Ep. 2: Can You Escape the Performing Arts Education Industrial Complex – While Still Investing In Developing as an Artist?

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Transcript:

This is a transcript of an episode of Classically (Un)Trained, published on November 11th, 2024.

Academic training is this looming presence in the life of a classical performer, isn’t it? Not only are we expected to get robust specialised academic training – in many cases starting in childhood – but there is also a whole parasitic industry of private teachers and educational programs targeted at early-career performers which is only growing as opportunities to perform professionally shrink.

That’s why I think it’s important to talk a bit about this idea of continued education, which often feels like the only option for performers who don’t want to give up on performing but don’t have steady work. 

But how did we get to the point where professional work isn’t the standard path to perfecting one’s artistry as a performer?

I think part of it is that there are two pervasive ideas which distort the way we think about education because they distort how we think about work: 

Idea 1: Do what you love! Follow your passion! 

Idea 2: Remunerated work is supposed to be drudgery.

How can these two ideas exist at the same time? 

Well, check out David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs from 2013 and Maya Tokumitsu’s book Do What You Love from 2015, for example – you can also just listen to the next episode of Classically (Un)Trained where I’ll delve into this mythical duo in more depth. 

For now, let’s focus on education – and how it is influenced by those two ideas. 

If there’s just one useful thing I would like to impart on you, it’s my answer to the question: When does it make sense to invest in your continued education, when you don’t feel the work you’re getting as a performer is enough to keep you in shape and developing your skills? 

I have a simple formula for that: If a given continued education program is simply perfecting something you were already learning during your primary training – it’s not worth it. Only if it’s developing a new skill, might it be worth it. And, yes, this means it’s usually more valuable to dip your toes outside your primary performance discipline than it is to focus on perfecting the technique you were already learning during the main part of your education. The only exception I would make is for the first few years after your training, when you’re on the offramp to professional work – during that short but crucial period of time, it makes sense to keep in shape with coaches in your discipline. But after a few years – I would go with my formula. 

Now, let’s talk about the oasis which is a performing arts education, how it neglects (according to arts graduates themselves) certain key skills, how it manages to have the same problem whether it’s state funded or tuition funded, and why it’s allowed to be an oasis, in the first place. 

What if you could be a fly on the wall during conversations between the kinds of people who have determined the shape of your life up until now? 

Well, I found myself in just that situation a few years ago. 

During the pandemic, I started attending meetings organised by the founder of NYOP – which is one of those services that caters to the “hungry crowd” of young performers and which I’ll talk about a little later. These meetings united English-speaking professionals from across the opera industry. It was a rag-tag mix of singers from all career stages, coaches at young artist programs, agents, opera directors, singing teachers – basically a group of individuals from the world of opera that probably wouldn’t have normally spoken so candidly in this precise constellation if it weren’t for the need to beam out of their isolation. 

And during those conversations, I heard something which I felt I wasn’t supposed to hear: 

I heard individuals working at academies and young artist programs admit, seemingly befuddled that anyone had an issue with it, that of course there are way more students studying classical singing than can possibly have a performing careers and that that’s been the case for a long time. There was a kind of impatience to the way they said it – as if they were really tired of people whining about this. 

Then, I heard these same people talk about how even going to the “right schools” doesn’t guarantee a career. “The right schools?” I thought – wait, does that mean there are large swaths of aspiring performing artists studying at the “wrong schools”, oblivious to the fact that they’ve already taken a wrong turn?

But the most shocking thing I heard was the statement of one educator who said something to the effect of: Well, it’s not all lost because those who don’t make it as opera singers can perhaps become great realtors, one day. 

Realtors. 

Now, I’d like to know: Does this attitude shock you? Or have you already become numb to it? 

I was somewhere between shocked and bored at this point. 

To be clear – my issue is not with the idea of being a realtor, in particular, or having a less prestigious but more lucrative job in general.

No – my issue is with how that statement frames the idea of arts education and education as such. 

The question I have is: Whom has the education this hypothetical formerly-opera-singing realtor received actually benefited? 

I could hear the answer being: Well, the joy of music and theatre is enough to make it worthwhile. Even as a realtor, you will live a fuller life thanks to dedicating yourself to music in your youth.

This very common argument puts you in the position – like I was on that Zoom call – of either arguing against the inherent value of the arts or keeping your mouth shut. 

On the particular occasion I’m thinking of, I chose to keep my mouth shut. But I kept thinking about it afterwords and I realised there were two issues with that line of thinking and I think it’s important to name them, because it causes young performers a lot of grief: 

First, there is a huge difference between the benefit one gets from being exposed to and interacting with the arts – which is something that I think should be much more of a focus in elementary and non-art-focused high school education – and the benefits one gets from competitively focusing in on a particular function within the arts and making success in it your primary goal. Once studying a craft within the performing arts becomes a primary area of effort it becomes… something else. A source of meaning, perhaps – but also a building-block, or even the essence, of one’s self-image, which can be a problem down the line when one has to give up that self-image. It can also – like anything that’s difficult – be the source of a lot of struggle and grief. I was actually told once by a music therapist that she felt professional singers kind of loose the ability to access the therapeutic benefits of singing, which is why she would hesitate to take them into any therapy that involved vocalising. That’s just an anecdote and I doubt it’s a universal point of view but – the point is, education and professionalisation are two very different things. Performing arts professionalisation is pretty much only valuable as an activity which shapes an individual into someone who has value to society as an artist. If the skills a student learns in a professionalisation program – that’s anything from a conservatory degree to a college degree – usually ends up not being used by graduates of those fields in their subsequent professional life then that professionalisation has failed.

Second, and this is the hard part, not all time is created equal and not all education can be done at any time. Meaning, those years in your teens and twenties during which most potential professional performers are training the hardest for their shot at the game are a crucial time for education in general and for many fields the advantage of starting in your teens as opposed to, say, your thirties is considerable.

In other words – that hypothetical formerly-opera-singing realtor could have had more career choices, if their crucial educational years weren’t spent practicing lifting the soft-pallet and pronouncing Italian double consonants. 

And what’s really important here: This situation isn’t just a potential loss to that individual, as it’s usually framed; in fact, it’s important that any individual in that situation be able to reframe it as valuable and find peace with it. What I would argue is that performing artists wasting good years on an education they mostly don’t end up using is a loss to society. 

Yet somehow it never gets framed that way – it always gets framed as a mere personal loss. As in: You wanted your shot – well you have a right to take it but you must also bear the consequences. It’s a kind of Hunger Games way of looking at the world. And it’s justified by those two myths I mentioned at the beginning: “do what you love” and “work is supposed to be odious.” 

The mantra “Do what you love” justifies education in fields that are nearly impossible to break into. The mantra “work is supposed to be odious” justifies that impossibility. 

The simple solution would be to say: Clearly, we have to drastically reduce the number of people studying the performing arts. Let them all have business degrees! 

It’s the most logical solution, and it’s also the least popular – and I think that’s not because it negates the value of the performing arts, but because it means lots of educators and administrators would lose their jobs. Threatening livelihoods in never a good look. 

And, to me, that solution also becomes less compelling when you look at how relatively small the percentage of people getting degrees in the performing arts actually is. 

So the question becomes: Can one salvage performing arts professionalisation, given how few classically-trained performing artists are needed in the real world? 

The issues at play in this situation are much bigger than the education sector, and outside of its control, but let’s look at what IS in the academy’s control – besides its intake of students, which we’ve set aside for the moment. 

In a lecture on his recent book Culture is Not an Industry, Justin O’Connor observes, citing a book called The People’s Republic of Walmart, that “most capitalists don’t like markets.” Isn’t that an interesting thought! He explains this by saying that big companies – think Walmart or Amazon – like to create an “oasis of planning” inside the larger “chaos” of a capitalist system. In other words, these big companies may have grown out of a free capitalist system but internally they don’t actually like freedom or competition. 

Now, what struck me here is how this parallels my mental image of how the performing arts academy works. 

In the trailer for this season I also used the term “oasis” – the same term used to describe big companies in the aforementioned lecture – because that really is what performing arts academies feel like when you regard them from the outside. Internally, they work on different rules than the outside world. 

And I should make clear that this is not just the case in the United States, where universities really are run like companies though the problem is certainly more exploitive and frustrating, there. 

Here I’ll share my personal observation as someone who attended higher education in the performing arts in three countries – the United States, the Czech Republic, and France. My observation is that in places where education is either completely or significantly government subsidised (like the Czech Republic and France), there is – and this is counter-intuitive – a lot more freedom for professors and students and a lot less beaurocratic bloat. This feels more humane because you don’t get this feeling of being pumped down an assembly line, with points and minutes measured mechanically at every turn, the way I felt when studying in the mostly-tuition-subsidized model (that is, in the United States) – but that freedom can also mean freedom not to come to class or not to teach and not to evaluate by a clear and unified set of standards. Now, while this was not MY experience in the United States, from what I hear, since I had studied in the US, a very depressing problem may have gotten super-charged in higher education, which is that the students are truly treated like customers and their education is treated like some kind of recreational experience – where the comfort of the dorms and the quality of the canteen is as important if not more important than the effectiveness of their teachers. Public funding does mean lower pay for professors and worse infrastructure – but it seems tuition-funded education has used much of its extra money to bloat beurocratically and invest way too much money in infrastructure that doesn’t directly serve quality of education. There is also less incentive, when education is mostly state subsidised, to take on too many students – this means you in fact are less likely to study the field you actually want to study. This can be good or bad. For example, the problem in many performance disciplines is that more women study them than men, even as there are fewer rolls for women in the real world than for men. At the Academy where I studied in the Czech Republic, they at one point openly admitted to accepting fewer women than men into the vocal program because they felt that’s what the job market actually needed – they had no incentive, unlike completely tuition-funded universities, to do otherwise. Good or bad? I don’t know. 

However, what seems to be very similar between public education and private higher education in the performing arts is that they are built around a rather archaic idea: The idea that a performer will simply be good at what they do, do auditions, and then get jobs – now a days usually with a step between to get an agent. 

There are certainly institutions which are trying to expand beyond that – but they are in the minority and I think they’re fighting an uphill battle because there are so many unknowns about what a truly 21st century education for performers would even look like and I can imagine it being very hard to convince existing institutions to change as fundamentally as would be necessary to truly offer a radically different education for young artists. So, overall, this audition-to-gig – or maybe audition-to-agent – format of thinking of a performing arts career looms over most professionalising education – and it’s a missed opportunity not to start framing young people’s understanding of the performing arts in the context of not just the market, but in terms of the social function of the arts, or cultural policy around the arts, in other words, around that fundamental question: What is the value of what we do as artists? 

Because when that never gets addressed in your training, what happens when you exit the academy? 

Well, unless you’re one of the lucky few, you might find you have a very narrow skillset and you’ll face the downstream consequences of that – not just underemployment but poor conditions within the employment you do have. 

Another scenario, one which can happen at the same time as the first one, is that you do become valuable – valuable to individuals and businesses catering to young hopefuls who have already invested a big chunk of their life into studying classical technique and need professional opportunities. 

I’m talking about the tuition-ed summer residencies, the pay-to-performs, the gurus with oil-paintings of themselves on the wall who promise to connect you with this or that agent, the masterclasses with big names who promise to give you exposure, the payed auditions, the subscription audition directories. 

I’ve already told you my formula: Anything that is just a continuation of what you were learning in your academic training is probably not worth your time. What you need, once your academic training is done, is to learn NEW skills, not refine the old ones. 

Because the brutal truth is that what you need to become a great performer is professional experience, not more training. That’s why those first few years after finishing your academic training are crucial and it makes sense to spend them zeroed in on breaking in within your primary discipline. The problem is that there is a paucity of professional experience to cut your teeth on and even when pay-to-perform programs try to mimic a professional experience, they fail. I should concede, here, that I do know people who stuck it out until their mid-to-late thirties, paying for lessons and summer programs, and did somewhat break in – but every one of them is independently wealthy and they aren’t making a full living, as someone who isn’t independently wealthy would need to, just enough to perhaps be artistically satisfied. That’s simply not realistic for most people – and not just because of funds but because of the unbearable meaningless of a life spent being a costumer of the field you studied. 

Then there’s another kind of business catering to post-academically-trained performers: For example, one company trying to bridge the gap between education and professional work in the opera sector is NYOP, which I mentioned earlier, and which until recently, took the form of mass auditions for a panel of agents and casting directors who may or may not be looking for new performers. These “professional” auditions cost a few hundred Euros plus the potential cost of travel and accommodations. Predictably, the number of singers who get jobs through NYOP is not even worth mentioning. While the NYOP model tried to address a real issue effecting young artists, namely the difficulty of just being heard by the people who are theoretically able to give you professional work, in the end I think it simply isn’t worth it, except perhaps as an audition-training service in those first few years after finishing your education – however, in the end, if you’re going to be noticed and given opportunities, it’s going to happen through fostering real relationships not paying to participate in mass auditions.

And that brings us to – what’s that buzzword I keep hearing, the cure-all for all under-employed artists? Ah, yes, entrepreneurship. 

And, no, it’s not just a buzzword in places like the United States who worship the self-started spirit and have basically no state funding for the arts. I have encountered this buzzword recently in France, a country which I think has some of the best networks of subsidised small festivals and regional theatres in addition to good support for individual artists (I mean the French government pays some freelance performers a monthly stipend, for crying out loud). But – I attended a talk, recently, by one of the directors of a French organisation which fosters experimentation in music, and this director said – to a group of students who seemed to just be waking up to how unfavourable the professional world was to them – that today’s performers need to learn to be entrepreneurial because the money an organisation like his used to have to give to small projects by young musicians has been cut. He also said – and this is actually why I would love to connect performers across disciplines – that dancers and visual artists have a better tradition of thinking entrepreneurially than musicians do. 

In any case – the times they are a changing, even in Europe.

The trouble with the term “entrepreneurial” is that it’s become this catch-all buzzword that gets repeated a lot but not really delved into – kind of like the terms “creative” and “innovative” are thrown around thoughtlessly in the business world. What does it mean to “be entrepreneurial”? I found out the etymology of the word comes from French – entreprendre, to undertake. And while etymology doesn’t determine what a word might mean today, the original meaning of the word “entrepreneurial” illustrates how broad the term is. What does it mean “to undertake” something? 

Even if we narrow it down to the way a classically-trained performer might undertake launching their own performance project we’re still dealing with a huge skillset – first, you have to have a sense of WHAT kinds of performances are likely to succeed in the spaces and institutions available to you, how to talk about those projects to potential funders (and how to describe the project differently if talking to potential audiences, online, to patrons, or with funding bodies) what sources of funding to even use, how to build a team, how to execute the project using the budget, technology and expertise at your disposal, how to market an existing project, and, preferably, how to remain an artist and technician of your craft while doing all of those things. Entrepreneurship touches on sociology, public policy, marketing, communication, budgeting, organisation-building, technology – I mean it’s a whole way of being. 

And performing arts graduates seem to feel this lack of training in entrepreneurship – in the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project special report from 2024, which used data from a survey of some 100 000 US-based “alumni of postsecondary arts, design, and adjacent programs about their employment as of September 2022,” graduates in art fields (and this was the performing arts lumped in with visual arts, to be clear) noted they used more “business, financial, or entrepreneurial” skills than “artistic technique” out there in the real world. More precisely, they estimated they learned 31 percent less “business, financial, or entrepreneurial” skills than they actually needed in the real world (which they estimated to be 65 percent of their current work activities), and 31 percent more artistic technique skills than end up being important in the real world (which they estimate to be at 55 percent of their current work activities). Now, what muddles this for me is that some of the respondent aren’t working in the arts, anymore – so OF COURSE they don’t need their artistic technique skills. It would be meaningful to look at these numbers using only data from respondents who were still working as artists – but that doesn’t change the broader issue these results illustrate. 

I remember attending a seminar on expanding professionalism, where the word “entrepreneurial” hung in the air even when it wasn’t mentioned directly, after which one listener, who happened to be the dean of a major European conservatory, expressed concern that this expansion of students’ skillsets would take time away from the high-level technical proficiency necessary to be a world-class performer – which, after all, is the thing students come to conservatories to learn, isn’t it? 

I’ll say the thing a lot of people don’t want to say: There probably is a very small group of very promising and well-connected performers who perhaps would do best to spend their education focusing on being products within the classical-performance industry. With regards to that, I think it would be totally fine to accept that there’s a much smaller group of performers who should get a different kind of training than the majority. Think: a performing arts equivalent of Olympian athletes. 

I wouldn’t, however, say, that that majority of performing arts which is not best served by being trained like they’re in that small percent of people who would make good products in the establishment classical performing arts industry – which is how most performers-in-training are being treated, despite the odds – shouldn’t exist at all. The arts are different than sports, in that respect. There is a value there beyond that of the spectacle of virtuosity and competition. 

Ultimately, it seems this whole predicament of many performing artists feeling they lack skills which would allow them to undertake, rather than merely audition and be employed, comes from a deep-set doubt – or maybe just confusion – about the broader value of the performing arts on the part of the institutions that train in them. And one of the central questions I’m trying to figure out is what it would look like to transform one’s self into a a classically-trained performer who brings value to the world at large, rather than merely begging to be graciously employed by the existing – and perhaps shrinking – classical music, dance, or theatre industry. 

So, by the end of this season, I hope I will have shared some ideas of what to actually DO to start that transformation into something we can call, for the purposes of this podcast, a Classically (Un)Trained performer. To be clear, I cannot offer some kind of clear, step-by-step guide – for one thing, I think it’s going to look very different for every single performer. But I have taken some first steps and learned some things from my failures and crucially – going back to the pitch I made in the pilot – I’m not trying to sell you a career coaching program which should count for something – while there are career-coaches who do honest work, and can be helpful, I think it’s important for someone to be talking about careers in the arts without it being a sales funnel. 

I’ll remind you again that the person to whom I am addressing this season is a classically-trained performing artist who has already tested the waters of the real world, outside the academy, at least a little bit. I am speaking to you, because I’m in the same boat. That said, I’m also trying to gather information and I’m open to the idea that I am missing something – so, please, if you have any insight that I’ve missed or disagreements with what I’ve said – do let me know. Or if you agree with me and would just like to add something, I’d also love to hear from you. You can submit anonymously, through a secret message box I’ve set up, or just through email. All that is linked on the website. 

Next time I’m going to go back to the idea of having mission and finding meaning as a performing artist and how that – though maybe sometimes in a roundabout and scary way – can lead one down the unexpectedly right path. I’m also going to ask: What is a career, anyway? 

Footnotes & Sources: 

Video of Culture is Not an Industry seminar by Justin O’Connor (which mentions the book The People’s Republic of Walmart by Leigh Phillips and Michael Rozworski).

My interview with David Blackburn about NYOP and the opera industry.

The SNAPP research which mentions arts graduates feelings about needing more education in entrepreneurship.

Dana Varga of the Empowered Musician studied the lopsided opportunities for men and for women specifically in opera here.

I also mentioned two other books in this episode, sources for the two myths about work: 

David Graeber: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory  

Miya Tokumitsu: Do What You Love: And Other Lies About Success and Happiness

(Full disclosure – I have not read Tokumitsu’s book from cover to cover, just the introduction available online. I actually got her research filtered via the Master’s thesis of a dancer, Barbora Hřebačková, who wrote about exploitation in dance employment – her dissertation is in Czech but can be accessed here.)