What is your vision or version of a better music community?

Opinions from the Set to Fire Podcast

"What is your vision or version of a better music community?"

     This is the question that we asked our artists appearing on season 2 of Set to Fire. Being a musician in academia or in the professional industry can come with lots of challenges. The work can be physically demanding, time consuming, competitive, and emotionally heavy sometimes. What are the support systems that we as artists currently have in place to deal with these stresses? What systems do we not have yet? While we don't have all of the answers, we believe the conversation is immensely important in starting to pave a way to a more positive experience in this field.

     Here is what our guests had to say: 

Myles Thomas

     So, that's interesting because, I think, for me, the barrier of entry needs to be way lower in terms of finding success and having it be a career. Right now especially in the percussion world, the barrier to entry in terms of orchestral playing is super high because you get that job and you're there for life. I think there just needs to be more ensembles! Ensembles that have the funding and the security to support their members. Through that there's going to be more music that is more meaningful, more meaningful performances, more meaningful change for the audience. I think that cycle does need to start in reverse... the audience members should ask for this more, but they don't know that, if it's not available to know in the first place.

     It's hard to know how to solve that problem, but I think we just need more quality ensembles in areas where there isn't so much of that happening. We need more outreach. A lot of ensembles that are super top notch, they don't have to put as much effort into outreach because they have a consistent audience base. My goal as a performer more so these days is trying to put music that I find important, whether it's mine or someone else's, into the ears of people who would not typically hear it. That's what I've been focused on more recently, in a non commercial sense. 

Ben Hausman

     That's a great question. Well, so, I think a really important thing is to get as many voices out here as possible. That's something I really like about Wildlight. The catalog of folks that you guys bring in is awesome. Such a diverse group of people coming in.I grew up in a military family, and so I moved every 2 to 3 years. One thing I learned about being around a bunch of military people is they're all really good story tellers. They all have such different experiences being in different parts of the world. So, I think it's really important that we give the chance for everyone to get to share their story.

     Diversity, equity, and Inclusion within the music space is a fundamental thing. That has to be a part of our musical space. Fortunately, music is one of those, to not get a little cliche, it's one of those universal languages. You can find it in every pocket of the world and it's a way that you can share your story without having to say a word, which I think is really powerful. There's this Victor Wooten album, and he's got a song called Cupid which is like, it dances the line between really cool and really cringey. The album is awesome. The song is basically like, "why don't we have a bomb that makes people love each other? Oh wait, we do, it's called music." It's a great song.

     I do think there's... I know that my personal perspective has dramatically changed by listening to the music of others. I talk about it a little in my piece Pipeline. I, like many others, was in kind of a weird space in the 2010's. I got into some really dark parts of the internet -- this kind of alt-right pipeline that you hear talked about. What helped pull me out was listening to music by other cultures that I would not have listened to at the time. I think it's unfortunate that it took that, to basically just listen to other people, but also at the same time it was that easy. Just having someone say "these are my lived experiences, this is why it happened that way", that is enough for me to be like "I can't believe I didn't think of that." I think to have a better musical world, you need to be willing to listen to as many different voices as possible, and really listen. To hear them out and see what they're putting out there. 

Hannah Moore

     I would say the biggest thing that comes to mind for me is, well there's two things. The first thing is that I am truly of the mindset that music is political, and that this idea of "music for music's sake" is just utter B.S. Because, if you are making music for music's sake, there is a level of privilege you have in order to be able to do that, and therefore it is still political. This idea that music can be outside of the political is just, in my brain, it's not even a possibility with our current culture and societal environment in American and other parts of the world. I just think that it's really important for us all as musicians to be thinking about how our work will be perceived in the world, what is our work telling the world, and is our work doing things to help elevate society or is it pushing messages that we don't want out in the world? I also, on that note, think that it can be very scary and very intimidating to write works and put them out there that are inherently political or very outrightly political, but I personally look at composers such as Julius Eastman and others from before out time who were very proud of their political works and were willing to put a lot on the line for their art, and I think that, I personally feel like I'm doing a disservice to those composer and the current musical community if I'm not saying what I think needs to be said. That's thought one.

     Thought two is that... depending on where you currently go to music school, your thoughts might be different, but, I think that for those of us who are going on to be music educators, we really need to take a step back and instead of just regurgitating what our professors and school teachers have taught us, we need to really think about what we've been taught, what messages are being given to our students through verbiage that's being used, pieces that are being played, etc. and along with that also think about "was the education I was given what made me successful, or were there other parts outside of my education that I had to learn on my own that made me successful, so can I incorporate that into my teaching because I personally feel like the current music school system needs a lot of work. I don't think that is one professors fault, or one individual's fault, I think the whole system needs a little revamp. I think that us as individuals can really help get that ball rolling by thinking about this stuff and trying to alter our teaching to better fit our students instead of saying "well my teacher did this so that is what I'm going to do." 

Joseph Spearman

     Yeah I think, for one thing, creating accessibility and opportunity for everybody. Of course I'm saying that I'm a cis-white man, and I have a lot of privilege in that regard, but you know it's about making a community actually welcoming to everybody and opportunity for everybody. I'm gonna say this-- I've sent so many messages to PAS about their membership pricing because I want to require my students be members of PAS because I like PAS, and they just changed their pricing guidelines to make it a little bit less expensive for students, but the student pricing stops at 26 and I have a student who is a junior in undergrad, and she's my age. She's 30. Why can't she get student pricing? She is an undergraduate student. Why can't the grad student that is like 37 and going back to school and has a family, why can't they get student pricing? I think that for some reason, we have this barrier - is $50 really worth it to you? The answer is... yeah, because money?

     In some ways I feel like the music community tends to uplift the same people over and over again, and tokenize, and I feel like transparency and dialogue surrounding that, and the difficulties of being a musician, are really important. Accessibility, transparency, and honesty. Social media can be poisonous in this way, but I have to constantly remind myself that what I'm seeing is a filtered version that someone chooses to use to distill everything that's going on in their life to mostly the really really good, and the really really bad. I'm guilty of doing the same things, I don't post a lot. I just wish there wasn't such a heavy emphasis on being on the gram and on the grind and making content for the sake of content. My compositional output isn't very high and part of that is because I write for people that I care about and like things that I find interesting. I don't feel the need to produce 3 pieces a year because I need to do it... and I don't think a lot of people do that necessarily but some do. I'll touch on this too, I don't have a great relationship with recording music, I've never paid for multi cam footage of me making music. Everything that's on my YouTube is like live and one-take, a recital performance for example. Here's a recording of me at 9pm of me playing rhythmic caprice and yeah there's wrong notes but it's a pretty good recording, I stand by it. I wish that people in music would recognize that there's an authenticity to like... we all agree that live performance is amazing and not that there aren't people that go up there and slay all day and don't miss any notes in life performance,  but I see so many things where I think "this too so much time and money" and I have neither of those things, so am I less than? The answer is no, you're just not doing what, you know, Bobby is doing or whoever. Your thing is different, it exists and it doesn't make it less than. 

Brant Blackard

     That's a really tough one. I think that something I would love to see more in the music community would be a less competitive music community, which is difficult because that's a problem that's bigger than us. I think we have a lot of forced competition because it's hard to making a living. Unfortunately that's led to so much angst. I teach a lot of students and a really big recurring problem that I see is the social media pressure or people - and I feel it too, you get on instagram and you're just like "oh wow here's some kid that's like 1,000 times better than me"... it can lead to resentment and this nasty competitive thing and obviously there's the audition circuit which is very competitive, just trying to get academic jobs these days is so difficult, there's like a thousand hyper-qualified people that are all trying to get the same jobs, but I think that we start to eat each other and it becomes kind of a less supportive thing. I really value my musical friends that are not that way, which is like all of them, they're all very supportive, but I would love a community where we could all be a little less worried about our little place in it, not trying to fight so hard. Sometimes there's people saying "you gotta be doing stuff, you gotta be more this or that", and the older I get the more I just get away from that completely. Life is precious. What's tough is I don't have any answers to this too, but yeah if there was less competition in music communities, that would be great. 

Keaton Jones

     The first thing that comes to mind is just everybody communicating with each other more. I think that society, at least here in the US, people are very easily isolated and I think that everyone has, you know, jobs and personal hobbies and their own lives that they live and I very see it commonly isolate them. Even good friends of mine, where I won't talk to them for months just because both of us have so much going on. I think the music community would benefit itself just by reaching out to each other and supporting each other and communicating more amongst themselves and having more groups and communities within the larger community. In the percussion community for example, if we had like a discord server for example. If more people had a discord server and talked in it frequently, and people from across the country could get to know each other a little better. I feel very close to the percussion community but even when I've been at PASIC in the past I feel like I can't just walk up to someone and start talking to them, or I might not know what to say, even though I know that we share the same passion in percussion, but it's just not me to walk up to someone and start talking to them.

     I think with more online communities communicating with each other, it would be more beneficial. It could be as simple as messaging someone on instagram and see what's going on, saying hey I like what you're doing here. Small things like that. 

Grace Shepard

     I have a slightly cynical answer potentially, which is it would really be a nice idea if we had a music community. Sometimes we don't. I mean, that is very much a reflection of where I lie within that network sometimes, or feel that I lie. I also look at social media and see what people post and see how long it's been since we've talked, and as I've said it's a bit cynical and I don't think that's necessarily, that's maybe a symptom of the things that we could do better. A music community - we define it by the structures that we know, music school, ensembles, concerts, types of music that we like, but if you think about it, I spend a lot of time right now teaching small children, and for many it's their first experience and maybe their families first experience of music at all, but for them, you're music community isn't just the other musicians. In fact it's the people that might be the donors, people that might be musicians but likely are not. They're the people in the community. [During my trip to Alaska], one thing I knew I would like about it was their sense of community and, you know it was Fairbanks, Alaska which is not int he middle of nowhere because it's a pretty big city, so coming from the lower 48 feels a little different but what struck me there was how many people knew about our concert and how many people cared about our concert. It was people who had artwork in different parts of the festival, and things like that. Our community should be like that... we should be the music representatives of the community, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't talk to the woodworkers and everyone else. I find that you have these centers of music which are usually around schools and then there's kind of nothing nothing nothing... 

     We're all in our lanes, you can't do what I can do and I can't do what you can do, but I can still be excited about it - me supporting you doesn't mean that it's going to negatively affect me or if I had to choose to do something that isn't music related, it doesn't mean that I care about music less.

     I think it's kind of like important to support everyone, the people who you know you might not like their music, you might not understand their music, but you know that they're trying really hard and you like what you see from them, I think that's a good way to think of community as well.

Paul Millette

     Well, my first thought is that I think there is a culture of perfectionism in many aspects of music performance and music education. I think it discourages people from taking chances sometimes, making mistakes and getting our hands dirty sometimes. I think something that would benefit a lot of our music community is improvising more. Improvising, a big part of what I do as a performer is playing freely improvised music with people and I love it for a number of reasons. One, I think the most important part is that it's just fun. It's a very organic way to be able to collaborate with people in real time, where you can't really be wrong. If you play a sour note, you're not playing a bebop chart, you're not playing along to a click track, you're just exploring freely with other people. I do a lot of improvisation with my students at UTSA and try to hit the point home that improvising is helpful because it makes our ears better, it makes our chamber skills better, and at the end of the day it's just a fun, organic way to express ourselves. 

     I think another thing that would benefit our music community is to emphasize, you know, we play, we compose music because it's fun. Because it's interesting, and it is a service to people. I think of all the really dark times in my life where certain musicians or types of music really helped me get through some difficult times. Again I think just reiterating, do this because it is fun and because it's a way to express ourselves. Often times when we're spending hours and hours in a practice room, which is totally necessary and I'm not backing off of that idea, I think as educators, we need to do a better job of hitting that point home with students. Sometimes I say with students, "it's just music", sometimes I think we take ourselves too seriously as artists, myself included, we need to remind ourselves that this is just supposed to be a fun art form.  

We want to hear from you!

     What has been your experience in the music and arts field, and what is your vision or version of a better community? Let us know in the comments below. 

The above quotes from Wildlight Artists have been taken from much longer podcast episodes. To hear the full conversations, you can find the Set to Fire podcast on all major platforms.