Here’s a Scholarship, But Forget About Getting a Job

By David J. Hahn
New York, NY

According to a report in the Winston-Salem Journal (North Carolina), the annual Christmas production of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker will no longer be played by the Winston-Salem Symphony. Instead, it will be played by University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA) music students.

The students will not be paid for their performances, but $80,000 will be donated to UNCSA, 70% of which will go toward scholarships for music students.

Kathryn Levy, Winston-Salem Symphony’s flutist, is quoted in the article, saying the the Nutcracker gig paid symphony musicians “over $1,000″ each December.

In the big picture, $80k isn’t a lot of money, and an annual loss of $1,000 by local musicians – while a big inconvenience – is not a catastrophic loss of wages. What I find more troubling about this news story is the idea that this music school seems to be competing with local professional for jobs and undercutting their wages with cheaper (student) labor.

I also wonder where the other 30% of the $80k will be going? Is the UNCSA acting as a talent agent for their music students, contracting out their time and skills and taking 30% off the top?

Why is a music school taking jobs away from local professionals? The article explains that the endowment that funds the UNCSA lost $5 million this year, and they need to raise $450,000 to be able to cover the scholarships that have been awarded for next year. In other words, scholarships for training will be provided, but it will cost Winston-Salem the jobs for which the training is given.

If there isn’t enough money for all the music students and scholarships at UNCSA, maybe there shouldn’t be so many students and scholarships? An article in the Chicago Tribune several months ago highlighted the exponential growth of music programs at universities, even when real-world job opportunities for professional musicians remain constant or (for cities like Winston-Salem) dwindle.

Why are music schools like Julliard expanding facilities and class sizes when symphonies in Utah, Milwaukee, Atlanta, St. Paul, Charleston, Brooklyn and elsewhere are cutting wages or canceling seasons? Why is the UNCSA trying to increase it’s market share of local professional work if they already have more students than they can afford?

Making irrational enrollment quotas is one thing, but when a recession-hit, resource-thirsty Academia begins raiding the jobs of the Real World – then we have a territorial conflict. Music schools should stay off our turf.

What do you think?

About the author

David J. Hahn is a music director and pianist in New York City. He co-founded MusicianWages.com with Cameron Mizell in 2008. His writing have been published in the International Musician, union trade papers and featured on the Huffington Post and About.com. Find out more at his website and follow him on Twitter.

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Thanks for bringing this up, Dave!

I guess this situation doesn’t surprise me: for those of us who attended university music programs, how many of our classmates actually went on to a professional life in music? If your school is like mine, less than 10%. Was there ever a correspondence between real-world job prospects and university enrollment? There is a divide between music education and performance. Their goals are different, and they step on each others’ toes a lot.

It seems to me that higher education is a business like any other, though it tries not to present itself as such. To those in the education business, then, it makes sense to do whatever it takes to keep the ship afloat: raise enrollment (and class size), offer “real world” opportunities to perform in order to attract students, etc. The fact that in so doing they undermine what professionals are trying to do is an unfortunate side effect.

There are two solutions to this problem as I see it:

1) Universities jettison their single-mindedness, operate not only in their own interest but in the interest of music as a whole, thereby staying off our turf.

2) Professional musicians make some noise about the problem, emphasizing the superior quality of a professional job to that of a university (and if that’s not the case, what do we have going for us at all?).

In some ways, this issue resembles the classic “amateur musician” issue, where hobby musicians take jobs for less money than professionals would, pushing the price of our labor down etc. As long as there is a noticeable difference in quality between the amateur and professional, though, some people will always be willing to pay for the difference…hopefully.

James
5/12/2009

Thats kinda harsh on the educational community and seemed a little self centered. So the young adults without the resources for a education should not have the oppertunity to follow there dreams because of hard economic times. I personally do not understand how you can argue against educating youth. I do not know where that exdra 30,000 dollars is going and would be very displeased as well if it where not used properly.

ddd p
8/31/2009