Being a 25 year-old musician is a lot different from being a 15 year-old one. At 15, playing an instrument is one of the things “smart” kids do. At 15, there are any number of competitions into which your parents can throw you. At 15, you don’t have to make a living. When you’re 25, the competitions still exist, but, all of a sudden, you’re not the center of attention anymore. All of a sudden, you’re not the best. All of sudden, you have rent. Is this really what you wanted to do with your life?
We all have to figure out what we like doing for its own sake, rather than for the attention it gleans us. The college years are an optimal time to explore different studies and immerse oneself in activities that not only broaden horizons, but also kindle a whole new idea of what we may want to do with ourselves once we leave school. Conservatories, being vocational schools, do not offer these opportunities so much.
Barring extraordinary circumstances, I would urge any student not to attend a conservatory for their undergraduate years. The conflicts between musical and other duties sure to arise at a traditional college will help clarify a young person’s relationship to music: were all those hours practicing Chopin Etudes spent for the adoration of others, the satisfaction of myself, or a mixture of the two? Given appropriate self-discipline, no college workload will absolutely preclude one from practicing or composing adequately to develop one’s skills. Furthermore, colleges transmit more intensely than conservatories skills of broad importance – the ability to communicate well (writing and speaking) and to be communicated to (reading and listening) being the most salient among them.
Should after this stressful time the young musician still desire to pursue music professionally, then surely he or she is more likely to have made the right decision for themselves. A conservatory-based masters program could be the next logical step. But maybe the interest in more mainstream professions will have been developed instead. Or perhaps the Chopin Etudes will have gathered dust as the midnight oil was burned reading about archeology or physics. Should one decide then to leave music behind, surely in this leaving one has learned something important about oneself.
These thoughts come to mind as I prepare syllabi for my (conservatory) courses this fall. I love teaching where I teach, and I love my students. I just hope they’re making the right decisions.
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I’m a college undergraduate in music performance, and I don’t agree at all with this statement:
Given appropriate self-discipline, no college workload will absolutely preclude one from practicing or composing adequately to develop one’s skills.
There have been weeks where I have had to choose between practice or sleep. Having the college work load on top of music studies, which are intense enough as it is, requires more than self-discipline to really advance your musical skills … it requires self-sacrifice.
I think David’s got some good points, but I don’t think this type of advice can ever be universal. By stressing the university workload as a primary filter in whether you’re really suited to a life in music it ignores other factors that conservatories can provide and unique stresses that conservatories provide (such as competition, back-stabbing and idea theft, all things I experienced at Juilliard). ;)
And it seems to downplay life itself as the filter. That is inevitable. Young musicians can just not avoid the pain of reckoning life choices with $$$ and the true risk of success. The self-important and grandiose delusions of youth are absolutely necessary for a healthy artistic life. Conservatories promote this type of delusional thinking, while colleges generally seem to turn artists into role-playing careerists who seem to believe that the arts are a job.
Also, the real world gets in the way of the artist in a much more profound way. How do you prepare young musicians for the choices of having kids or not, leaving academia for a better paying job, relationship disasters, health problems, the plain old crap that gets in the way of music. Career disappointment. How can you tell a composer that she may go for years without a performance?
One thing that EVERY teacher in a university and a conservatory should do and generally doesn’t (because I only heard it once) is tell your students that one out of 30 OR LESS in this class will be active in music 20 years from now. When I had a teacher tell me that, that alone was a shock that prompted some deep consideration. And I instantly knew it was me. And it’s turned out to be true, FWIW.
And the Juilliard cafeteria was one place I learned as much about the real musical world as any school I attended. (I’m LSU undergrad, Juilliard grad, finishing at Tulane grad – so a combo college->conservatory->college was my path). We’d have lunch everyday with some of the most brilliant successful musicians in the world. The inspiration alone was worth it. Plus, the people I met there, who are giants now (and don’t remember me for my music now heh) could have been instrumental in my career – if I hadn’t gotten sidetracked with activism and jobs etc…
ALL music schools are factories for disappointment. By de-emphasizing the dream and attempting to simulate the real world, there may be some benefit but again, young people need to dream big. To dream absolutely as big as they can. It’s how great art is born. Not in the mediocrity and disaster that is the real world. And frankly, it doesn’t matter that people make wrong choices. As an artist we should be concerned not with the losers and how they’ll fare, but with those who are going to create the great music we’ll love and play and helping them to become great. The losers do not matter in the arts. And I don’t mean the career losers, like me, I mean the people who drop out of music who don’t have the excitement and the drive to continue.
Good thread David.
Interesting posts. However, I will hazard a guess these are all written by Americansunder the agr of 35. I, too , am an American but I still remember what a friend raised in West Africa and a professional organist has shown me about “career” — how you earn you living and whether it comes from something you love, is irrelevant. Naturally, the extreme cases of doing something you absolutely loathe or love greatly are uncommon. Oftimes, people discover aspects to love about their career and even those who do what they love develop other hobbies or interests outside of it for balance.
As for the “losers” – the ones who drop out because they don’t have the “drive and excitement” sounds to me very American in its cultural view of career success as those who “quit”. Honestly I think these “losers” should not be ignored by artists as they most likely become our audience. Therein lies the fault of some of the conservatories — they play for each other who are “committed” and neglect a large potential reservoir of listeners with this attitude.
Oh, a larger point I want to make too is that at the end of your life, I doubt you will spend much time gloating or opining about your career (although it may be a fond source of pride or great memories) — you’ll be more concerned about who will keep you company before you die (which, from several years working in a nursing home, I saw often).
I couldn’t agree more that music schools and conservatories are wastes of time. Before I get flamed, I’d like to say that my reasons for this relate to the fact that people, be they musicians, composers, nuclear physicists, writers, journalists, etc., would benefit greatly from a liberal arts education, preferably one with a common core of studies that teaches one how to think critically. I don’t remember half of what I studied in college, but it did teach me how to think, which is invaluable.
I’ve known many people in the physical sciences who were not well-rounded, who knew physics and that’s that. That’s fine—perhaps it makes them good at what they do, I don’t know. But it also makes for a boring group of individuals who know little, and care little, for anything outside their field. This is no different in music. Sure, there’s benefit to be had in hanging out with performers, etc. So do it in grad school, after one has had a well-rounded education. Music school is a trade school, and is fine at preparing people for a particular musical career. But it doesn’t give a very rounded education, and I just think musicians/composers especially need to be exposed to other disciplines.
I also think a conservatory education is…well…conservative. And limiting.
Yes, life is rough! :) and full of odd turns. just like good music. I don’t think anything in the world is remotely a waste of time. Granted, I have often wished that I was more ambitious when I was younger, but then again, I was a first a wierdo DJ, and then played pschedelic guitar rock music at parties, and really had no idea that I had an orchestral composer in me until I was 20. It just wasn’t part of my upbringing up in vermont to go see the orchestra. however, was it the right decision? maybe if where I am now is where it leads! viva la adventure!
that all said – i’ve been impressed with my undergrad friends at the manhattan shcool of music, quoting Hagel and everything. brats! but fun brats. but they’ve probably never seen the bread and puppet theater.
David, that’s exactly what a VERY rich composer friend of mine at Juilliard was told by his parents. (Imagine thick Park Ave. accent).
Dahhhhling, but Juilliard is juuuuust a ‘trade school.’
If I had it to do all over again, I would probably begin with a liberal arts degree.
Instead, I was so focused that I took three degrees in music. and, I must admit
that much of the coursework was a waste of time.
Follow Harry Partch’s lead: go to the public library and educate yourself!
In response to David Toub’s comments, most scientists I know are interested in a wide variety of subjects. I’m a physicist with an undergraduate degree from a midwestern liberal arts college (Bradley University. Jerry Hadley was a student there at the same time.). As a freshman I was trying to decide between physics and music as major. A physics professor worked out a way to take sufficient classes for both. I settled on physics, figuring I could be a physicist with music as a hobby better than I could be a musician with physics as a hobby. Plus I have no talent. And the music students were kind of jerks who had trouble with the idea of a non-musician in their midst. So here I am years later, a middle-aged physicist who composes in his spare time and lurks on new music sites hoping to learn something. (I never got over that no talent problem.) The point of all this is that because I went to a liberal arts school I learned about music and many other things, all of which make me a better person and citizen. Now I’m the audience for those music students who didn’t think I belonged with them.
If I as a scientist benefitted from learning music, then musicians also benefit from learning science. And literature. And economics. All of it broadens your horizons and may eventually work its way into your music, either in what you write or how you perform. If nothing else, you have to live in the real world, so you might as well learn what everybody else out there is up to.
I think David Toub makes some valid points about the value of a liberal education.
One of the smartest kids I ever knew went to Rochester specifically because he could have a double major – engineering and music. And he did it in 4 years – a truly exceptional individual. Last I heard he was pulling down big bucks at a Washington think tank and playing the pipe organ at the National Cathedral from time to time.
I think you could make a case in a liberal arts college that music only be taken as a second major or as a minor. The thought of graduating from a Bradley or any other good small school with a degree in music is daunting. Kids these days often go into considerable debt to finish a 4-year program and they are counting on a good job later to help pay off the loans.
Sad to say, the state of music these days pretty much requires a person to have a day job – so the forward-looking universities should be taking reality into account when working out their requirements for a degree in music.
I agree, some good points. and probably all very poignant to David. However, I agree, this kind of thing can never be universal. Personally, I agree that the conservatory atmosphere is not always the best for growth, but that depends on the person. I believe strongly in liberal educations and learning about everything you can get your hands on, but that can be done in any environment, it doesn’t take a traditional college, it takes a good student. In fact some times, in my experience, traditional colleges thwart those kinds of endevours. After all, especially in dealing with the arts, it is all so interconnected, (music performance, composers, art and artists, authors, poets, philosophers etc…) we should be learning it all, so that we can understand all of its connections, or at least make the attempt at understanding, you never know who, or what idea, is going to spark the thought that gets turned into a masterpiece.
having taught in private and public institutions its my observation that any any music school technique can easily be over emphasized at the expense opening a score and understanding what is going on.
i strongly feel that any student that has good work ethic and an open mind can be successful. i think its easy for the more affluent families to feel that entrance to the more elite academic institutions and music conservatories guarantees a ‘career’ which leads to the uninspired outcomes many of these institutions create; young adults who chase a ‘career’ instead of ‘ideas’.
[...] Barring extraordinary circumstances, I would urge any student not to attend a conservatory for their undergraduate years. (RTWT) [...]