Hang On to Your Dreams

My “portfolio career” happened by accident. It exists because I wanted to work, and I wanted to work in music. Whatever allowed me to do that was enough to keep me moving and growing. There hasn’t been a single point since I left school that it stopped changing, although there have certainly been plateaus along the way. Change has been the constant, adding pages to the portfolio as time passes.

Even now, at a stage when it might appear that the constant motion could stop, I still feel the underlying movement as if I’m standing on one of those slow people-moving belts at the airport. The trick, I’ve learned, is to keep your eyes just far enough in front of where you are on the belt to know if you’re coming up on solid ground. At the very least, you won’t trip. In the last three years I’ve pivoted away from doing arts administration and toward my interest in yoga, mindfulness, how the brain and body communicate, and writing. Although they’ve become central to my life and work, my slightly forward gaze was not enough to put any of these on my radar as career elements even five years ago.

Part of this current era of constant motion is learning how to show up online in a way that feels both useful to others and authentic to me, which is so much harder than it sounds or seems it should be. Every time I’m on social media I’m left with the feeling that my brain is rattling.

There is so much gross oversimplification online, the kind that all but guarantees both followers and likes. A plethora of ideas that won’t have any lengthy traction because they lack depth or application to real, personal circumstances. I am constantly amazed at how we all try to boil down our depth of knowledge to create tiny, aesthetic posts so that a few strangers will give us a thumbs up. It obviously feels good to be liked, and some posts are genuinely informative, but what do we or our audience gain from it? Can we really make an impact this way?

I ask myself these questions a lot, and the danger for me is the way my outlook on social media hedges on cynical and complaining. It’s one of the underlying drivers in my motivation to create my own space online. The B-List is meant to be a resource of ideas, potential solutions, and positive-but-practical outlooks. A space where we can come to consider the intricate and winding path of life and career. But having said that, sometimes (a lot of the time) I just really hate the things we’re being sold online as musicians. Like it or not though, the internet plays a part in every career and industry now and it is becoming part of my portfolio of skills, even against my better judgement.

Maybe my personal struggle with going online is because I’ve always been fighting to focus my attention rather than divide it. For all the skills that I’ve learned or pursued by choice, performance have always sat at the center. I never actively allowed myself a fall back, because I couldn’t stand to sacrifice the incredible amount of focus that music demanded from me. Maybe that’s short sighted, but it’s also my personality. I dropped my ed degree, the classic fall back, half way through school when I realized it was only the flute that I wanted to teach. There were plenty of circumstances where I felt scared of living up to my own expectations and considered adding a backup or changing directions entirely. I waffled between arts administration and performance when it came time for grad school auditions knowing that I was really committing to something that might not materialize the way I was imagining. I knew that I needed to continue to hone my attention, and every decision since then, no matter how long they took to make, has been to made to enhance my approach to my instrument or teaching, the application of my musical skills, and the direction of my career around that central goal. It’s almost never clear how we will move forward, and it’s a guarantee that at some point we will have to close our eyes, hold our breath, and leap.

All of us who have majored in music or pursued any career in the arts have been asked the million dollar question. “But how will you make money?” It’s true, a career in music will not produce the income of one in venture capital. It’s not true, however, that there is no money in music or that having the skills of a good musician will make you unemployable. On the contrary, many other fields and industries seek out musicians for their work ethic, self-drive, and adaptability.

What we need to reconcile as we consider our career path is the financial stability that will be required to live a life that makes us happy (different for everyone), and what our personal definition of success is (also different for everyone). Is money the goal? If you want to make millions and own multiple properties, but teaching private lessons is your desired main source of income, you’re always going to have friction between what you want to do and what you desire to have.

Working in the arts means that we have many lofty goals. Entering a creative field means that somewhere on the inside you are a dreamer, no matter how much practicality you coat it with.

Lofty aspirations aren’t a bad thing, but they will remain aloft if we undermine the value of our art and discipline, and of our choices. Will we all reach these great heights we aspire to? Maybe not, but no one will if we aren’t allowing ourselves to try. Remaining open minded to the way that music unfolds into a life and career is very different than deciding from the get-go to have a Plan B running in the background at all times. By putting Plan B in motion and assigning a percentage of your time and energy to it, you’ve already stolen from your resolve to commit to your growth and development toward Plan A. No one can know how any career might unfold when they start school or choose a major, but they never will if they don’t give it a chance to blossom naturally. Perhaps you’ll wind up on stage in your dream orchestra, or you might turn another direction along the way that wouldn’t be possible without the skill and nuanced understanding you have developed. Many musicians think they will go into performance but end up in careers that have bloomed out of their musical background in fields like copyright law, audiology, arts administration, educational policy, and more.

Having an aspiration of performing doesn’t mean we are shortsighted about our lives, it means we are willing to dream. To a large extent what makes a dream practical is hard work. I would venture that most of us understand from the beginning that the “ideal” performing career is something entirely different than it used to be. We need to encourage students to desire to reach for their ideal while staying open-minded to what’s possible while teaching them to stay rooted in their interests. This is true for professionals as well. We end up making ends meet by taking on extra projects or jobs, but sometimes those “extras” lead us to places that are greater than what we could have imagined. We might end up somewhere that’s a better fit than where we were originally aiming, but would have never known without trusting ourselves to tackle Plan A.

Striving toward our musical goals means giving our full attention to what drives us. No college degree is a guarantee anymore. Our own work ethic goes with us everywhere we go. It is the closest thing we have to a guarantee, and we owe it to ourselves to put genuine, concerted effort in where it matters. If we do this, the sky is the limit, even if it will take years full of challenges to see where the path is leading us.

This isn’t encouragement to fly blindly, but rather to put your blinders on and filter out anything that is not compelling or that is distracting. Let all of your interests in and trust that as you learn you’ll see how they can work together. So much learning happens in hindsight, only after the information has been given time to percolate.

There is a true cacophony online right now about music careers - why we need a second discipline, how we can find a healthier approach to being a musician - all of these topics might be valid, but when they get over-simplified and blown up for click bait the advice they give ends up just as bad as assuming we’ll leave school with an orchestra job that pays all our bills. They undermine the value of our dreaming.

Every time we open social media there is a new “hot take,” “controversial opinion,” or “spicy” post meant not to educate us, but simply to garner enough likes to guarantee fifteen seconds of internet fame. Even if the message is well-intentioned, there is no such thing as one-size-fits-all advice in our industry, and if there’s anything we don’t need it’s another hot take.

My career is so much deeper than I could have imagined, and also took a thousand times more effort than I expected. How could I begin to distill it down? I have spent years doing menial administrative work, thousands of hours teaching, even more thousands of hours practicing and daydreaming about what comes next. I am not a full-time performer, but for the last two decades the underlying constant and goal of my career has been to be the best possible performing musician I can be. It drives my commitment to all the things I do - teaching all ages of students, helping musicians find the ability to be themselves under pressure, and writing about these dreams we’ve taken on.

By focusing on performance as a goal, I committed to building a deep understanding of something I love and value for its impact on myself and others. I’ve learned how to stretch myself to the limits, how to adapt and adjust to people and situations, how to create space for deep and satisfying work. I’ve learned how to translate intricacies into a broader picture of meaning. I don’t make millions, but I am secure. I feel satisfied by the way what I do challenges my mind. I am learning to create space for my personal life around work. I know that I have a tremendous amount of effort ahead of me if I hope to reach the new heights I have in mind. I am not in a top five orchestra, or even a tenure track teaching position, but I play in wonderful orchestras and have meaningful teaching jobs.

Flute is both at the center of what I do, and a tiny piece of my musical life. It’s a platform to build from.

Is music a practical major? Absolutely not. Is it a way to open doors to better versions of myself? Absolutely. Majoring in music isn’t our problem, and odds are that all of us will have a portfolio career to some degree. The problem is that we’re still framing this as novel or even as a second prize to a more ideal scenario that doesn’t exist anymore.

Our job as musicians, especially if we are teaching, is to encourage and focus on the right kind of dreaming combined with logical understanding of the way skill and effort mesh into a custom portfolio. Each of us has something to offer, and there’s never been a better time to cultivate it into a career.