During the course of my daily life, I have two areas of prime concern and responsibility. The first is as a musician and the other is as caregiver to my wife, bedridden from the ravages of MS. In both instances, there is a fine line, where action is concerned, between reaction and response. The sensibilities of my instrument, the bass, apply to everything else I am involved with.
Bass players face the challenge of noting myriad rhythmic and harmonic potentials, noting patterns, and mediating everything toward a central, root-based point, with the hopeful outcome of making cohesive sense of it all. This is the skill set that I bring to bear in mediating countless other areas of involvement and issue. For me, music is my politics. The conditions and controls bearing down on the creative class not only have reduced its present status — the average, full-time professional musician earns $8600.00 per year, roughly half of the poverty threshold, too poor to be considered poor — but also the future of the whole of the musical imperative.
When music education, as the core example, is reduced or eliminated, a multiplier effect is created. The empirical evidence is staggering. For those students who enter into any music education course, test scores markedly improve in as little as two weeks. Science and math majors who are musicians outperform their peers who are not. 66% of music majors who apply to medical school are accepted, compared to biochemists, at number 2, whose acceptance rate is 42%. Given the slash-and-burn tactics imposed on music education and the territorial grabs in the industry, what remains is no means to learn in a common setting and no incentive to do so on one’’s own, with such dismal job and career oriented prospects. The multiplier effect, just on the clusters around the musician, playing a regular gig in a bar or restaurant, can be seen in its impact on hosts and hostesses, wait staff, bartenders, cooks, busboys, dishwashers, suppliers, delivery, warehousing, and service providers, without consideration of those more directly involved on the musical side of the equation.
That’s a lot of jobs, livelihoods, and families affected. What’s more, these clusters directly connect to other clusters, from neighborhoods to institutions, from artists and craftsmen to technology. More over, the loss of any true cultural identity, short of waving the flag and yearning for times past, with less and less “exceptionalism” evident, is the bigger victim. Ultimately, however, it is the economy that suffers most. In time past, when there have been economic downturns, musicians and those reliant upon them have been able to make a decent wage, allowing them the luxury of not having to get a “real” job, in order to make ends meet and allowing others to enter into the ranks of the employed or to augment income. My contention is that there was a solid middle class, unencumbered by having to live through the struggles of insecurity, unsure of the ability to live beyond a paycheck or two. A modest investment in the common musician could turn at least some of that around.
The more the individual steeps himself in music, the greater its impact on the brain. In cases where there is damage, from disease or injury, to any one center in the brain, the quicker the ability to recoup and compensate in the correlating area on the opposite side. The membrane separating right and left hemispheres is almost nonexistent in the musical brain. The inference is that the musician is concurrently capable of both analysis and intuition, to be objective and subjective at the same time. What is further implied is that there is a holistic foundation for problem solving, involving the capability to recognize nuance, in lieu of binary, black-and-white thinking, which offers limited solutions, at best, maybe solves some particular problem, but usually only creates other problems.
When musicians suffer, so does the rest of society. We are the ones who provide more holistic sustainable solutions, yet we are the ones who are kicked to the curb and told to accept the fate of the “struggling artist”. Given that the “love of the art” is the only incentive to persevere, with countless offers of exposure, in lieu of pay, and fewer people really understanding the incredible efforts and costs involved in the development process, the future, immediate and long-term, looks bleak.
We don’t need fewer musicians. We need more.