Doing
For musicians, there’s various routes of doing. One would be to form a group, work on recordings, play shows locally, and go on tour, playing for various sized audiences, usually small at first, with little pay, and keep doing it until things naturally grow, or fade, and then move along.
Another way would be to form a group, and just play locally, as many shows as possible, sometimes playing where the music is not even the focus (parties, festivals, weddings, etc.), but the pay for these can be quite high. The trade off in these two cases is creative control – playing covers or originals based on the audience’s interest.
Another route would be a solo musician, who occasionally plays local, with other individuals or groups, tours (for little or high pay), and continues on in this route always changing lineup, but again making the choice whether to pursue situations where the creative control is either personal or external, with income varying accordingly.
Having a conversation with Matthew De Gennaro this past weekend, we discussed another route: the route of making music, and not pursuing anything – collaboration or audience. Simply making music out of enjoyment – not for recording, concert, or otherwise. If those situations occur, fine, but playing without considering those things as an aim. Of course, there is no financial expectations with this route.
There’s something interesting about each of these routes, particularly Matthew’s. However, each of them are an act of ‘doing,’ and sometimes it’s important to stop and think about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and if it makes the best sense for you personally. I think if more people did this, they might stop playing music altogether, or they might break through many hurdles that are holding them back, and really do something powerful. In either case, they will find a lot more fulfillment in what they do as they get closer to their true interests.
Posted in News
July 3rd, 2009 at 9:25 am
I think this is a pretty interesting topic, but I’d like to separate it from the money issue just for the sake of clarity. Above all, whichever ‘route’ we might take on the musical path, I think it is most important to address the issue of expectations, challenges and rewards.
Music is unique among the arts in that there is a much lower quotient of actually playing music relative to how much time is spent networking, traveling, preparing, i.e. not actually playing. This is all in the nature of a performance-based art that is tied to social interaction. I like that about music, but at the same time I like the fact that when I work on photography almost all of that time is taken up with building cameras, taking photographs or printing in the darkroom I exhibit photos perhaps once a year at best – spending a fair amount of time making exhibition prints and framing, transporting, and hanging a show, attending an opening, etc. – but the photography quotient stays near 95% as opposed to music’s AI score of 5% (AI stands for “at it!”).
For me that is one more motivation to have a range of interests and areas of engagement.
There are consequences to not being exclusively involved in music. I don’t network as much as I should. Except for a period in the late 90s I don’t pursue opportunities to play festivals or tour extensively. Those choices affect the attention my musical work receives, and so on, but I think I am fairly realistic with assessing those consequences. The benefit of such choices is the freedom to move in any direction musically, that I am not limited by my audience’s expectations of my work, and that I have a great degree of latitude in the musical experiences I can open myself to and enjoy.
I made a decision very early in my creative life (as a teenager) that I didn’t want those areas of interest to be influenced by what I needed to do to make a living. (Sorry to break my rule and bring up money.) I chose to make a living at something that I didn’t care about so personally or was so deeply a part of the sort of person I wanted to be. It still feels, almost 50 years later, like a good decision. And the consequences – such as they are – are just fine.
Notwithstanding music’s substantial social involvement, whatever rewards are to be found are not the rewards of social status, attention, reviews, or reputation but are the same rewards that are to be sought with any other creative activity. These are the personal rewards that come from challenging, risk-taking, exploring new pathways and discoveries that have very little to do with the outside world at all. May that task never end.
Hal Rammel, July 2009