14: Unicorn Professions
An AI-generated image, that’s why there are some funky details…
Imagine studying to be a medical doctor. You study for 12 gruelling years, go into massive debt. Then you leave school and find out that there are no jobs for you in the field in which you studied. But you should have known that from the beginning of your studies! And naturally, you can use the skills you acquired through your studies to teach children how to put on band-aids. That’s a noble profession!
AND: You should be Happy about it.
(Grumpy Cat NOT Happy)
This scenario is almost unthinkable, right?
How about this scenario: there’s an awe-inspiringly talented kid who is drawn to the piano at age 6. This kid practices several hours a day, eventually goes to the top-ranked conservatories in the world, studies with the most respected teachers, goes to several masterclasses with international superstars, participates in elite summer programs, goes to competitions (and even wins some). This kid has spent from age 6 to age 30 studying piano (24 years, take THAT medical doctors!), almost non-stop. He incurred a lot of debt from very expensive schools. When he finished his last degree - an Artist Diploma or Doctoral of Musical Arts, or both - he fully realizes that there is shockingly limited available work for him as a performer. There are probably also no available jobs for him as a professor in a conservatory or university. But wait… he could probably find some opportunities teaching kids which key is middle C is on the piano! That is a noble profession.
BUT WAIT: He should have known about all of this at the beginning (at age 6), AND he should be Happy about it. He gets to spend his life in music!
Hmmmmm……
Unicorn Professions
What is a Unicorn Profession, you might ask?
A Unicorn Profession is one that exists only in the imagination, mostly in the imagination of young people and story-tellers. Unicorns are mythical creatures with magical powers. They’ve been (virtually) around since 3000 B.C.
Marco Polo believed he had actually found one, delighting in its black horn, elephant feet, and its preference for living in “muck and mire”. It’s believed that he may have mistaken a rhinoceros for a unicorn.
(No worries, Marco Polo, anyone could mistake a rhinoceros for a unicorn…)
So, Unicorn Professions are mysterious and mythical occupations, and are often mistaken for some other, more homely form, like a Rhinoceros Profession: stuck in the mud, cumbersome, lolloping, and perhaps not so nice to look at.
A professional life in music can be profoundly challenging for anyone, but there are some professions I’d like to send a special shout-out to: pianists, as well as composers and conductors. These types of professions have an obscene imbalance between what is put in and what tends to come out, professionally speaking. I can’t find any statistics to back up this claim, but actually doing the kind of work in these fields that one trained to do, has approximately the likelihood of winning the lottery or getting struck by lightning.
A thread on “Piano Street” asked: “What are the chances of becoming a concert pianist?”. One answer stood out:
“If by 'concert pianist' you mean someone who earns a living as a solo piano performer, the odds are very, very slim. My estimate is that the world market for full-time solo pianists is about 4 or 5 [entering professionals] per year. WORLD market.”
So, when one studies “Piano Performance”, “Conducting”, or “Composition”, one studies one thing, but winds up doing another, not only after graduating but throughout one’s entire career. It’s as if a person would study Marine Biology (doctoral level), and then find that there’s no work in Marine Biology and go into work in a Kindergarten, Home Depot, or Disney World. I’m not knocking working in any of those areas, it’s just that the training for working in those contexts is very different. And an incalculable load of excess training went into being a Marine Biologist that cannot be used later in a professional setting. And Marine Biologists working in Kindergartens are in danger of becoming embittered and unfulfilled because the can’t realize their life goals and might take this bitterness out on the sweet kids who so deserve a loving and enthusiastic teacher, preferably one who was extensively educated to work with them.
Should we expect jobs to be available for graduating artists?
People study for many different reasons: to prepare the path for a career, to satisfy their curiosity, to gain desired skills, to fuel personal growth and development, or sometimes merely to satisfy parental expectations. One should be clear and honest with oneself about one’s reasons for studying.
However, I believe that training institutes do have an ethical obligation to train musicians for entering into a diverse range of professional settings. This training includes the acquisition of intra- and interpersonal skills like communication, negotiation, leadership, management, boundary-setting, work-life balance, goal-setting, resilience, etc. I’d like to see some statistics (can’t find any) about conservatory programs that have vigorous extra-musical requirements, such as high-quality humanities classes, and see if career trajectories benefit from this wider scope of education. The liberal arts college, Oberlin, comes to mind as a spring-board for a lot of entrepreneurial musicians who forged unique paths through collaborative enterprises.
I believe that training institutions could also provide more assistance in forging concrete post-graduation professional plans. The urgency for this type of assistance might correlate to the price tag of the education. The more students pay, the higher the ethical obligation ought to be for assisting them in forging a career after graduation, and also in leveling with them about the serious challenges they will probably face. Professors in US higher education institutions have told me that they have a hard time looking their students in the eyes when thinking about the enormous debt these students are incurring for their education, coupled to a dreadful dearth of professional opportunities after graduation. One doesn’t want to cripple music students with fear of an unknown and inhospitable future, but there are ways to provide honest appraisals for upcoming challenges and to provide a toolbox and supportive framework to meet these challenges.
In Germany, where I live and work, people often are concerned that there are ever-increasing numbers of graduates from music degree programs and ever-decreasing available jobs. This is indeed a concern: to snag an orchestral job, one has to intensively train for years as a soloist. The primary focus of the training is on instrumental proficiency and artistry. Skills that are essential for orchestra players (communication, leadership, management, negotiation, boundary-setting), are usually not considered a part of the training in any meaningful way and are subsequently learned on the job under fire, often during ‘sink-or-swim’ probationary periods. So, for orchestral instrumentalists, musicians train as soloists and then go to work in highly collaborative fields for which they are not properly trained. Difficult!
But what about the pianists? Pianists who train as soloists have severely limited work in any affiliated field. The most respectable alternate fields for pianists: as collaborative artists and pedagogues, are filled with musicians who have intensively trained exactly for those fields. The poor pianists who trained as soloists are left out in the cold.
But musicians find their way…
As an ancient German song celebrates, musicians are a hardy bunch:
Himmel und Erde müssen vergeh’n,
aber die Musici, aber die Musici,
aber die Musici bleiben besteh’n.
Heaven and earth must pass away,
but the musicians, but the musicians,
but the musicians remain.
I see many entrepreneurial musicians, including pianists, composers and conductors, who break through these professional difficulties and create unique and meaningful professional pathways, often outside of the expected norms of the profession. When I use the word “entrepreneurial” a lot of you might cringe and think of this or this:
slick, cut-throat, profit-driven;
or else shady, sleazy and a more-than-a-bit creepy.
Let’s return to the original 13th-century meaning of the French word “entrepreneur”: ‘to do something’, ‘to undertake something’, and leave behind the baggage.
Entrepreneurs manage to identify their values and then find concrete paths to implement and realize them, with intention as well as deep reflection. They mostly work hard, very hard, but are emotionally intelligent enough to understand the dangerously self-defeating nature of burnout and physical injury, and they therefore create ample space for rest and regeneration. They are ready to try things out, acknowledging the very real possibility of failure or embarrassment in any given undertaking, and know how to dig themselves out of failed situations and try again. They probably are not fearless, but instead know how to manage and grapple with fear and anxiety.
They understand that ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’, and therefore cultivate meaningful relationships with (possible) collaborators, supporters, and friends. They create and contribute to musical biotopes in which they are creating performance work for themselves and colleagues by founding festivals, venues, community projects, ensembles, etc. They support this biotope by attending the performances of other artists.
They don’t self-exploit by overstretching their mental, emotional, and physical capabiities, and know that ‘not-doing’ can be as valuable an contribution as ‘doing’. They not only accept, but embrace vulnerability and openness, but yet are adept at understanding and establishing safe boundaries with people and in various situations.
This all is difficult, very difficult. Perhaps even more difficult than playing your instrument, singing, composing or conducting. It requires skill, training, reflection, self-knowledge, the ability to ask for and receive feedback, and a SUPREME MATURITY.
ALL of these things can be learned and cultivated. NONE of them are merely innate predispositions. We can all work to cultivate these entrepreneurial skills, and training institutions can step up and provide more support in these areas. Training institutions can also challenge the trend to narrow education rather than to expand it by maintaining or increasing holistic educational offerings, such as humanities classes.
In closing, when faced with difficult life situations, it’s always a good idea to turn to Rainer Maria Rilke, especially in his Letters to a Young Poet: the best career-advice book of all time, especially for people entering into artistic professions.
Rainer Maria Rilke, the best “Career-Coach” of all time.
Excerpts from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet”:
“Most people have (with the help of conventions) turned their solutions toward what is easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must trust in what is difficult; everything alive trusts in it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself any way it can and is spontaneously itself, tries to be itself at all costs and against all opposition. We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us.“
“No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us...We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.
How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
So you mustn’t be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises in front of you, larger than any you have ever seen; if an anxiety, like light and cloud-shadows, moves over your hands and over everything you do. You must realize that something is happening to you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you w ant to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change...”
“You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”