Friday, April 29, 2005
I Don't Wanna Work, I Just Want To Bang On Me Drum All Day
The short answer to David's question is this: different models work best for different people. Some composers love having academic jobs and find working with students stimulating and inspiring. Others find academia oppressive and overly politicised, and with too high an entry cost. Some composers can find a way to scrape together a living from commissions and lectures and consulting and writing and thrive on the variety. Others find that the stability of a non-music or arts-administration 8-5 job affords them the mental and financial security that they require in order to be able to afford to put energy into composing. None of this is to say that everybody ends up in the situation that best meets their needs -- academic jobs in particular are pretty hard to come by.
The long answer is considerably longer, and in two parts:
1. This question ties in nicely with Kyle Gann's recent post on the romanticization of the poverty of the composer and said poverty's alleged positive influence on creative output. He and I agree that the notion is bunk. The key quote with respect to David's question is "Every composer knows how your art improves: produce a lot of it, which requires loads of time and freedom from exhausting day jobs. Everyone knows how you gain the technique needed to increase your work’s scale and ambition: by getting the practical experience of being performed." This is not to say that no composer has ever flourished in poverty -- Kyle mentions Partch -- but as a generalization I think it's true that practice is the surest route to success. Any day-job at all, be it academic, corporate, or otherwise, takes away composing time. The standard argument in favor of academic jobs is that more time is available for composing, and it's probably partly true, but I know academic composers who do all of their substantial composing for the year during academic vacations. It's also worth pointing out that supporting oneself entirely on commission, even if you have enough of a reputation that you can command large fees, is a lot of work too -- you have to find where the money is at, and then persuade them to give it to you instead of somebody else, which requires its own non-compositional skill set.
2. So what, if anything, can we do about it? Yes, we can try to raise more money, or pass larger NEA budgets. Yes, we should try to prevent academic composition jobs from being eliminated and composition programs gutted or killed. Yes we can and should do a better job of educating people from a young age about the value of the non-commercial arts and the importance of philanthropic support -- this last is especially important. But ultimately we need to face the fact that some of the old economic models are in trouble, and that the trouble is probably structural and thus long-term rather than short term. We need to accept the decline of the old systems with grace and dignity rather than with the anger and indignance I so often see, and look proactively toward new models better suited to the modern world. Most importantly, we should do our best to see the change as an opportunity to breathe new life into the new classical music field.
posted by Galen H. Brown
12:29 AM
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