Daily Bow: A Day in the Life

As a classical musician, if I had a dollar every time somebody asked me what exactly I do with my time, I’d be quite a bit better off than I am now. In a world of 9-to-5 jobs and five-day weeks, the life of a musician can seem to outsiders to be glamorous, cushy, strange, or futile, depending on the person’s perspective. The recent labor disputes between orchestral managements and player’s associations have caught the attention of the media, and the conception that musicians work a few hours a week for princely sums of money seems to weave through the coverage. This misconception is a pervasive one: while I was doing my undergrad–waking up at 7:00 am to start practicing by 8:00 and working until midnight or beyond every night with rehearsals, classes, homework, and personal practice–I had a friend who would consistently belittle me and my music major friends by asking me what I was doing and what I was so stressed about…after all, he said, I wasn’t taking any “real classes,” and it wasn’t like I had a “real major.” I eventually became so frustrated with the needling and the constant attempts to explain what I did and why it was valuable that I didn’t speak to him for a year.

This frustration is not uncommon amongst musicians. We encounter this kind of difficulty frequently, often even within a family. While I have been fortunate enough to have parents who (while they are not musicians) are supportive of my choice and understanding of what it entails in terms of lifestyle, schedule, and trajectory, other musicians–many others–have not been so fortunate. Many musicians who come from non-musician families encounter resistance or pressure: I have friends, as I’m sure we all do, whose parents can’t quite understand why it is difficult to practice and hold a desk job and still manage to prepare for auditions, or why a low income stream in music does not equal laziness or ineptitude. These parents, like so many members of the general public, see a person who has a few hours of work scheduled per day, perhaps, and wonders what goes on for the rest of the time.

There are, of course, many benevolent outsiders–the curious people who stop fellow passengers on planes to ask them about their instrument cases, the friends who aren’t in music by find it fascinating, the old friends from high school who wonder what happened to you after college. To many of them, the life of a musician can seem a glamorous thing–after all, we go to our jobs dressed in black heels or tuxes (think: how many musicians do you know who have gotten married in their tux? One friend said it would be like a TGI Friday’s employee getting married in his server’s uniform). We work late at night, rarely have weekends, and rub elbows with rarefied company, and, to the uninitiated, it’s a pretty cool life. But, as we all know, it’s more work than play. Says St. Paul Chamber Orchestra board chair Dobson West, “Our musicians play with passion, intensity and joy that can make it look easy, but it is far from easy. Their work is both physically and mentally challenging. They work extremely hard.”

In fact, it’s becoming more work for fewer jobs and less money, which has led Kristin Tillotson of the Minneapolis Star Tribune to number it, only half-jokingly, as one of the riskiest professions. As the lockout continues for the two leading orchestras in the Twin Cities, the Star Tribune has profiled a married couple, the Adamses, to provide the outside with a look at what life as a classical musician really is. Tillotson profiles Michael and Daria Adams, two musicians who, until recently, had every reason in the world to think that their jobs were secure. Michael plays in the viola section of the Minnesota Orchestra; Daria is a violinist with the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Both Adamses are now locked out of their job and have been without pay for over a month–Michael since October 1st, Daria since mid-October. The couple has been looking for work to pay the bills, sending out resumes to over 25 orchestras. Getting the jobs they have (or should have) now wasn’t easy. Daria worked as a part-time nanny while practicing seven hours a day before she landed her job, a familiar story to anyone who is taking auditions now or has in the past. Of the job search for a musician, Michael says, “Very few talented high school football players ever make it to a Division I college; fewer still make it into the NFL. The odds are similar for an aspiring high school musician to get into a top music school, and then the elite ranks of the orchestra world.” Tillotson adds that “Indeed, there are about 1,700 players in the nation’s top 17 orchestras — about the same number as on NFL rosters.” The audition process is, in Michael’s words, “brutally competitive,” with hundreds of players turning up for an audition for a single spot in a section. For a sense of how brutal it is, try explaining the audition process–with the multiple rounds, the screens, and the group warm-up rooms–to a non-musician friend, and get a load of their facial expression. It’s a lot more daunting than the typical interview process, that’s for sure.

The most valuable facet of Tillotson’s piece is that in which she addresses the gorilla in the room: why so much money?

As section string players — the “worker bees” of the orchestra — he makes about $117,000 and she $83,000, salaries that are 10 to 15 percent below the average for their organizations. While those are enviable incomes by most American workers’ standards, they’re on a par with other specialized white-collar professions, including attorneys, engineers and ad executives. They live in a middle-class Edina neighborhood of 1970s-era split-levels. Their kids attend public school (their 18-year-old son is a freshman at Brown University). They drive an 11-year-old Toyota van and a Hyundai Elantra with 135,000 miles on it. “Nobody goes into this career for the money,” Daria said.

For one thing, a classical musician’s education is expensive. Michael attended a boarding school for the performing arts in Illinois, then earned a bachelor’s degree at the Eastman School of Music in New York. Daria got hers at the New England Conservatory of Music, then a master’s at SUNY/Stony Brook. Both were scholarship students at least part of the time, but by today’s standards, that’s a combined half-million dollars’ worth of tuition.

They also spend $1,500 a year to maintain their instruments — one violin, one viola and four bows. Worth a total of about $250,000, the instruments are still being paid off.

As it turns out, music is, as my first cello teacher semi-jokingly used to say, a money pit. Regardless of the hours of work and the mounting uncertainty and insecurity in the job market, the Adamses, like most musicians I know, wouldn’t have it any other way. “It’s too important a job,” Daria said. “It’s fulfilling, it’s giving back to the world.” Kristin Tillotson has also done an important job this week by giving readers a realistic view of life as a classical musician. Consider it a little bit of education in the hopes of promoting greater understanding between the musicians and non-musicians of the world. You work hard for your money, and we hope you can see that we do, too.