Hard Truths

CORRECTION APPENDED, see below.

I want to go back to something Sarah was writing about last week - the idea that our conservatories and music academies are currently overflowing with aspiring musicians, many of whom are simply never going to find permanent, steady employment in this field. Sarah was very kind to suggest that the problem here is simply an issue of supply outstripping demand, but I'll take it one step further: many college students majoring in music are simply not good enough musicians to ever have a real hope of making it in the professional world, and no one is telling them this!

This is a bigger problem than I think we want to acknowledge. It certainly doesn't apply to all schools - Philadelphia's Curtis Institute, for example, is still small and exclusive enough that it accepts only the very, very best young musicians, all of whom have at least a chance of finding success in this highly competitive field - but I believe it applies to most. I attended a fairly prestigious conservatory with a strong reputation and plenty of alumni spread across the music world, and I was consistently shocked by the presence of students who were clearly deluding themselves in pursuing a career in music. I'm not talking about other violists who I somehow felt didn't measure up to my own abilities here. (If anything, I have a bad habit of always assuming that I'm the worst player in any given room, and my college studio was a pretty non-competitive one in any case.) I'm talking about people with little to no sense of rhythm, pitch, or musicianship, who were somehow being allowed to train professionally for a job which they would clearly never be able to perform.

Now, I know that everyone, regardless of profession, knew people in college who were just sloughing along, wasting their parents' money and minoring in drug use and slacking while doing just enough work towards their degree to avoid flunking out. These people presumably found work of one sort or another after graduation, even if it had little to do with the profession they were ostensibly training for in school, so what's the big deal if a few wannabe musicians end up chucking the business after they leave school?

But this is exactly the problem. With a few exceptions such as pre-med, most undergraduate majors at American liberal arts colleges are designed not just to train you for a specific job, but to give you a complete and well-rounded education that will serve you well professionally even if your life takes an unexpected turn after you leave school. Music schools are different - in fact, they're less like colleges than they are like trade schools, academies for the focused instruction of a single topic. The upshot is that people who graduate with a Bachelor of Music degree are usually trained and prepared for one and only one professional sphere. And it is a sphere that many of them are wholly unprepared to enter, and will have little chance of ever breaking into.

The more self-aware of this unfortunate group may realize quickly that they are out of their depth as performers, and seek another professional path before it's too late. But what most non-musicians don't realize is that, once you leave school, you receive almost no feedback on your playing from other musicians (auditions are anonymous exercises, remember,) with the result that it is entirely possible for an inadequate musician to continue bumbling along on the fringes of the business, convinced that only bad luck and vast conspiracies are keeping them from full and satisfying employment.

This is a tough problem to attack, especially for those of us who have had a modicum of success in the business. Among freelance musicians, there is a very real (if frequently unspoken) belief that those with full-time gigs have just gotten lucky. In the same way, freelancers who have trouble getting even menial gigs are often convinced that those at the top of the gig ladder have gotten there not through superior musicianship, but by playing the political game. (Fueling these delusions, of course, are the undeniable facts that a) luck does play a role, albeit a small one, in a successful audition, and b) there are political games being played in most professional situations.) It's a simple human defense mechanism: admitting failure is much, much harder than finding an alternate explanation that involves someone else's sinister machinations.

So what's the solution? I'm tempted simply to say that conservatories need to stop admitting so many students, and teachers at the collegiate level have to start being honest with their underperforming charges. You could even make a case that undergraduate schools that aren't prepared to seriously train top young musicians for the professional world have no business even offering a music major. It's fine for the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople to have an orchestra, and even to offer private lessons. But a major indicates that, after four years, the school expects that you will be prepared for a career, and most undergraduate music departments can't come close to fulfilling that promise for most students.

I know that it isn't as simple as that. Teachers are supposed to encourage their students to improve, and if they bail on all but the obvious prodigies, a lot of promising young musicians might never have a chance to fulfill their potential. (I might actually have fallen into that group, since I know for a fact that I didn't work nearly hard enough in my first couple of years at Oberlin, and only woke up to the reality of my situation in my junior year.) And maybe this whole thing isn't as big a problem as I think it is - I know more than a few former classmates who've gone on to non-performing jobs on the fringes of the music business and are perfectly happy.

But I also know a lot of musicians who were probably never going to be good enough to make it, but were never told so, or never believed it if they were. And after years of watching success elude them, I've watched them slip into some very, very dark places. And every time I see it, I just wonder what might have happened if, back when they first considered majoring in music, someone had taken them aside, and said: hey, c'mon - we both know this isn't for you.

CORRECTION/APOLOGY, appended 01/08: In a response to Don Picard's comment below, which references the book, "Mozart in the Jungle" by Blair Tindall, I explained my skepticism of Ms. Tindall's conclusions in part by claiming that she had been sloppy and inaccurate on several important points in an article written for the New York Times about the Minnesota Orchestra in 2004. A wounded and mystified Ms. Tindall subsequently replied in the comments, as well as in private communications to me, that she could remember writing no such article, and in fact that she didn't work for the Times in 2004.

She is absolutely correct, and I was clearly the sloppy and inaccurate one. Somehow, in a raft of follow-up correspondence (most of it written more than a year after the article ran) with concerned musicians' union leaders, Ms. Tindall's name got substituted for the name of the actual author of the piece, Cori Ellison. I've deleted my original comment containing the incorrect assertions. I've reposted the part of my comment that was relevant to Don Picard's original question at the bottom of the comments. My sincerest apologies not only to Ms. Tindall, but to anyone who was misinformed by my sloppiness.