THE MUSIC SALON: classical music, popular culture, philosophy and anything else that catches my fancy...
Sunday, February 24, 2013
Leaving Your Vocation
This account of a singer who stopped being a professional classical singer, rings quite true. I went through a somewhat similar experience. Some quotes:
When you are a classical musician at a professional level there is no
question about who or what you are. Your life automatically has a
purpose.
Because I was a musician, I did not go to college. I attended a
top-tier music conservatory, which, if you are unfamiliar, is basically a
ferociously competitive vocational school for people with profound and
highly specific talents and skills. The best conservatories don’t admit
students on the basis of potential to attain professional
caliber. By the time a classical musician is college aged she has to
already be at that level or she’ll likely never acquire enough of an
edge to succeed. Thus classical musicians are trained at classical
music… and virtually nothing else. When you are a classical musician at a
professional level there is no question about who or what you are, or
what you do. Ever.
Except
that sometimes, oftener than any classical musician I know has ever
admitted, it does eventually become a question. Statistically, of
course, it must be so. There are not enough places, in the great parlous
game of musical chairs that is the world of classical music
performance, for everyone to sit. In the end some people just don’t have
the chops to make a go of it. Some people just don’t have the patience.
Classical musicians, like other working artists, deal with
preternatural amounts of penury and shit-shoveling in order to stay
competitive. Sometimes shit just happens—a car crash or an addiction
hitting bottom or the realization that someone’s got to put shoes on the
baby. Sometimes the interest, the talent, and the opportunity just
can’t all be made to happen at the same time. One’s ability to be that
thing, a professional classical musician, gets lost, or given up. Or
taken away. Or maybe all those things. And so does that sturdy,
symbolic, insular but sometimes magical identity.
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