Worth it
You get what you pay for - what is that, exactly? And should it be you who’s paying?
First of all, fact: I am still taking a knee at least once a day to recover from my exploding inbox.
If I may say, fam, damn.
This newsletter has been viewed almost ten thousand times in the last thirty days. It has twice as many subscribers as it did ten days ago. I have heard from so many of you personally, everything from fist bumps to personal tales both triumphant and tragic.
Thank you so much. It’s very humbling to be a steward of your stories.
Now, as always, on to the next.
I promised y’all some words about money as it relates to the field of collaborative piano. It’s been harder than I expected to find those words.
When I announced the topic, I felt pretty confident. So many colleagues were sharing information with me about hours and compensation, contracts, lack of contracts, and schedules, all in the context of responding to Overcoached. It was a total whirlwind.
It turns out, however, that almost no one wants that information shared further in this newsletter.
I can understand why. For one thing, it’s normal to feel ready to talk about a problem and also not feel ready to act on it - and collaborative pianists’ reluctance isn’t simply rooted in their feelings. Based on the personal anecdotes shared with me over the last week and for years before that, I am confident in saying that collaborative pianists have significant experiences of impactful, often permanent consequences for raising any issues around the topics of money and working conditions. These range from being labeled difficult to being fired, or at least not rehired. Another consistent theme in these personal stories is that teachers and mentors often emphasize staying positive and not rocking the boat in order to ensure consistent employment.
But we don’t only experience fear and resentment around these topics. Through the dozens of messages I received, and through many years of conversation prior, runs a deep, true desire for dialogue and change. Our community’s reluctance to disturb relationships with our partner musicians isn’t simply rooted in the need to stay employed, but in our true commitment to our craft and love of collaboration. We love what we do, but it’s becoming increasingly unsustainable.
And we really need our friends to see their part in why. We need you to stand up for us even as we need to stand up for ourselves.
I considered making a kind of primer for non-pianists about the many ways in which our jobs are structured and compensated, but that is a little further off. Many colleagues in different quarters have been trying to get a broadly based dialogue on job responsibilities and remuneration going among pianists for years. It’s been a hard sell, because folks are so afraid even to report anonymously. However, the time might be right. There are dynamic conversations in the works, including a plan for collecting good data. We’re talking to each other, and not just in a trauma-bonding way. I feel hopeful about where that’s going, and it will be the result of a large shared effort. Keep your eyes peeled, because that work will definitely have a place in these pages. I can’t wait.
So for now, let’s go back to why we’ve been so shy.
You all know at least something about the precarious nature of most collaborative pianist work. The majority of it is based on short-term contracts. Few of us have access to tenure or other job protections. Fitting into existing systems, then, is imperative for most of us if we wish to maintain employment. All of that pushes against any boat-rocking. A harder thing to say is that we don‘t often choose to act as though we are in the same boat. We pianists often operate as though what we do individually doesn’t affect the whole community of us, and our partner musicians also often act as though we are not all beset with the same problems.
Since pianists operate most frequently as independent contractors, we often set our own fees with little or no sharing of information between us. In other words, we‘re competing with each other. So, free market, right? Except that we‘re not selling, say, hats, or massages - both awesome things to obtain that are way more satisfying when manufactured or delivered with great expertise, but that you can live without. We are most frequently in the remarkable position of competing with one another to do work that is required by our institutions (both academic and non-academic) for the successes they are pursuing (student and professional development and performance). However, to varying extents, institutions are not fully bearing the cost of that work. So we‘re competing for institutionally mandated work that‘s being paid for by our partner musicians, not primarily because they want a better hat or massage (of course they do), but because the collaboration is a necessary part of their development and success.
This has resulted in unfairness on both ends of the scale. Collaborative pianists with broad experience and a lot of repertoire can command some pretty great fees, which they deserve. This also means that the information available to students preparing recitals and juries or aspiring artists preparing auditions and roles will be determined by what they can personally afford. That‘s not fair, and it quickly puts into question any easy talk around diversification, equal access, and inclusion within those institutions. It also exacerbates problems around performances. Usually, soloists make way more than pianists, but they also pay pianists for rehearsals. That’s understandable given our structures, but again, doesn’t that setup intrinsically hamper equality? Imagine a violinist forming a quartet and saying, well, I play most of the notes, so I’ll ask for a big fee and then pay these other three people from it. Pianists face that kind of thinking all the time, if not from our partner musicians, then certainly from institutions and presenters.
On the other hand, pianists can garner quick clientele by underpricing themselves. This can hamper efforts to make things fairer at the low end of the scale, when institutions wonder why they should pay more when they‘ve always had folks willing to do the work for minimal compensation. And minimal is all that many, many aspiring musicians can afford.
The above landscape of haves and have-nots is basically what we have had forever. Should more experienced and adept pianists make more than less experienced and adept musicians? Sure! But! I see the profession as a whole suffering when the skill of individuals is emphasized absent any valuation of the work itself. And there should be an industry-wide, standard valuation of the work, because the work has value as an integral part of musical training, development, and high-level performance preparation.
Our dangerously dysregulated field is heading towards a tipping point. No pianist gets to that top experience level and those top fees without first being at the bottom. We have to learn the repertoire, meet our partner musicians, develop our styles, and build our reputations. That means years in other teachers‘ studios, track records of success, the security of repetition. There are no potential stars without all the many students, beginners, and strivers. Without caring for the entry level of our industry - without ensuring it is possible to begin learning our profession - preserving the top level will quickly become impossible.
And I fear we may be too late.
These quotes are from some recent conversations with colleagues who preferred to remain anonymous.
“During the pandemic, I used Appcompanist - we were all doing it. But I hated it, it was such a loss and a huge backward step in music making. Now that we’re out of that time, I don’t allow it in my studio. Absolutely not. It does mean that a couple of my students don’t have pianists, so I play for them as best I can.”
“I don’t want to say this to too many people, but almost all of my students use Appcompanist. Our school charges a fee per semester to access a collaborative pianist, but that’s beyond what most of my studio can afford, and most of them are working outside jobs. I encourage them to pay the fee in their recital semester, but they often don’t land the best pianists because they haven’t been in the system developing those relationships.”
“I like using Appcompanist for my basic prep so that when I’m paying for a human I can move through a lot of repertoire quickly. It would be great to spend more time with pianists but that’s not a financial possibility for me right now.”
And this is me in a virtual session with a client:
“There’s not enough time in your recording for you to take the rubato you want. Do you know how to adjust that in the app?”
“Oh sure, but I hate doing stuff like that. It’s just the app - a real pianist will catch me.”
I’m not hating on Appcompanist (I might be hating a little on people who don’t bother to learn it - will your “real” pianists get any better effort?). But y’all. So many of our early functions, where we begin our training, are very elementary - playing easy repertoire in beginner lessons, for example, or accompanying a few pieces in an audition. Our industry is already beginning to choose an app that doesn’t function very well over us. Maybe not often, but not never, and not because of the pandemic anymore - out of necessity, and sometimes a lack of understanding (we now have a whole country full of advanced students who have done very little collaborative work compared to their predecessors, and that’s singers, instrumentalists, and pianists alike).
Imagine what those choices will look like when AI gets just a little better.
I’ve thought so often lately about my own beginner years. They were a patchwork of ten dollar an hour clients (ah the eighties), assignments through my short-lived collaborative degree program, and a brief period as an insanely underpaid staff accompanist with no benefits and a workload whose time boundaries were regularly violated, sometimes by the institution and sometimes by me.
Reader, I wasn’t good at any of it.
I didn’t know any songs. I didn’t know any arias. I didn’t know how to say no. I wasn’t really a strong sight reader. I didn’t practice enough so I was always afraid. I was faking it so often that I’m sure I often pulled focus from people just trying to live their lives and have their lessons (as brutal as the Creston saxophone sonata is, no one wants to hear about your pain). It’s hard for me to imagine what a pain in the ass I must have been. Or maybe I was simply a scared young woman trying not to fail, all that drama just happening inside me. Who knows?
In any case, a whole raft of teachers - patient and impatient, competent and lazy, wise and distracted, vocal and choral and opera and instrumental - let me sit on the benches in their studio while they corrected me, explained things to me, sang and played at me, demanded their students listen to me, demanded I listen to their students, turned on the metronome, turned off the metronome, conducted, folded their arms, stopped me, made me keep going, told me I had to get it together, thanked me, ignored me, were glad to see me, taught me, taught me, taught me.
My dear colleagues, we collaborative pianists carry the words and advice and musicality and spirits of all these many mentors in our bodies, our hearts, our minds. We are formed through our work with all of you. Not a one of us whose playing you love avoided passing through those clunky apprentice years. We are dependent on the gift of your time and the engagement of your coaching, every last one of you, to get to where we might someday arrive.
Even if you didn’t notice us, we were learning from you.
We carry all of your traditions. If you value us, you value them, and vice versa.
Our institutions will never choose to make our survival possible if you do not advocate for us.
I’m going to take a bit of a left turn here to close.
While taking a break, I checked out social media (shocker) and found this Facebook post from the great cellist, chamber musician, and mentor Nick Photinos. He was sharing a job posting from the Cleveland Institute of Music.
“CIM, one of the top conservatories in the US (a note from KK: it’s also embroiled in an enormous scandal involving its director of orchestral studies, Title IX, and student protests supported by many faculty and alumni, so there’s institutional money being spent for sure), has a full-time piano faculty opening. 2/3 CIM faculty piano teaching, 1/3 CIM Academy teaching, plus acting as the Director of Academy Piano Studies. Requires (note: prefers) a DMA and minimum 7 years teaching experience. They're also one of the few that post the salary range.
$60,000-$75,000
To put that in perspective, that is:
--$28.85-$36.06/hr
--the same as a current opening in Cleveland for a Technical Sales Rep for Rhodes Wolfe, no exp needed, only HS diploma required ($65k-70k)
--less than a Direct Appointment Setter for Andersen Windows, no experience and GED required ($65k-100k)
--far less than a Powersports Sales Associate, no experience required, not even GED ($77k-97.5k)
…Share with your students what the positions they might go for really pay. Make sure their eyes are open. Make sure they're ready to think creatively and entrepreneurially. They CAN make a living in classical music, but it will increasingly be apart from the traditional pathways, which are and have been eroding.”
There’s so much to say about this posting, which isn’t collaborative piano but does carry a whiff of classical music domestic labor about it. “Academy” equals kids equals women equals, I suspect, gender pay gap, regardless of the applicant’s gender; I can’t imagine other directorship positions being compensated at this level.
*braces myself to get proved wrong, please just send pictures of puppies instead*
I’m sharing it as part of this essay, though, because I find hope in the point of view that Nick shares here and teaches through his work: that a living in classical music will increasingly be found outside of traditional pathways. That includes, I think, outside of traditional relationships within traditional institutional structures.
Here are some questions on my mind these days. I don’t claim any of them as mine; they are in the air anytime two or three collabs are gathered (hallelu). Check out the credits on this essay in particular to learn more about a few of the organizations who are engaging with these questions and others like them - by supporting and encouraging discussion, yes, but also by beginning to model solutions. By listing these questions, I do not imply that institutions are not thinking about these things. I’m happy to be the broken record and say again that there’s so much good work going on, and that we need so much more.
(if we weren’t so afraid to talk about the problems, might we share more about great solutions?)
I wonder…
How might our collaborative relationships form, and how might they function, if our peer musical partners were not in the position of providing our compensation?
What if there were no longer bright-line divisions between solo and collaborative pianists in most training situations? How might that look if a school’s required collaborative work were borne by all the piano students, and the costs borne by the school?
Is there a way for institutions to acknowledge and underwrite some or all of the coaching necessary for competitions, role preparation, and auditions?
Can we rethink studio teaching in favor of a more team-like structure, with coaches and collabs as part of the team, and with peer mentorship as part of that team structure from the get-go? How could that positively affect compensation?
Might pianists discover some of these things through discussion with one another, and through peer mentorship outside of academic settings?
Broken record once more: what if we all acted as though each one of us was indispensable?
Thanks to Nick Photinos and a whole slew of anonymous colleagues, pianists and not. And a big shoutout to my Lied the Way peeps led by brilliant Nora Pertz for great work on the socials this week. Check them out.
Weighing in on the problem of playing for voice lessons: these days many singers and teachers don’t want to engage and pay the pianist for an entire hour. Smaller schools don’t have programs requiring pianists to play for lessons (as they sometimes did in the days before collaborative piano degrees!), nor the budget to have a pianist on staff to play for those lessons. So here in Central Ohio, where there is no culture of coaching, I get frequent requests to play for a singer’s lessons once a week until the end of the semester. (They contact me at the advice of their teacher or know me from my other work.) That makes no economic sense: why would I drive for 50 minutes round trip and pay to park at the school for the pleasure of playing for a 30-minute lesson to make $20? Why do the voice teachers even encourage this thinking in their students? (Even beside the issue that as an experienced coach I would not play for lessons…) The teachers complain that they can’t get pianists to play for lessons, so they are forced to accompany themselves or use Appcompanist. Why would an experienced pianist with a brain or self-respect do this? And yet enough of them do it that it creates an expectation that this is acceptable to expect it from someone with an MM, DMA, and/or decades of experience.
Yes, as a young pianist at IU back in the glory days, I accompanied in all 18 studios over 6 years and learned most of my craft as Kathy described. I sat in while singers vocalized (instead of sitting out in the hall) to learn what was happening. I made notes in my scores, and I treasure the ones with markings from the the great teachers like Virginia Zeani who took an interest in me. These young singers paid me $10/hr to be present for that hour, whether I played 55 or 10 minutes. I learned more in those studios than I did in any classroom. BTW female pianists who were in any MM program could play for lessons as an ensemble requirement, so that helped staff many lesson slots. Male pianists had to be in a chorus because they needed the men.
If schools are not encouraging *all* of their pianists to play for voice lessons or in instrumental studios, then how will they learn? They’re not all going to famous soloists. Because admins see the “collabs” as free labor to be exploited, while the “piano majors” just concentrate on their “art.”
Thank you for this discussion, Kathy, even though it gets me worked up every time. I feel that the people who are insulated in their work in academia have very little idea how rough it is outside their sheltered tenure-track positions. I’m doing my part to encourage my Central Ohio colleagues to ask for more from their employers. I am able to speak out now because my husband makes good money, and I have the luxury of choosing what I want to do. I used to have to keep my mouth shut like everybody else. And yes, I have been fired and disciplined before for asking for equity!