Life and Options

I just read something that made me realize how much things have changed since I was a young person thinking about what route to pursue with my life. Here is the link: My Parents Give Me $28,000 a Year. Give it a read. Here are some quotes:

Not long ago, my wife, a composer, asked me if I would ever advise a student from a low-income family to pursue a career in the arts.

“What do you mean? Of course.”

“Really?”

“If that’s what they wanted to do, and they had talent–”

“But they don’t have money.”

“If a student were really passionate and talented, she’d figure out a way.” That’s always been something my parents told me. “Think about what you’d do if money were no object. And then work hard. You’ll find a way to make money.”

“Your parents give you $28,000 a year. They paid for your tuition. They made it possible for you to do what you’d do if money were no object—because money was no object for you.”

I got a little defensive at this point. 

With the arts, a student may be accepted to an arts program without a scholarship and find herself $200,000 in debt before realizing she isn’t going to be able to get a real paycheck with her arts degree—at least in the next decade. Sure, there are exceptions. But for every exception there are many more who are impoverished by their arts education or by not being able to take on more than part-time or temporary work as they struggle early in their careers.

There are a lot more details at the link, but this gives the general idea. Yes, a guaranteed $2,000 a month can really help you pursue a career in the arts. Well, it makes it possible to attempt a career, but with no guarantee of any success, of course. Perhaps it just enables you to be mediocre.

This got me thinking about what enabled me to pursue a career in music and that led to a comparison of that time with now. I was born in 1951 so I came of age in the late 60s when popular culture was in ferment and everything seemed to be changing rapidly. All the ordinary careers seemed extremely dull and the meagre rates of pay hardly seemed compensation. I became completely committed to a career in music when I discovered classical music. It cost little to attend university those days and the entrance requirements were not very hard. You could save a bit of money and pay for your own education, no need for a loan. Student loans were rare in those days (bear in mind that this was in Canada in the early 1970s). I even saved money and was able to spend a year studying music in Spain, which was really cheap back then. I did two degrees at McGill and did get a student loan. But it only amounted to around $2,000 so no big deal. It still took me a few years to pay off. I was lucky enough to get a job teaching in a conservatory as soon as I graduated. The pay was low, but adequate. So I was able to completely support myself, in a very modest way, for my entire career. No government grants.

But you know what?, as we discover from the above link, all is different now. Honestly, if getting an adequate education as an artist involves getting $200,000 in debt, or even a fraction of that, then you should really find a different career, because starting out with that hanging over your head is going to ruin your life.

The exception: those very, very few people who have an enormous amount of creativity and who really cannot do other than pursue some vocation or another. But they are pretty much in the same position as a Franciscan monk: you are essentially going to pursue a life devoted to the accomplishment of certain goals, irrespective of any material reward. In other words, you are basically taking a vow of poverty.

Jordan Peterson gives us the lowdown on the curse of creativity:

Passion and Success

Norman Lebrecht at Slipped Disc posts a brief essay about the tribulations of auditions: "Many musicians are destroyed by success, but no one is destroyed by failure." This echoes a comment by Joseph Heller, the author of Catch 22. In reply to a question about which is better for your writing, success or failure he answered "failure." When asked which he preferred he answered "success."

Brinton Smith, principal cello of the Houston Symphony is trying to console aspiring musicians having to do difficult auditions:

It takes incredible bravery to take part in this system, and every player who does has my respect and gratitude. Remember the words of Kipling- triumph and disaster are both imposters. We need jobs of course, and have to do what it takes until we find one, but we didn’t go into music to find a job, we went into music because of what it means to us and in the world. Guard and protect that belief and that passion, remember why you play, and never stop learning or trying to improve, even if you win.

Many musicians are destroyed by success, but no one is destroyed by failure. If there’s any lesson to my own career it’s that every failure is temporary. Play without regrets and play music- we are rooting for you.

This is the kind of standard boilerplate that we all hear early in our careers. The intent is simply to encourage you to keep trying until you succeed. But that sentence about musicians being destroyed by success but no one is destroyed by failure is just nonsense. Follow the link and read the comments:

What a pile of rubbish. Many a fine musician is destroyed every day by the constant beatings at auditions, and their ‘failure’ to win a job. I’m sure the view from his ivory tower (with health insurance and holiday pay) is delightful and his pompous words will resonate with the idealistic 19 year olds

Or:

While you need to love the music to put in the work, who except trust fund babies or those with spouses who earn enough to support them can prattle on about getting into music purely for the love of it and not caring about compensation or feel the effects of constant failure? It’s this nonsense that helps society feel okay about devaluing the worth of artists and feel they aren’t worth paying a living wage because somehow being able to eat and pay bills isn’t as important to a cellist as it is to an accountant.

Towards the bottom of the comments are some lengthy ones also worth reading, including one explaining his view further by Brinton Smith, so go read them yourself.

I used to do a lot of concerts with a very fine flute-player. He was working hard at orchestral excerpts, preparing himself for an audition for an orchestral position. He mentioned to me that around two hundred flute-players applied for every opening. He did eventually win the principal flute position in the local orchestra and he has been there ever since (about twenty-five years). The best musicians, who also persevere, for years if necessary, do often win orchestral positions, but if you just review the numbers you will see that the vast majority simply will not. There are too many aspiring musicians graduating from music schools and too few orchestras to absorb them. There is, in other words, a permanent disparity between jobs and those who want them.

What keeps this Ferris Wheel turning is the passion that attracts people to music. Music is a transcendental art form that rises above all the trials and tribulations in this world. It is a perennial comfort and inspiration. But it is also a particularly difficult career to pursue and one that for most people, will inevitably end in failure. Young musicians really deserve the respect of being told the odds. If you are a flute-player the odds of your winning any one audition might be 200 to 1. But even if you reconcile yourself to doing 200 auditions, this is still no guarantee that you will win a position.

If your career choice involves being a soloist, then the odds are much worse! For example, my career choice was basically "international guitar virtuoso" and while I did pretty well--few guitarists get multiple opportunities for nation-wide broadcasts of their performances of major concertos with well-known orchestras--the reality was and is that there are perhaps five guitarists in the world at any given time who have prosperous careers as soloists. All the rest eke out a living by teaching.

I think that if we were to re-word the claim about success and failure it might come out like this: Some musicians who achieve success do so by compromising their artistic integrity; those who do not succeed may do so either because they did not compromise or because there was no market for what they had to offer. As Jordan Peterson has pointed out, it is extraordinarily difficult to monetize creativity.

This is the Victoria Symphony Orchestra conducted by Tania Miller playing the Symphony in Three Movements by Stravinsky. The principal flute is my old friend, Richard Volet.

Role Models

The function of role models is often talked about and I can vouch for their importance. As a young Canadian classical musician I really had no role models. After running through a succession of teachers and finding most of them wanting, I had to go to Spain for a year to learn my trade as a classical guitarist. I see now that there really did not exist a niche for me on my return to Canada. Sure, I could find a job teaching at conservatory and university, but trying to hack out a career as a touring performer was pretty much a doomed project. Why? Well, who were the role models? Who, in fact did have a successful career as a classical guitarist in Canada in the late 70s and 80s? The answer is: Liona Boyd. Let's have a listen:

What I was doing could only compete with that if the audience were open to it, which, based on my experience, they were not. Now, I have to confess that I wasn't open to a few things myself! I didn't know how to develop my career, I didn't play programs that were easily accessible, I didn't play the political game and so on. In other words, I played musically challenging concerts and expected the audience to get into it. Well, mostly they weren't interested! I could probably have found more willing audiences in Europe, or perhaps even the US, but my self-deprecating Canadian character wasn't so ready to take that step. The one time I toured Europe, audiences were wildly receptive and when I did my international debut at Wigmore Hall in London, critic John Duarte, who had heard everyone, was very positive. But moving to Europe or the US always felt like a bridge too far and audiences in Canada were just not so interested. Hey, they had the fabulous Liona!

This is what I had to offer:

So one of the obvious functions of role models is to show you what is possible in your environment.

It's Your Career!

I see that the folks at The Practicing Musician linked to my post on talking to the audience. Thanks, that's much appreciated. So let me do another one on those practical issues that come up with regard to career development.

I pursued a career as a classical soloist for nearly thirty years and, while I can't say I was as successful as I had hoped, I did learn a few things. One important lesson is to be objective about yourself. This is incredibly hard to do! For one thing, one's identity as a musician is bound up with one's identity as a person and it is so hard to see oneself from another perspective. My problem, for example, was that I tended to worry excessively about my technical competence as a "guitar virtuoso". What I needed to do was accept my limitations, realize my strengths and choose repertoire that enabled me to take advantage of my strengths and please audiences. That "pleasing audiences" thing is really important! Instead, I did too much virtuoso repertoire that tended to reveal my limitations and not my strengths. I got into this because I kept thinking I was in my developing stage too long. Long after what sort of guitarist I was became clear, I still kept doing pieces to develop my virtuosity.

Let me explain a bit. Since I started late, I had to work hard to become competent at technique. But I did the work and mastered what you need to to be a concert guitarist. Evidence of this was that I had several engagements to play the Concierto de Aranjuez by Rodrigo and the Guitar Concerto by Villa-Lobos with orchestra. You can't do those pieces unless you have the chops. But loud fast scales are not really my strength. What is, is tone color, dynamics, phrasing and counterpoint. This is stuff I am particularly good at. Musical stuff, not technical stuff. So what I should have done is chosen, from the repertoire that audiences really want to hear, those pieces where I can really shine. Perhaps this might be a good example:

Or this, a more standard piece of repertoire:

Now of course, each musician has to figure this out for themselves and it will be different from every other musician. You are unique! Don't try to copy someone else's technique, or musicianship or career. You have to present yourself as yourself. That's what audiences want: they want to connect with you as an individual human being on the personal level. They want your personal performance of the music, your individual perspective. I know that career consultants talk about this as "branding", but that seems to strike the wrong note for me. You are not a corporation, you are a human being! If you want to be authentically yourself, then thinking in terms of branding might not be the way to go.

Record yourself. Listen to yourself. And figure out what sort of musician you are. Then look at what audiences seem to like and put it all together. You might end up with something like this:

502nd Post

One of my posts on Sunday was, without me noticing, my 500th post. So I think I will take a moment and have a look at the progress of this blog.

The main thing I notice is that I learn a great deal from posting. The obvious way is that most posts have to be researched to some extent. But there is a more interesting and less obvious way. Doing the blog is an exploration of my own engagement with music over some forty-six years. I tell anecdotes from that whole period and it puts it in perspective for me. I start to get a more or less objective sense of my own life and career while telling it to the blogosphere. Of course, this is not what I am actually trying to do.

My real purpose with the blog is to talk to people about music. I have always had a kind of instinctive attraction to teaching. I think you only start to be sure of what you know when you try to tell it to others. In so doing you discover things you didn't know you knew, you discover gaps in what you thought you knew and sometimes you even discover new things and connections between them.

One thing I have discovered is that it is difficult to have objectivity about your career and abilities when you are in the middle of it. You really don't think about these things, you are too busy learning music, playing concerts and teaching. Now that I am away from all that I realize some odd things. I was trying as hard as I could to be a guitar virtuoso and came pretty close.

At my peak I was playing the Rodrigo Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra and doing a pretty good job--something that relatively few guitarists can do. I actually think that I may have been the first Canadian guitarist to perform the piece with orchestra. One performance was recorded for nation-wide broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. They also recorded my performance of the Villa-Lobos Concerto with the CBC Vancouver Orchestra. Another CBC broadcast was of a solo and chamber recital in which I played the Manuel Ponce 20 Variations and Fugue on Folias de Espana. That is one of the longest and hardest pieces in the repertoire.

So, a strong performer at least. But I had to work very, very hard to sustain that because I am not a natural virtuoso. I'm also not quite consistent enough--sometimes I made mistakes. The great virtuosi are like machines and rarely make mistakes. While I was struggling to become and remain a virtuoso, I was neglecting something much more interesting and important: I can compose music. I have always composed music, even before I was a musician. The first time I saw someone reading from a score I looked closely at it and then went off in a corner and scratched down an imitation of it on a piece of paper, then ran back and said "play this!" I was nine years old. I taught myself how to read music, something few people do. When it comes to understanding and creating music I have more natural talent than I do as a guitar virtuoso.

I have been composing music for at least as long as I have been a musician--forty-six years. But for all but the last five or so years, I didn't really take it seriously. It was something I did, but I barely noticed that almost no other performers of my acquaintance did the same. I was friends with composers, but didn't feel as if I was one of them. I did take some informal composition lessons at one point and wrote a piece for two guitars and harpsichord that was very well received by the audience. This was in 1977 and I much later realized that it was the first 'process' piece for guitar, preceding Steve Reich's own piece for multiple guitars by at least a decade.

So if I had been a lot more self-aware and open-minded, I would have switched from performance to composition back in the 70s. But many of we humans are not so self-aware! For some reason I became fixated on being a guitarist: that was my identity. Even though I could compose and was interested in it, I couldn't imagine myself being a composer. This might have been partly because the only models I had of being a musician up until I was twenty years old, were performers. I had never met a composer and probably thought that they only existed in books or the distant past. This may be why most musicians tend to come from families of musicians. They get exposed to different models from an early age and this gives them a wide field of possibilities. If I had met a composer when I was nine years old, that might have been an inspiration.

But enough of this. I'm not a narcissist and don't usually indulge in a lot of autobiography in this blog. Sure, I tell anecdotes from my experience, but they are meant to illustrate a point. Let's end with the first piece of classical music that really made a big impact on me and started my 'conversion'. The Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto:

LIfe vs Career

Missy Mazzoli is a young American composer who has pursued an unconventional path outside of academia. For a long time, generations, the only place to survive as a composer was either within a traditional music department, who were very supportive of certain avant-garde styles, such as serialism, or as a commercial composer writing film scores or, lower down, commercial jingles: "You Deserve a Break Today!"

Ms. Mazzoli instead, as we learn in this article, became an "indie" contemporary composer.

“For our first tour outside New York, we played a tremendous variety of places” that mostly welcomed indie rock bands, not classical music ensembles, including “a kind of punk gallery outside Detroit,” Mazzoli recalls. “The audience was standing around drinking beer, and they couldn’t have been more appreciative. It was so inspiring.”

Here is an interesting clip in which she talks about her kind of career in music:

The thing that most strikes me in this interview is her comment about the distinction between "a life in music" and "a career in music". I was struck by it, because it is not something I have quite clarified in my own mind, but once I heard those words I knew exactly what she was talking about. My mother, for example, a traditional Canadian fiddler, had no career whatsoever in music. But she had a life in music! She played for dances her whole life, but probably half the time, never got paid. I'm sure that Ms. Mazzoli, has her revenue a bit better organized. She never quite explains the difference between life and career in music, but perhaps I could speculate a bit.

Living in music comes from your nature. Most of the time I have some sort of music running around my brain, it's just who I am. I compose because something comes to me. A career is a different thing: it is a calculation based on your estimates of what is needed to reach out to other people, how to maximize your exposure and visibility, how to project the right kind of public image and so on. I'm not criticizing this, because if Ms. Mazzoli hadn't figured out some of this we would never hear of her nor her music. So, the building of a career is important. I suspect that what she is implying is that a career in music needs to be built on a life in music, otherwise it is a bit of a fraud. At least, that is what I think is true.

Here is a complete composition by Ms. Mazzoli:

My Brilliant Career

Once before I put up a humorous (Ed.: it was humorous? I thought it was tragic!) post about my career as a performer.  Here it is:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.mx/2011/10/highlights-of-my-career.html

I was making the point that performers, well, some performers, well, me, tend to ignore some basic truths about why audiences go to concerts. Let me share a little anecdote that illustrates the point. For a while, as a young artist looking to find an audience, I roomed with an elderly lady whose son was a musicologist and organist. At this time I was very worried about having enough technique to be a real virtuoso as that was what I felt was important. Part of my work was practicing some etudes every day including the Estudio brillante by Tarrega. Here is how it goes:

That is from a tv documentary about Julian Bream. Lovely and cheerful piece! But I was doing it as a technical study and so how lovely it was, wasn't really the issue. In any case, my landlady used to say, "play that piece I like, the brilliant one..." She thought it was great. I thought it was a bit halting and uneven. By the way, if you listen very closely to Bream's performance you can hear quite a few technical flaws in it as well.

This, my landlady's liking of this piece, was a useful piece of information, had I not ignored it. I should have thought, "aha, so that's what they want to hear!" But instead, though I worked it up to a pretty good level, I never played it in public! Hard to believe. What prevented me was my aesthetic evaluation that the piece was a very lightweight sparkler with no real musical substance to justify the hard work. Well, yeah! But so what? If audiences want to hear it, then that justifies the work, not some obscure aesthetic criteria. After all, I played the Etude No. 1 by Villa-Lobos for many years in public and it has even less aesthetic justification.

Highlights of My Career?

Wow, that is a distressingly dull title! But don't worry, the post won't be dull. That title is what we in the writing biz call 'ironic'.

Whenever I read the bios of musicians lately I can barely restrain the urge to re-write them for comic effect. They are absurdly dull and all read like they came out of the same mechanically-programmed word processor. Here is one paragraph from the Afiara Quartet's bio:

In addition to its win at the 2008 CAG Competition, the Quartet claimed top prizes at 2010 Banff International String Quartet Competition and the 2008 Munich ARD International Music Competition.  From 2007-2009, the Quartet was the Morrison Fellowship Quartet-in-Residence at San Francisco State University's International Center for the Arts (ICA), where the members were teaching assistants to their mentor ensemble, the Alexander String Quartet.  One of two fellowship quartets at the 2008 Aspen Festival's Center for Advanced Quartet Studies, the Afiara Quartet also serves as Artist-in-Residence at Lake Tahoe Music Festival's Education and Outreach Program and is an Affiliate of San Francisco Friends of Chamber Music. The ensemble has been heard on Bavarian Radio, CBC Radio 2, KALW, and was featured in the Road to Banff documentary profiling its participation in the 2007 Banff International String Quartet Competition.

There are eight paragraphs exactly like that! Apart from letting me know that they have done well in a lot of competitions and hooked up with a lot of the right people and places, this doesn't tell me a single thing of interest. It is so bad I'm not even sure you could parody it! There is nothing there that tells me a single thing about this quartet that distinguishes them from every other quartet--apart from their institutional associations. The only factlet revealed is that they are all Canadian, which as a Canadian myself I find intriguing. But not a word about where they were born, or even details about the course of their musical education, who they studied with, what sort of performing tradition they might feel themselves part of. Is it the Julliard Quartet? Do they emulate them or the reverse?

So to counter this mind-deadening crap, let me do my own musical bio, in my inimitable fashion.

Bryan Townsend has had a checkered career as a performing musician. Son of an accomplished Canadian old-time fiddler, he found music mostly quite dull until his teen years. Hooked on the Beatles, the Stones and Bob Dylan, he played bass, shakily, in bands so bad they had to change their name after every gig. He reincarnated as a folk musician and when given the opportunity to shine at a little talent show where a good choice of repertoire might have been Four Strong Winds, instead he chose to perform, in a state of high anxiety, Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, the ten-minute long dirge by Bob Dylan that only hard-core Dylan fans could really love. Later on, after becoming a classical guitarist and in a much bigger talent festival before an audience of five thousand people, he chose to play one of the more subtle and introverted preludes by Villa-Lobos--not quite the absolutely wrong choice, but pretty near, as he was told by a judge afterwards. In his first recital in his first job as music instructor at a regional conservatory, he chose to play the bizarre avant-garde piece Memorias de "El Cimmaron" by Hans Werner Henze which begins with about a minute of random scrapings on the guitar with a cello bow. Parents of several of his students immediately walked out of the concert. Selected to appear in a New York competition, he again chose odd repertoire by playing a new work by Leo Brouwer that was unfamiliar to everyone. He got beaten by a bassoon player--bassoon!--from Julliard.


Bryan Townsend has usually decided that playing the familiar and charming music that audiences are longing to hear is just too dull and lacking in challenge. So instead he prefers to choose odd or bizarre unfamiliar repertoire that at most perhaps 2% of the audience will actually enjoy.


On the other hand, he has a fantastic sense of timbre, articulation and phrasing. Pianists have come up to him after concerts and praised him for his contrapuntal sense.


Heh.

Would anyone like for me to re-write their bios for them?