The 2024 Amateur Hour challenge

One hour a week. Who’s with me?

2023! How was it for you?

One of my favorite parts of this year has been writing Overcoached and starting to find a new relationship to music and musicians through this platform. There’s so much text and so many opinions flowing in and out of our screens, but as ever, we’re only looking for one another and trying to connect. Thanks for reading these words over here, for subscribing, engaging, and interacting. Every comment you make and message you send is golden, and you’ve taught me a lot about what I’m trying to say.

I started Overcoached at the end of an epic vacation. In Barcelona, exhausted after putting in a couple of thirteen-mile days on our walking shoes, my husband and I were chilling on the terrace and looking over the rooftops on a late, hot summer afternoon. I know! It was amazing! And where my mind went on that tired day was to the profound differences between that city, infused with art and music and built for interaction, and so much of my home country, filled with strivers and built for isolation.

Summer 2023 was the first time I returned to continental Europe since leaving Vienna in 2013 - I needed time away after the Staatsoper, though maybe not a whole ten years. Life happened in the meantime. When we finally traveled this June, it was for work and for pleasure, and it was joyous. It was also sobering to experience Europe again, its greater gusto, less worry, and so much less aggression, especially after this particular intervening decade. I knew life in America had become angrier, sketchier, and lonelier, but this trip put in all into sharp relief for me.

The question of how we begin repairing our frayed connections weighs on me, as it clearly does on so many of you. I started in on that topic from a musician’s perspective, writing about pianists and coaches and opera but also mentorship and ambition and some of the things that keep us wary and separated. I can’t overstate how your engagement has helped direct Overcoached. I knew I didn’t want these pages to center on industry gossip or personal catharsis, but it took some practice and some interaction with y’all to begin figuring out what they should express.

Most of the public comments I’ve received have been ones of connection - “you’re saying what I’m feeling” - and that’s really gratifying. But the private messages you’ve sent have been more troubled. A lot of you have used the word “dying” to describe classical music. It is dying and it isn’t, IMO - but I feel you. That’s the water we are swimming in.

I’m increasingly convinced that we’re looking at the wrong end of the continuum; at least, we’re spending too much time looking at big-institution survival when the larger damage is happening out of the spotlight. We have been starving out the early and middle echelons of musical life in America, magnet schooling and conservatory-ing a small population into an ever-shrinking sector of top-level-only opportunities. It’s crazy and frightening to look at how unsustainable it is.

But the country is big, so the opposite is also happening. Valiant people are hanging on to teach and make music in their communities, and elite performers are trying to refresh the artistic soil and cultivate whatever kind of art, music, and theater the twenty-first century might be seeking.

Many of you who read this publication have the power to make valuable contributions on a professional level. You’re teachers and performers, and you are working hard at your jobs to refresh and renew things, to try and sustain them.

What would happen, I wonder, if all of us invested as well somewhere earlier, or simpler, or less visible, on the big continuum of artistic life?

My goal’s as unreasonable as the wild art I saw in Barcelona, as deliciously unthinkable as the French four-day work week, as prosaically insistent as the well-marked walkways of the German countryside. Even as we strategize how to preserve and revitalize our shiniest programs and institutions, I want us to consider how to rebuild our musical culture from the ground up.

What if all of us took one hour a week to make music in that arena?

Welcome to the 2024 Amateur Hour Challenge.

It’s simple. Take one hour a week and participate, musically, in something amateur.

Amateur: in other words, not for accomplishment, not for improvement, not for money. Choose something to support community music making in your area. Do something you are not good at, or where how good you are doesn’t matter. I am sure that many of us are already doing this, but I’m also sure that many of us are not.

Then, whether you’re at it already or starting something new, please talk about it! Comment here or in the Overcoached chat. I would love to know what it is you’re up to, and what it’s like over time. I’ll let you know how it goes for me too. I’ll be the worst second violinist in a community orchestra, and (I think) singing with a community chorus as well.

But I’m an older person with no kids and a lot of control over my schedule. Because I also live in America, I know what might be standing in the way of you also choosing to join a group with your amateur contributions: time and access. So let’s get into it!

If you are singing in a church choir, you are already doing the thing!

If you are a parent who’s going to your kids’ events, taking them to music lessons, helping them practice, making stuff for the bake sale - you are already doing the thing!

Buy a ticket and take the time to go to community theater or musical performance. It might not be good. Support it anyway. If you can’t see your way clear to attending, buy a ticket and donate it as a giveaway to someone else.

Make a small, repeating contribution to a local organization. One that I run has several supporters who contribute on a very small monthly level, including one who gives $1/month. I can tell you exactly what we use that $12 for. EVERYTHING counts!

Give up some volunteer time to a local arts organization or church ensemble. Do they need office help, fundraiser planning, envelope stuffing, or concert setup? Reader, they do.

Any kids you can give lessons to, local choirs/bands/orchestras who could use volunteer help, high school musicals who could use literally volunteer everything since there’s no money to help make them happen?

What musical nitrogen can you pour into the soil around you?

However…

If you are a professional musician who could make the time to go play on your secondary or tertiary instrument, or to start croaking in a chorus, consider just doing it.

Consider what might happen if you give up one hour of scrolling each week to connect with a group of people in a creative activity.

Consider what might happen if you take time to meet people who aren’t working full time in music and to learn why they keep at it.

Consider what might happen if you take time to meet audiences who attend amateur musical performances and to learn why they connect.

Consider what might happen if you let yourself not be the best, if you allowed yourself to learn from someone who doesn’t identify as a musical expert, if you allowed yourself to connect to a different definition of “play.”

Consider that every breath you might give would be a necessary addition to a living thing.

Amateur hour, 2024. See you there, I hope.

Thanks to all of you for reading and supporting Overcoached in 2023.