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.

Hidden Tracks (ii)

As long-time MFEDI readers know, I've been fixated for some time on the question of the inherent value of art considered apart from it's content. This comes as a direct consequence of the frequency with which I encounter people, institutions, theories, philosophies and public policies alike that take art to be an inherently positive thing simply by virtue of its being art. The most obvious flaw in this idea is that we, collectively, cannot seem to agree on what is and is not art in the first place, and hence, a rational debate is impossible because we cannot agree on a definition of our terms. But what if we could define our terms, proceeded to have the debate, and reached the conclusion that all art is, in fact, wholesome, constructive, and valuable (i.e. the way many seem to have concluded anyway, but which I personally disagree with)? Where would that leave us?

More recently, what fascinates me about this idea is the matter of supply and demand. How much of a good thing can we have before that good thing becomes a mediocre thing, or even a bad thing? Is there anything about art that would lead us to expect it to be immune to this mechanism (other than the fact that because we can't define what it is, we can't really know the answer)?

Supply and demand is an economic principle, but there are parallels to this idea in every conceivable facet of life. There's the physical aspect of it, seen in the principle of diffusion; the geographical/migratory aspect of it, seen in people going where the jobs are, where the resources are, or simply trying to get farther and farther from each other (i.e. suburban sprawl); the biological aspect of it, where practically any element in its purest form is toxic to living things, where we know it is possible to die from drinking too much of the substance most essential to survival (water), and where overpopulation ultimately leads to near extinction.

I lack the formal Philosophical grounding to know if there's an established global term for this idea outside the realm of economics, but one can clearly see that it is everywhere, both in nature and in society. It is not only possible to have too much of a good thing, it is virtually always the case that having too much of a good thing is 100 times worse than having just barely enough, and only marginally better than having none at all. Hence, even if we cannot define art, it would be silly to believe that its case would any different. And so I worry about it. A lot.

Art is everywhere. There's more music available for free online than a person could listen to in a thousand lifetimes. It would be a chore to find a vacant storefront in a bad neighborhood to fix up and turn into an art space because most all of them have already been bought up and turned into art spaces. And then there's the relatively recent idea of finding beauty in everyday objects or sounds (i.e. from Cage, et al), something which I embrace wholeheartedly, sometimes against the complaints of acquaintances and colleagues, but which also scares the living crap out of me as an artist because it would seem to render my work irrelevant, even to myself.

Digging even further, there's the "music is for everybody" issue. There's scarcely a saying I feel more conflicted about than that, since, while I (and everyone else) would just love to believe it solely for it's power to validate what we do, we all know it's not true. Speaking in absolutes is a death wish in rational debate, and this saying manages to do it not once but twice, first with "music" (i.e. ALL music? Music generally? What?) and, more obviously, with "everybody." More relevant to the present discussion, though, is that us musicians are literally putting ourselves out of business with this phrase. This is a brutal irony considering that it is most often trotted out as a marketing tool aimed at getting more kids involved in music, and hence yielding more income both for the music teachers who teach them and for the performers whose concerts it is assumed they will then attend for the rest of their lives. I've bellyached before about the soulless cynicism inherent in that thinking, so I'll leave that issue alone for now. The point is that in aiming to create more and more of a good thing, we inevitably create too much of it, and that it's equally inevitable that this will leave us worse off in the long run than we were before.

Some would (and do) argue that we're not creating the same good thing here, since the vast majority of these students don't become professional musicians, and hence don't offer a competing product (i.e. "professional level" performances). In a world with any justice whatsoever, that would indeed be the case, but we do not live in such a world, for in practice, audiences don't choose "professional level" performances over less-than competent performances; they're more interested in their friends' bands than anyone else's band simply because it's their friends, and they largely can't tell the difference in musicianship anyway where there is one. The retort to that is that more music education creates more astute listeners who can tell the difference. Perhaps, but it also creates more friends who continue to perform at a less-than-professional level as adults, creating a product that friendless professional musicians simply can't compete with, no matter how good they are. Further, it is demonstrable that more and more of these students are pursuing professional careers insofar as that entails majoring in music in college. That's the crown jewel of the "music is for everybody" battlecry, and one which is responsible above all else for its exceptional power to induce the opposite of its intended outcome.

Why the extreme cynicism? Because if there's one thing I wasn't prepared for when i left school, it was what audiences everywhere do and don't notice about musical performances. We've all had the experience of playing a less-than-stellar show and subsequently receiving a warm compliment from an oblivious audience member who couldn't tell the difference. That's not really what I'm talking about, though. I'm thinking more of identity: age, gender, dress, manner, politics and social group all seem to have more to do with success than musicianship does. I won't even tack on the seemingly obligatory "...these days" to that last statement, since "these days" are the only ones I know. Who can say if it's ever been any different? I do have a theory, though, which is that the age of musical plenty we live in has made this even worse than it could possibly have been before. Indeed, it would mark a rather momentous break with countless observable phenomena in nature and human society alike if this were not the case.

It's fun (and very blogospheric of me, I must admit) to list off economic, geographic and biological principles as if I know something about them, whereas in truth, I have only a cursory understanding of each phenomenon I listed. Nonetheless, allow me to attempt to spin this cursory understanding into a halfway compelling recommendation for the way forward. As I understand it, the word "sustainability" is on the tips of a lot of people's tongues these days. This is because we're slowly realizing that economic growth is not mediated solely by our desire to make it happen, but by factors beyond our direct control, like the non-renewability of certain natural resources, or the impossibility of technology replacing more workers than there are left to replace. Hence, instead of continued economic growth benefitting everyone, we are finding that the costs of maintaining a certain rate of growth are so severe as to defeat its utilitarian purpose.

It's more than a stretch to lump modern-day arts advocacy in with fascistic global capitalism, but I don't think it's debatable to say that growth-for-growth's-sake describes the philosophy of one as well as the other, or that there's a tipping point right around the corner in both cases. As we know, too much of something portends that thing's imminent starvation or diffusion or migration or explosion. So-called sustainability isn't so much about surviving that endgame as it is about achieving a kind of equilibrium that prevents the situation from ever getting quite so dire in the first place. So what does sustainability mean in the economics of art? A good start would be to abandon citing extrinsic benefits as the primary method of establishing art's value in the public arena. Nothing could be less sustainable than that smoke and mirrors act. A related action would be to embrace the idea of exposure over that of proselytizing, or in other words, to present music one believes strongly in to new audiences without a hint of superiority or moralization. This ensures a sustainable (if small) influx of new listeners who haven't merely been fooled or seduced into showing up. And last, of course, is to abandon the conceit of music being for everyone.

How could I write such a thing? Besides knowing it not to be true, the idea terrifies me, and not because I'm some elitist snob who'd rather be poor and unknown if it means getting the better of my aesthetic enemies. Sign me up for fame and fortune yesterday, but I'm afraid that what's keeping me from getting there isn't a lack of a musical awareness in the world at large, but rather a heaping, volatile, unsustainable pile of it that just keeps on growing, rendering my contribution to it more meaningless by the hour.

Prodigy

There's nothing remarkable about prodigal talent. What's remarkable is when someone manages to recognize its existence.

A Tuba in the Jazz Band?

One of my tuba students recently came to me for advice on how to convince his high school band director to let him play in the jazz band. Among other things, I offered to write a letter for him, which I've now turned into an "open letter" to all K-12 band directors who favor strict adherence to the "standard" big band instrumentation of saxophones, trumpets, trombones, and rhythm. My naively optimistic hope is that this document could be used by any student who wants to play a "non-standard" instrument in their school's jazz band, but whose band teacher won't allow it. I've posted the letter on my website as a PDF file:

A Tuba in the Jazz Band?

I'll refrain from rehashing the whole letter point by point in hopes that you, the reader, will click on the link and read it in its entirety. There are, however, a couple of additional thoughts I've had since I finished it.

First, I mention in the letter that this situation never arises at schools with small/weak music programs. That's because in those cases, there aren't enough (or good enough) students available to cover the parts in the first place, and hence, regardless of their feelings about jazz band instrumentation, the teacher is typically in no position to turn down interested students on any instrument. I suspect this accounts for the fact that the majority of my K-12 tuba students were already playing in jazz band when they came to me for lessons (a point which I was sure to emphasize in the letter). This makes it all the more frustrating that one who attends a school with a larger program would be the one to find himself potentially trespassed from jazz band because of his instrument, yet if you think about it, it makes perfect sense, since there apparently are more trumpet, trombone and saxophone players at his school than there are spots available, making the admission of other instrumentalists quite the slippery slope for his band teacher.

In hindsight, I realize now that as someone who came up through bare bones jazz programs rather than sprawling, competitive ones, I benefitted greatly from this very dynamic, even if it didn't seem like it much of the time. My high school band teacher, who was overworked generally (aren't they all?) and particularly inexperienced in the jazz realm, went looking for help and stumbled on Jim Torok and Kerry Ashmore, two traditional jazz musicians who had been working with school jazz bands on a volunteer basis for many years. She turned the reins over to them, and suddenly not only were we afforded the opportunity to work with two highly experienced professional musicians, but two highly experienced professional musicians who, I was soon to learn, often hire their best students. They ultimately gave me my first paying gigs while I was still in high school, not to mention instilling a love and understanding of early jazz that I may not have otherwise developed. To this day, I still play with both of them several times a year.

I lucked out again in college at the University of Minnesota, where Jazz Studies Director Dean Sorenson spearheaded a collaboration with the dance department that entailed commissioning many new works from local composers. When he offered to include tuba in the instrumentation, I jumped at the opportunity to be a full-time member of a big band for the first time, as well as write a piece of my own for the project. While at The U, I was also lucky enough to have drummer Phil Hey as a jazz combo instructor. Phil, who is ubiquitous on the local scene and is the first call drummer for many big names passing through from out of town, has been a valuable teacher, mentor, and friend over the years, but, oddly enough, one of a type which I may not have had if I had gone to a big name jazz school where TA's run all of the combos, as was the case at the University of Northern Colorado, where I spent a year as an exchange student. This is not to diminish the generosity of Dana Landry, the Director of Jazz Studies at UNC, who graciously agreed to do 1-on-1 lessons with me during my second semester, and also had me play a couple of tunes with the Lab Band I. (Did you get that last part, high school band directors?) Nonetheless, since all of the combos and most of the big bands were directed by TA's, this was my only direct contact with jazz faculty members while I was there.

Certainly, there were ups and downs to all of my academic jazz experiences, and I definitely did not feel lucky to be part of small programs at the time. Nonetheless, it has been difficult watching a student of my own be offered less (nothing, actually) by a program that has more to give, and it has also made me more grateful for what I did get to be a part of as a student.

Secondly, I mention in the letter that, in hindsight, the academic world in general seemed less receptive to me as a tuba player playing jazz than the "real world" of living, breathing musicians has been since I left school. I'll refrain from naming names here, although it should be obvious that the one's I've mentioned in a positive light above certainly aren't who I'm talking about. With this idea still fresh in my mind from writing the letter, I just happened to stumble on a recent New York Times article about the guitarist Mary Halvorson, from which this excerpt particularly jumped out at me:

In high school she enrolled in summer programs at the Berklee College of Music and the New England Conservatory of Music, learning to shrug off chauvinistic appraisals of her talent.“Nobody would take me seriously,” she said. “They would take one look at me and say, ‘O.K., folk singer.’ That was really hard for me, and I was angry a lot of the time. I did all these summer programs, and I never encountered another female playing jazz guitar. Ever.” The experience taught her to be comfortable as the only woman on a bandstand, she said, adding that the issue rarely comes up anymore.

Let me preface my reaction to that very last passage by saying that I have no illusions that anything I've experienced as a tuba player in a saxophone player's world compares to the pervasiveness or hurtfulness of sexism or racism. Nonetheless, both of our stories point toward an indictment of musical academia as unduly resistant to diversity, the road less travelled, "the world as it might be" as opposed to "the world as it is," or whatever else you want to call it. Maybe we knew that already, but if nothing else, this is more fuel for the fire.

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I'll close this post the way I began my "open letter," which is to say that the very notion of "standard" and "non-standard" instruments is more representative of where the music publishing industry has thrown in their lot than it is of the whole of jazz history and the attitudes of its practitioners. It's never been about what you play, but how you play. Though I am a tuba player, this is about much more than just the tuba. It's too bad that so many schools have hitched their wagons to a jazz band instrumentation that automatically excludes more than half of the wind band, virtually all of the string orchestra, and everyone in the choir. In the face of this, creative band directors have always found the flexibility necessary to involve all of their interested students in jazz, regardless of the instruments they play. As much as we appreciate these extra efforts, they really ought to be par for the course, and we ought not accept anything less.

To Read or Not To Know

I've said before that my primary justification for the low level of activity here is that it reflects how often I myself am able to set aside the time sit down and read other people's blogs (not skim through, but actually read and digest; anything else would be a waste of time). Certainly, if I had more to say, I would say it, but I find nothing unfortunate about the fact that most of the time, I don't. With writing as with music making, I value being consistent over being prolific (though I'd like to be both, I'm neither most of the time).

As with virtually every other aspect of what the web has wrought, the sheer number of music blogs seemed daunting for a long time. It is somewhat odd, then, that as I've settled into a routine of checking in with the rest of y'all quite a bit less frequently than I used to, I am now beginning to get frustrated with my inability to unearth any new blogs of substantial interest to me. Being someone who gets off on crashing parties and being an outsider, the guiding principle behind my blogospheric machinations to this point has been an idealistic optimism towards unknown quantities (i.e. blogs that don't seem to be attracting much attention) while casting a cynical eye towards the ones that are in virtually everyone's blogroll. Two years into this endeavor, it's now past time to admit that while there are indeed a good number of very popular destinations whose attraction is utterly lost on me, the vast majority of my favorite blogs have a significantly larger readership than my own blog does.

Of course, a very "popular" music blog is still not very popular in the grand scheme of things, but if nothing else, I'm heartened by the possibility that the marketplace of ideas is not only stocking something I want to buy, but selling a lot of it, too. I'm still looking forward to reading any insurgents that might crop up, but I guess it's time to stop feeling guilty for going back to the same old blogs whenever I manage to make time for reading. The more frustrating part is that it is difficult to keep up with most of them, and even if time were not an issue, I'm not convinced that I would be in the mood for the kind of conscientious reading I referred to above often enough to manage this anyway. Complain about long posts if you will; it's really no different than writing a boatload of really short posts over the same period of time (I would venture that far fewer words are posted here over a given month or year despite the length of the individual entries). Maybe by spending less time looking for enlightenment in all the wrong places, I'll be able to keep up with some of the more prolific among us.


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When I graduated from college, I realized that I didn't know anything. And I'm not talking about "street smarts" or the "real world," I'm talking about the type of "book smarts" that school is supposed to endow you with in gross excess, but which I can't help feeling that I lack spectacularly. I could go on about the structure of college music programs, but I won't because I already have, and if you're interested in what I have to say about that, you can go there and find out. All that aside, suffice it to say that I was not inspired to learn because I wasn't interested in what was being taught. The three years since then have mostly been spent shuttling between worrying about what this might mean for my career as a music maker and feebly attempting to do something about it (the latter course of action being based on the assumption that, as I was always told in school, whatever the possible consequences, they are all bad). Needless to say that reading music blogs can make one feel really smart sometimes and really dumb other times, the latter in my case most especially when the writer is an academic or specialist twice my age. As a student, I chided those people for pursuing knowledge for its own sake. "If I want to make music," I might have said to myself, "I don't have time to become a musicology expert. I have to practice."

Upon getting a safe distance from the institution, I realized that I had spent a hell of a lot of time practicing without putting an ounce of effort into knowledge gathering (again, I'm hesitant to blame myself entirely for this given that music school "knowledge gathering" was more like "knowledge stuffed down your throat depending on what will get us and keep us NASM accredited"). I fairly immediately began to thirst for knowledge, usually for its own sake and simply because I felt I didn't have any, but sometimes because I didn't think I could go on making music without it. This latter inclination would seem to validate what I heard repeatedly for 5 years as the meekest of all justifications for what I was putting myself through, and it shocked the hell out of me to imagine myself embracing it.

I have not, however, been thoroughly converted. Under my breath or in my head, I would often dare the utterer of such a phrase to back it up with a lucid, academically rigorous explanation of specifically how knowledge of the bit of extra-musical fodder under discussion would make me a better musician. Because I never said it out loud, they didn't, and I can't, hence, I'm not convinced that most of the knowledge I'm interested in will mean anything for my career other than becoming a know-it-all (not a good networking move at all, unfortunately, as this tends to alienate people like all hell).

The inconvenient part of all of this is that I have found myself to have been correct on what would seem to be the most juvenile of all things I ever thought back then, but which is turning out to be the most absolutely and frustratingly true: I really don't have time gather all of that knowledge and keep my chops in any kind of performance-ready shape at the same time. There are only so many hours in the day, and only so many of those hours are inspired hours, and only so many of those hours (actually, I think we're down to a matter of minutes at this point) are hours when it's not impolite to play a tuba upstairs from a family with a small child. I'm finding it a hell of a lot harder to become a top-notch performer/composer than to become a know-it-all, but damn near impossible to become both. Given a choice, I'll take the musicianship, which, as my younger self would have said, produces something that doesn't die with me as my knowledge most certainly will.

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.