The union for the musicians of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, late this June, refused to sign a contract that would cut its unionized musicians’ income by some 20 percent. The musicians were, in turn, locked out by management, which meant facing months without pay or health care. In a Baltimore Sun article, orchestra members told of their fears about losing homes and caring for sick loved ones. Perhaps the most striking interview in the report comes from a twenty-seven-year-old violinist who had done everything right: she was talented and worked intensively; after college she rose through the ranks from the second to the first violin section, finally landing her dream job with a union symphony. But before that, she went to the right schools, Oberlin Conservatory and the Manhattan School of Music, at a cost of over $100,000 in student loan debt. This was debt she was determined to pay off by the time she was forty, if she continued her frugal lifestyle, living with a roommate near the concert hall. And now, here she was walking the picket line with her railroaded colleagues, who had also done everything right.
The world of classical music is neither noble nor fair, though its reputation says otherwise. This is partly because to be classically trained means being regarded among the highest caliber of skilled musicians. Those who achieve such heights are capable of playing the most complex, technically difficult music on equally complex instruments that take decades to master. The prestige that comes with this mastery is, of course, heavily dependent on rankings—orchestra rankings, seating charts, a general fetishization of skill and dedication. And classical music itself is considered the highest echelon of institutional art music, its practice spanning centuries, its history a tapestry of colorful personalities and political upheaval. Like fine art and classical literature, it is considered a high-water mark for culture, a pastime enjoyed largely by the rich, the old, and the snobby. But classical music can be other things, too: transcendental, lush, heartbreakingly emotional. Nothing captures pure rapturous anguish like the third movement of the Shostakovich Violin Concerto; the profound unrest of unrequited love can be found in the see-sawing feverishness and piercing cries of Janàcek’s Second String Quartet; and one still comes out of the 23rd Mozart Piano Concerto or a Mahler symphony in a swirling, euphoric trance.
These are musical experiences that can change the life of a young person. It can give them reason to believe in the power of art above all else, and it can encourage a desire to participate in this art at all costs. I was one of these young people. After seeing Vanessa-Mae on the Disney Channel at the age of three, I begged my parents to let me play the violin. They waited until I was four and had the motor skills to at least use a pair of scissors, and finally granted my wish. They rented my first violin, tiny and horrible sounding, from Johnson String Instruments. Growing up in rural North Carolina, I took violin lessons from a woman who lived in a trailer. She had a stern voice and wore muddy boots. I switched to private lessons from one of the local school teachers, before, in my senior year of high school, commuting to the nearest city to take precious few lessons with one of the musicians from the local symphony. I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t play the violin. It was the backbone of my upbringing, my adolescence, my young adulthood. My formative human experiences, heartbreaks, desires, triumphs, and joys all revolved around playing the goddamn violin.
Meanwhile, I was discouraged from pursuing a number of different careers—botany, architecture, creative writing. But I was never, somehow, discouraged from pursuing a life in classical music. Growing up in a small Southern town, I was a shark in a little pond, better than my peers because I had a head start. Everyone thought I was talented, including myself, as I nabbed first chair after first chair. With every victory, the belief that the world was just and fair, and that the talented and hardworking would inherit it, became more and more cemented in my child-soul. When I was in high school, I decided I wanted to be a composer more than a violinist. I wrote my first pieces, little violin ditties, during my sophomore year. Pirated notation software expanded the ensembles to string and even chamber orchestra. I begged my parents to let me attend a pre-college summer program for composers at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
I should have thought twice about the career choice I had impulsively made at the age of seventeen when my parents explained they could only afford to send me to an in-state school instead of an out-of-state, high-end conservatory. My unshaken worldview relented, telling me that if I worked hard, I would succeed no matter which school I attended. I enrolled in the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in the fall of 2012. Frankly, I’m glad I went there and graduated debt free instead of going to an expensive conservatory, where the crushing of my dreams would have been far more expensive.
Elective Epiphanies
In music school, you have time to do two things: make music and drink. I threw myself into doing both. I spent the $5,000 inheritance left to me by my grandfather, the same inheritance my sister used for a down payment on her house, to go to expensive summer festivals where you get to spend an hour a week with a composer whose name looks good on your resume. This is where I began to see the writing on the walls, when I met other musicians: those born into artistic families in big cities, ingrained into classical music culture at a young age; those who matriculated expensive and prestigious music schools; those attending their third festival of the summer. Meanwhile, I worked almost every night at a minimum wage job in the school recording studio to make ends meet; and I turned down a career-changing unpaid internship in one of the most important new music institutions in the composer mecca of Brooklyn because neither I nor my parents could afford for me to live in New York for a summer.
One day, around the beginning of my junior year of college, it occurred to me that I wasn’t going to make it. I had already developed carpal tunnel and tendonitis from years of improper violin technique taught to me by my rural music teachers. I was out of money to go to festivals, and I had no way of making lasting, important connections in a field where who you know matters more than anything else. I had no serious job prospects, nor any hope for job prospects. At work one night, the falseness of the “work hard and you will succeed” ethic washed over me: the truth was the music world was a two-tiered system, and I was in the second chair. Hungover, in the comfort of a dark recording booth, I began to cry. Few things are as life altering as realizing your preferred life is unalterably a fucked impossibility.
I needed a way out. I threw myself into my work at the recording studio, thanks to the generous help of my boss and mentor, who frequently let me skip class in his office in order to do so. I memorized signal chains, did an independent study on piano microphone techniques, studied circuit diagrams, and built synthesizers on breadboards. I got a paid internship at a speaker company, applied to a single graduate program in audio science at the Peabody Institute, got in on scholarship, and still managed to accrue $44,000 of student loan debt, graduating embittered. In a twist of fate, my blog went viral, and I became a full-time writer. The end. That’s the end of the story of how I devoted my life to a singular cause for twenty years and then didn’t do it anymore. I picked up the violin a few months ago, after two years of carpal tunnel recovery, and found myself unable to play pieces I had mastered in the sixth grade.
The myth of meritocracy had swallowed my early life. It also swallowed the small lifetime of the young violinist on lockout at the Baltimore Symphony. And it swallowed the small lifetimes of the dozens of people I spoke to when writing this article, all of whom asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution in this tiny, vindictive world.
Classical music is cruel not because there are winners and losers, first chairs and second chairs, but because it lies about the fact that these winners and losers are chosen long before the first moment a young child picks up an instrument. It doesn’t matter if you study composition, devote years to an instrument, or simply have the desire to teach—either at the university level or in the public school system. If you come from a less-than-wealthy family, or from a place other than the wealthiest cities, the odds are stacked against you no matter how much you sacrifice, how hard you work, or, yes, how talented you are.
Vetted and Indebted
Despite its reputation as being a pastime of the rich and cultured elite, classical musicianship is better understood as a job, a shitty job, and the people who do that job are workers just as exploited as any Teamster. Classical music has a high rate of workplace injury, especially chronic pain and hearing loss. Many musicians don’t own their instruments, some of which can be as expensive as a new car. My high school orchestra teacher, who played in a regional symphony, was still paying off a viola that cost $20,000. Even the elite among players don’t own their instruments outright; many of these instruments, including Amati and Stradivari violins, are loaned by philanthropists as gifts. I had to rent violins from the same company for sixteen years before I had accrued enough credit to buy one outright at $7,000, right before I graduated from college. One percussionist I interviewed, who works as a middle school band teacher, told me: “As a percussionist, another point of privilege comes with equipment. To own everything we could ever need professionally is very costly, especially a marimba, vibraphone, and full set of timpani. So that’s another huge point of privilege when, for example, one of my middle school students . . . his parents bought him a marimba earlier in the year. Which is great for him, yet here I am with my master’s degree, and I definitely don’t own one yet. I probably won’t for a long time.”
[ed. See also: The Prodigy Complex: On Children in Classical Music]
The world of classical music is neither noble nor fair, though its reputation says otherwise. This is partly because to be classically trained means being regarded among the highest caliber of skilled musicians. Those who achieve such heights are capable of playing the most complex, technically difficult music on equally complex instruments that take decades to master. The prestige that comes with this mastery is, of course, heavily dependent on rankings—orchestra rankings, seating charts, a general fetishization of skill and dedication. And classical music itself is considered the highest echelon of institutional art music, its practice spanning centuries, its history a tapestry of colorful personalities and political upheaval. Like fine art and classical literature, it is considered a high-water mark for culture, a pastime enjoyed largely by the rich, the old, and the snobby. But classical music can be other things, too: transcendental, lush, heartbreakingly emotional. Nothing captures pure rapturous anguish like the third movement of the Shostakovich Violin Concerto; the profound unrest of unrequited love can be found in the see-sawing feverishness and piercing cries of Janàcek’s Second String Quartet; and one still comes out of the 23rd Mozart Piano Concerto or a Mahler symphony in a swirling, euphoric trance.
These are musical experiences that can change the life of a young person. It can give them reason to believe in the power of art above all else, and it can encourage a desire to participate in this art at all costs. I was one of these young people. After seeing Vanessa-Mae on the Disney Channel at the age of three, I begged my parents to let me play the violin. They waited until I was four and had the motor skills to at least use a pair of scissors, and finally granted my wish. They rented my first violin, tiny and horrible sounding, from Johnson String Instruments. Growing up in rural North Carolina, I took violin lessons from a woman who lived in a trailer. She had a stern voice and wore muddy boots. I switched to private lessons from one of the local school teachers, before, in my senior year of high school, commuting to the nearest city to take precious few lessons with one of the musicians from the local symphony. I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t play the violin. It was the backbone of my upbringing, my adolescence, my young adulthood. My formative human experiences, heartbreaks, desires, triumphs, and joys all revolved around playing the goddamn violin.Meanwhile, I was discouraged from pursuing a number of different careers—botany, architecture, creative writing. But I was never, somehow, discouraged from pursuing a life in classical music. Growing up in a small Southern town, I was a shark in a little pond, better than my peers because I had a head start. Everyone thought I was talented, including myself, as I nabbed first chair after first chair. With every victory, the belief that the world was just and fair, and that the talented and hardworking would inherit it, became more and more cemented in my child-soul. When I was in high school, I decided I wanted to be a composer more than a violinist. I wrote my first pieces, little violin ditties, during my sophomore year. Pirated notation software expanded the ensembles to string and even chamber orchestra. I begged my parents to let me attend a pre-college summer program for composers at the Cleveland Institute of Music.
I should have thought twice about the career choice I had impulsively made at the age of seventeen when my parents explained they could only afford to send me to an in-state school instead of an out-of-state, high-end conservatory. My unshaken worldview relented, telling me that if I worked hard, I would succeed no matter which school I attended. I enrolled in the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in the fall of 2012. Frankly, I’m glad I went there and graduated debt free instead of going to an expensive conservatory, where the crushing of my dreams would have been far more expensive.
Elective Epiphanies
In music school, you have time to do two things: make music and drink. I threw myself into doing both. I spent the $5,000 inheritance left to me by my grandfather, the same inheritance my sister used for a down payment on her house, to go to expensive summer festivals where you get to spend an hour a week with a composer whose name looks good on your resume. This is where I began to see the writing on the walls, when I met other musicians: those born into artistic families in big cities, ingrained into classical music culture at a young age; those who matriculated expensive and prestigious music schools; those attending their third festival of the summer. Meanwhile, I worked almost every night at a minimum wage job in the school recording studio to make ends meet; and I turned down a career-changing unpaid internship in one of the most important new music institutions in the composer mecca of Brooklyn because neither I nor my parents could afford for me to live in New York for a summer.
One day, around the beginning of my junior year of college, it occurred to me that I wasn’t going to make it. I had already developed carpal tunnel and tendonitis from years of improper violin technique taught to me by my rural music teachers. I was out of money to go to festivals, and I had no way of making lasting, important connections in a field where who you know matters more than anything else. I had no serious job prospects, nor any hope for job prospects. At work one night, the falseness of the “work hard and you will succeed” ethic washed over me: the truth was the music world was a two-tiered system, and I was in the second chair. Hungover, in the comfort of a dark recording booth, I began to cry. Few things are as life altering as realizing your preferred life is unalterably a fucked impossibility.
I needed a way out. I threw myself into my work at the recording studio, thanks to the generous help of my boss and mentor, who frequently let me skip class in his office in order to do so. I memorized signal chains, did an independent study on piano microphone techniques, studied circuit diagrams, and built synthesizers on breadboards. I got a paid internship at a speaker company, applied to a single graduate program in audio science at the Peabody Institute, got in on scholarship, and still managed to accrue $44,000 of student loan debt, graduating embittered. In a twist of fate, my blog went viral, and I became a full-time writer. The end. That’s the end of the story of how I devoted my life to a singular cause for twenty years and then didn’t do it anymore. I picked up the violin a few months ago, after two years of carpal tunnel recovery, and found myself unable to play pieces I had mastered in the sixth grade.
The myth of meritocracy had swallowed my early life. It also swallowed the small lifetime of the young violinist on lockout at the Baltimore Symphony. And it swallowed the small lifetimes of the dozens of people I spoke to when writing this article, all of whom asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retribution in this tiny, vindictive world.
Classical music is cruel not because there are winners and losers, first chairs and second chairs, but because it lies about the fact that these winners and losers are chosen long before the first moment a young child picks up an instrument. It doesn’t matter if you study composition, devote years to an instrument, or simply have the desire to teach—either at the university level or in the public school system. If you come from a less-than-wealthy family, or from a place other than the wealthiest cities, the odds are stacked against you no matter how much you sacrifice, how hard you work, or, yes, how talented you are.
Vetted and Indebted
Despite its reputation as being a pastime of the rich and cultured elite, classical musicianship is better understood as a job, a shitty job, and the people who do that job are workers just as exploited as any Teamster. Classical music has a high rate of workplace injury, especially chronic pain and hearing loss. Many musicians don’t own their instruments, some of which can be as expensive as a new car. My high school orchestra teacher, who played in a regional symphony, was still paying off a viola that cost $20,000. Even the elite among players don’t own their instruments outright; many of these instruments, including Amati and Stradivari violins, are loaned by philanthropists as gifts. I had to rent violins from the same company for sixteen years before I had accrued enough credit to buy one outright at $7,000, right before I graduated from college. One percussionist I interviewed, who works as a middle school band teacher, told me: “As a percussionist, another point of privilege comes with equipment. To own everything we could ever need professionally is very costly, especially a marimba, vibraphone, and full set of timpani. So that’s another huge point of privilege when, for example, one of my middle school students . . . his parents bought him a marimba earlier in the year. Which is great for him, yet here I am with my master’s degree, and I definitely don’t own one yet. I probably won’t for a long time.”
by Kate Wagner, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Clemens Habicht[ed. See also: The Prodigy Complex: On Children in Classical Music]
