August 19, 2006
Does a day job make music better?
Listening to a piece this morning on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition about a band called Oneida, I’m struck by a segment in which the players point out that they all have other day jobs — teacher, social worker, IT specialist — and that they aren’t planning to give them up.
One of them says it’s important for him to have other things besides the music to do. He doesn’t say this, but I gathered that it helped keep the music fresh for him when he got back to it.
This reminds me first off of Charles Ives, an insurance man (pictured above), and Alexander Borodin, a chemist. Both men worked on music during their spare time, and preferred it that way.
Many classical musicians today have other jobs in music, many of them as teachers, but I wonder how many have non-music day jobs. I’d bet that more of them today have unrelated jobs, and I’m thinking that number will grow.
It seems to me, basically, that habits of mind have changed for people today, and multitasking is not only the normal approach, but the preferred one. It’s not difficult for people today to enter quickly into the semi-depths of another field of interest, and it may be that in the very near future you won’t be considered a well-rounded person unless you’re pursuing several fields of thought more or less simultaneously.
What effect does that have on the music itself? Does it make it fresher, more urgent? Do you do better, concentrated work because you know your time is limited not only by necessity but preference?
I can speak only for myself in saying that my day job makes it hard to get back to the music, but that I do indeed pursue it more aggressively when I do have the time. In some way, too, I think it nourishes the music.
If I am thinking only of the music, all the time, it becomes more important for my economic functioning that I have a sure thing: the gig at the piano bar, the ringtones I’ve promised to write, the two weddings for which I’ll brush up on my organ-playing skills. When I was in music school, I found it confining to have to think about music all the time, which is why I made sure to have as many non-music electives as I could.
If I have reduced the dominance of music in my life, and earn my daily keep in fields far from home, I can approach the music with a certain newness, or even a sense of relief. The question is an open one, however, as to whether I write better music that way. It seems to me that the music is more direct when I have less time, but that I might sacrifice reaching of some small pinnacle of artistic success without total absorption in the work.
There is a certain kind of art that is only possible if you’re ruminating on its possibilities day in and day out, and perhaps as a society we’ll have less of that in the future than we do now because it won’t be fashionable to spend all that time on creative work. It just may be that people are happier and overall more productive if they are focused on several fields of endeavor rather than just the one.
Maybe what we give up is art like Proust, or van Gogh, or even Schubert. The question then is whether society is happier when more of its members are healthier, or whether by being less extreme it becomes less illuminating.
Anyway, here’s Vladimir Horowitz, playing an unaccountably neglected piece by Chopin, the Introduction and Rondo, Op. 16, in E-flat. The synchrony of sound and movement are off slightly, but not when he speaks at the very beginning. Might be better to listen than to watch too closely. But I love this piece:
