Scorched-earth excellence

Can we restore an ecosystem for amateurs?

One of the luckiest periods of my life was the fifteen or so months I spent in ninth and tenth grade studying piano with David Porter. In the late seventies, he was a professor at one of the colleges in my hometown. Somehow, a conversation with my dad had led to David accepting me, a random local high school kid, as a student. The lessons ended when my family moved to Arizona before my junior year. David and I didn’t have much time together, but the time we spent changed my life.

Sometimes we’d meet at his office on campus, a nearly unnavigable space crammed with bookshelves, an overflowing desk, and two grand pianos. I was booked for an hour but almost always got ninety minutes. Once, halfway through my first go at “La fille aux cheveux de lin,” David scrambled over a folding chair stacked with papers, grabbing a book about Debussy off a high shelf for me to borrow. Another time, when I asked about the new, chunky reel-to-reel tape player, David switched it on with glee and leapt back to the piano to play Davidovsky’s “Synchronisms No.6.” When he assigned a Bach French Suite, lessons shifted to his home so that I could play the harpsichord; he showed me how it worked and how to tune it.

In lessons with David, playing the piano became just one activity in a smorgasbord of ideas, one avenue of exploration among countless others. For the first time, I began to imagine how musicians lived, who their friends were, which artistic and political ideas they embraced or rejected - the context of the music. For me, the trajectory of my technical improvement developed some context too. The bigger stories around the music helped me see myself - imperfectly, fleetingly - as one participant in an enormous, ever-changing, ever-developing community.

But the most marvelous example of that was David himself. As I said, he was a professor…of classics, not music, with his Ph.D. from Princeton. He knew Homer and Horace together with Beethoven and Berio. Later, he would serve as president of Skidmore College, teaching through and after his presidency. He is remembered by generations of people as a phenomenally engaged, kind, and energetic mentor, a true Renaissance man.

David showed me that you could excel and practice deeply in multiple areas. But most of my mentors post-high school told me that wasn’t true. David had had time to spare for a high schooler while raising a family and teaching in two different disciplines at a college. But in college I learned that there was no time, that everything else but music had to go by the wayside if there was to be any chance at a career. You may be thinking, David would have foregone his classics degree had he been ambitious of a solo performing career. Except he did perform throughout his life, often, as both a soloist and chamber musician, while writing about Greek tragedy and his piano teacher Edward Steuermann and Willa Cather.

I hardly know how a career like his might be possible today.

---

David graduated university and entered working life in the mid-sixties, a time of political upheaval that saw academic institutions clamoring for change and equality. When I did the same in the late eighties, America was well into the backlash against all that. “Trickle-down” wasn’t just a phrase for economics: educational systems also began to subscribe to the idea that strengthening the top echelons would somehow benefit everybody down below.

In the decade between my lessons with David and the end of my schooling, I experienced the beginnings of a profound shift in the cultural conversation about what education was for. For my friends a few years ahead of me who started college in 1979, expense was not daunting for most, few had thought of declaring a major, and the idea of changing plans midway and taking extra time to graduate didn’t seem impractical. By the time I finished my masters in 1988, costs were beginning to sharply increase, and government support was beginning to waver. Politicians and others were beginning to ask for data on the success and cost-effectiveness of different degree programs. Getting out in four years started to become a financial necessity for more and more students. The discourse around a college degree was less and less about taking time to investigate and develop a mind, and more and more about return on investment. We’re so far down that road now that only us olds can remember a different time.

I wrote about ambition last week; among other things, I was thinking a lot about the ways in which we’re expected to publicly and privately demonstrate ambition as part of our trajectory up the ladder. In my lifetime, I’ve seen artists pushed to do this even more by ever increasing cultural pressure to prove that our sunken costs are worth it. We have to constantly prove that the investment in our training is paying off, and the public dance around that takes up a lot of energy. We are also bearing another burden. What constitutes a “payoff” has become very narrowly defined for many of us. Part of that is caught up with people looking for data to prove the worth of a degree. A commonly cited statistic in those conversations is how many students in a given degree program are employed in their specialty within a year of graduation. It’s hard for any arts program to look successful under those strictures, and I think that way of evaluating our training has had a big effect on what careers we emphasize - the ones at the top. This is at least part of why it’s hard for many artists to talk about their real lives without sounding apologetic, as though combining performing with teaching, or performing with a career in another discipline, is a matter of having not quite made it, in spite of the undeniable fact that the majority of artists have always combined different interests and careers.

While we were all being taught to shoot for the top, the middle ground was disappearing; if you grabbed for the brass ring and missed, or if you decided that the grind of top-level professional performance was not for you, there were fewer and fewer places to land in music. Take as an example my friends who played in rock bands when we were in college. Even an average (no shade) band from Phoenix with no agent could, with enough time on the phone and reliable transportation, keep themselves working in Holiday Inns across their region. Live music was everywhere. You didn’t have to be the best or have the best connections to get started. Technology changed that situation fast, and irrevocably. No one expects to eat and pay rent with their band money anymore, but in the eighties, I knew people who did. Ramen noodles and sketchy landlords, true - but you could string a beginning existence together while learning to do your thing. That’s impossible for an unconnected, average young musician to do today.

In the nineties, the rise of what would become streaming platforms, together with continued cuts to school music programs and erosion of church music participation, caused the big middle ground of musical life in America to shrink precipitously. It’s not hard to see how our current expectations around ambition grew out of this. To be taken seriously in the running for inclusion in an ever smaller, ever more exclusive musical system, it became advantageous, then expected, to display your dedication at every moment. The “god I hope I get it” mindset is much older than this, of course. But by the turn of the century, where was the place for, say, a brand new classics Ph.D. who also wanted to teach and perform music?

---

While we were lining up vontrappishly to demonstrate how ready we were to do anything the industry asked, something else was happening. As we anxiously performed our ambition to join the most excellent ranks of the business, it became harder for us to believe that people who didn’t display ambition could nevertheless be excellent.

I hear about this from younger artists frequently. If they get the chance to work at the top, it’s hard for them to find professional support for a wide variety of career choices. It’s hard for them to find professional support in taking a break, or changing the pace of a career trajectory (things that will likely arise as life happens). And if someone with big career potential should desire a musical life out of the spotlight, that person will often feel the downgrade in esteem from other musicians that comes with choosing a life in education, or worship leadership, or a career outside of music. Social media is also very tough for performers to navigate, and they don’t have a lot of choice about it since they are expected to participate in the marketing of their work (you can also be sure that companies are checking out how many followers they have). The overlap between personal and professional is really hard. Performers gonna perform, and the strain of proving dedication to your career in a space that’s both public and private can exacerbate anyone’s mental and emotional struggles.

How do we make more places for musicians to build lives including music at a rich, satisfying, excellent level? We have to start revitalizing the middle ground of musical life in our country. A place to start, I think, is looking inward at *gestures wildly* all this anxiety-driven hierarchical thinking, see it, question it, and change it. We could start by talking about all musical and artistic pursuits and jobs with respect. We could notice if we find ourselves assuming that someone is less excellent, or less interested in or capable of becoming excellent, because of how they look or dress, or because they have a family, or because they pursue another area of interest, or because they need a break. We could notice moments of “all or nothing” in our own thoughts and speech, and try to change. Changing our thinking alone won’t transform our economy or elevate the place of music in our lives, but it’s a necessary start. Framing excellence as something that requires leaving everything else behind hasn’t gotten many of us anywhere good, and has contributed to the downgrading of music and musicians in the culture generally.

I worked in Vienna for three years and took part in some great performances, but what I think about most when I remember that city is the incredibly rich musical life at all levels, not just the top. I heard blues, jazz, church choirs, chamber music, opera, symphony, song, country music, everything, all performed at every level from barely competent to expert, in every kind of organization from huge and state-funded to small and amateur. There was room for it all, and the Viennese showed up to hear it all. They loved music in general, and they were ardent about what they loved specifically (I learned more about the Delta blues from two fans in an underground club than I learned in eight years of school).

Getting from our current relationship with music in the USA to something even resembling Vienna’s is a daunting idea. But don’t we have to try? We won’t keep our own top class if no one else gets started, attempts, and learns. We need our beginners, our teachers, our journeymen, our amateurs, as much as we need our stars.

More, actually.

Restoring an ecosystem is long, slow work, but it’s possible. And the time to start is always now.

I would love to talk to you more about how to sustain musical lives.

If you’re interested in connecting over this further, join me in the chat:

Thanks to Alex and Reggie for this one.