The Notorious, Most FAQ for Musicians
How will you find job(s) and make a living?
Following up on my last post which included the following abstract, somewhere near 3/4 of the post (sorry, I hope that helped!):
I’ve learned so much. I realised I didn’t have to be the version of me I wanted to be first, to qualify for jobs. There are jobs for many different levels. For example, in the case of this gig, they don’t need a concert pianist like Lang Lang to play the waltz on the piano for the kids’ show. Just because I’m not a virtuoso at it yet, doesn’t mean I’m ‘worthless’ if I were to apply or get hired for jobs.
Maybe I’m mediocre, but that’s probably all someone else needs to get the job done. Maybe that’s better than having no one get the job done at all, I don’t know.
I watched an interview of professional musicians last night, featuring some very accomplished professors teaching at some of Taiwan’s great music institutions. The video is in Mandarin since the Youtuber is Taiwanese and since there are no English subtitles in the video, I will try my best to translate the main idea said by one of the interviewees that I found profound and wish to cover here.
One of the professors said what I thought was a pretty cool analogy when asked if he would advise students who are very passionate about music but aren’t exactly great at it to not pursue music professionally. He said no since there will be a place for these students in society as well.
He talked about society being a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid, by mass, sits the people like music lovers. At the top of the pyramid is where the elites belong. In this pyramid, there are many different levels in between, and they all require very different people of different levels to fill up these positions in society which are all very important. This would result in every musician finding different paths, and without having to sit at the very top where they become the best to find work out there.
And I find this analogy pretty cool, and I think it applies not just to music, but to most other fields that I can think of as well.
A super rough (definitely non exhaustive) pyramid for musicians, brain dumped and done in a few minutes on my Ipad just to try including visuals in this post:
I kinda included these not in order of skilfulness, but rather in terms of groups since the levels of each group may vary. There are probably some teachers who play better than other teachers, for example. Another random example that I can think of right now would be composers who might play their instruments better than conductors. Who knows?
These may not be 100% accurate reflective, like I said. It’s just a very rough visualisation to demonstrate the point — feel free to disagree, just don’t kill me for that! :)