Teachers: Where did you study, and how did it prepare you for your current work?
Students considering careers in music learn a lot from hearing professionals talk about diverse careers and how they managed to turn their passions their work. Some young students have the impression that the career choices in music are performing in an orchestra, teaching at a school, or being a rock star. Hearing from real professionals opens their mind up to the different possibilities.
How did you learn to play your instrument? Did you grow up wanting to be a musician, or is it something that you discovered and chose later on? Did you study formally at a university or conservatory? If not, how did you learn what you needed to learn to do your job? What aspects of your education - musical or otherwise - have you found most critical for your career success? Are there aspects of your education that you now consider a waste of time? On the flip side, are there critical skills that your education failed to teach you, and how did you fill those gaps when you realized they existed? What information do you like to share with students considering careers in music?
I'll skip my full story for now... but as a late-comer to classical guitar and even later to flamenco, I used to have some regrets about starting so late. (I started playing in my early twenties, after finishing an undergrad degree in biology.) However, in hindsight, I can see ways that my indirect path toward a music career has helped rather than hindered my work. Here’s a quick summary of what I found useful and not-so-useful in my formation.
Useful parts of my education:
Basically everything. Understandably, all my musical training has been pretty directly applicable to my teaching and performing work. Before music, I majored in biology at a liberal arts university, and a non-music degree has proved useful in its own way. Liberal arts degrees take a lot of ridicule, but I defend mine whole-heartedly. True, there are specific skills that I invested many hours in that are completely useless to me now. I doubt I will ever need to run gels on plant DNA, translate Sanskrit to English, or analyze gender issues in science fiction novels again. But certain skills that a liberal arts education develops are useful in any field. The three that I’m most grateful for are:
(1) Writing. As tangental as some college essay topics may seem to later career interests, no one ever regrets developing good writing skills. Writing decently can be the deciding factor in getting jobs, winning grants, attracting students, you name it.
(2) Strategic thinking. The music business is complicated, and talent on your instrument doesn’t guarantee work. You have to be a good musician AND figure out how to live off those skills.
(3) Learning how to learn. There’s no end to learning as a musician, and there’s no way to predict the skills you may need in the future. For example, I never would have thought to take a web design course in college, but my website has ended up being a major player in finding work. Having learned all those ‘random’ skills as a liberal arts major gave me confidence to figure out how to build functional, search-optimized website by a combination of research and trial and error.
Useless parts of my education:
Practically nothing. I took a conducting class, and I never conduct. But it improved my score-reading, sense of rhythm, and musical multi-tasking skills. Similarly, I haven’t had much use for higher level music theory and analysis. However, the process of learning the finer points of theory and analysis helped me to internalize my freshly-acquired basic theory knowledge. Because of that higher level study, the fundamentals of music theory - which I use all the time in performing and teaching - are second nature to me now.