Sustainability

You can’t live in our society without coming across the buzzword sustainability. It has been used to sell everything from green energy to organic farming. The point of sustainability is to keep practices and strategies that meet society’s present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

So every so often when I open my mail and find a plea for money from the conservatory I graduated from, I don’t hesitate tossing the forms and expensive invites directly into the trash. Why? They are not helping to create a sustainable future for musicians. As a matter of fact, most university music programs I’m aware of have the same problem.

Conservatories and most music schools out there have no problem luring students to their fine institutions. The sell is not too difficult since most music students dream of playing professionally or being involved in the music field in some fashion. Schools will charm their students into believing that with their top notch education, the placement of said student in their desired musical job will be a snap.

When a student graduates and lands a job in an orchestra, the music school takes some of the credit, and rightfully so. During the years I was in college, my violin teacher produced more professional symphony players than most of the other top conservatories. Word gets around when there is that kind of success, and schools capitalize on good news. Enrollment increases, more students pay full tuition, etc. etc. and it doesn’t take too long for schools to begin turning out far more graduates than the field can absorb.

What’s become clear in the past few years is many schools realize they are creating more talent than ever before because they’ve adopted a new buzzword to address the growing problem: Musical Entrepreneur. Sounds good, doesn’t it? It creates the illusion the school is providing students with a skill set to give them a leg up in the increasingly difficult job market.

And by increasingly difficult job market, I mean the loss of orchestra jobs and music teaching positions. So by creating these entrepreneurship courses, colleges let themselves off the larger hook of actually contributing to the problem. But within the bigger picture, their responsibility to the future of music in this country, schools cannot just teach entrepreneurship and wash their tuition filled hands of other realities that impact everyone: keeping up audience development, quality music education, and support of local professional symphony and community bands and orchestras. Simply put, making classical music sustainable.

While the job of today’s academic music institutions is to create top notch players and ambassadors to music, there needs to be a bigger purpose of these schools: sustainability of classical music in our society.

It may seem like a lot to ask, and I can already see the letters coming back saying they aren’t paid enough to teach and do community service, but I see this as incredibly short sighted. Especially since today’s orchestra players are expected to do just that: educate and community service, something not in the traditional job description and sometimes no extra pay. While that is a tough reality, schools are not sharing this extra tidbit of work expected of today’s graduates. In other cases, some within academia are pushing for it while simultaneously cutting back on what little community involvement efforts they have.

Eventually, orchestra jobs and music education will dry up if the music field goes untended. Maybe that won’t happen in this generation of today’s university and conservatory music programs, allowing them to avoid bothering with the negative all while collecting every tuition check they can get their hands on. But with the concept of comprehensive sustainability working so well in other fields, there is no excuse to not expect music schools, universities, student orchestra programs to lend some help in creating a more sustainable future instead of overloading the fields.

So when my conservatory announces that they are partnering or helping get new patrons in to the orchestra hall, or working with current students on community engagements, or temporarily fill vacancies in school music programs due to budget cuts with the goal of creating a more sustainable music world, I will reconsider sending a donation. Until then, all I can do is what I just preached, but I don’t think it will be enough to save the industry.