I hate to be the harbinger of bad news, but something has been on my mind for many a year, and after seeing an article online dredged it up once again, and, as food for thought for all of us, I thought I would address it. It is the Elephant in the Room, and I think we all know it…
The bad news that I have been thinking of, time and time again, is about the validity of voice students going to college to study classical singing. Now, I know that I have your attention, because many of you teach at the Conservatory and the Universities and Colleges around here. And others of us, like myself, are in the business of training teenage voices, and some of them dream of having a career in opera. And for me, almost every year one of my students goes off to college as a voice major.
I am afraid that as proud as I am of my students that have gotten into Indiana, Eastman, Manhattan School of Music, Boston Conservatory and a slew of other fine institutions I still harbor in my secret heart, the wish that they had gone off and done something else. I wish that they were not going to study singing, and get a degree in it, and suffer the heartbreak that we can pretty much be assured that they will have when they realize that they will not be able to earn a decent living from Classical Music.
Lets face it: Classical Music is hardly main-stream. At best there is about one Classical music station per city in the United States. And how much Opera or solo vocal music does the station play, anyhow? The one around here rarely, if ever, plays an Opera aria, much less an art song. We may hear some choral music, and a portion of a symphony or chamber work, and there even may be an occasional Opera broadcast. But in general, most of the music played on the classical stations is bland, unchallenging snippets of famous music that any idiot could ignore. Even people who don’t like Classical Music can’t be offended by what the classical music stations play.
One has to look pretty hard for Classical Music and Opera. I meet (fairly normal) people all the time who look at me oddly when I say I am an Opera singer, and they shake their heads with disbelief. They say they have never met an opera singer before. They don’t really believe me because I am not fat and I don’t have horns on my head. If I said I was a rock singer, or a pop singer, or even a Jazz singer they would get that. But an Opera singer? Usually they don’t know that there is an Opera Company here in San Francisco because they have only heard of Julliard and the MET. I get so tired dealing with these beings, but I am afraid, actually, that they may be the norm, and my knowledge and participation in Opera and classical singing is the weird thing.
How could this attitude translate into money for us outcast classical musicians? It can’t. Opera is a novelty and it subsists on foundation and private grants. It does not support itself by selling tickets. It supports itself on fund raising. And in this economy, with its lack of clout… things are not looking too good for fresh faced eager young opera singers…
Opera has been a niche sport for a long time, but prior to the advent of Apprentice Programs, Opera singers could earn a decent living doing secondary principal roles and comprimario roles. No more. Opera companies have learned that they can kill two birds with one stone by securing educational grant money AND get cheap labor by having an apprentice program. It is a win-win situation! They get money to NOT have to pay a decent salary to a professional comprimario singer. Some companies like Sarasota even get free chorus singers out of their apprentices. Brilliant! And yet depressing, because it has made it impossible for us to earn our living singing.
Even tiny companies now have young artist programs. Great for the young artists, but after they become full-fledged opera singers, there is nowhere to sing: All the entry-level positions are being taken by the next generation of new college graduates. At age 24 or 25 the graduated apprentices are now put out to pasture, or in other words, put out to… earn a living… singing? Are you kidding? They are not singing. They are waiting tables. They are temping, working as bank tellers, living back at home because they cannot afford to pay back both their student loans and be in their own apartment. Sometimes they do a role with a small company around here for two or three hundred dollars for a month’s worth of rehearsal and work. I am wondering what fee that would work out to if anyone ever bothered to take that down to the hourly level—two dollars an hour? Less?
Back to the article that I cited at the beginning of this little tome: It was not about students studying classical music. It was about students in college studying ANYTHING. Here is a little quote from the article I read, which was written by Zac Bissonnette for Daily Finance:
“The real question that families, institutions of higher learning, and lawmakers will need to confront soon is this: Have we as a society dramatically oversold the financial benefits of higher education? It's hard to argue that that's not the case. Back in February, it was reported that the $800,000 increase in lifetime earnings that The College Board and other institutions claimed was associated with a bachelor's degree had been quietly reduced to just $450,000 based on further research…. Meanwhile, student debt loads are exploding upward along with default rates and fewer than half of college graduates under 25 were working at a job that required a degree-- and that doesn't include the huge percentage of students who drop out.
It's the parents, teachers, guidance counselors, admissions officers and financial aid counselors who tell kids "It's OK. Go to the best school you can get into. Sign this promissory note. Your education is an investment and your earnings will increase enough to more than make up for however much you pay."
Turns out, it doesn't work like that. There is ample data to suggest that hundreds of thousands of kids are enrolling in college each year who will later find themselves worse off financially for the experience. By the time those young people figure that out, the guidance counselor will have retired, the admissions officer will have moved to another school, and the student loan company will have referred their account to collections.”
I confess that I squirmed a lot after reading this… This was what I have been wondering about with regard to singing, and here someone puts this into words about…all jobs. And yet, I already knew this. I already have many friends who have Master’s degrees in science and finance and business who are unemployed, some of whom have been unemployed for a couple of years. My brother is a prominent PHD and author of many books about medicine and science. He lost the government funding for his projects twice at two separate Universities and is now writing text for pharmaceutical companies. Needless to say he is not happy about it. I do not think he would have gotten a PHD if he had known that this would have happened. I have a friend who took a voluntary severance package from the SF Gate, has won two Emmy awards and yet has been unemployed for nearly two years. I know a CEO with a vineyard at his house in Woodside, and, well, he too has lost his job, and is not sure what he is going to do next. Almost everyone in marketing is sweating, and those people who were the hotshot headhunters of 5 years ago raking in six figures easily? They are working at Trader Joes, and Safeway. Do you know anyone like this? I am sure you do.
What are WE going to do? Are we going to continue to encourage young singers to take out loans to finance education that will likely never make as much money for them as the amount it took to pay for the loans in the first place? How can we not? This is what we do—We teach. We teach them to sing, and it is our livelyhood. We WANT them to sing. Occasionally someone gets through the system and becomes well known, and thus, is able to earn a living, but the chance is very small. Is that a large enough hope to keep us going? The economy is going to get better, people will get their jobs back, but is classical singing ever going to be main-stream enough to keep us afloat?
I am not judging anyone here. I am hardly in a position to judge! As I mentioned before, almost every year I have some eager young High School Senior Hell bent for leather to get into a Conservatory and study singing. I honestly try to warn them what they have in store, and I have been warning them for 20 years. I have also been fortunate that they all have had a lot of parental money backing them, and that they did not take out loans for their bachelor’s degree. For me, that is some small consolation.
In the end of the day, I hope that our students do find a way to “make it” in music. Or if they don’t “make It” in the traditional sense, that classical singing is their favorite avocation, their favorite hobby, something that they always love. I hope that they use their beautiful trained voices to sing their lucky children to sleep, shine brilliantly in their church choir, volunteer at the kindergarten to teach the kids some music. I’m not sure that is enough to justify all that expense, all that training, all those years of expensive lessons, but until I can come up with something else, it will have to do…