage counselor please give me a married person who has navigated the marriage contract over a lifetime and has kept their individual spirit, their love and their home intact. Please don’t persuade me that the one madly in love and in their twenties can guide me just as well in the art and disciplines of marriage.
After working a myriad of “professional” performances and “amature” performances this lable has come to mean something completely different to me. What I have seen over the years has led me to see professionalism as an attitude and a quality of performance. If you are serious, have a certain attitude about what you are doing and have a quality performance you are professional. On the other side of this coin, we have all seen the professional performance that is not polished, unorganized and makes us cring inwardly wondering how they managed to find someone to pay them for their product. I’ve recently read a book by Malcolm Gladwell, in which he points out that perception is everything. If your production (in the broad sense of the word) is professional you are perceived by the theater community as a whole as professional. Our local Jr. Ballet comapany is comprised of an entirely ameture group- none of the dancers are professional. They take their work in this organization seriously. Attendance at rehearsals is mandantory, auditions are required for admittance. They listen to criticism from others in their field. They put on performances that are by thier very nature “professional”. Professionalism is what you put into it. To borrow from Forrest Gump “professional is as professional does”
Being musical is like being “handy” round the house. Why is it (this covers a scream) that many of the art disciplines have a hard time in North America pursuading even their managers that there is a difference between professional and amateur ways of approaching their work? No one that I know of has long heart-pounding arguments about the difference between a professional plumber and one’s neighbour (highschool teacher-yes, professional) or husband (doctor -yes, professional)who happens to be handy with a hammer and a blow torch. One of them is a professional plumber and the others are amateur – or rather dilletantes. Let’s leave out the love angle. And to complete the analogy, my husband (the professional doctor) is a better plumber than the one we hire on a regular basis. But we hire the professional because he works at his job and can be booked to come during the day, he’s good, he knows all the angles and the other tradespeople when they’re needed. Whatever the discipline or skill which gives you your primary income that pays the rent, the bills and the food and which takes up all your time during the work day, and that you plan to do or have done for a lifetime- that is understood to be your profession. When you work as a dilletante, you presumably work at another job that brings in the money to pay the rent or you bring up the kids maintain a home/household while your partner does.
When you work at being a professional, not only must you do the skills of that activity, but, if you are self employed as many are, you must perform a myriad of other tasks related to practice, preparation, upkeep of one’s instruments and tools, marketing one’s work, travelling, scheduling months/years in advance, networking with others, very often hiring workers related to your discipline and -most of all perhpas- learning as much as you can about and keeping up with the entire body of work in your discipline and where it’s edges are in the present and where it might be evolving in the future. Almost all the above can be said of the professional plumber as well as of the musician. And almost none of the above can be said of the dilettante -whether plumber or musician.
Dividing between the professional and the amateur isn’t a matter of deciding who’s a genious and who’s boring. Both can be either one or the other according to their character, talents, dedication, hard work and passion. When an orchestra hires a professional as opposed to an amateur or a student, hopefully they want a person who will spend time during the day to practice, keeping up and continuing to advance on their instrument, someone who’s always available to rehearse during the working day, someone who has a professional level instrument and working etiquette, can contribute as performer and teacher to those who are currently students in the community, and who brings the wealth of some years of diverse playing experience with them. Hopefully the professional accumulates knowledge and aquires skills over a lifetime. Time is the last element which is always part of the professionl’s description. A professional accomplishment isn’t a one shot deal: it’s expressed over a lifetime, and can’t be gauged by a single event like a competition or a race or a test, a single show, or throughout one or two years. You can’t take a single snap in time of a talented student and call the student a professional because of her talent and skill levels. Whatever a single job looks like, whether its of genious or as boring as all get out, there’s the professional the next morning working on improving it, overcoming the problems that got in the way. The next morning and the next, for all the mornings of her world. If that’s not the real world, I don’t know what the “real world” means.
After Richard Rodzinski went through all the exceptions to the professinal he finally concluded with one absolute rule:
“At our competition we also do not accept anyone whose principal livelihood is derived from giving performances or teaching piano.”
Isn’t that the only defining rule?
My background is in Fine Art, specifically painting. In the late 70’s while an Honor Student, I learned that in producing a working definition for the word “art”, the first three words of that definition must begin: “Based on esthetics…” Esthetics separate the extraordinary from the ordinary. As a responsible society, we were once charged with the responsibility to learn, appreciate and reward the difference. If a nine-year old child contributes his/her voice to a professional chorus, and the end result is an experience in a qualitative mode for the audience, that child is demonstrating a talent that is extraordinary. Presently, newspapers are dropping Art & Culture critics for a couple of reasons, but primarily because as sculptor Richard Serra correctly observed: “In Europe, people spend their money on art and culture, whereas in America, people spend their money on sports and entertainment.” A few years ago, I predicted that by the year 2008, all required university texts whose titles address The History of Art, will, and certainly should be, re-titled to read The History of Esthetic Experiences, because today’s scholars, critics and publishers are uninterested in and/or incapable of defining what presently passes for as…art. James L. Weaver, MFA
Those without talent or skill, including the critics who cannot discern it are the most adamant about making the amateur/professional distinction, i.e. “who are you to question my opinion? I’m a professional.”
Those working in the critical establishments avoid judgments of vituosity or craftsmanship. It makes them vulnerable to attacks on their authority. Instead, their critiques use purely subjective measures, such as “rawness” or “sincerity”. These are not open to dispute…nor does it take a tuned ear or eye to note them.