A particular trial for many over-educated musicians is the ubiquity of background music. Studying music for ridiculous lengths of time during their formative years can make some musicians so focused on music that they are incapable of ignoring it; for us, there no longer is any such thing as background music. Any music we hear immediately become our primary focus. This can make conversations in restaurants difficult. . . and maybe I shouldn’t even talk about elevators.
Many over-educated musicians also have music playing in their heads, pretty much constantly. This can be useful; I recently went on a two-day backpacking trip during which I listened to several bands from a recent Celtic music festival, a selections of Lutheran hymns, and several of the works of Josquin de Prez, all without having to carry an mp3 player. It can also give one a vacant (or totally nuts) expression that causes social problems, and, as you might imagine, combining the involuntary focus on music with the mental mp3 player can cause even more social problems.
I recently read an article comparing trying to become a professor in today’s economy to trying to become a dinosaur when you can see the asteroid coming.* I found the comparison disturbingly apropos. As anyone who has tried knows, seeking a professorship in these days of reduced education funding and massive, impersonal online classes ranges from “long shot” to “tilting at windmills.” If your doctorate is in music, you can slant that toward the windmills. And yet, like Don Quixote, we keep trying. Yes, we fight a system that doesn’t even notice our efforts in hopes of a job that probably doesn’t exist, but the key word here is “hope.” Someday, the windmill might really be a giant, and if, by some miracle, we vanquish it, we would find ourselves using our education to do valuable, satisfying, meaningful work, and that would be worth any amount of bruises we get from trying.
*Wheeler, David R. CNN Opinion, “Will online classes make professors extinct?” Last modified November 25, 2013. Accessed January 17, 2014. http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/25/opinion/wheeler-tenured-professors/.
A curious thing about being over-educated, or at least over-educated in the liberal arts: it actually hurts your chances of getting a job. I don’t just mean you may not get a job at your level or in your field; I mean your degree can make it almost impossible to get any job. Even fast food jobs. Even jobs normally filled by high school dropouts with criminal records.
At this point, you are probably thinking that, since this is a humorous blog, I am using exaggeration for comedic effect. . . and I like to think it would be still be funny if I were. But guess what the really funny thing is: I don’t have to. It actually is close to impossible for someone with a doctorate to get a lower level job. Apparently, if we can’t find work in our fields we are supposed to sleep in cardboard boxes until we do, or until the student loan people repossess our boxes.
Case in point: a 16 year old without a high school education can get work in food service without great difficulty; I’ve seen it happen frequently. I have a doctorate, excellent references, and a solid work history, and I can’t get so much as an interview at Starbucks.
This seemed odd enough that I conducted an experiment:
Method
I found a company in my area that was hiring to fill two identical, entry-level positions at separate branches. I had exactly the work experience and other qualifications were asking for (they weren’t asking for much). I applied for both positions. Job #1 received a resume listing all my relevant work experience and all my degrees. Job #2 received a resume that only listed my lower level work and left off all my advanced degrees.
Results
Job #1 never responded. They didn’t even send me a “sorry- we hired someone else” email. I had to call them just to find out if they even received my resume, and call again to find out whether they had filled the position. Job #2 asked me to interview less than three days after I applied. After I interviewed, they recommended me for a manager position. (Update- they later found out that I had a doctorate and I never heard from them again).
Discussion
Apparently, being educated makes one a sort of employment leper. We wander the world hopelessly, with “Ph.D” branded on our resumes that all may know our shame and avoid contamination.
Maybe I should start using heavily redacted resumes.
Volume can be a problem when playing with bagpipes. Bagpipes are really, really loud, and harps, especially folk harps, are really not loud at all. At my college, they made the bagpiper play his recital outside due to liability concerns. In fact, there has been some argument that bagpipes should actually be classed as offensive weapons, and I once read a story about a man who was challenged to a duel and chose bagpipes at 10 paces. There are different ways to deal with the volume issue; you can amplify the harp, or somehow muffle the bagpipe, or you can use the method a piper I once played with did:
At an outdoor wedding in a gorgeous mountain valley, the bride asked me and the piper, “Angus,” if we could play Amazing Grace together. We both knew it, of course, but balance was difficult. I tried playing as loudly as I could, and Angus played as softly as he could, but you couldn’t hear the harp at all. (In fact, after Angus tried playing next to me, I couldn’t hear much of anything for a bit.) So Angus tried standing several yards behind me, but the harp was still inaudible to the audience. After that, Angus told the bride he had an idea. He took off hiking across the valley and after a while I saw him waving at us from partway up the mountainside, about a quarter of a mile away. When he saw me looking at him, he started playing, and I joined in. It balanced perfectly, and it was a good volume for the audience, so he played the whole wedding from there.
I play a lever harp- also called a folk or Celtic harp. Historically, Celtic harps were strung with wire or gut. I’ve strung mine with nylon instead of sheep innards. I get enough sheep innards just sitting near the haggis at Robbie Burns Night 🙂
People tend to associate bagpipes with Celtic music as strongly as they do the Celtic harp. Clients planning Celtic themed events are prone to hiring both a harpist and piper, and may even want them to play together- often without advance notice of any kind. Given the tuning and volume differences, this can be a problem.
Gigging presents several challenges in addition to beer (see July 28th’s post). One of these is the unwieldiness of many instruments and gear. This can be extreme, and is why roadies exist . . . if we could afford them. As many of my readers have probably gathered, I play the harp: probably the pinnacle of musical unwieldiness. Today, I will discuss two of the main harp-gigging challenges: doors and llamas (yes, llamas).
First, doors. Doors and harps don’t tend to get along with each other very well. The harp I use for most gigs is a folk (lever) harp about 4 feet tall. Compared to a concert harp, this is nothing, but mostly I’m not comparing it to a concert harp. Most often, I’m comparing it to the flute, or the clarinet, or any of the other instruments I could have chosen that easily fit through doorways. There is an effective procedure for getting a harp through a doorway: you use one hand to support the harp’s weight, your other hand to keep the harp from swinging into the jam, your third hand to hold open the door that’s trying to close on you, your fourth hand to keep from stepping on your artistically long skirt- I think you see the problem.
Some gigging venues, however, have no doors to deal with, being, in fact, out-of-doors. This is where the llamas and other animals comes in. Flower-filled meadows are understandably popular for weddings, and mean less doors, but animals can be an issue. I have played a surprising number of weddings in llama pastures, which are particularly challenging in terms of where you can step. Also, with outdoor weddings, the guests often bring their dogs. I am very fond of animals, and they seem to know it, which means they all want to hang out with me, next to the harp. I played one wedding with a puppy asleep in my lap behind the sound box and a llama looking over my shoulder; I hadn’t the heart to dump the puppy, and the llama wasn’t budging. In my experience, however, the wildlife most dangerous to a harp is small children running loose after eating enough wedding cake to power a small town.
Despite the bulkiness, there are some significant advantages to playing the harp. It can be a major selling point, since it is a bit unusual and most people associate harps with beauty, peace, heaven etc. (“of course it sounds good- it’s a harp“). In fact, people in general seem so taken with the idea of a harp that I sometimes wonder whether I really even need to be able to play- I sometimes get the impression I could just sit there, with a harp, and still provide the atmosphere the client wants. I suppose that would be an easy job, but I prefer not to feel like an accessory to a piece of woodwork.
There are, of course, other issues associated with gigging with harps: bagpipes come to mind. But that will have to wait, because this post already too long. To those of you who actual read this far: Huzzah! You are amazingly cool!
Gig: a term commonly applied to a musical engagement of one night’s duration only; to undertake such an engagement (Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians)
Gigging: to have a job performing music. (Webster’s New World Dictionary of American English)
Like so many of us over-educated musicians, and in fact most musicians in general, I am willing to take just about any gig that offers anything remotely resembling payment. I am at a major disadvantage here in that I don’t like beer. The reason this is such a problem is that beer serves as a type of ersatz currency in the gigging world- a sort of alcoholic Bitcoin with a limited shelf life. Restaurants and especially bars these days often prefer to hire musicians they can pay in beer, and even those few offering some actual money tend to include drinks as a sort of bonus, which is nice of them but does me no good. Even if I did like beer, most landlords will not accept it as rent, and it is very difficult to apply it toward student loan payments. Nevertheless, at many of the gigs I ask about, people are surprised when I want my payment in a non-drinkable form.
A number of people have told me how unnatural not liking beer is. To hear them tell it, something unprecedented must have happened to my DNA to produce the world’s first non-beer-drinking musician. Once, while I was at a music store, I overheard the guy at the desk get a call from someone who wanted to know what the best microbrewery in town was. The guy at the desk asked the caller why she was calling a music store to ask about beer. The caller said that she figured local musicians would know a lot about the local beer (and, in fact, the guy at the desk did). Often, people ask me to try some beer yet again, just to confirm that I truly, impossibly, don’t like it.
Also, of course, there is the issue of beer consumption by the audience. This has both benefits and disadvantages for the musician. Audiences drinking beer are less likely to notice mistakes, will likely think the music is better than it is, and in many cases will think that the musician is much more attractive than he or she actually is. This last, however, can also often be a disadvantage. Also, beer-drinking audiences are more likely to sing along, with worse results, than sober audiences. When one is a harpist, another disadvantage to beer-drinking audiences (at least beer drinking audiences of a certain age) is incessant requests for “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin. I actually quite like the tune, but there is no way to do some parts of the song properly without a drum set.
In fact, gigging with a harp presents several unique difficulties, which you can hear about next week in “Gigging Part II: Harps.”
So why did I get all these degrees? Why, come to think of it, do so many musicians spend so much time, effort, money, blood, sweat, and tears getting advanced degrees that will, if they are very, very lucky, get them a job that pays about as much as bagging groceries?
Are we just addicted to college? Is it simply that we graduate with our bachelor’s degrees, and then start going into withdrawal and rush to grad school to feed our habit? Could be, but I think a big part of it is how one views the purpose of education.
Basically, do you consider education a monetary investment, like the stock market, or an investment in who you are. Is your goal to improve your bank account, or yourself? If we look at a music degree as a monetary investment, it suggests that we should really let someone else manage our money. Maybe our cats, since they couldn’t possibly do worse than us.
But what if we consider our educations as investment in us? An improvement in our quality of life, instead of our quality of wallet? Suddenly, it looks like much better planning. We pursue music degrees not because we want a resumé line that will get us a high-paying job, but because we actually care about what we are learning. We study music because we want to know about music, not because we want big gobs of money. After all, we all have to live with ourselves, so getting a degree that means we are living with a more interesting person doesn’t seem like such a bad investment after all.
The musician seeking a sound financial strategy in uncertain economic times.
Welcome to the first ever posting on my first ever blog! Today, I am being assisted by Clyde, who is officially the neighbor’s cat but sometimes hangs out with me. He provides valuable purring, which can only make this blog better, and less valuable cat hair, which the purring makes up for.
The purpose of this blog is to, as humorously as possible, discuss issues particularly associated with people who got music degrees and are now trying to get a “good job.” A “good job” is defined here as “a job that provides rent, food, health insurance, might let me retire before I’m 137 years old, and has some connection to music.” These jobs seem to be very rare creatures these days, something like a cloud leopard or some days, a unicorn.
In fact, as a musician in 2013, I feel rather like a mountain gorilla. My natural habitat is shrinking more every day as online music downloads, reduced government funding for the arts, lack of deposable income among the general public, the view of music as solely a luxury, etc. irrevocably alter the forest I planned to make a living in. My hope is to become more like a black bear or a fox, however. I want to adapt instead of dwindling away, and, metaphorically, knock over the garbage can of life.
Some of the subjects I plan to discuss in the near future are: my addiction to higher education, the fact that large numbers of music jobs tend to occur only in places with a very high cost of living, and some of the difficulties of gigging with a harp. I hope you will find this blog insightful and even useful, but I will happily settle for amusing.
The musician in the early 21st century- trying to adapt to a changing world.
