Lasch—The Trouble With Professionalism

Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)

[228] Bureaucratic Dependence and Narcissism Recent studies of professionalization show that professionalism did not emerge, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in response to clearly defined social needs. Instead, the new professions themselves invented many of the needs they claimed to satisfy. They played on public fears of disorder and disease, adopted a deliberately mystifying jargon, ridiculed popular traditions of self-help as backward and unscientific, and in this way created or intensified (not without opposition) a demand for their own services.

footnote to above:

[228] my argument must not be misunderstood as an unqualified condemnation of professionalism. Obviously professions uphold important values. ... But it is not true...that "professionals are autonomous individuals beholden to the nature of things and the judgment of their peers, and bound by an explicit or implicit oath to benefit their clients and the community." [P. Goodman, "The New Reformation"] The way in which professionals construe and discharge these responsibilities naturally reflects the social surroundings in which they operate. American professionalism has been corrupted by the man-
[229, footnote cont.]
agerial capitalism with which it is so closely allied...

[Thomas] Haskell writes: "Membership in a truly professional community [cannot] be based on charm, social standing, personal connection, good character, or perhaps even decency, but on demonstrated intellectual merit alone." Haskell does not appreciate how easily "intellectual merit" can be confused with the mere acquisition of professional credentials or, worse, with loyalty to an unspoken ideological consensus...

Great points. So professionalism is an ideal that can never quite be realized?

I wonder also if the internal technical contours of a field have at least as much to do with just how professional it can ever become as do any social and political contexts? Also whether these surrounding contexts invade a profession precisely to the degree that said profession is unable to objectively define merit?

Once a Writer, Twice...??

An older friend who has earned the authority to say so tells me (paraphrasing here) that my writing is tantalizing but unpolished. Given the surfeit of mindless positivity in circulation today, I certainly appreciate the frankness and take no personal offense. I also think it is the proper assessment. In the end, though, I don't anticipate bending towards journalistic accessibility as her critique suggests, or at least not with any particular alacrity.

The task of giving concrete voice to inner thoughts must count as an abiding passion of mine by now, actions speaking loudest of all as the saying would have it. Even so, it is not and never will be an identity; definitely not a personal one, and most likely not a professional one either. For better or worse the tuba seems destined to continue in both roles until further notice. Identity being a far heavier burden than passion, the process of making peace with the externally imposed demands of professional instrumentalism¹ has been long, slow, and often tumultuous. Not too much has changed since my mother first diagnosed her 4 year-old only child as "stubborn," and so it is that the intervening three decades of psychosocial development have seen the formation and refinement of many elaborate rationalizations for this trait's oft-neglected social utility (and a few half-hearted efforts at personal reform). Tuba playing has nonetheless been the site of my most extensive and compulsory mediation with a society which lets no good deed goes unpunished; and so, having thus given over one life-consuming endeavor to such protracted mediation in exchange for an identity, the mere thought of giving over other parts of myself to this miasma is a bridge too far. Given both where this society has been it has been and where it is going, any mediation with it is destined to be an ongoing, dialectical process rather than a cleaner teleological one, heroic in a Promethean sense rather than the Spartan one that I, like most other professional brass players, would much prefer to known for. (At least I have that in common with my colleagues in the brass world. This has not always always been obvious.)

I should add that relocating to a place where I can actually make a living playing my horn has allowed me to further compartmentalize this uncompromising streak, which to say also to consolidate it. In hindsight, it's clear enough that in my twenties I was conditioned by failure on this front. The material payoff for compromise was then so meager as to not be worth the trouble, and I became less and less sure that professional instrumentalism suited me at all even as my commitment to instrumentalism more broadly construed never wavered. Nonetheless, as I type this I have turned down a grand total of two paying tuba gigs simply because I didn't want to endure them, and needless to say I've accepted dozens which I would rather not have. I remain weary of those self-styled musicians-in-the-trenches who would make such amenability into the single criterion of a classically capitalist musical meritocracy; and yet in my gut I am indeed strangely proud of my record in this department even as intellectually I will always look at such pride as irredeemably perverse and have no less trouble than ever conjuring some pretty good abstract arguments and real-life anecdotes alike to support that assessment.

As for other accounts, my lifetime earnings as a composer are not enough to buy a tank of gas, and my earnings as a writer of words are literally zero. If either state of affairs bothered me intensely enough, I would have done more about it; I've certainly been party to enough facile huckstering over the years that appropriating a few tactics here and there wouldn't be all that hard. For now I have no such inclinations. I have long suspected and now truly believe that relative to the competition I have much more to offer in these two areas than I do as a tuba player. In college I used to ponder this question as one of choosing the right career; now I'm thankful that I made the "wrong" choice back then. As long as I can survive as a tuba player, I can listen, study, and write strictly on my own terms, and I'll be at peace with this balance in a way that I never could be were the polarity reversed.

Of course in my capacity as uncompromising, rationalistic grown-up-only-child, I'm not content to stop there: I have often been left with the impression that others need me to compromise on their behalf more than they really care about bringing me along for whatever world-conquering careerist ride they have plotted out. It is invariably a ride which requires, let's say, a band of other sentient human beings, each one spontaneously grabbing a paddle and commencing to row in proper synchrony as if by magic. (This will certainly be the narrative spun later, whether or not it is the least bit true.)

Having thus gone "further," there remains the "deeper:" I sensed in the discussion which prompted this post (which was offline and one-to-one) as well as in many prior mediations something akin to so many canonical art-historical polemics: form as against content; art as against entertainment; writing for oneself as against writing for the audience; and not insignificantly, refined as against unrefined modes of expression. To wit, I decided years ago that my posture here and anywhere else I might publish my "writings" is most definitely not as a writer per se but rather as a thinker presenting thoughts via the least wretched of the many wretched avenues one has for doing so.

I'm just seasoned enough to acknowledge the puerile aspects of this sentiment, and likewise to stand by it unapologetically even so. Scholar, critic, theorist, analyst...these are at least fit to be personal identities, if not in every case professional ones. "Writer" is, besides being tainted with the stench of Hollywood pretension, too vague in one sense and too specific in another. "Prophet" meanwhile is a rather absurd and value-laden term which is used and abused in much the same vein as is "genius," but one which is thus applied quite often to people whose writerly (and musical) achievements I most admire. Rather than indicating privileged communion with an all powerful creator, it could simply mean one who speaks The Word of a given discipline from a place of great knowledge; who mediates with a body of knowledge in service of society, as opposed to the messier, joyless task of mediating with society in service of a body of knowledge as so-called professionals do. If we can ever agree upon less loaded terminology to indicate that distinction, I will happily put it into service.



1. Spell-check/autocorrect flags this word, hence it's worth clarifying that I mean it to encompass both performing and teaching. To omit the latter would implicitly deny the role it has played in sustaining me both financially and, for lack of a better word, spiritually.

Against The Literary Imperative

literature/the novel: "a lie that tells the truth"

so...

=pre-industrial infotainment?!
e.g. when the latest trove of freshly leaked government records is not nearly entertaining enough to hold the attention of an audience whose record keeping is not quite so thorough. instead, storytime! ergo the collective appointment of mandarin technocrats to digest the proverbial federalist papers on our collective behalf. ergo the offense taken to such appointees, drawing as they do equal attention to our own deficiencies as to any justly-sounded alarms. down with the mandarins! unless they entertain us! (and unless we may continue to reason anecdotally! especially if we are 'oppressed'!) thus is the political colonized by the aesthetic and the aesthetic colonized by the political; thus are the minds and souls of the people conquered, in their own names, so as to preserve psychic domicile over a dead land mass; thus the suddenly-old saying about 'letting the terrorists win' metamorphoses from talk-radio zinger to supremely useful figure of speech to the master narrative of our time; etc., etc. so no more art for art's sake k? cuz that is a lie that just plain lies. and we won't stand for that any longer.


...perhaps more specifically...

=victorian infotainment?!
i.e. for those tough household spills wherein The Truth in its unadulterated form is simply unspeakable. in its place, a little white lie! just this once! for your own good! hence a privileged position for literature among The Arts, the lesser castes aspiring half-heartedly to do what literature does vis-a-vis Great Big Truths and Little White Lies. all hail literary thought, the bounty paper towel of the left, soaking up spilled grape juice a whole glass at a time while the leading national brand just turns to grapy pudding. don't make grapy pudding, kids! make art!


...but...!

this place of literature in The Arts and in Society can (and should) (and must) be deconstructed in the best sense of that term. perhaps owing to the impenetrable language in which this has been undertaken by academics, word seems not to have reached the (wo)man on the street that sometimes (or, uh...perhaps most of the time??) a lie is just a lie. less excusable yet is the effect of such "privileged positions" on the internal political dynamics of the professional art world: as in the wider political and social world, a subclass of Limousine Liberals emerges, an art-ontological Bourgeoisie who not only wield the greatest explanatory power but know it too. hence more is more: more narrative, more amplitude, more ethnicity, more mixing of media, more shouting over each other just to be heard; and yes, ever more consequentialist mendacity in purported service of deferred truthtelling. whew!! damned if you don't have to deconstruct just to get through the day!! damned if a profusion of Little White Lies isn't the most effective concealment of one Great Big One!!


hence the guiding rejoinder to the given truism:

"If truth-telling is so important, why not just do that? What are all these indirect paths we keep hearing about and what is lost/gained by way of each one?"

the aestheticist 99% demand answers.


...to wit...

=an aesthetically nihilist (or at least agnostic) social imperative for literature (and its imitators, all the other Arts)

that is, an imperative to address itself (themselves) to social matters which demand corrective Truth-Telling on account of a prevailing Lie which is presently doing more harm than good. (this is nothing like the Little White Lies that literature tells! those we are proud of!)

but of course there are *other* socially valuable functions for art and literature, and there are *other* aesthetics which have prospective value/potential but which necessarily are at odds with this narrow social imperative. further, wider social imperatives necessarily beget value systems, and any value system grown up around such concerns is bound to reinscribe itself on the narrow internal value systems of artists and artmaking. this, then, becomes the opposite of the liberationist gesture which activist artists would like to posit for it; rather, it clutters the social world of critical and popular reception with arbitrary proscriptions and inhibitions, above all a deep distrust of the ineffable which is anathema to so many extraliterary artistic traditions in so many ways.

Career Designs: Relative and Absolute Privilege, and the Even Keel

I seldom go long between social encounters with laypeople bent on idealizing my career choice on my behalf, the customary remark being something about "following your passion." Needless to say that my peers and colleagues are rarely quite so saccharine when discussing music as a vocation. The combined effect of these contradictory expressions can be disorienting, though to be sure they both betoken a familiar grass-is-always-greener outlook as well as the facility with which we can put either face on things, not just in our various interfaces with outsiders but also in our own minds. That is, we may reason relatively, as the layperson tends to (think Symphony Tubist vs. Ice Road Trucker), or we may present our real situation (statistically speaking, probably not anything like Symphony Tubist nor anything approaching it) in absolute terms.

There are good reasons for artists (and everyone else for that matter) to keep sight of the relative sense, if not merely to avoid saying something that they might later regret. But if The Arts so broadly construed are thought to have even the slightest objective social utility, then there is, dare I say, a reciprocal imperative on the extra-artistic world to keep sight of the absolute sense in which the vast majority of artists one can expect to meet face-to-face are dealing with much the same mixed bag of joys and sorrows that any committed professional does.

For me, music certainly has proven a potent avenue through which to learn that sources of great joy are uniquely suited to pile on great heaps of sorrow, and are typically also quite happy to oblige. This is a Life Lesson with implications beyond the narrow concerns of any one profession, yet I doubt that someone who has never truly devoted themselves to a calling can meaningfully understand it, particularly because it is a profoundly dualistic statement whose reverse does not hold: sources of great sorrow, as a group, are not particularly likely to also be sources of great joy. There is something in there about the wretchedness of the human condition, I think, but that is another topic for another time. More to the point is that the irreversibility of this fundamental vocational principle is what causes so much of our dialogue with outsiders to remain rhetorically anchored in the notion of relative privilege. To posit this relative privilege as a defining characteristic of artisthood, however, is to commit three related errors: first, by obfuscating its non-exclusivity to The Arts; second, by defining The Arts via what they are not; and third, by failing to account for the fact that this roller-coaster ride of privilege and obligation is quite a bit more than the sum of its parts.

Indeed, this latter reality is why so many of us academy-trained creatives were at some point told by an institutionally-sanctioned mentor not to get "too high or too low." If we were in fact told this, then we were, for one thing, fortunate to have fished out of the academic miasma at least one person who knew what they were talking about, and this in spite of their own relatively privileged position in the selfsame anti-meritocracy which we ourselves ostensibly aspired to enter. This much we may even have realized at the time. Less apparent back then, in all likelihood (and ever more so with "privilege" in seemingly perpetual ascendance as a watchword) was that we were being asked to withdraw from the relative into the absolute, to set our own standards for success rather than triangulating based on the messages being sent to us by the external social world; all of which is to say that every degree of failure to meet these internally-generated standards which is occasioned by an external factor makes it that much harder to swallow the more strident critiques of bourgeois art currently in circulation.

I am certain that my musical mentors were also correct in advising that "You get out of it what you out into it," and I expect that this is a less controversial statement than the one immediately preceding it. Precisely because this is such good advice in all areas of human endeavor, non-initiates of virtually any stripe getting a rare window in on the artist's habitus are bound to fixate on what appears to them as a conspicuous lack of either putting-in or getting-out. In fact you can't even admit to other musicians that you're not available for any reason other than that you already have a gig, and especially not if the real reason is that you've blocked out time to get out of public view and hone your craft. Suffice it to say that I speak from experience on this point. It is a phenomenon which, again, speaks to many larger human concerns which ought not be dredged up in too much detail right this minute. Even if you're not a professional artist, you can probably relate an analogous situation that you've faced, and if so, then perhaps you've also caught yourself thinking that privilege is a more complicated concept than the lowest common denominator of armchair theorists is capable of giving it credit for.

---
Time has a strong existential claim to being the most valuable personal resource, but I for one, millenial that I am, find focus per se to be the scarcest of all, which conventionally and practically speaking makes it the most valuable too. Hence the focus here on what I am calling the even keel. The advent of leisure time has an unimpeachable place in the study of history whereas the subset focused time remains incomprehensibly decadent even to some career academics. Hence the external social pressure to self-flagellate at the altars of myriad political interest groups is thrown into higher relief by the question of focus than by that of time even though the latter speaks to more basic political issues.

For the artist, this pressure creates palpable tension with an outside world which in spite of its boggling diversity of political orientation and worldview is seemingly quite unified in its intent to define art and artists relatively rather than absolutely. I have to think that anyone reading this can readily conjure the vastly different versions of infinite regress that, say, Bernie People and Trump People can be counted upon to summon in this respect. The region along this spectrum where inhabitants risk being accused of harboring an unseemly "relativism" is rather small and remote, yet there is, at the minimum, relativistic thinking in evidence both in the soft-Marxist critique of bourgeois art and in the contemporary red-state contempt for Artsy-Fartsies as against red-blooded, mammal-eating Americans. Both rhetorics cherrypick small differences and explode them into full-blown deviance. There is as well a characteristic distrust of the abstract and the unmeasurable which is a defining feature of the era of sclerotic institutions. (Hey arts non-profit people, can you say "measurable outcomes?") I would love to convince myself that these are essential mechanisms of social accountability upon which artists can profitably draw both in the content of their work and the living of their lives. What I actually stand convinced of is that this relativistic streak is merely a low-stakes commission of several deadly sins with which we are all familiar no matter what we do for a living.

That is to say that those who would accuse me of "following my passion" seem to be saying as much about themselves as about me. If they were merely expressing support or admiration, I suspect the wording of choice would be rather different; and of course if they knew what I actually have done for money over the years and how much of it has had nothing to do with music, they might have bitten their tongues altogether. It is just as easy for me to lapse into idealizing the many other fields I could have gone into; but alas, whereas enabling a select group of artists to live as solid middle-class earners has been an enduring project of the actual institutional bourgeoisie, the rise of the gig economy perversely relegates a great many others to live as only artists used to. Here as always, then, the term "professional" is used literally, reluctantly, and advisedly. Nihilism is the ultimate even keel, especially as human suffering becomes ever more visible; hence no "professional" milieu will ever lack for nihilists. As in most every other respect, The Arts are neither immune from nor especially exemplary of this reality.

The Latest on Extrinsic Benefits

This NYT opinion piece detailing the notable musical backgrounds of several highly successful people is currently making the rounds. Having gained a reputation in my immediate circle as a cynic, I've been asked for a reaction.

I doubt very much that the correlation between musical training and extramusical success is a mirage. I feel that my own musical endeavors have had much the same impact on me as these people describe, and I have iron-clad confidence that should circumstances dictate it, I could slip into any number of second careers that could have been my first, and with greater success than if I had majored in them in college.

Where the article and most every other one like it equivocates in a counterproductive way is in addressing (or not) the difference between rigorous pre-professional musical training (e.g. Paula Zahn) and sustained amateurism (e.g. Woody Allen). If there is one thing we can count on regarding the extrinsic benefit discussion, it is that where the rubber meets the road, it will be loudly proclaimed by all involved in the most overdetermined fashion imaginable that it must never, ever become the primary or even the secondary purpose of music education to train the students to be professional musicians. In the most literal sense, I could not agree more; however, I think it is equally self-evident that the ultimate beneficiality of the training (not to fret, Postmodernists, I promise to unpack that term in a moment) varies in direct proportion to the degree of rigor and accomplishment.

This leaves us in an awkward place few commentators are willing to explore, and one which requires much more space than they are customarily afforded in the dead-tree media. Many on the outside of this discussion will be quite surprised to be told that most professional performers don't have nearly the grasp of the kinds of higher-order musical skills that we think of as having particular value outside of music; that most of them are not equally fluent in playing from notation and playing by ear; that hardly any have had meaningful, sustained engagement with either the science of sound or the rich literature of philosophical aesthetics; and that virtually none truly reach their ceiling as technicians for simple lack of of dedication. In terms of making cross-disciplinary connections, pre-professional musical training as it is currently constituted is actually too narrow and not rigorous enough! The admonishment against training future professionals, then, is constructive primarily as an issue of mindset, far less so, though, as one of curriculum.

Even if we accept that characterization, however, there are still great conceptual problems here. Students, parents, and teachers do not simply throw themselves into rigorous, comprehensive, all-encompassing, life-dictating academic endeavors without any clear endgame. Should they? It would be far preferable to assuming a studied ambivalence which runs counter to all the values we purport to be teaching through music. That is my greatest fear and objection to much of the dialogue on this issue, the fly in the ointment that needs to be addressed in any and all of these discussions but virtually never is. I don't think we have any hope whatsoever of musical or extramusical successes if their pursuit becomes calculated, compromised, or triangulated.

Every research study and anecdote alike that is piled onto the heap of evidence for music as a force stronger than itself only causes making good on this promise to become less likely and more difficult. And to be unequivocal, I say that without any doubt whatsoever that the benefits are real. People need to understand that those two positions do not contradict each other in the least. One is directed at the ideal potential of the work and the other at its present, less-than-ideal mode of implementation. The point is that these are benefits which we know to arise from the naive, the recreational, and certainly, where they are pursued happily and healthily, the rigorous pre-professional and professional varieties of musical activity. It is not at all clear that they arise from what following Shunryu Suzuki in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind could be called "gainfulness," in other words, the self-conscious notion held from the outset that one is going to "get something" from all of this musicking. No, that has not been studied enough, if it can be at all; yes, it does matter; and holy shit does that mean we're playing with fire here.

Even as Kenny Werner, most notably, has delivered a suspicion of the gainful mindset to the musico-pedagogical mainstream, as far as I can tell no one has yet succeeded in doing the same for the arts outreach, advocacy, and non-profit community. Indeed, if I may be so callous, here is a meta-example of extrinsic benefits at work, a line in the sand between those who "do" and those who merely administrate, editorialize, and evaluate. If the latter groups all read the Suzuki and Werner books and rededicated themselves to their own artistic endeavors, that would be a start; I think, though, that without their having been through quite the same ringer as people like me, we're bound to have this same discussion with them over and over. Their culture is profoundly shaped by the concept of accountability, a rosy-sounding term which is nonetheless among the most toxic to art. In that sense, all of this relates to the general erosion of trust in our society, the fragmenting of culture, the world becoming smaller, the blowing of the lid off pedophilia, the notion of letting the terrorists win, and the whole mess. Accountability is society's answer to its own disintegration. Hopefully you agree that's too much to tackle for the present moment. But if you were expecting me to make some sarcastic remark about music not really being that important, hopefully this analysis to the contrary has been a pleasant surprise.

The bulk of those profiled in the article were or are high musical achievers, not dabblers, and while they clearly were cherrypicked to a degree that makes drawing any such larger conclusions inadvisable, I have to strongly agree, incidentally, with this bias in the method of selection. Even Woody Allen, as the token dilettante in the group, is fiercely committed: "I have to practice every single day to be as bad as I am." Talk about mindset! That's not a zinger I would willingly share with a young student, having as it does the potential to be lost in translation, but the intent of the remark is one I wish they would all grasp more readily. At half an hour of daily practice and regular gigs with his band, how many of us have had more than a few students that devoted?

After the unknown, unintended consequences of gainfulness, my second sphere of concern is yet more difficult to approach and also virtually never raised in polite company: which music are we really talking about here? It would come as an utter shock in purely statistical terms if all musical traditions proved to offer the exact same extrinsic benefits to the exact same degree. If this is indeed not the case, then the extrinsic benefit discussion has a highly political dimension to it that cannot go unremarked upon if this dialogue is to bear any fruit at all.

Personally, I think it is self-evident that the particular types of results described in this article could not possibly be achieved with, for example, New York School experimental music as the curricular focal point; and yet I feel equally strongly that virtually any music curriculum on any level which fails to meaningfully account for this body of work, or at the very least its philosophy and spirit, is profoundly compromised and minimally relevant to today's world. Of course, the question is not so complicated for me: the traditional and early-modern classical and jazz styles at the core of so much extrinsic benefit blather are also at the core of my own work as an artist; the ultra-modern, the experimental, the minimalist, and the popular are decidedly secondary, studied only casually and borrowed from only in tiny fragments. (Think Stockhausen to Feldman: "Your piece could be part of one of my pieces," possibly the ultimate asshole-composer quote for all time, but one which I, for better or worse, identify with to the core.)

There is existing research, philosophy, and infrastructure to support a mainstream, highbrow musico-pedagogical edifice, and we are busy at work building more of all of those things. This promises to earn money, prestige, and influence for musicians who work in those particular modes of expression, usually at the direct expense of those who do not. Even in my case, as someone who espouses the right kind of music on one hand and an odious devotion to rigor and ambition on the other, it has not been so easy to convince colleagues, institutions, and most of all, students and parents to buy into my version of the narrative. This is an unavoidable and dire political problem for musical culture broadly, particularly as music education becomes increasingly compromised through teaching positions at all levels having become the art-world equivalent of shoe contracts in basketball. It's a time bomb of sorts for the musico-cultural ecology that has delivered a body of knowledge we now know to have profound applications to every aspect of life. If educational utilitarianism truly becomes the only justification of our existence, as it is well on its way to doing, the nineteenth-century European value system we have spent the last century deconstructing, protesting, and overthrowing merely becomes reinstitutionalized, with music restored roughly to the place it had in ancient Greece, but without much of any acknowledgment of the events of the intervening millennia. That's a loaded statement I'm not fully prepared to defend here and now; but I believe it wholeheartedly and it keeps me up at night.

Two closing thoughts to this diatribe:

First, even if the various extrinsic benefit profiles of a wide range of musical cultures were to be codified, I would remain trepidatious. Aesthetic synergy with the individual student will always be a bedrock prerequisite for reaping extrinsic benefits, and it's hard to imagine that the prescription of certain courses of study with certain endgames in mind could possibly have much success. Gainfulness is an abstraction, but I think this much we can agree on, at least those of us who have ever been forced to study closely music which we didn't necessarily think warranted it in our cases.

Second, and finally, because I pay attention to all of this stuff in music, I chuckle often when I encounter less compelling extrinsic benefit narratives from other areas of culture. Golf, science fiction, gardening, and just about everything else is being sold virtually the same way music is. That doesn't change the evidence in our favor, but I think it does change the nature of the dialogue once we understand that we are hardly the only ones taking this tack. If we don't realize it, the people we are trying the hardest to reach will.

Secretary of Outreach

George Colligan relates a familiar story, drawn in this case from his early years on the East Coast scene:

What often ends up happening is that whomever can convince every friend they had from middle school on and every extended family member to come out every time they play will be the successful ones. If you spend all of your time shedding, and have a small circle of friends and family who also have a life of their own, you can't expect them to come out every time you play! (I used to do OK at Blues Alley in Washington, D.C. when my Dad or Mom would really organize folks to come to my performances. But I did a lot of gigs with local singers who were secretaries by day; they would invite the entire office to their gig once a year and they would pack the place. So this was the beginning of what I thought was an imbalance. The really good local musicians who played on the scene regularly couldn't draw a crowd at Blues Alley; but the amateur folks could do really well with ticket sales.

Indeed, it has always astounded me just how well "amateurs" tend to do with ticket sales and the like, and this dynamic is clearly at the heart of it. However, the dark matter here, that which lurks beneath the observable dynamics and outcomes while dwarfing them in severity, deserves to be articulated too: could it be any clearer that listeners can't tell (or don't care to) the difference between professional and amateur productions, whether they are personally acquainted with the band or not?

Exit Strategies II: The Two Dignities

In many ways, the day jobs I have held have engaged, challenged and utilized my entire physical and intellectual capacities to a much greater extent than many of the paying tuba gigs I have played. Those prone to hawking music as the ultimate multi-disciplinary task for the developing brain will of course accuse me of exaggerating, but I'm not so sure I am. In fairness, it is true that I have invested quite a bit more time and effort in improving my tuba playing than I have in becoming a better security guard, and that this has made certain kinds of tuba gigs much easier than they would otherwise be. That being what it may, in facing the transition from academic to civilian life for the second time, I find myself far less fearful of the indignities associated with low-wage jobs than of those which inhere in the musical cultures I inhabit.

As with so many other musico-cultural issues, a disconnect with my peers is palpable when it comes to weighing these two dignities against each other. One consideration, of course, is instrumentation. I cannot demand $100 for a $50 gig where the contractor truly needs about $20 worth of tuba playing, and I struggle to take pride in imbuing that $20 worth of music with $100 execution. Of course, I understood from a relatively early stage that this is what it means to play the tuba. All of this came quite a bit more easily to me then, a time when I more readily embraced the idea that any musical task is as hard as you make it for yourself, when I enjoyed the particular challenge of being an accompanimental voice, took pride in being saved only for the biggest and best parts of the piece, and found fulfillment in doing the little things. I was constantly commended as a young adult for my "maturity" in such matters, scoffing at that evaluation with increasing frequency as neither I nor my less "mature" peers seemed to change much as we aged. With time, however, the politics of orchestration have indeed eroded my willingness to sit idly by while the bulk of the music is made without me. As the saying goes, I set out to change the the world and the world changed me instead.

By any number of measures, this is a rather petty and selfish tantrum to throw, not very zen at all, and potentially rather destructive to just the kind of collaboration that sustains creative musicians like me. And yet I don't think it can be denied that there is something profoundly unhealthy and equally un-zen-like about living one's musical life bottled up; about so rarely being necessary to the whole of which you are a part; about enduring the absolute insistence by careerist colleagues that the indignities and injustices the rest of the world suffers through on a daily basis makes the life of a $100 tuba player being paid $50 for $20 worth of work into one of the world's higher privileges. Perhaps it very well should be. For me, it is not.

By and large, tubists as a group have quite admirably taken to heart Jacobs' admonition to seek out greater challenges than our established roles present to us on a daily basis. I would, of course, agitate for casting a much wider and less stylistically conservative net throughout this process, and I have written plenty about that already. The point I want to reprise this time around is that because of this overwhelmingly conservative orientation, we have not succeeded in establishing idiomatic roles for the instrument in living contemporary musical traditions, roles which are commensurate with our newly evolved technical achievements. Instead, the emphasis has been on getting better at the roles which already exist. Neither as performer nor as listener would I want to live in a world devoid of those traditions, but nor can I say that I have much of a shot at a dignified existence within the confines of that music. Earth to tubists: we need this music more than it needs us, a surefire recipe for an unhealthy relationship in virtually any sphere of human existence.

Such it is that when the dignity of making a living through one's life's work gives way to the indignity of boredom and superfluousness, it doesn't matter how much we're getting paid to play whole notes or how beautiful those whole notes are. Raising the technical bar is only half the battle; only in applying these advances to great, living music do we ensure ourselves a share of the musical future, by which I mean the dignity of being necessary to a living musical tradition. (Quick! Somebody reading this convince me that the tuba is "necessary" to a "living" musical tradition! No, seriously, I really need to know!)

I certainly have found my way into some interesting tuba work over the years through my investment in playing changes. Perversely, that is my most marketable skill, with both competition and demand being almost non-existent. Yet by and large, the gig that absolutely needs me and my skill set just to be able to happen is a rare bird, and the more gigs I play as an interchangeable piece, the stronger I sense that there is an indignity here for me of the type I've never sensed at any day job. Of course, in the professional music world, you are supposed to be thankful that people want to hire you, period, no matter who they are and what the occasion might be, and all of that should go double when someone else could just as easily have gotten the call. "He's a great player and a swell guy to work with." The meritocrats admonish us that this is no less that the essence of dignity in our chosen profession. Where is the dignity in walking away from it?

I have already given part of the answer, but the more important part, I am only recently coming to think, has everything to do with what might be called "family values" (note lower case). Music history is of course littered with major and minor figures alike who rankled their parents by abandoning more stable, respectable, lucrative paths in order to follow their respective muses. Other aspirants are themselves rather terrified when they first fully grasp the reality of the situation they are facing and either take up a fallback career or become the most rabid of self-promoters. Still others were raised by parents who suffered true indignities of various stripes along the way, leading both them and their children to aspire to something better. It seems quite clear to me now that most of my peers have been shaped by one or more of these factors and that perhaps I am rather exceptional in not having been shaped by any of them: my career choice met little parental resistance, I was raised to fear bourgeoisification more than poverty, and economically at least, there was scarcely a better life my parents could have aspired to give me than the one we had.

As for place, it may or may not be relevant in my case:

The culture in Minneapolis is very comfortable. Our guest artists almost always comment on how much they love Minneapolis--the clubs, the scene. But they also comment on the lack of drive in local players. They're all like, 'I love it--but where's the fire behind these musicians?'

Well...there's fire, and then there's fire. There's rehearsal, practice, listening, study, diversion, and then there's hustling. There's proving something to yourself and then there's proving it to others. For whatever reason, my thing has always been outward humility and inner fire; I think that derives from an upbringing where achievement was valued, self-importance was discouraged, and basic needs were never in jeopardy of failing to be met. Meanwhile, ever since I discovered the degree of misjudgment and misinterpretation that goes on in the professional music world, as easily in one's favor as against it, it has been rather difficult to get fired up about controlling my own narrative. I decided to direct that energy into my work instead. That way dignity lies.