A carefully mapped out path to nothing
Hattie Butterworth
I flippantly described my musical education as this yesterday.
Why wasn’t I happy when I came to the end of conservatoire? I said it ‘felt like a carefully mapped out path leading to nothing’. I quickly retracted. Though it was funny, it’s hard to be honest about this feeling. It really has painful truth to it.
People would ask me what kind of musician I wanted to be five years ago and it would always be the same confused answer. ‘Most musicians have to do a bit of everything’. I never liked this. It felt like a lot of practice to end up doing very little of what I was being trained for. For those like me in the middle of the pack, the intense training and judgment of concertos, excerpts and sonatas don’t turn seamlessly into solo careers or orchestral jobs. There are so many of us feeling like the training isn’t leading anywhere.
Is this inherently negative thinking? I suppose this is why it felt difficult being honest. It feels like a negative thing to say, even though it can be the truth for many thousands of music students. It’s a lot of comparison, anxiety, judgment and, sometimes, abuse to endure without a clear reward. To be the musician I was trained to be, playing the sonatas and concertos I love, I would have to play for free. The places that would pay me aren’t anywhere frequent enough to call a ‘career’.
So teaching is where we end up. Much of what I learned in college can transfer well onto a student. I know how to play the cello and can now teach it. But what if I don’t enjoy teaching at all? What if what I want to do is perform the sonatas I practiced for years upon years? The career I trained for just doesn’t exist.
So my piano trio was a thing that gave me purpose and some income. It was far too irregular and, due to my having to work full time in an office, it appeared something that the group couldn’t work around so I was asked to leave. The thoughts of having some success as a chamber musician has also been at the top of my priorities many times, but I don’t have the free time to continue waiting around in an endless gamble for work. There’s a chance I will perform the Schubert trios again for some good money, but reality is the demand isn’t really there.
Do we blame the general public for not wanting to sit still and listen to Schubert for two hours in their evening? Or should some blame be attributed to a musical education system that promises this, without questioning whether a musician needs nurturing differently? Some acknowledgement that there’s another way?
A life of pop music, sessions, weddings, teaching, writing, journalism, podcasting, choir training and conducting exist for talented young musicians. None of this was in my awareness as a student- I wanted to be a serious classical musician with my Brahms sonatas. How much more vibrant, and less depressing, the transition from conservatoire to real-world could have been if I’d had some awareness of the validity of a different way.