(Photo from a CBC blog post on unlikely classical music venues, featuring members of the Blythwood Winds.)

Once upon a variety of times in Western history, making a living as a musician was a reasonably straight forward affair. There were employment opportunities at opera houses, concert halls, churches, and schools. There were patrons of the arts who would commission new creations, and publishers who would canonize them. The musical training classical musicians receive today are based on very similar assumptions. That is, there are employment opportunities out there, as long as you are a well trained musician of the western classical tradition.

Today, musicians seem to lament the disappearance of those good old days, and struggle to navigate the latest social media technology that allows them to freely and economically reach out to an audience. They try every free service out there that promises to help them get hired. Some are lucky to have access to that kind of know-how in their network, or just have an intuitive understand of how it works. Others grapple with the proper balance of their time to their musical craft, and improving their bottom line.

Regardless of the era we find ourselves in, the principle of supply and demand will always play a role in how people decide to make a living. Seeing as we no longer live in a world where people go to operas as a pass time, classical trained musicians are hung out to dry with a rude awakening after they graduate; After many years of hedging a bet that they will ‘make it’, they noticed the world is changing quickly, and classical music has a heck of a lot more things to compete with as a pass time, with fewer and fewer secured employment opportunities when performing organizations prefer to stay nimble and flexible. Not that their teachers are addressing these real-life issues—that will be their own problem to solve once they get out there as professionals.

The concerns are familiar. The responses to these challenges? Not so much.