For this piece, I chose four different connotations of the word work, which I’ve translated as work, toil, solve, and hone. Not all languages used have exact analogues for these connotations, but in each case I found the best fit by consulting with native speakers.

The mezzo-soprano sings each of these words in 12 different languages. Her voice is also looped and delayed strategically throughout the piece to create counterpart and harmonizations. This ma- terial is juxtaposed against four percussionists playing glockenspiels, xylophones, and non-pitched percussion.

This instrumental setup provided me with an unusual and interesting palette that stretched my materials in new directions. For instance, the mezzo is the lowest pitched instrument in the ensemble and the only sustaining pitched instrument, making any traditional notion of voice + accompaniment impossible. On the other hand, pairing the mezzo with a looping device creates an “ensemble” that contrasts to the four percussionists. As such, we find ourselves with two roughly equal groups of very different sounds. The dialogue between the groups becomes the main focus of the piece as they “work” through the process of developing the material.

Some friends of mine were having an interesting Facebook discussion around Ellen Cushing’s recent article in the East Bay Express, about crowdfunding, philanthropy, and what the young and well-to-do of Silicon Valley mean for the future of the arts. The issue was whether or not crowdfunding was replacing traditional arts philanthropy and what this means for the long-term viability of arts organizations. Kickstarter campaigns are great for early-stage artists, but they couldn’t reasonably sustain something like the San Francisco Symphony, or even smaller chamber organizations like SFCMP or SFSound. So if young people with a lot of money are eschewing the traditional philanthropic route in favor of crowdfunding, what does that mean for arts organizations?

Nothing. Crowdfunding is a new category of fundraising, and it draws a different set of people for reasons unrelated to traditional philanthropy—each addresses a separate “need” for the donor that the other doesn’t. The reduction in philanthropic support for the arts right now is not tied to crowdfunding, but rather to larger shifts in cultural priorities.

Philosophies of Philanthropy

There are many reasons people give money away, but I think there are five main categories, none of them mutually exclusive:

1. Because it’s morally right: if someone is in need and you can help, then you might feel obligated
2. Because you want others to realize their potential: if someone can be incentivized to make better choices, everyone benefits
3. Because it provides you with status: you gain power and influence by strategically giving away money
4. Because it reduces your tax obligations (no explanation necessary)
5. Because you don’t have a better option: debt amnesties, freeing the slaves, and periodic gifts to the less fortunate have been the go-to method of preventing revolutions worldwide since at least 2500 BC

Looking at those motivations helps to explain where traditional American philanthropic models came from. American orchestras were essentially founded on these principles, and they continue to be supported by them. There was a push in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to develop high-calibre professional orchestras that proved America’s cultural independence from Europe—to show America’s artistic potential. Building an orchestra was considered a net good for the community (morally right), and those who did manage to found and sustain large arts organizations gained status among their peers. In addition, all of these developments happened in the same era that invented an income tax not tied to a war (1894), legitimized it through the 16th Amendment (1913), saw the top income tax rate go from 6% in 1913 to 77% in 1918 (yes, seventy-seven), and began cracking down on robber barons with anti-trust laws. That kind of pressure would make any rich man want to give his money away, not that he had much choice.

Today these specific motivations no longer exist, but the core principles still hold. Corporations might donate to large arts organizations because it shows that they are concerned with enriching the community around them. Individuals might donate because they see competition from other art forms and they genuinely like going to the symphony—in essence volunteering to pay higher ticket prices. For all involved there are still the tax breaks of course, and people who donate often think it’s the right thing to do culturally. But all in all we live in a much less progressive and much more pluralistic time, which means the wealthy can find all sorts of defensible reasons to contribute to other causes or not contribute at all.

Infatuation with Entrepreneurship

Crowdfunding works on an entirely separate model. The basic incentives of philanthropy don’t apply because the relationship between donors, their peers, and the recipients is totally different. You may gain some influence in your peer group by donating to a Kickstarter campaign, but nothing like the pull someone with old-money connections would get by donating to the symphony. So although crowdfunding has been rightly touted as a democratic approach to fundraising, democracy implies a certain lack of status: you’re not particularly special when you donate a few bucks toward someone’s demo CD, you’re just a face in the crowd.

In many cases, people don’t even approach crowdfunding in a philanthropic spirit, something Cushing dwells on. Instead, they consider it a form of venture capitalism, although this too is incorrect because the VC culture of Silicon Valley is based on exclusivity, vast sums of money, and the potential for astronomical returns. If you’re investing $20 in a crowdfunding campaign you probably have some interest in seeing it succeed, but you won’t spend weeks refining a business or production plan. You won’t do extensive market research to support your theories. You won’t make phone calls and introductions to help sell your investment to other people. You won’t consult experts in the field or recommend people for a board of directors. With smaller investments of capital come smaller investments of effort: the fact that you chose to support the cause via crowdfunding instead of direct donation or cosigning a loan or helping them set up a 501(c)3 in their name means you don’t really care all that much about the success of the venture. It’s something that would be nice to have, but nothing you’d be willing to lose any sleep over. That doesn’t sound much like the stories of VCs and angel investors I’ve heard.

Crowdfunding then is neither a philanthropic process nor a democratization of venture capitalism. It’s essentially a money-based “game” modeled on venture capitalism and designed to push certain cultural buttons. As one of Cushing’s sources comments, we’re infatuated with entrepreneurship nowadays; that entrepreneurship is a good thing is probably the only ideological statement accepted by both the modern right and left. So when a cooperative, technology-enabled platform (liberal) meets a self-sufficient, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps work ethic (conservative), everyone signs up enthusiastically. Because giving away money makes you feel like a good person, and because entrepreneurs can apparently do no wrong, everyone feels great. Plus it’s fun: you get a sense of participating in the entrepreneurial process without having to go through the hypertension-inducing process of actually founding a startup yourself.

Supporting Long-term Visions

Cushing worries that the conflation between crowdfunding and philanthropy will lead to a permanent drop in donations to the arts and the inability for cultural organizations to budget over the long term. She frets that the well-to-do young have little long-term vision for the arts and that if they stay rooted in crowdfunding models, we will lose a lot of culture. Obviously that would be catastrophic, but I don’t think it’s a likely scenario.

While crowdfunding can sort of feel like philanthropy on the surface, as I’ve said it doesn’t actually provide the same benefits to the donor. At some point, even narcissistic rich kids grow up and find themselves caring more about the issues at stake than the free t-shirts they get by donating. That will lead them to discover true philanthropy, as they donate time and money to the concerns that are genuinely important to them. Similarly, as young donors age, their priorities will change, and a certain percentage of them will want the status and influence that comes from old-fashioned, endowment-building philanthropy. Others will be moved by personal experience to donate to causes that help people achieve their full potential, while many more will hire good accountants that will help them part with their money as strategically as possible. Of course, none of this means existing arts institutions will survive per se, but philanthropy won’t go away.

That 20-somethings earning money for the first time in their lives don’t have much of a long-term vision for art and culture shouldn’t surprise us—they don’t have much of a long-term vision for anything, and a six-figure salary doesn’t automatically change that. Especially during a time that celebrates entrepreneurialism and the gamification of everything, it makes sense that the young would flock to a pastime as fun as crowdfunding.

Besides, long-term visions are overrated. I can’t count how many times I’ve read a celebrated artist saying something like, “I didn’t think about it much, I just sort of fell into it.” Today’s long-term vision becomes tomorrow’s stubborn narrow-mindedness (cf. Robert Moses; we’re still paying for the damage caused by his long-term vision). So maybe we should just chill out and let kids be kids.

To my mind, the only real question is what crowdfunding itself actually contributes. I lean toward seeing it as a net good, because money circulating creates value whereas stagnant money doesn’t. And even if that money is circulating among artists supporting each others’ projects, at least it’s circulating among artists instead of flowing from artists to some corporate entity trying to maximize profits. True, the vast majority of crowdfunded projects are less than world-changing, but at least some good ideas will get a break they wouldn’t have otherwise. Beyond that, lots of people are learning the value of effective mass communication, of having professional failures, of reaching out to one’s network.

Those are all good things. Crowdfunding is certainly improving society by capitalizing on a previously untapped source of financial efficiency. But it’s not philanthropy and it doesn’t fulfill the deep-seated social functions that the old-school philanthropic models do. So unless donors eventually find that they no longer need the unique benefits of philanthropy (unlikely), traditional models will continue to thrive alongside the newer crowdfunding system.

Ta-Nehisi Coates had an interesting article recently in the Atlantic about being asked, as an emerging journalist, to write for free. He got his leg up in the industry that way, and he makes the argument that there’s no ethical problem with asking people to write without paying them (as in, for the exposure). Obviously, there are strong feelings on both sides of this issue, and I found myself pondering the question anew in relationship to composing, though really it holds true for any artistic endeavor.

The more I think about it, it seems you can make an ethical argument on either side of the debate depending on if you see yourself primarily as an entrepreneur or a professional. That’s because the arts are neither businesses nor professions in the true sense of either word, and neither model fits that well—whatever path you choose, it’s going to be a compromise. In my own case, I always try to get paid and I usually succeed, but if it’s a project I really care about, I don’t let a failed grant application stop me.

Professional vs. Entrepreneur

For a professional, working solely for the exposure means taking a loss: income that you might have earned otherwise is being replaced by free work. The non-artistic parallel would be someone like a lawyer or a dentist. You might offer your professional services for free occasionally as an act of charity, but you wouldn’t do it to build your client base: you get new clients through your reputation for good work, you pay for advertising, or both. But even when you advertise, you don’t do it by doing work for free, you list your services somewhere that you hope will attract the attention of people who might be interested in them.

Part of being a professional is that your services are both rarified and generic: there are lots of people doing exactly what you do, but that’s okay because those services are hard to perform and there is a large demand for them. There’s also usually a strong barrier to entry in the form of professional certification, so when people see DDS behind your name, they assume they will receive a certain degree of dental competency (usually): dentists don’t have to do a free filling for every patient to prove they know how to drill.

For an entrepreneur it’s a different story, and the issue of working for free becomes unimportant. Time devoted to free work is an investment in your reputation, your professional network, your skills, your business plan. Entrepreneurs concern themselves with building a critical mass of interest that will lead to huge demand for their work some day. But until they get to that point, they’re perfectly happy to work for free or even at a substantial loss; after all, that’s why the entire culture of venture capital and angel investors developed around Silicon Valley. As an entrepreneur, you might advertise in addition to working for free, but basically all of your activities are designed around building a name for yourself. And in fact, working for free is usually better than advertising, because people want to see you can deliver the goods before they give you their money.

That is because entrepreneurs are working in largely undefined markets, providing services that are specialized and designed to meet a potential demand. There is no certification to show that the product or service will meet the buyer’s need, and in fact, the buyer may not even be aware of the need in the first place. (The Nest thermostat is a good example.) The only way to get people to commit their money is the “try before you buy” approach. Once you succeed in building a critical mass, you can ramp up your production and realize economies of scale that lead to massive profits.

Choosing an Approach for the Arts

Artists can follow either of these two models, but neither works that well. You can’t sue another composer out of business because s/he didn’t get the right academic degree, and you can’t automate your creative output so that you’re cranking out 100,000 hit songs a day, so the expected goal for both models doesn’t apply to artists. Sure, there are a few professional composers who command enough demand that they can simply wait for the commissions to come in and not do anything else. There are also a few entrepreneurs who start ensembles or concert series or solo acts and manage to build a paying career around that. However, most artists following either model end up failing, because the arts is a winner-takes-all market: the successes are exceptions that prove just how bad of a fit the models are to begin with.

That said, being an artist is intrinsically interesting to a lot of people so they keep on trying to do things for free or on a shoestring, despite the sky-high failure rate. That’s part of the intrinsic nature of art-making, and it’s the reason we continue to have an endless supply of starving artists no matter how much subsidy goes into the sector. For the same reason, you shouldn’t let someone guilt you into not working for free if you want to. Your decision to create doesn’t have any impact on their ability to earn a living making their art, because this is not a supply-and-demand industry and there is no corresponding downward wage pressure.

It’s also worth noting that whatever your model or your career, when you engage in work outside of your discipline, it’s almost always unpaid. Lawyers aren’t usually paid to write journal articles or serve on the boards of professional associations. Entrepreneurs aren’t usually paid to appear on TV or guest author blog posts. Similarly, while the types of writers Ta-Nehisi Coates discusses may feel morally outraged to write for free, I’ve never had any expectation that someone would pay me to write this blog—I do it for my enjoyment and because people seem to be reading it. Yet according to the professional model, I would have to conclude that my blogging is undermining the work of paid journalists and that I should stop doing it.

In the end, I think the issue of getting paid or not to do artistic work is irrelevant. At some level, you need to earn a living, but the income doesn’t need to be connected to your art, and even if it is, it won’t make your art any better and it won’t necessarily make it any worse either. Why? Because being a professional or an entrepreneur has never been closely tied to the act of art-making. Art comes from some pre-economic facet of human evolution and serves needs that are not monetizable. Some people get lucky and fall into successful professional or entrepreneurial careers in the arts, but most have a day job to supplement their art-making, whether teaching their art form at a university (e.g. professor of composition), giving piano lessons, or working in a non-artistic role.

What we can learn from the whole culture of blogging and writing for free is that what you get paid is not a reflection of the value of your work. There are lots of great blogs I read that are written for free; I don’t respect the authors less because they don’t have salaried journalists’ positions. And sure, many types of work require capital investments—not everything can be done for free and I would never want that to be the case, because we would lose a valuable body of work. But that doesn’t mean the work done for free isn’t also valuable. As Coates says, if you have something to say that you think is valuable, you should say it.

This is the second in my installment of mini-composition lessons based on non-classical music, this time on the topic of how to write for voice. Today, I’m going to take a look at “Police Story” by the Dirty Projectors, which I think is a fantastic example of how to use timbre and word-music placement to great effect. “Police Story” is practically an instructional guide on how to fully and effectively use voice in composition. It’s also great in a lot of other ways, but we’ll focus on the vocal elements.

To start, a general outline of the form: “Police Story” is roughly structured into four distinct musical ideas: introduction, alternation of two types of material (A & B), and a coda on new material. It contrasts very tranquil instrumental accompaniment with very aggressive singing and lyrics. The introduction and coda are both instrumental, while the rest of the piece uses voice.

Text is a vital part of the music

“Police Story” is an angry rant against police brutality in which the character describes various injustices. The text is sparse, each word chosen for impact both musically and dramatically. After a relatively tranquil instrumental introduction, vocalist/guitarist David Longstreth bursts into an aggressive ascending line on the text, “This fucking city is run by pigs!” We are thrown forcefully into the world of the song, one that is defined by poignant contrasts between calm instrumental music and harshness in the text and singing.

That first line highlights just how powerful text can be in music. Many composers treat text as secondary: something you need to come up with because there happens to be a singer in the ensemble. Once in awhile that is a useful construction, but most of the time putting the text in the background is really just a missed opportunity. A powerful text treated masterfully creates a heightened experience that instrumental music alone rarely achieves. It is for this reason that pop music almost always has voice. No, not all pop lyrics are inspired and I readily admit that many do little more than provide an excuse for the singer to sing, but the obligatory inclusion of voice in pop music speaks to its potential to transform the listening experience. More composers should look at text as the generative impetus for their music in the way Longstreth does.

Accented and unaccented words

Going back to that first line, the way it is set is also striking. Of the seven words, two are extremely vulgar nouns and one is a verb. The rest are transitional words. Longstreth spits out the word fucking in a harsh tone in the low register. Pigs is treated in the same way, except that it is a high note and Longstreth lingers on it a bit. Emphasizing these words makes sense because they are loaded and will make people perk up. I’ve often said that it’s very hard to swear effectively when singing, but if you need an example of how to do it, listen to “Police Story.”

Swearing is hard because the majority of singing is expressive and nuanced. When you sing “fuck,” it usually comes off sounding cheap—like you’re trying to make up for something that’s missing in the music. To use the word successfully, you need to have an extremely balanced musical structure and a vocal interpretation to match. (Hip-hop is the exception, because spoken word is naturally more percussive and the harshness of profanity is appropriate.)

Timbre is what makes a melody

Another important consideration of the vocal part is the way Longstreth uses growls and other harsh timbres to expressive effect, starting with the first word of the second line of text (bolded):

This fucking city is run by pigs!
They take away the rights from all the kids.

His strained-sounding they hurts to listen to, but it lands perfectly at the high-point of the two-stanza phrase, which has a symmetrical up/down shape.

Consider how unremarkable the word they would be in most musical contexts. It’s not an important word and it’s entirely generic. However, in this case it appears at the climax of an extremely forceful vocal exclamation, made even more powerful by the gentle guitar strumming beneath it. Anything less than a painfully strained vocal timbre would not do justice to the spirit of the song.

When working with text, composers need to pay attention to the secondary level of meaning that occurs in the level of dissonance between music and text. Completely inexperienced composers pay no attention to word–music placement when they write, leading to unclear text and phrasing. Those with somewhat more experience take the accented words and map them out mathematically to the musical phrasing, creating clear but somewhat predictable lines. However, great composers map most but not all of the accented words to musical phrasing: they sometimes force unaccented words to the forefront like Longstreth’s growled they. It’s a push and pull between words and music that provides a touch of unpredictability and nuance, making the song more interesting.

Melisma & text–music relationships

Throughout the song, Longstreth uses progressively more baroque melismas to ornament his vocal declamation. In the A sections, these are limited to slides and 2- or 3-note trills. In the B sections, however, he extends the melisma into an expressive gesture, hanging onto the last word of the line, “I tell them to go get fucked, they put me away.” That word away becomes an important musical transition, a forceful declamation over calm guitar chords that eventually leads to more subdued material.

Melisma is a concept that only exists in vocal writing: having more than one note per syllable of text. It is often used to turn the voice into a de facto wind instrument, but I don’t think that’s the best use of the technique, because it is devoid of intentionality. The voice is not a wind instrument: we know instinctively that it emanates from a set of vocal chords and that people use vocal sounds primarily to communicate linguistically. Sure, sometimes a vocal cry can transcend language, but it should never be used to makes something less expressive than language. Consider Freddie Mercury’s powerful vocal slide in “Under Pressure,” which always sends shivers up my spine: that’s what a non-linguistic melisma should do.

In “Police Story,” Longstreth demonstrates two useful ways to employ melisma: (1) to make the music better serve the text, as in the ornaments he places on run and pigs; and (2) to make the text better serve the music, as he does on the transitional away.

Melisma is powerful because it brings into contrast the relationship between words and text, emphasizing one over the other. When you have one note = one syllable musical phrases, listeners simply hear singing. When you employ melisma strategically, listeners hear directionality to and from important words. Short text-serving melismas function as accents that heighten the storytelling aspect of a song. Longer music-serving melismas function as formal markers or transitions into different types of musical material.

* * *

There are a lot of other interesting aspects to this song, such as the contrast between calm and aggressive materials, the stylized punctuation marks that delineate the form, and the coda that has little to do musically with the rest of the piece. So great text–music writing is not the only important consideration in sung music, but it is a pretty important piece of the pie. If you swapped out Longstreth’s vocal part for a clarinet melody, it might be an interesting piece, but nothing nearly as powerful as “Police Story” is. Composers could do worse than to imitate Longstreth’s approach in this song.

I saw a meme on Facebook a while ago, the one with the fake greeting card and custom text: “‘Yay! It’s the weekend,’ said no composer, ever.” Funny yes, but completely wrong. Bravado aside, if you consistently work “weekends” (meaning, you don’t take planned days off on a weekly basis), your art will suffer.

Composers think they’re being tough by never taking structured breaks and working at any time of day or night. Sometimes they use the excuse that composition doesn’t pay very well to justify this type of constant working attitude. More often, they do it as a part of the mystique of being an artist: you are so driven and inspired that you have no desire to take weekends off, you’d rather be constantly immersed in the creative process.

Unfortunately, every profession makes the same kinds of bullshit excuses, from CEOs to stockpickers. Work productivity is an extremely well-studied field (due to its obvious applications), and we know this driven/inspired/hardcore approach doesn’t work.

Since finishing grad school I’ve gradually gotten myself into the habit of taking weekends off, and in the process I’ve become a better artist. Slowly I’ve gotten to the point where I don’t feel guilty about days off, and I rarely make an exception to my schedule (it’s okay to work weekends sometimes, just not as a matter of habit). I actually get more musical work done now than I did in grad school, and I enjoy the rest of my life a lot more.

The Productivity Paradox

Economists have spilt a lot of ink on the paradox that productivity increases over the last few decades haven’t led to a lot more free time for most North Americans. In real terms, the IT revolution has doubled the productivity of the average worker in the United States, but real wages have gone stagnant or even decreased. On top of that, people are working longer hours, or they’re working from home when they’re technically “not working.” The causes and effects are complex and beyond the scope of this piece, but let’s just take this as a starting point.

What we know from productivity studies is that there is a tradeoff between hours worked, quality of work, and quantity of work completed. Some menial jobs can push the quantity limit because quality is not a factor, but there is an upper limit to that too. That upper limit is where we get the 40-hour workweek, designed by Henry Ford (no joke) to maximize productivity on his assembly lines. Prior to his studies, much longer workweeks were the norm, but he went to great length to make the 40-hour week standard. Why did he do this? He was no softie—Henry Ford was a cutthroat capitalist who could give a fuck about workers’ rights. He did it because it made him more money.

So we know that for non-creative work, like putting doors on a Model T, 40 hours per week gives the best tradeoff between output and quality that can be sustained over the long run. Later studies have suggested that for creative work, 35 hours is more or less the max (the quality/quantity tradeoff at work). You can go beyond this and cram on the short term, but you should avoid doing so regularly, because every hour crammed needs to be made up with a non-working hour later. Furthermore, the time you spend cramming is at decreased productivity—you may in fact end up in negative productivity if the sloppy work you do causes more work down the road because you didn’t do it right in the first place.

Many composers (and people in general) get into a cram work mentality. They think that the only way to be dedicated to their work is to push beyond optimal productivity, sort of like exercise. They work to exhaustion to meet deadlines, maybe getting some kind of rush in the process (or not), and then they crash. But unlike the post-workout crash, what should be recovery time is usually spent working too. As with exercise, however, if you don’t take time to rest you’ll stop making progress—you’re just draining your energy reserves and reducing your total output.

That right there is why everyone is “busy” nowadays. If they had simply stopped working before the point of exhaustion, they wouldn’t need as much downtime and they would meet all their deadlines sooner, with more energy to spare, and with less stress.

How Not to Work Weekends

As a composer, it takes willpower to keep yourself at (but not beyond) peak productivity, because your time is entirely self-directed. Further complicating things, we all believe we are that one exception to the rule, just like 95% of drivers think they are better than the average driver. Yes, everyone does have a slightly different capacity, but being unrealistic is just more likely to get you into a car accident (or burnt out and unhappy with your work). Very few people can work consistent 12-hour days with no measurable impact on productivity or health, and the only way to know if you’re one of those is to dial down your work schedule and see what happens to your productivity. Then you have to accept what you find and work around that, because the only way to increase your capacity for productive hours is the solution discovered by rock stars and high-powered lawyers.

You have to become confident (not pay lip service to) the idea that if you work less hours, you will get more done, and you have to be realistic about your limits. Not lazy—you still have to work—but objective about what you’re getting done. Then you start to reap the benefits, such as:

Enhanced mental clarity: I find it much easier to get into “flow”, and I have very little lag time. Because you have a set amount of time to do something in, you actually do it, instead of subconsciously procrastinating. You know you can’t make up the time on the weekend, so every moment becomes precious. As Chuck Close says, “Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work.” Taking weekends off makes it easier to “just get to work”.

Time becomes more tangible: When you have X hours in the day and you know there are two days off coming up in which you can’t compose, your short-term goals become more realistic. Instead of just diving into a 40-minute orchestral score and freaking out until you get to the end, you measure your progress in smaller, week-sized steps. This makes the larger challenges seem more manageable, because you develop a sense for eyeballing work: “I can do this much this week,” or “I’m going to try to get to here by Friday.” Without a weekend, those milestones become meaningless and you find yourself much more stressed, which in turn hurts productivity.

More time: Paradoxically, taking weekends off gives you more time for everything. You’re getting more done, so once 5:00pm rolls around (or whenever you decide your workday is done), you can relax: cook dinner, go to a concert, grab a drink with friends, play with your kids, go for a workout, etc. Suddenly, you have time for all the things you used to put off because you had too much composing to do.

Happier: You’ve got to avoid the stereotyped “fitter, happier, more productive” definition of productivity that has been forced upon us by short-sighted corporate managers (and encapsulated by Radiohead). Productive does not mean more work done (quantity) at the expense of everything else (health, happiness, quality, longevity). Productive means getting the most out of your working hours, keeping in mind that you’re going to continue at this pace indefinitely without hurting your health. When you internalize this, there’s a lot more satisfaction to living, because you’re not setting yourself up for failure every day. Instead, you’re achieving what you thought you would and there’s momentum in your work life. Sure, there are always good days and bad, but truly finding personal productivity helps you appreciate your accomplishments; it puts the silver lining onto the clouds of life.

NB: You may find it ironic that this post was published on a Saturday morning. Rest assured, I write my blog articles during the week and schedule them to autopublish at the times people are most likely to be trolling Facebook.

David Pay of Vancouver’s Music on Main asked me to write a composer’s profile of Ana Sokolovic. The article, Ana Sokolovic: Made in Canada (Sort of) is now available. In it, I talk about the national character of Canadian music and how Sokolovic’s approach to composition finds a very Canadian way of dealing with her Serbian musical roots.

Elissa Milne had an interesting article on her blog the other day about audience building, essentially advancing the claim that you build an audience for new music in the same way you build an audience for anything, be it an opera company or a rock band. This is true, but it doesn’t help most musicians—especially new music musicians. It’s very rare to find a person who both creates appealing new music at a high level and has a knack for marketing and self-promotion. Beating the drum of “learn how to sell your music” is technically correct, but it’s also an unrealistic expectation for the vast majority of new music practitioners. So what’s a more practical solution?

Shortcut: Winning the Lottery

Milne’s solution is essentially the same one espoused by most entrepreneurs, startups, and grassroots organizations: you build an audience by getting the word out, and then producing something at a high level that people will care about. They won’t care automatically, and they won’t all care for the same reason, but generally it starts with people who have an interest in you already (read family and friends), expanding out to their circles of influence, and so forth. Social media is a cheap way to get a jump start on this type of approach, but do-it-yourself audience building was just as viable before the Internet, so it’s by no means obligatory to tweet and “like” your way to musical success.

Of course, there is another way to develop a successful, no-strings-attached musical career with a large following: you get “discovered”. This is the American Idol model of artistic success, and it happens in new music the same way it does in pop music. Every sizable local scene seems to pick a few “stars” per generation, and then larger national scenes will pick from these stars to represent the country, and so on up to international level. The odds of that happening to you are close to the odds of winning the lottery, but people do hit the jackpot.

Step 1: Establish your priorities

Let’s assume you didn’t win the lottery. By now you probably know that a career in new music doesn’t pay that well, so you’ve got two major obstacles to overcome: how to pay the rent, and how to keep on making music. (There are larger issues behind both of these goals, but let’s leave it at that for now.) Secondary to that is how much you care about the audience. Some people just care about getting a perfected, refined project off the ground, and as long as a few people show up, they’re happy. Others are not satisfied unless they see a growing audience for their work, and they may be more willing to compromise some degree of artistic perfection at the outset for the greater good of generating buzz around their work.

So the first question to ask is whether the audience actually matters to you, and where you fall between those extremes. You’re not hurting anyone or destroying the fabric of society by playing to empty rooms, so if you don’t want to bother with the question of audiences, make peace with that reality and go about your musical life.

On the other hand, if you make music primarily so that others will hear it, you need to decide who you want to hear it and how you’ll get them to bother coming to your performances. Maybe you work as a professor, so you attract people by doing concerts in academia. Maybe you’re a piano teacher, so you invite students and their families. Or maybe you work an office job, shamelessly promote yourself online, spam all your friends, and get some of them to come to your concert. All of these work.

The key is finding that sweet spot where the amount of effort vs. size of the audience is in balance for you: the point where if you worked harder on promotion, you’d lose the motivation to make music, but you do have some people coming to your concerts because of the promotion you are doing. Once you find that point, it’s perfectly fine to stay at that level if you’re satisfied with it, there’s no need to keep on pushing.

Step 2: Collaborate with others

Unfortunately, you may come to a point where you crave greater recognition as an artist but you know that if you work harder on self-promotion, you risk burning yourself out. At this stage, logging onto Facebook fills you with procrastination-inducing dread, and you find yourself with a permanent background feeling of guilt.

The solution to this problem is to team up with someone else. Collaboration is built into our DNA at a very basic level; it’s part of the reason we evolved into the successful species that we are. Look at the history of anything and you’ll see that when you work with others you get more done. Most musicians work alone because we’ve been conditioned that way through countless hours spent alone with our instruments, so this collaborative attitude is a paradigm shift for many of us. But it remains true that the best way to build an audience is to do it with someone else.

Naturally, people have different proclivities and talents. You might obsessively read and post to Twitter all day long between other tasks without having to put much effort into it. That’s great, that’s a valuable talent you can bring to the table. Lots of other musicians don’t feel that way, so you can do the social media for both of you and they can do something in return that helps you.

Find a network of collaborators in this way: a grant writer, a gig hustler, a score preparer, a graphic designer—whatever you happen to need. You’ll get a lot more done because (1) you’re not killing your productivity by stressing about not being good enough at X, (2) you’ll be doing things you’re actually good at much of the time, and (3) you won’t be wasting your energy.

Step 3: Get hired help

At first, your collaborations will probably be informal, but at some point you may find that it’s worth hiring someone. Eventually your collaborations will lead to you having too many projects going on to manage as a group, and you will all get stressed, despite the productivity gains you saw in Step 2. This will probably also be at about the time where you’ve almost stopped losing money doing music. Your audience will have grown to a few people that you don’t know and have never met, and it’s not as hard anymore to get people into a room.

This is the point where it make sense to hire someone. Start by hiring for tasks that don’t require a lot of specialized expertise, like booking rehearsals. An admin assistant will give you sanity and let you take your audience building to the next level. You’ll start making more money again and your audiences will grow even larger. Eventually you might want to look into an agent or a publisher, but also keep in mind that by the time you really need one, they will usually come knocking on your door. You’ll get better terms if you wait them out than if you go chasing after them, so it’s almost always best to hire down than to hire up. (NB: There are a few notable exceptions; for instance, most classical singers sign with an agent somewhere in Step 1 or 2.)

Once you reach this level, you don’t need my advice anymore (I’d be happy to listen to any pointers you have for me though…). But from what I have seen and experienced, this is the tried and true method of building an audience, independent of technology, your marketing acumen, or your interests as an artist. Successful artists are collaborative artists, there’s no other way around it. Those who end up developing a following do so by building a network of colleagues around them that they can exchange skills with. Nobody can do everything by themselves.

Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, Jacket, © 2012 Tracy Wong