A couple of years after college I commenced sporadic production of a half-humorous zine as an outlet for various petty frustrations with the world of music and musicians. The focus was more personal and quotidian than on this blog, which I started around the same time. Blogging being public and more or less permanent, I have always maintained that the more personal the content the more interesting and unique it ought to be. Ditto regarding any imperative towards expression as that word is broadly and colloquially construed across The Arts. Seems to me that any such imperative is necessarily colored by several more general features of the society or social group in question, e.g. the degree of shared experience, conformity to norms, obedience to authority, and so on. In other words, most of us are not quite different enough from each other for the public airing of even the most intimate details to be the least bit interesting to our various constituencies. (And if a public airing is to be deemed necessary on purely therapeutic grounds, then the offending malaise must be a particularly virulent and contagious one indeed; on which point I must thereby beg your indulgence in suspending judgment of this meta-airing until its purpose has become clear.)
In any case, as the blog has skewed speculative, the zine has become an archive of the personal, and this dovetailed with the fact of the latter's strictly private and offline circulation. I have recently resumed production after a long hiatus and am finding it quite useful in exactly this way. The reason, however, for writing at length on all of this now is to relate a very practical use, perhaps even a necessary one, which has recently emerged and which never would have occurred to me the day I brought out the first installment.
Employers are demanding to moderate what their employees say about them online, and not even a jazz tuba player can avoid falling under surveillance. This was ostensibly the case with a certain car opera recently staged in and around LA by a company you probably haven't heard of, and it is ostensibly the case regarding my current employment with an entertainment franchise you’ve most certainly heard of. Neither of the organizations in question will ever be mentioned by name here, not by me at least, and not by you either if you happen to know me well enough to put all of this together and would like me to be able to address any new developments to the already limited extent possible under the circumstances. They will not be mentioned because as a condition of employment both demand authority to moderate online content pertaining to them, and because one is known to devote significant resources to this. (And really, what quantity of resources is not "significant" when you consider the implications of such policies and the time-is-money realities of running a business?)
For what it’s worth, I don’t have to start a limited-run, privately-circulated, dead-tree social commentary franchise with which to digest, explore, archive and (usually) exorcise the vicissitudes of such personal experience: I already have one as an existential matter if not much of a material one. What I didn’t have before was real necessity for such an outlet ("real" in this case meaning "beyond the personal")1. Thanks to the new thought police, which, like so many other rhetorical constructions of modernist dystopian thought, has coalesced fragmentarily and incrementally rather than all at once, now I do.
For anyone just devoted enough to my personal concerns to be an earnest and comprehensive reader of both publications, it might be useful to think of the zine as a sort of annotated bibliography in support of the more sweeping generalizations I make here about the professional circles I inhabit, and perhaps also as a way of “blogging” on topics and experiences which would be socially ungraceful and/or professionally damaging to address publicly online. I suppose this betrays my rather cynical view of prevailing norms of social and professional comportment, but unfortunately there is almost always something arising from artists' relationships with employers and/or with each other which really ought to be addressed and brought to wider attention, i.e. for the specific purpose of giving the community a chance to look itself in the mirror. Social grace and professional viability are quite flimsy excuses for forgoing such opportunities: first, because together they amount to very little when compared to the potential chilling effect of the new reality; and second, because, as I am attempting to outline here, it is not impossible to have it both ways given the variety of media and social settings presently at our collective disposal. In any case, there won't be much worldly grace or prestige left to preserve if transparency is ritually sacrificed to branding in this arena as it already has been in so many others. Unfortunately the seemingly ideal online platforms which emerged in the 1990s are in the 2010s now equally ideal for surveillance. Hence the ongoing need for a Sneakernet of Everyday Life.
1. Again, is “personal” necessity ever better than oxymoronic vis-a-vis the act of telling others about yourself? And does the therapeutic value of artistic "expression" really hinge on the act of public presentation over and beyond private creation? Even if the answer is simply, "It depends," these two questions are always worth pondering before hitting the Send button. Ask me how I know.
Showing posts with label employment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label employment. Show all posts
30 December 2017
18 September 2009
Against "Hire Education"
Despite music's external reputation as a field teeming with hippy liberals, certain bits and pieces of distinctively conservative rhetoric never fail to find their way into the mainstream. For example, it seems that most every proclamation of the death of this or that music is now accompanied a call for music schools to teach business, to make entrepreneurs, schmoozers, and administrators out of each one of their performance students, this in the name of making them more employable orchestral players and/or more astute freelancers. Sounds simple enough, but it raises a question that's bigger than music: what is the role of higher education in our society? To make well-rounded people, or maximally employable people?
There are those who would argue that the sole purpose of education is to lead directly to employment, and that the relative merits of various fields of study are hence directly proportional to the employability of their graduates. Among those who feel this way, it's safe to say that there are not many advocates for teaching music and art, let alone for offering them as areas of specialization. The liberal arts in general are anathema to the employability doctrine, and music and art degrees stand out as particularly egregious cases (I should know, I have one).
While I certainly have been known to accuse musicians of blowing the extrinsic benefits of music education way out of proportion, I will defend to the death the value of a well-rounded education. That means us, too, music majors. The universitories may not teach much business to their students, but their business acumen is constantly on display in how badly they coddle us academically. They let us off the hook for things like foreign languages, science, math...you know, all the things music majors hate, things that might cause us to look at other schools or consider changing majors.
We barely deserve our bachelor's degrees because they are just barely bachelor's degrees, and unfortunately, this often means that we don't have to look too far to find examples of what a lopsided curriculum begets. It's great fodder for dismantling the employability doctrine in higher education, but even so, there are some musicians who would not only leave this doctrine in place, but actively embrace it. Hence, rather than arguing for their field's academic and cultural necessity in the abstract, they merely intend to make it fit the employability doctrine any way they can. For the moment, that seems to entail forcibly making business people out of music majors.
On the surface, there's an obvious contradiction here. I'm arguing for greater breath of curriculum, and adding business classes to music degrees would appear to represent just that. I certainly have my own decidedly liberal hang-ups about business as a field of academic study, but that's my problem. More pertinent to the present discussion is to establish what exactly these music school business classes would entail. It's safe to say that not every music major wants to have to take business classes, and also that many of those who do either can't or won't be able keep up in a "real" business program. So basically, what we're really talking about are more watered down music-major-specific classes with a narrow focus and a lighter credit load, and which by virtue of being tailored so narrowly towards music majors have significantly less currency outside the music world. This represents more of the same coddling we've grown to expect, and the advent of even greater specialization, not less.
It seems to me that music schools increasingly treat their students like children, weighing them down with a laundry list of low-credit nuisance courses, micromanaging their academic lives in the name of the misguided and all too politically malleable concept of "accountability," yet still setting the bar for academic success embarrassingly low. We need less of this, not more, and everywhere in education for that matter, but particularly in music school, where ulterior motives for maintaining high enrollment run rampant. Speaking of which, this most certainly factors into the embrace of the employability paradigm as well; after all, it's a paradigm that many parents (and their money) embrace, too.
Aside from philosophical hang-ups, the specter of teaching business in music school raises some interesting practical problems. How do you make room for it in the curriculum? Add a year? Further cut non-music course requirements? And what about theory versus practice? Keeping the information current from year to year? Based on my undergraduate experience, I'm skeptical about the institutions' ability to navigate every one of those obstacles, but I'm even more dismayed that we are having this discussion in the first place. It seems that musicianship is becoming valued less and less, even among musicians, and that the "school of hard knocks" brow-beating that at one time was the exclusive domain of the occasional disgruntled guest clinician is quickly becoming the publicly stated platform of many music school administrators and a credo for malleable aspiring professionals who don't know any better.
It sometimes seems that we are still in the midst of a post-1960's conservative backlash, even in the field of music, and that this is slowly killing idealism and imposing a dark, cynical pragmatism in its place. Or maybe it's just the economy. Either way, idealism is dangerous in a lot of ways, but it's a necessary component of any musician's development. You can tell a student a million times that they have to be versatile to make a living freelancing, but if they're not interested in anything but one kind of music, this admonishment rings hollow. By the same token, not every music student wants or needs the added burden of business classes, but those who do will likely be better served seeking out the real thing rather than blindly accepting whatever uncomfortable compromises their department ends up putting forth.
There are those who would argue that the sole purpose of education is to lead directly to employment, and that the relative merits of various fields of study are hence directly proportional to the employability of their graduates. Among those who feel this way, it's safe to say that there are not many advocates for teaching music and art, let alone for offering them as areas of specialization. The liberal arts in general are anathema to the employability doctrine, and music and art degrees stand out as particularly egregious cases (I should know, I have one).
While I certainly have been known to accuse musicians of blowing the extrinsic benefits of music education way out of proportion, I will defend to the death the value of a well-rounded education. That means us, too, music majors. The universitories may not teach much business to their students, but their business acumen is constantly on display in how badly they coddle us academically. They let us off the hook for things like foreign languages, science, math...you know, all the things music majors hate, things that might cause us to look at other schools or consider changing majors.
We barely deserve our bachelor's degrees because they are just barely bachelor's degrees, and unfortunately, this often means that we don't have to look too far to find examples of what a lopsided curriculum begets. It's great fodder for dismantling the employability doctrine in higher education, but even so, there are some musicians who would not only leave this doctrine in place, but actively embrace it. Hence, rather than arguing for their field's academic and cultural necessity in the abstract, they merely intend to make it fit the employability doctrine any way they can. For the moment, that seems to entail forcibly making business people out of music majors.
On the surface, there's an obvious contradiction here. I'm arguing for greater breath of curriculum, and adding business classes to music degrees would appear to represent just that. I certainly have my own decidedly liberal hang-ups about business as a field of academic study, but that's my problem. More pertinent to the present discussion is to establish what exactly these music school business classes would entail. It's safe to say that not every music major wants to have to take business classes, and also that many of those who do either can't or won't be able keep up in a "real" business program. So basically, what we're really talking about are more watered down music-major-specific classes with a narrow focus and a lighter credit load, and which by virtue of being tailored so narrowly towards music majors have significantly less currency outside the music world. This represents more of the same coddling we've grown to expect, and the advent of even greater specialization, not less.
It seems to me that music schools increasingly treat their students like children, weighing them down with a laundry list of low-credit nuisance courses, micromanaging their academic lives in the name of the misguided and all too politically malleable concept of "accountability," yet still setting the bar for academic success embarrassingly low. We need less of this, not more, and everywhere in education for that matter, but particularly in music school, where ulterior motives for maintaining high enrollment run rampant. Speaking of which, this most certainly factors into the embrace of the employability paradigm as well; after all, it's a paradigm that many parents (and their money) embrace, too.
Aside from philosophical hang-ups, the specter of teaching business in music school raises some interesting practical problems. How do you make room for it in the curriculum? Add a year? Further cut non-music course requirements? And what about theory versus practice? Keeping the information current from year to year? Based on my undergraduate experience, I'm skeptical about the institutions' ability to navigate every one of those obstacles, but I'm even more dismayed that we are having this discussion in the first place. It seems that musicianship is becoming valued less and less, even among musicians, and that the "school of hard knocks" brow-beating that at one time was the exclusive domain of the occasional disgruntled guest clinician is quickly becoming the publicly stated platform of many music school administrators and a credo for malleable aspiring professionals who don't know any better.
It sometimes seems that we are still in the midst of a post-1960's conservative backlash, even in the field of music, and that this is slowly killing idealism and imposing a dark, cynical pragmatism in its place. Or maybe it's just the economy. Either way, idealism is dangerous in a lot of ways, but it's a necessary component of any musician's development. You can tell a student a million times that they have to be versatile to make a living freelancing, but if they're not interested in anything but one kind of music, this admonishment rings hollow. By the same token, not every music student wants or needs the added burden of business classes, but those who do will likely be better served seeking out the real thing rather than blindly accepting whatever uncomfortable compromises their department ends up putting forth.
05 October 2008
Can Great Music Be Created By...Anyone?
A respondent to a Daniel Wolf posting asks whether part-time musicians can make great music. In fact, part-time musicians like Charles Ives have made great music, and hence, the question is answered. A better question to ask is whether it is likely that part-timers, full-timers, or anyone in particular for that matter, will make great music. No. No, it is not.
With the rate of success for everyone so low yet still resulting in an almost unmanageably vast and diverse body of work spanning many hundreds of years, one cannot in good conscience issue a blanket condemnation of either group for not keeping up their end of the bargain. One can, however, chide "professionals" for whoring themselves in order to make a living and then hiding behind a supposedly selfless commitment to making people happy by feeding them aural Splenda. Yes, one can say that. I just did.
An even better question ask is whether part-time bloggers can create great posts on a full-time basis. Don't answer that one.
With the rate of success for everyone so low yet still resulting in an almost unmanageably vast and diverse body of work spanning many hundreds of years, one cannot in good conscience issue a blanket condemnation of either group for not keeping up their end of the bargain. One can, however, chide "professionals" for whoring themselves in order to make a living and then hiding behind a supposedly selfless commitment to making people happy by feeding them aural Splenda. Yes, one can say that. I just did.
An even better question ask is whether part-time bloggers can create great posts on a full-time basis. Don't answer that one.
19 February 2008
Returns (Diminishing and Otherwise)
A funny thing happens to me every Thursday afternoon on my way to the non-musical part-time day job that I work in order to keep from starving. After two days off, the first of which I usually spend reading and listening, and the second of which I spend teaching music lessons, I'm actually in the mood for some menial labor that has nothing to do with music. When I was unemployed, I developed this strange longing to be a "normal" part of the rest of society. It came to outweigh even the more practical end of supporting myself and being able to move out of my parents' house. I figured that it would wear off quickly, and sometimes it feels like it has, but in truth, it's still there somewhere, and I don't think it's going to go away soon.
I don't know if there are any musicians active today who don't feel unproductive most of the time. It's easy to beat yourself up for not getting enough done when there's so much to do. Nonetheless, I've found that my productivity level seems to be fixed, and doesn't vary much (if at all), no matter what odd curve balls life throws at me. Even during the afore mentioned period of unemployment, when I had enough spare time to work through a library's worth of books and recordings, I just wasn't in the right mindset to work most of the time. Sure, I waste some potentially inspired, productive time at work, but I also am able to translate a great deal of the uninspired, unproductive time into cash. Why not?
The really difficult realization I've made recently is that I'm uninspired most of the time. I've played the part of high school student and college student; full-time employee and part-time employee; freelance musician and umemployed lout; but none of it seems to matter. I have a fixed amount of focused energy to expend on making music, and once that's gone, it's actually better not to force myself to continue working as much of that work becomes not only pointless but actually harmful or regressive.
Perhaps it's merely a front, but the message I get from most of the music world is that the best thing for us is to have as few non-musical obligations as possible so as to allow for the maximum amount of time to work on music. I would probably take it if I could get it, but it may not make a difference in my case. Of course, there is also a school of thought that says that our cumulative life experience is what we put into our artworks, and hence we ought to be more concerned with having lots of cumulative life experience than with practice. Unfortunately, that doesn't cut it either. What is needed is short term impatience (for daily motivation) combined with long term patience (willingness to endure slow, steady progress that may feel like anything but). Where one or both of those things is absent and we can't be productive, is it better to have a job or play video games all day?
Some artists come to hate the world for not allowing them to make a living through their art. I guess I'm becoming ambivalent, not to mention strangely contented with my current situation. If I was independently wealthy or had a massive grant, I can't say for sure whether or not I would accomplish anything more than I would without it. I'll just keep my mouth shut, then, the next time government funding of "The Arts" comes up, since it looks like I embody a good argument against it. I think it is important to also mention the prospect of earning said cash through musical engagements that aren't your first choice. When I am away from music for 5 hours every afternoon, I return home ready to get down to business; conversely, when I awake at 7am and drive across the city to play background music for the grand opening of a new bank building, I return home not wanting anything to do with my horn (or really anything musical) for the rest of the day. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Familiarity breeds contempt. Insert your idiom here; it will probably work, too.
I'm reminded of a story a friend recently relayed to me of a freshman saxophone player who, when asked what his summer plans were, stated that he intended to "get all that technique stuff out of the way" so that he could just focus on music after that. We had a good laugh over that, although I admit to having moments exactly like that at that age, and I'd be surprised if others hadn't also. It's natural to want everything now, but the process of attaining progressively higher levels of musicianship is an inherently slow one, and while some undoubtedly do manage to accelerate it through exceptional work ethic and/or by possessing circus freak levels of innate aptitude, the rest of us simply have to be more patient.
My age is a dangerous age. A lot of 25 year old musicians are nearing the end of their doctoral programs with no realistic music-oriented employment in sight; others who didn't go to graduate school have already let their skills fall into disrepair through a combination of social distractions and economic realities; others have already given up completely. Yet other 25 year olds are already on the downside of their careers: among them are child prodigies who no longer look enough like children (though they may still act like them) to garner attention for the novelty of their age (although with modern medicine, most will live long enough to give that approach another try eventually); then there are sellouts whose best work already lays behind them, the result of the brash creative ferment of adolescence that suddenly becomes inconvenient to maintain into early adulthood not only because it requires continued hard work, but because the alternatives are both less work and more lucrative; finally, there are the local heroes, who developed an unjustified contentedness while growing up as the big fish in an exceedingly small pond and are standing idly by as that rug is pulled out from underneath them.
I can envision plenty of scenarios by which I could have fallen (or could still fall) into one of these traps, among others. My goal, however, is to continue to make slow but consistent progress. At some point, most of us have probably met older musicians who gave up that goal up long ago. It breaks my heart and pisses me off at the same time. It's a phenomenon that has spawned numerous wisecrack cliches about youthful naivete, optimism, and idealism; but if a constant desire to better oneself is an inherently naive proposition unbecoming of an adult, then we have truly fallen a long way.
For someone with a strong aversion to blogs that are "about" their authors, I've spewed an awful lot about myself here. I guess I could have saved everyone the time and just said this: may we all continually aim to play, compose, write, improvise, and live better tomorrow than we did today, whatever that might mean; and when unexpected adverse circumstances arise, may we in the service of the previous admonition always address them in a constructive rather than destructive fashion.
I don't know if there are any musicians active today who don't feel unproductive most of the time. It's easy to beat yourself up for not getting enough done when there's so much to do. Nonetheless, I've found that my productivity level seems to be fixed, and doesn't vary much (if at all), no matter what odd curve balls life throws at me. Even during the afore mentioned period of unemployment, when I had enough spare time to work through a library's worth of books and recordings, I just wasn't in the right mindset to work most of the time. Sure, I waste some potentially inspired, productive time at work, but I also am able to translate a great deal of the uninspired, unproductive time into cash. Why not?
The really difficult realization I've made recently is that I'm uninspired most of the time. I've played the part of high school student and college student; full-time employee and part-time employee; freelance musician and umemployed lout; but none of it seems to matter. I have a fixed amount of focused energy to expend on making music, and once that's gone, it's actually better not to force myself to continue working as much of that work becomes not only pointless but actually harmful or regressive.
Perhaps it's merely a front, but the message I get from most of the music world is that the best thing for us is to have as few non-musical obligations as possible so as to allow for the maximum amount of time to work on music. I would probably take it if I could get it, but it may not make a difference in my case. Of course, there is also a school of thought that says that our cumulative life experience is what we put into our artworks, and hence we ought to be more concerned with having lots of cumulative life experience than with practice. Unfortunately, that doesn't cut it either. What is needed is short term impatience (for daily motivation) combined with long term patience (willingness to endure slow, steady progress that may feel like anything but). Where one or both of those things is absent and we can't be productive, is it better to have a job or play video games all day?
Some artists come to hate the world for not allowing them to make a living through their art. I guess I'm becoming ambivalent, not to mention strangely contented with my current situation. If I was independently wealthy or had a massive grant, I can't say for sure whether or not I would accomplish anything more than I would without it. I'll just keep my mouth shut, then, the next time government funding of "The Arts" comes up, since it looks like I embody a good argument against it. I think it is important to also mention the prospect of earning said cash through musical engagements that aren't your first choice. When I am away from music for 5 hours every afternoon, I return home ready to get down to business; conversely, when I awake at 7am and drive across the city to play background music for the grand opening of a new bank building, I return home not wanting anything to do with my horn (or really anything musical) for the rest of the day. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Familiarity breeds contempt. Insert your idiom here; it will probably work, too.
I'm reminded of a story a friend recently relayed to me of a freshman saxophone player who, when asked what his summer plans were, stated that he intended to "get all that technique stuff out of the way" so that he could just focus on music after that. We had a good laugh over that, although I admit to having moments exactly like that at that age, and I'd be surprised if others hadn't also. It's natural to want everything now, but the process of attaining progressively higher levels of musicianship is an inherently slow one, and while some undoubtedly do manage to accelerate it through exceptional work ethic and/or by possessing circus freak levels of innate aptitude, the rest of us simply have to be more patient.
My age is a dangerous age. A lot of 25 year old musicians are nearing the end of their doctoral programs with no realistic music-oriented employment in sight; others who didn't go to graduate school have already let their skills fall into disrepair through a combination of social distractions and economic realities; others have already given up completely. Yet other 25 year olds are already on the downside of their careers: among them are child prodigies who no longer look enough like children (though they may still act like them) to garner attention for the novelty of their age (although with modern medicine, most will live long enough to give that approach another try eventually); then there are sellouts whose best work already lays behind them, the result of the brash creative ferment of adolescence that suddenly becomes inconvenient to maintain into early adulthood not only because it requires continued hard work, but because the alternatives are both less work and more lucrative; finally, there are the local heroes, who developed an unjustified contentedness while growing up as the big fish in an exceedingly small pond and are standing idly by as that rug is pulled out from underneath them.
I can envision plenty of scenarios by which I could have fallen (or could still fall) into one of these traps, among others. My goal, however, is to continue to make slow but consistent progress. At some point, most of us have probably met older musicians who gave up that goal up long ago. It breaks my heart and pisses me off at the same time. It's a phenomenon that has spawned numerous wisecrack cliches about youthful naivete, optimism, and idealism; but if a constant desire to better oneself is an inherently naive proposition unbecoming of an adult, then we have truly fallen a long way.
For someone with a strong aversion to blogs that are "about" their authors, I've spewed an awful lot about myself here. I guess I could have saved everyone the time and just said this: may we all continually aim to play, compose, write, improvise, and live better tomorrow than we did today, whatever that might mean; and when unexpected adverse circumstances arise, may we in the service of the previous admonition always address them in a constructive rather than destructive fashion.
Labels:
education,
employment,
freelancing,
independence,
inspiration,
philosophy,
practice,
the "real" world
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