For musicians, job market hits sour note
At the Undergraduate Career Services building Monday night, about 25 students gathered as they would for most other career panels, grabbing bags of chips on their way in, some with notebooks and pens in hand.
The few students donning suits were dressed to impress — not in typical Brooks Brothers ensembles — but formal a cappella-style tailcoats.
The panelists, after all, were not investment bankers or consultants but rather a motley musical quartet: an organist, a flautist, a singer and one musical jack-of-all trades — all alumni speaking at UCS’s “Careers in Music”...
great/interesting article!
Claire has got the right idea. The work - and the money - is in orchestra-level playing, whether that means a symphony or a studio orchestra somewhere. You have to be a very, very fine musician to play in one of these ensembles, something many schools with music departments do not stress enough. Networking will get you nowhere without true skill and talent.
As far as the other "music" jobs go, rock star, record producer, music company executive, there is one of these jobs for every 100,000 or so applicants, so if that's your goal, get another major.
Doug, are you kidding? You think that the job prospects in music administration are so forbidding as to turn one away, but that ORCHESTRAL job prospects are worth sticking around for?!
Making a living as a musician means picking up as many jobs as possible, because no single one is going to be enough to live on.
Eine Kleine Volkmusik
Unless you envision sticking strictly to a classical music or music education career in your area of instrumental or vocal specialization, it would be helpful in the contemporary music marketplace to add a "general" folk/pop instrument to your musical studies, such as guitar or piano, if you do not already play one of these instruments.
I have always enjoyed playing strings in folk, rock, country and jazz groups, with violin and viola having been my principal instruments, then mandolin having later become a most pleasing and musically satisfying sidelight.
So even though I would probably rather play violin for another singer or perhaps hold down a fiddle-mandolin spot in a larger country rock band, I have found that a dash of solo piano or acoustic guitar work in such venues as restaurants and coffee houses can go a long way toward "running cover" for my other, more thoroughly practiced instrumental applications.
Indeed, a course which I wish I could teach sometime for orchestra violin and viola students who wish to keep the door open to occasional excursions into contemporary, traditional, folk and jazz musical styles would be along the lines of:
"Non-Classical Applications of Violin and Viola Performance."
This way players in my favorite section of the orchestra can pick up an occasional folk, rock or jazz gig every now and then while still honing all their Beethoven, Brahms and Shostakovich symphony parts. They can enjoy the diversity of these muscial excursion while also helping make ends meet financially, "measure to measure."
Good luck to all of Yale's musicians!
David P. McKnight
Durham, NC
Cleaver Smith Swenson & McKnight
http://www.itsthemusic.com
I plan to have a musical career in the future. I'll be taking up a course in music and plan to belong in an orchestra. But I guess it's quite hard to have a job in music especially if you're not lucky enough to be one of the best out there. I wonder. .Well for no, my focus is on building my online presence. I did start at a student resume network at nuresume.com. It's a place where you can create your free online resume and post the jobs you want. Well, this one's pretty helpful for students like me.