Career Morph

I would like each of you to answer the following question, said our Dean during a recent meeting of department chairs. The question: what is one thing you wish you had learned in college, and didn’t?

I was sitting on the far side of the conference table so it took a while to get around to me. That was a good thing because I needed time to think it over. Unlike my colleagues, who are doing professionally more or less what they were trained to do, I pursue a highly varied and delightfully successful career that has only a nebulous and tangential relation to my college degrees, both of which are in piano performance.

Playing the piano is just about the only thing I don’t do for a living any more. There was a time when I did make some (not much) money as a pianist, but those days are long gone. Piano-playing has got to be the most time-intensive and low-paying occupation I know. Oh, there are those few headliners who rake in the dough, but that never would have been me. Whether I had the ability or not—personally I don’t think I do, although others might hold other opinions—I had no desires in that direction. Getting me to enter a competition, for example, took a lot of arm-twisting, and then my preparation was so desultory as to qualify as resentful. Nor did I take any steps to get my name out there, to act as huckster or self-promoter. I just didn’t want to.

Piano playing was for me a means to an end and not the end. It got me into a conservatory and it got me into the music profession. And for a while there I did a lot of playing, although the performances that really mattered to me—chamber music and solo recitals—paid doodley-squat. I could make money with scutwork, accompanying singers and playing in bars and ballet schools and doing studio work and the like. But how life-draining that all was, how enervating, how blah. And, all things considered, it was all at downright starvation wages once you factored in prep time and travel and all that.

Nor was piano teaching ever all that attractive to me. That isn’t to say that I didn’t give it a chance. I taught piano in the SF Conservatory’s preparatory and adult extension divisions for a good fifteen years. I’ve taught tons of piano students, from the talented to the tone-deaf. And I’m good at it. But I teach only a few weekly lessons nowadays, and in the near future I will almost certainly stop altogether.

As it turned out, I was to make my primary living teaching music theory—a discipline that originally held few if any charms for me—and eartraining—a discipline that I never had to learn in any concrete sense given that I’ve had a rock-solid ear since early childhood. But that’s how it evolved, and I have become quite accomplished in both disciplines.

And then, somewhere along the way, I started doing a musicological-commentarial thing. That is in keeping with the observations of some of my more astute conservatory teachers, who noted that I may have been better suited for one of the big universities with separate schools of music—Michigan, Yale, Indiana, Rice, that sort of place. I was always fascinated by music history and literature, and I have been an orchestra wonk practically since my earliest musical experiences.

So that was my answer to our Dean’s question: I wish I had learned to take professorial advice more seriously. But I hastened to add that it wouldn’t have made any difference. For the past five years my career has taken a swooping curve in the direction of musical commentary and writing. And I probably couldn’t have entered this phase from a professional background in musicology. For one thing, most publication editors wouldn’t have touched me with a ten-foot pole, given that they know perfectly well that musicologists are, on the whole, lousy program annotators. The problem is twofold: first, musicologists tend to be narrow specialists with marked agendas, and second, musicologists are usually hardcore academics and therefore write in glutinous academic Gloppitygibberish instead of English. Being a good program annotator means being a good writer first and foremost, just as being a good public music commentator means being an engaging public speaker first and foremost. Whether or not I have contributed meaningful research is completely beside the point.

I taught myself to write by the only way anybody learns how to write: by reading extensively, and by writing incessantly. I became an adept public speaker by doing a lot of public speaking to intelligent but not necessarily musically-savvy audiences. It didn’t happen overnight, but by the time I started speaking at the SF Symphony and other such public venues I was a seasoned veteran.

So I’m not really a musicologist or historian, either. About the only thing I can say with certainty is that nothing I do nowadays has much to do with my college degrees.

And where does my knack for being a curator fit into all that? Or archivist? Or my near-instinctive skill with technology?

Just this past week I met with a tax specialist, and in the process it became abundantly clear that my cottage industries of the past few years have morphed from sidelines into a full-tilt small business. I couldn’t quite live on my writer-commentor income, but within a year or so that could very well become the case. I spend a significant amount of time each week tending to my work with the San Francisco Symphony and the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, not to mention the big chunks of time I recently devoted to my course on Romantic symphonies at the Fromm Institute. A lot of my emotional, intellectual, and musical energy goes in those directions.

So I’m in the midst of change, growth, and development. This is a very good thing, because for many folks my age, the only forthcoming event on the horizon is retirement. I’m on the uphill slope to retirement age but not there by any means—nor have I any plans to retire. Why stop when it’s just getting really good?

I have to admit that I’m wondering just what my career will look like at age 65. A few years ago I could have anticipated that easily. But not now. And I’m feeling quite open for whatever might develop.

So I propose a new question: what is the one thing you’re very glad you didn’t learn in college? That one I can answer very quickly: I’m grateful that I didn’t learn just how differently my career was going to develop. Otherwise I might have tried to anticipate the changes, and in the process, ruin them.

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