Lon Price wrote:
[snip]
I have about 40 woodwind students, and it seems that very few of them have much enthusiasm for what they're doing. I'm constantly trying to think up ways to get them interested enough to practice once in a while. And if one of them shows real promise, what then? I don't want to tell them, "You're gonna get replaced by a virtual orchestra machine someday." But neither do I want to give them false hope.
In my 30 years of private teaching I have come to realize that as a teacher I can never know when the lightbulb will go off in the students' brains and souls and they will become enthusiastic for what they do. Often that happens while I'm teaching them, and often it doesn't. I've had students come back and speak to me and tell me of all the music they're doing and I'm quite literally shocked because I would have figured they would have put their instrument away as soon as they were through with high school band and never look at it again.
You don't need to give your students false hopes and neither do you need to squash their enthusiasm by bringing up the specter of the virtual orchestra. There are millions of musicians in the United States alone who love music, who are very enthusiastic about music and who never expect to earn a dime from their music -- the community bands and orchestras and choruses are filled to overflowing (the community band that I direct has 85 members, and is only 1 of 14 such bands and choruses and orchestras within a 30-minute radius) with such enthusiasts. That isn't even to begin to consider the smaller ensembles (brass quintets, dixieland bands, woodwind quintets, string quartets, recorder consorts) that meet at people's homes. There is plenty of room for inspired musicians, just possibly not in a professional capacity.
When one of my students raises the possibility of turning professional I run the numbers with them, as best I can, citing applicants-per-chair for auditions for professional orchestras, the lack of professional concert bands outside the military, the lack of professional choruses outside the recording industry. Then I remind them that SOMEBODY passes those auditions, and if they are inspired enough and work hard enough they MIGHT be the lucky somebody who actually gets hired. No false hopes given, but also no hopes truly squashed by a healthy dose of reality.
As for the virtual orchestras, somebody has to program them, somebody has to run them, somebody has to work along with the producers in the booths when they record Evening at Pops to read the score and get the focus on the featured instruments at the proper time, there are lots of jobs for people with musical skills.
But the job outlook for music students is just as bleak as the job outlook for many different areas of study -- the most creative students will find a way to be gainfully employed and still active in their art, others will find employment outside the arts and have only marginal involvement with their art, and still others will pack it in and stop participating in their art.
I don't think we're in the twilight of our art form at all -- I think we might be facing a more realistic place of the arts in a more egalitarian society than that of past centuries where the nobility and the higher levels of the clergy (bishops on up to popes) and the emerging wealthier classes were the major patrons of the arts: that of an avocation rather than a vocation.
-- David H. Bailey [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
