New Music Hustle
Even before I started to read my PDF of Taking Note: A Study of Composers and New Music Activity in the United States, a quote on the study’s NewMusicBox Radar page from ACF prez/CEO and Twin Cities new music kingpin John Nuechterlein caught my eye. Here it is, in case you missed snagging your PDF:
The field of new music is fractured and diverse, with composers of the 21st century focused as much on the promotion and distribution of their work as they are on the work itself. Professional composers are thinking holistically about all aspects of their career—not just the music.
This is a solid first principle for making sense of the study itself, because if you doubt the importance of staying on your hustle, Taking Note is going to make you really angry. For example, one of my favorite statistics has to do with how composers’ earnings grow throughout their careers. Check out the informative graphics on page 26 (the table on the following page seems to contradict them, but I may be reading it incorrectly): The median annual income among professional composers starts at almost exactly $25,000, rises to about twice that by the mid-career stage, and winds up at a respectable $67,501 by the “accomplished” phase. Meanwhile, non- professional composers make a little less bank at the outset ($17,500) and lag only about five grand behind professionals at mid-career ($45,001). But by their twilight years, non-professionals aren’t making any more than they used to—they’re still floating around $45,000.
This is pretty shocking if your vision of a “non-professional composer” is someone like Charles Ives, making a killing in estate planning while scribbling away in the loft at night. Can it be true that people who self-identify as professionals (only eight percent of whom, page 22 tells us, make their livings solely from composing) make more money in the latter stages of their careers than amateurs do? Moral of the story: If you want to stack paper, go all in.
As a person prone to roll down the path of least resistance, I find these numbers really bracing. Maybe all those gurus who advised me and my peers to focus our formative time and energy on the volatile, competitive field of contemporary music, to put all our eggs in that one esoteric basket, were right. But their directive included more than the “promotion and distribution” that Nuechterlein rightly identifies: There’s another variable in that inspirational equation that you won’t find anywhere in Taking Note, and that’s the quality of the product we’re obliged to sell. Sure, I should devote more effort to disseminating and publicizing my work, but first I have to make sure it’ll stick to the wall when I throw it.
Download Taking Note now if you haven’t already and join what is likely to be a rich coast-to-coast conversation.