For my son
It has been over a year since I last offered a post on this blog. I’ve tried several different approaches recently to restarting this blog, including finishing the posts of the BRAVING series and writing new material and with each one I’ve struggled to find a piece that feels resonant as a restart to the blog. Eventually, I realized that perhaps the best way to start again was through the story of why I haven’t written here in so long.
After I published the last post in April 2021, I was lucky to be offered a position as Assistant Dean of Community Engagement and Teaching Artistry at the New England Conservatory for the Fall of 2021. This position in many ways was the right fit that I didn’t know I was looking for. It relies on my pedagogical experience, my understanding of high-level music performance, and the administrative and non-profit skills I built during my graduate degrees. Most importantly though, it directly supports my strongest creative interests at this time: the development of community engagement learning in conservatory and higher education musical study.
My wife and I quickly packed up our life in Colorado and moved across the country to Boston. Most of my time was taken up with adapting to a new city and onboarding into a new job. Only a few months after starting that job, we welcomed our son to the world and since that time have been balancing new jobs with all of our responsibilities as first-time parents. Amidst all of that change and activity, finding the time and the energy to maintain a creative writing practice has been a challenge to say the least. Yet this change also has given me a new perspective on why I do what I do. Having a child has profoundly influenced every aspect of my life, and I can’t approach my work, playing the saxophone, and in the case of this blog, my writing, without acknowledging what is different in my life now that he is a part of it.
When I first began this blog, I had a fairly good understanding of its purpose. It was mostly influenced by my recent experience as a doctoral student who had written a dissertation on creative placemaking in higher education, while also looking for a saxophone teaching job. The blog existed as a way for me to workshop ideas that could turn into something I could build into future job applications and workshop offerings. Trying to pick up with the blog right where I left off a year ago, meant I was still writing into that purpose, one that is out of alignment with the person I now am. After several months of writing and plenty of reflection, I realized that while parts of that original purpose still resonate, I also have changed as an artist, and that change is fundamentally due to my relationship with my son. This post is an articulation of that changed purpose. It looks at the long view of what I am trying to say with this writing and who I am writing for.
The first part of that changed purpose revolves around exploring ways that I, as a musician and artist, can leave the world in a better place for my son. In our society today, we seemingly daily confront many complicated and challenging issues, including but certainly not limited to, racial and gender equity, abortion rights, gun violence, climate change, voting access, misinformation, and so many more. All these issues are complex and intersect with many different aspects of our lives. They also are not issues that can be addressed by any one person or even a small group. All of them require us to come together as a larger community and solve them together. Yet, as I have written about before, our communities are so isolated and mistrusting of each other that the potential for us all to come together and confront these challenges seems all but impossible.
I’ve seen the following attitude in many colleagues and also in myself numerous times: I am frustrated by the way that things are and I want to change them, BUT I’m just a musician so what can I do? The inevitable answer to that question becomes putting the blinders on and continuing to be a musician in the way we always have, teaching in schools, performing in concert halls, and doing very little to use our art to address the challenges with which we profess to be so concerned.
This business-as-usual approach directly contradicts the understanding that music, and more broadly artistic and creative experiences, are well suited to bringing people together to solve collective challenges. Author and teaching artistry advocate Eric Booth says that art, at its best, “happens outside what you already know; it has the capacity to expand your sense of the way the world is or might be.” Inherent in any musical experience is the capacity to help us reach a place of collective imagination and possibility where, through storytelling and emotion, people can find communal solutions and discover new ways of being in the world. The first step in solving any of these “unsolvable” issues is not testing solutions and convincing others, but creating diverse groups of people that can collectively tell stories about possible futures on the other side of these challenges.
The language in the last paragraph was purposely vague because how this work manifests strongly depends on the individual artists, the communities in which they live and work, and the challenges they are talking about. My hope is that this blog and my broader work can be a place where, if you’re like me and have asked the question of what we can do as artists in response to the challenges in our society, we discuss what that work looks like and how we go about doing it with intention, consistency, and craft. There’s plenty more discussion to come, but what I can say with certainty right now, is that we are leaving our most valuable tool on the table if we are trying to separate our concerns as citizens from our work as artists.
The second element of this changed purpose is connected to the first, but looks through a different lens. As both my wife and I are musicians, I have to imagine that music will be a part of my son’s life in some way. Both of us want him to become the person he is meant to be and won’t guide him down any particular path. However, one question that we have asked each other is about our comfort with letting him pursue a career in music, especially in light of how challenging it has been for both of us.
It has been well documented in numerous different articles, studies, and conferences how the number of music graduates from schools across the country far exceeds the number of jobs available for those students after graduation, particularly in the full-time performance profession. As a field, we use that knowledge to bolster an attitude of exceptionalism and rigor. If you work hard enough, are diligent with your training, and pay your dues in lower-tier opportunities, you too can eventually have that career as a full-time performer which will support your lifestyle. This is selling a false bill of goods, though, to every student that this doesn’t pan out for but is told some variation of this story throughout their study, and even to those who it does work out for, because it largely understates the amount of privilege, struggle, uncertainty, and luck it takes to get that full-time performance job.
Both my wife and I availed ourselves of extra classes and study in our respective degrees that were designed to prepare us for the careers available to musicians. These extra classes and opportunities were the things our institutions had built as a response to the scarcity of jobs in the field. Yet, despite doing everything that was made available to us to help prepare us for the real world, both of us have endured significant challenges in carving out our own creative careers in the field. I know that our stories are not unique and that I am lucky to be able to do what I love and make a living doing it, but the journey to get to that point has me worried about the pipeline that we are building from training to sustainable musical careers.
Many schools, including the one I work for, are working hard to reimagine how we train musicians for the work of the future. One thing that often gets asked in these conversations is about how classical music and those who practice it are relevant in modern society. Oftentimes, this comes down to the topic of audience building, but I think it goes so much deeper than that. Building an audience is great and essential to our careers, but that conversation is often reduced to finding people to support our existing creative offerings. If we are truly seeking more relevance in modern society, then we also need to look at how we make music, where we make it, and who we make it for, not just find new people to come see what we have been doing already; the onus is on us to look in the mirror and change our approach. Finding relevance is also connected to that first statement of purpose, in how we show up as artists in our communities, and build experiences that allow us to address the biggest challenges facing our society in the only way that we can: together.
The work of this blog then is also to be a place where the hard questions about how we train musicians of the future can be asked. It is a place to take a long look at the way we do things and what ends those methodologies serve. Can we come up with new models for training musicians that help alleviate the doubts that my wife and I have had about having our son pursue the same career path that we chose? I hope this blog can be one place of many where we reimagine our training so that it prepares musicians to not only be integral members of their community, helping to improve the lives of all around them, but so that the training also prepares them to support their lifestyle with a fulfilling career practicing music in whatever way they choose.
