 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: EEBaum
Date: 2010-01-09 05:11
Interesting indeed. I probably read it different than a lot of people... to me, much of it demonstrates what's wrong with the "orchestral musician" career path, and makes me less sympathetic to her cause.
Taking out $40,000 in CREDIT CARD DEBT for auditions??? Never making a minor decision, not taking time out for your family, without considering the impact it has on your career?
While I haven't seen Cleveland live, I've been to many concerts of various orchestras that were indeed just like listening to a CD or watching on TV. Stuff is phoned in and apathetic at times. Everyone has bad days, sure, but it's a very rare case indeed, imho, that any orchestra does something wonderful and exciting night after night.
Every single day of his life for years, without break for vacations or holidays, practicing the instrument with hope for a job, while some may call unwavering dedication, I call unhealthy and unbalanced. It is during some of my time off that I "figured out" how not to freak out on stage, and it doesn't involve some mind games you play with yourself (like ignoring the audience, which I find irresponsible).
I'm all about following your dream, but if you follow an expensive, low-paying, stressful dream with little chance of making a living, I will have little sympathy to your plight. You're employed in a very narrow niche profession, of which the applicant-to-job ratio is ridiculous, financially supported largely by benefactors. You can't honestly be expecting everything to come up roses.
I'm not saying this to take sides one way or another in a labor dispute, and the suggestion that they're only working 20 hours is absurd. I'm just pointing out that, to quote from Airplane!, "They knew what they were getting into."
-Alex
www.mostlydifferent.com
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Author: GBK
Date: 2010-01-09 05:50
Alex - very wise thoughts and nicely worded.
Now, if only some of the clarinet teachers would be truthful to their students about the reality of becoming a professional musician.
...GBK
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Author: Ed Palanker
Date: 2010-01-09 13:36
GBK said "Now, if only some of the clarinet teachers would be truthful to their students about the reality of becoming a professional musician." Bravo GBK
What a business we're in, sorry art, as we produce dozens and dozens of new clarinetists each year coming out of our music schools to compete for a half dozen jobs, at best. How many teachers actually tell their students up front, as I've done in the past, that the chances of them landing a job that they can actually make a living is very slim indeed. One student once accused me of discouraging her from becoming a performance major, I told her I was simply trying to be truthful. She did complete her undergraduate degree and went on for a masters in music history or something like that. She also took some courses, on my recommendation, in instrument repair during the summer. I've always said how grateful I was for the military bands in the USA or there would be almost no jobs available at all for my clarinet students when they graduated. Now that I'm retiring from institutional teaching I don't have to worry about them any more, but I'm still very concerned. I have a lot of students that are playing professionally, but a lot more of them are not. It's sad to spend that kind of money and time and effort to become a professional musician only to discover that there just aren't nearly enough jobs out the for all the applicants. ESP
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Author: TPeterson
Date: 2010-01-09 18:11
As a public school teacher I feel that my primary responsibility to music making should be just that-- making as much music as possible with my students! A tiny few will have the potential to play for a living, but I desperately hope the vast majority may some day be enthusiastic supporters of the arts. Without prominent doctors, lawyers, business people, etc. passionately involved in school, college, and community music organizations-- where will our culture go?
Tim Peterson
Band Director & Clarinetist
Ionia, MI
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Author: Paul Aviles
Date: 2010-01-09 21:37
Bravo Tim!!!
What are music teachers for anyway?!!!? Reality is what it is, but if you are a music teacher talking students into a law degree, then you need to be an instructor of law.
...............Paul Aviles
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Author: David Spiegelthal ★2017
Date: 2010-01-09 22:29
The American Federation of Musicians monthly magazine just arrived, and I didn't see a single notice of a clarinet vacancy anywhere (in the world). Not even for a third- or fourth-tier orchestra. A fair number of string and French horn vacancies, though.
I can't imagine how hard it must be nowadays to land a job as an orchestral clarinetist. It took me "only" three months from being laid off to finding an engineering job, and I was lucky at that.
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Author: EEBaum
Date: 2010-01-10 00:09
David:
Landing a job as an orchestral clarinetist is like landing a job as a CEO of a corporation. It might happen to you some day, but you shouldn't expect that it will.
Tim:
I hear what you're saying a lot, and while I think it's noble in intention, I think it also can do a disservice to music in a few ways...
- It puts music in the general realm of classical into a special category of "this needs our support to survive," as if it is so unappealing to the general populace that it needs constant life support. It unintentionally labels classical music as something that someone is "supposed to" like, not something that someone may or may not like and is encouraged to explore.
- It relegates classical music to a sort of museum piece, not a vibrant, dynamic medium. Granted, the way the majority of ensembles play it, I'm often led to believe that it IS a static museum piece.
- Associating classical music as synonymous with "culture" is, to me, an absurd bastardization of the word culture. Culture is what people do, who they are, how they interact, and what great things they produce. Culture is in classical, in rock, in mariachi, in the dreadful panflute bands at strip malls, in 8 year olds singing dirty tunes in the schoolyard. If anything, classical music is the LEAST cultural because so much of the classical world goes very far out of its way to be exclusionary and to insist on all sorts of rules on how to play it and how to listen to it and on how it may or may not be enjoyed and on who is "worthy" of playing it.
- There is a hint of "if we don't educate them to like our stuff, we'll be out of a job" in these attitudes as well. If the primary reason to perpetuate all this great music we play is to ensure future job security for ourselves and our colleagues, I'd just as soon throw my clarinets into a wood chipper.
People don't need education to appreciate good music that's played well in an inviting atmosphere. They'll come on their own, if they know about it, and if we don't drive them away.
As for orchestras, they're financially impractical relics of an age when nobility funded things for their own enjoyment. I appreciate their continued existence and continue to buy tickets to them and appreciate the benefactors who make this grand system continue to happen. But they should be treated as such, as awesome things that we're keeping around because we consider them to be awesome things, expenses be damned. Not as some vital mechanism of our entire art form that will surely perish in their absence. And most definitely not as anything mentioned in the same paragraph as "career possibility." Musicians should, must, be well-versed in creating their own musical paths.
If an orchestra is treated as "Hell yeah, we have an orchestra! They're going to do something awesome!" rather than "There is a building over there where culture happens and you should support it because if you don't you're an uncultured idiot," maybe we wouldn't need to keep up this absurd game of orchestral life support panic.
-Alex
www.mostlydifferent.com
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Author: Ed Palanker
Date: 2010-01-10 04:20
Music, in all forms, art, theatre and dance are what makes us what we are. Our culture and our civility. Look at the cultures around the world and you will see why orchestra's, museums, works of art, dance, theatre, books. poems etc. are important to make us what we are. Sure we can do without any of them but we all lose something if and when their gone. You can enjoy a musical play with recorded music but it adds more when it's live music. You can listen to a CD but it's more exciting when it a live performance. These things are, and will always be, supported my a small minority of people but they are all important to make us what we are as a people. Without these in our lives we have the Taliban or a society like that. The symphony orchestra is just one small piece of that playing the great music of the world. The problem for clarinet students is that only a very few will ever be able to make a living in one, there simply aren't enough jobs for all those desiring them. That goes for other instruments as well. ESP
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Author: Old Geezer
Date: 2010-01-10 16:53
Apparently (in the blog) these are wives complaining...wonder how the guys feel having to perform sublime music in a world class orchestra all the time.
The blog mentions someone needing a $40,000 bow. Do all the members of the string section need such expensive bows?
As for all the time needed for practice et al; isn't that what professionals live for?
Clarinet Redux
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Author: Mark Charette
Date: 2010-01-10 16:57
Old Geezer wrote:
> The blog mentions someone needing a $40,000 bow. Do all the
> members of the string section need such expensive bows?
If you assume they're already in the section:
Need, no. Desire, yes.
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