4th
On careers(?)
Greetings from STEIM in blustery Amsterdam. Been breathing solder fumes all day - time to get out the thinking cap.
There’s a legend among American improvisers; a legend shared by Americans engaged in other areas of new music, media arts, contemporary dance, and any creative activity considered avant garde. It’s the legend of the European arts career: Through all the disrespected lobbed at arts in general in America, for every gig that pays a few dollars at the door or nothing at all, for every adventurous record label revealed to be a money-losing living room labor of love, American underground artists take comfort in the belief that at least their counterparts overseas are able to make a living doing what they love, what they were born to do. And some even dream of taking up the expatriate life to realize their dream of making non-mainstream creative work full-time without reliance on unrelated employment or the mixed blessing of pursuing a teaching career.
It’s been programmed into a lot of American artists, myself included, that if your work is not of a mainstream variety - or, as with classically trained performers, even if it is but you are not one of the tiny percentage who can make a full-time playing career happen - your only recourse for an art-oriented life is through academia. In fact, I and others have been so immersed in this kind of thinking that we equate a life in art with a life in academia.
How do American, and especially New England, improvisers create careers that at the very least permit themselves a minimum level of participation in their improvisation scene? What are the experiences of American improvisers who have managed to make a full-time career out of music making? What about New England musicians who have moved, or are moving, towards academic careers to realize their dreams as fully as possible within American economic realities? (People like me)
Seriously, drop me some comments, I’d love to hear what you think.
