INDIE SPIRIT

Recording Clairières at Skywalker Sound in Marin County, CA in 2019. Photo: Clubsoda Prroductions

The expression “When it rains, it pours,” really feels applicable in an interesting way right now. In just the past six days, I have been approached by four different singers about advice on how to record an album. It’s exciting to see everyone’s independent spirit rising to the fore, and I wonder if this is perhaps a symptom of the lockdown. I know that all of this time to sit still has certainly gotten my own creative juices flowing, and it sounds like many people who have placed their recording dreams on the backburner are realizing that this long performance drought can provide the ideal opportunity to turn visions into realities.

I am very much enjoying these conversations with my colleagues. It is exciting to hear their ideas for their programs, and there is always a benefit to being a sounding board as people find their ways forward producing these projects: it helps me hone my own work and reminds me that I should often take my own advice. It’s a privilege to be let in on an artist’s creative process in this way, and hearing my colleagues’ determination as they navigate the challenges of production inspires me to keep the momentum going with my own plans.

In these discussions, I find myself thinking about how independent and self-motivated we freelance musicians must be in this day and age. In a time in which technology is empowering increasingly more people to create by making the required tools accessible and easy to use, that same technology is also eroding the financial foundations that buttress the infrastructure that supports our industry and our livelihoods. Because you can find it in so many different places at no cost to the listener, there is the mentality that music should be free. But nothing in life is free. Lifetimes of training along with the tools and teams of people that are required to make our art come at a steep cost. All of this can send a lot of mixed messages to us as artists. While we might believe in our societal and cultural value, it’s difficult to understand the financial value of our work.

As classical musicians, we call ourselves artists, but in many ways, our training doesn’t encourage us think as artists. Our conservatories try to help us skirt the fate of the artist-genius who starves, living in abject poverty because they were unappreciated in their own time by offering to teach us important and valuable lessons about how to navigate the systems the classical music industry has constructed in order to secure a livelihood for ourselves so that we don’t starve. With the objective of empowering students to earn a steady paycheck upon graduation, these teachings tend to be focused on how the student can fit themself into the pre-ordained boxes that await us: For a singer, it’s an obsession with finding the right package of five arias that indicate what limited set of roles in which an opera company could cast them; for an instrumentalist, it is often honing a set of orchestral excerpts that are standard audition fare at many orchestras. While we are taught to scale the framework, we aren’t necessarily taught how to innovate or create.

Understandably, the primary focus of our education is the craft of playing our instrument (our voice, in the case of singers) and the history of our art form. As we study the history of the art form, humanity has succumbed to the seductive, yet dangerous temptation to place those creators who have come before us on pedestals. As an example, we are taught to think of composers like Johannes Brahms as a genius, whose musical creations were so beautiful, they naturally drifted into the pantheon of the classical music canon, where they are to be studied, performed, and worshipped for eons to come.

Yet somehow the story of the young Johannes Brahms’ struggles to gather up his courage to knock on the door of Robert and Clara Schumann gets lost in the shuffle. A young man who nurtured dreams of leaving behind a gigging-life as a touring pianist-accompanist in order to support himself fully through his composing career alone, he knew that an introduction to the influential Schumanns would do wonders for spreading the word about his music. Their meeting sparked the fabled friendships that inspired some of the most beautiful music ever written. That music still echoes in our halls today, because they worked tirelessly to promote each other’s work, believing steadfastly in each other’s talent. For them, this wasn’t entrepreneurship, networking, or promotional marketing: it was spreading the gospel of music and finding creative ways to ensure that their music was heard and played. They were doing what had to be done so that their own artistic visions could become reality.

Blinded by the halos we place above the beatified busts of these artists who came before us, we lose sight of the hard, quotidian, practical work they put in to establish themselves artistically. When these parts of their narratives are blurred out as we mythologize their lives, we lose sight of the fact that production, funding and promotion are all part of the creative process. Without that understanding, we’re just placing extra roadblocks on our path to artistic freedom.