The Music Business

One thing I've been able to stand back and observe about myself, with the wisdom of age and perspective, is that in stressy work situations, those that inspire frustration and anger, but even more so those that could be construed as some kind of personal failure, I have a reflexive "flight" response.

Usually, that desire to just walk out and go do a different job is fixated on some particular alternative that has presented itself to my imagination.  The most recent time this happened, there happened to be a position posted at my local music store for a Music Education Manager.

My guitar teacher talked me down from actually walking out of my current day job, so I never did formally apply for the Music Education Manager position, but it has haunted me in fantasy ever since, and is still my go-to Happy Place imaginary alternative work position, on days of high stress (before this it was to be the new owner of a shop that sells bird houses and birdseed, at which I had noticed a "Business for Sale" sign, but that has been sold to new owners so that path is, for now, closed to me).

Then, recently, an actual professional Music Education professional of my acquaintance posted a Facebook link to an article online that injoined Music Educators to stop trying to rationalize the value of music education by linking it to work-related transferable skills that the students could gain. This was a wrong and dangerous path, the article argued.  Music has intrinsic value.  It is around us all the time, and it is of intrinsic value to learn more about it.

And then, just this morning, a college classmate posted a Facebook link to an article that made basically an identical argument, but this time about Liberal Arts education generally.  Stop trying to argue that a Liberal Arts degree has value primarily for the job skills that graduates can bring to the workforce.  Liberal Arts have intrinsic value.  They are important in themselves.

This subject matter has been top of mind in my State recently, as our right-wing, non-University educated Governor continues to slash budgets not just for childhood education but for the reknowned state university system, and news spread among my peers like wildfire a few weeks ago when he "accidentally" struck out the "search for truth" part of the Univeristy's Mission, and replaced it with "training the future workforce".

Those of us who have and have provided for others Liberal Arts education, and those Music Educators of my acquaintance, both feel very strongly that education is different from trade school, that it has intrinsic value beyond the workplace skills it may indirectly provide, and that a developed society should provide it to its citizens.

So, having done an MBA as well, following my Liberal Arts degree (and two more graduate degrees in between, in a fiercely impractical subject matter), and also having been wondering how I could flee my current day job but still live in the lifestyle to which I've become accustomed, lately what's been on my mind is, where does the value derive, for Music Education (and by extension music itself, the existence of it and the listening to it as an audience member but also the opportunity to learn about it and make it oneself)?

What are the economics, here, and how can they be played into a decent replacement salary for me?

The other input to these musings is the new book by composer Philip Glass.  The section of the book that has stayed with me was his description of his music education, which he received in France on a Fulbright scholarship.  The intense, difficult, grueling training that he describes was essential for him to become a composer, because composition requires a breadth of musical expertise.  And he needed to be pretty darned good to be able to go beyond any composer who had lived before in history, and to extend the form in revolutionary ways, as he did (as he has).  He describes what he was trying to bring to the audience of his pieces (transcendence, basically).  He states what he thinks music is for (to learn to listen), in contrast with other art forms (dance is to learn to move, writing is to learn to speak, painting is to learn to see, I can't remember what else).

But, is that enough?  To devote a whole, whole human life to?  To delve in and learn and learn and practice and practice, to suffer and be punished and humiliated and struggle and think and analyze and practice and remold yourself into a musician, into a music creator, into a music revolutionary who expressed something essential about our epoch in a way that no one else every quite did - is it worth it?