The Problem of Obsolete, Unrealistic Music Education
A recent lawsuit filed by a college graduate who claims that her college didn’t do enough to help find her a job makes me wonder how many music students are spending a lot of money training for full-time music careers that are simply not viable for the vast majority of graduates.
Looking at the career of being a film and television composer, our industry over the last 15 years has seen a massive influx of people come into the business and market themselves as score composers. The resulting massive oversupply of composers combined with a rapid increase in the number of quality of music libraries dumping thousands of instrumental tracks onto the marketplace for little or no up-front sync fees has created a shrinking market for custom score music where downward pressure on composer fees exists like never before.
Yet whenever I speak at events attended primarily by music college students, the vast majority of attendees seem to have little knowledge about these harsh business issues, instead focusing their efforts on developing the technical and creative skills involved in score composing.
As score composers are pushed out by music libraries and recording musicians lose jobs in favor of low-cost sample libraries, the viability of many jobs in our industry is changing very rapidly. This is something I fear our educational institutions simply don’t want to confront. It’s much easier (especially at admissions time) to focus on technical and creative skills, ignoring the fact that there is a rapidly shrinking marketplace for those skills in the real-world marketplace. This is massively unfair to students and their parents who spend tens of thousands of dollars and years of hard work on college educations, only to find out that full-time job prospects for the students upon graduation are slim to nonexistent. Things were bad enough in this respect before the recent problems with the economy, and now they’re even worse.
As technology rapidly changes the creative environment as well as the business environment that is the music industry, music industry educators need to take a long, hard look at what, exactly, they’re training their students to do and how viable a career they’re really preparing their graduates for. Educators need to be honest with students before enrollment about the economic state of the music industry and just how viable their intended career may be, and educators need to equip their students not just with creative and technological skills, but with the business, negotiating, and marketing skills that they’ll need to carve out a career in today’s tough music industry.
MARK,
You are so dead on target with your “UNREALISTIC MUSIC EDUCATION” article. I have not suffered from the problems you outline; but, I have always wondered how educators or the department heads educate themselves as the business of music.
I look forward to anything else you have to say within the topic of your article.
Respectfully, john p sullivan
Hi Mark:
I appreciate and agree with your article, but as a composition professor at a university, I’d like to interject a couple additional points, and maybe play devil’s advocate for a minute.
Higher education has always been torn between the often conflicting goals of creating educated, intelligent, and well-rounded individuals, and the need for them to be “employable”. The traditional line between these two approaches has been the “liberal arts” degree and the “vocational” degree. The assumption that it is the university’s obligation to make their students employable (and maybe even be held accountable for that) is a fairly recent phenomenon. It is a shift in thinking that universities are still grappling with.
You have at least some familiarity with the program in which I teach, and you know that we ARE attempting to combine the traditional academy approach (most of which is predefined by our accrediting body – NASM), with a healthy dose of “real life” characterized by hands-on film-scoring work, workshops and seminars with industry professionals, and courses in music business and recording technology.
I would suggest that we are not alone in this attempt. In fact I know of many schools where the issues you raise in your article are being heatedly discussed and addressed. I think there IS a general acknowledgement that most entering composition majors have film or game scoring as their professional goal, and that we should figure out ways of incorporating this into our curriculum.
The biggest obstacle to this (of course) is the incredible inertia of academia. While beneficial in many ways, it ensures that every good idea has to go through years of committee approval and be poked and prodded by the whole food chain. I’m sure I don’t need to expand on that problem.
But I want to return to the idea of the “non-vocational” approach. Historically, film music uses language borrowed from concert music. Virtually all the major innovations in extened technique, pitch organization, harmonic progression, etc. have come first from composers who were trained in the “pure” academic way. These techniques then enter the vocabulary of other composers and work their way into film.
In our haste to get all our composition students jobs, I would hate to think that we might no longer have programs that focus primarily (or even exclusively) artistic development. They have paved the way for us in the past and I think they will continue to be needed.
In the end, of course, we need both. As more and more programs move to the center as we are doing here at SFA, the problems you cite may diminish. On the other hand, academia will probably never be able to shift directions as fast as industry can, so maybe these problems will be with us forever.
Steve
Hi Steve -
Thanks for the thoughtful comment, and congrats on your excellent film scoring program. You’re one of the bright lights in our business, and it’s great to hear that more folks in the world of academia area addressing the real-world business and career needs of graduates and current students.
Mark, you f**king rock.
Steve, I fail to see how learning to be a “working composer” and not a teacher, requires a college education, especially post-grad degrees. My time and money at Chapman Conservatory has been a disaster. Everything I learned could have easily been learned by myself (which 90% of the time happened anyway): looking through scores and learning online [which will be the ultimate doom for universities] is a hell of lot cheaper then spending all that wasteful money on an absurd degree in music composition. They offered no music business courses or film/tv/medea courses. I feel like I’ve been scammed; I feel naive now for thinking that my professors could offer me a future.
So, back to school now to probably learn computers, while continuing my pursuits in composition, essentially becoming another charles ives.
I also teach at a university and am very open and honest with parents and students about the job market out there. I really encourage my students to take advantage of the other departments at our university. Take classes in education, computer programming, business, etc. Make yourself more marketable. By doing a variety of things, you can make a decent living doing this. I lead by example! Between teaching, gigging, and composing, I am making a pretty decent living!
Rik