8.~~~~~~~~~revised 12-08

A career is a kind of machine, of which we set ourselves up to be operators. It is intended to manipulate something we think of as nature, not our material but our social environment and our relation to it. We think it is ours to control and serve us, to mold to our interests, only to find that we have built ourselves into it and cannot disobey or escape it. The career is not at fault, it is we ourselves who invite it to take over, believe in it, and can’t imagine we would let it come to dominate. James P. Carse’s description of the relation of humans to the machine could well be applied to the career:

“We make use of machines to increase our power, and therefore our control, over natural phenomena….To operate a machine one must operate like a machine. Using a machine to do what we cannot do, we find we must do what the machine does. Machines do not, of course, make us into machines when we operate them; we make ourselves into machinery in order to operate them. Machinery does not steal our spontaneity from us; we set it aside ourselves, we deny our originality. There is no [individual] style in operating a machine. The more efficient the machine, the more it either limits or absorbs our uniqueness into its operation….Because we make use of machinery in the belief we can increase the range of our freedom, and instead only decrease it, we use machines against ourselves….A machine is not a way of doing something; it stands in the way of doing something.” (Finite and Infinite Games, p. 122-3)

In the past a career was not so much a machine or collection of techniques for self-advancement as it was a socially and economically accepted role in which one chose to place oneself for a lifetime, a step above simply taking whatever job was available. It still had some of the earlier sense of a “calling”, derived from the early Protestant conception of each individual’s sanctified vocation in the world, involving a certain asceticism. To have a career in the twentieth century at least involved some degree of personal interest and discipline, with higher status as a further motivating factor. Career distinguished the office worker from the industrial worker; a secretary was “a career girl” even if she made less than some factory workers and made no moves to advance herself. In the higher ranks of career, one could be considered very highly as an artist, an engineer, or a doctor, and far advanced in one’s profession but not in terms of financial reward. For some the integrity of following professional standards, doing things the proven right way rather than what one was ordered to do, stood above career advancement. This was especially true of professions that were considered implicitly noble and self-sacrificing. Such people saw themselves as giving of themselves for the good of others, like doctors serving a community, scientists and scholars contributing to the store of human knowledge, or even, despite a hostility to bourgeois society, avant-garde artists opening perceptions beyond present limitations. In fact this covered even the obscure artists and others whose career might yield little immediate visible success but who worked on the assumption that they were in touch with the future, the visionary thinkers and scientists before their time.

After the crushing of sixties altruism and utopianism, cynicism about such motivations in the Reagan era and the development of the New Economy of the nineties convinced people that the only valid goals are individual, immediate reward and not social contribution, or at least that the individual need not sacrifice in order to fulfill public need. The individualized career, aimed strictly at advancement over one's peers, has become the means to that end, to which idealistic motivation is an obstruction of old-fashioned vintage. This is the kind of career that is not aimed at status gain over manual labor, but at the singular aim of success. This is not the success of the physicist at the moment of discovery but at the podium of the Nobel Prize, nor of the artist in the studio but at his or her opening in a highly visible gallery and a feature in a major publication.

The importance of idealistic motivation is still alive among artists, however, particularly those who want to feel they are contributing something new and of value to the world, and not just attractive enough to sell. It is the function of this motivation that has changed. In the early twentieth century the avant-garde offered their art to an ungrateful world, or at least could imagine that world ungrateful and themselves oppositional, holding out for higher values. They may have been politically on the left but were contemptuous of popular judgment, instead turning to their peers for judgment. Contemporary artists who honor that avant-garde, however, prefer the appearance of autonomy and opposition while never doubting that their efforts will attract buyers. If disillusioned they will try something else, no point doing something that has been rejected. Unlike their predecessors, they expect and are expected to be appreciated immediately if they are doing anything valuable, and widely enough recognized to draw a significant viewing and buying public. There is no cultural lag allowed if one needs to get gallery shows or performances here and now in competition with one’s peers. A large part of creativity today is finding what arouses a response, a practical problem to be solved, leading to the convergence of the high art and advertising worlds. What does not elicit response is considered elitist, in just the sense that the business enthusiasts and “values” defenders have named elitism as the enemy of democracy. With the explosion of the art market beginning in the fifties and then finally with the nineties’ marketplace populism (the notion that market demand determines ultimate values) the gap between artist consumer and producer has practically vanished. The two flatter each other with their good taste, each serving the other on opposite sides of the bargaining table.

The myth at large, and held often sincerely by artists themselves, is that they live for their art, and so their idealism runs the show. However, their very status as artists is inseparable from the career—the shows, reviews, the contacts, the rising price tags. The same word—strategy—is used interchangeably for artwork and career; whatever works for one will work for the other. Without a strategy you will never get past the entry-level stage, the wide-open door that everywhere proclaims the unity of democracy and market. But when everyone gets to call him or herself an artist then who is the significant*** artist? Only the career can tell: significant equals successful in the complicated hierarchy of demand. So here is the contradiction of idealistic myth and commercial reality, such as one would find rare among doctors or scientists today, whom everyone, including themselves, expects to be mercenary.

Musicians of the past had no such complications. They thought of themselves not as artists but more humbly as skilled workers, providing a service to entertain, selling their skill, bargaining for wages through a union, and deferring to the entrepreneur who was their boss. Musicians were distinguished from composers; even if musicians improvised it was over chord changes that were laid down in writing, of which the composer was owner and recipient of royalties. For some exceptional players, especially singers, there came to be agents who intervened on their behalf (the legendary figure that approaches them from the bar with a promise of a “real” career). Many musicians do still play for weddings and in clubs as cover bands, but generally today they have been upgraded from workers to entrepreneurs of their own ventures without middleman agents. Most musicians need to be recognized in public media and to compete with one another for revenue, rather than to be picked from the crowd on the basis of relative competence. We—I include myself--either manage their own careers or are relatively enough in demand to be able to get gigs with a minimum of this work. This role assimilates us to contemporary artists, whether we call ourselves that or not, and as such we are pressured to acquire the image and self-image of composers—creating rather than reading or interpreting a score--even if we are free improvisers. (In fact, the role required of the contemporary musician is in conflict with the approach of free improvisation, dooming it time and again to the margins, as I have pointed out in numerous writings. The only improvisers who make any kind of living have developed a repeatable style or attractive career trajectory—legend or innovator, etc.) We are expected to have a style, identity within a genre, resume, associates and contacts, perhaps even a philosophy presented in interviews, just like the successful visual artist.

The fact that art has become the entertainment choice for a portion of the urban audience means that we are still judged by our ability to bring in revenue (paying audiences, cd sales) yet must do so in the image of idealistic artists—independent, following our individual muse, etc. It would defeat our project to acknowledge that we are in fact entertainers, dependent on market demand. The artist image obscures the reality that we are a good step down from the working musicians of the past, who did, after all, earn a living playing music, unlike the bulk of musicians today. We have been paid on the cheap, with the status of artists and entrepreneurs, “boss of my own”, liberated from the working class with a self-managed career. The skilled musicians in dance bands in the thirties, on the other hand, were self-acknowledged entertainers. They were largely neglected and unknown, disinterested in pursuing higher status, and are often upgraded today to mirror how musicians present themselves, as artists, just as “outsider artists” are now discovered and brought into the fold. We see them as deserving more, perhaps waiting to have their fortunes reversed. How could anyone be truly happy who is talented and yet invisible? That is the modern blind spot, and there is no vision available today to see beyond this notion, sadly little coming from self-respecting artist/musicians themselves.

Above I’ve called the contemporary career a kind of machine, which tends to take over its operator. For the artist-entertainer, the nature on which the machinery operates efficiently or not is called the art world or the music world. This is the spontaneous nature that we feel needs to be controlled, to serve us, rather than us just going along with it and letting it be, ignoring publicity and image. This world is the audience, the readers, the viewers, the critics, the promoters, the favored venues, the trendsetters who will either help us or harm us, and will have the control over us that we dream of having over them. In fact we can manipulate it, but only if we are willing to be manipulated by it. We might decry others’ manipulations in order all the more to deny that we are doing the same thing with the tools we are more skilled in using.

One musician/entrepreneur told me that the actual playing of music was half of what we were about, the other half was publicity. I have come to the conclusion that to maintain this balance is impossible; one will be master and one will be slave. Not only do audience, readership, viewers of art, not want art to be self-defining, but the shocking thing is, neither do we the artists. That is, we do not behave as if we want art to be what we do, we want it to be what that doing represents to others. Without some reason to advocate the actual playing of music for its own sake, the entrepreneurial side will always triumph. Conversely, if making art is even just 51% it will be impossible not to see entrepreneurial activity as anything but interference, again and again.

To paraphrase Carse, a career is not a way of doing something, it stands in the way of doing something. For thirty years I have tried to see it otherwise, ever since I first realistically imagined myself as a musician. But now I see that it was only my own desire for acceptance, my desire to represent myself to others in some favorable way, that led me into that illusion.
In all I am writing here I am not judging my fellow musicians, on the contrary I am speaking on our behalf, of our deepest dreams and most troubling frustrations and sources of confusion. Many musicians respond to my writings such as this, not insulted but pleased, relieved almost, to see our experience laid out in print, how career and marketplace requirements make it so difficult to play the music we wish to play for others. How many would be improvising, for instance, if they did not have to disguise and apologize for it, sacrificing livelihood for it? People hold in highest esteem the after hours jam sessions of the thirties when musicians played only for themselves. Yet few critics show any interest in what musicians do for themselves today, and too many musicians are confused by standards of financial success and failure into thinking that they have reached their musical heights when their career starts to take off. My belief is that we have not begun to see—or hear--what is possible for us to do.

I am a musician directing my writing primarily to other musicians, and encouraging non-musicians to look over our shoulder at what we might say to each other, if freed of the hype and illusions we generally have to hawk to get a few people to show up at a performance…or a foundation to fund us. We need to see ourselves not as competitors for ever scarcer resources but as people who share in common a situation brought on us and not of our choosing. We cannot be the working class musicians of the past, paid to read a score or do whatever the bosses think will turn out an audience, nor are we fulfilled as entrepreneurs, masters of image creation, dependent on others for our self-esteem. I would say that we deserve to be paid well, but that only brings the response from the music world, “then give us what we want.” So I say instead, we deserve first of all our own self-respect for the years of our lives we give to our love and passion, what we would do without social support or reward, the invisible that we must always distort into visibility in order to justify ourselves.

For our sake I mourn the loss, the absence at least, of what our musical experience could be. I mean ours here in the broadest sense of what is shared: there is no true listener who is not also playing; there is no player who is not at the very same time listening--the two are only inches apart. Music for all of us lies buried under the layers of judgment about what should be played and who should be heard, which indicates just as much what should be unheard and who deserves to be unheard. For the musician, if our desire to be one of those heard drives our music, then our musical experience will follow the fate of that desire and not the actual playing. Only an honest and deep indifference, an indignant refusal to be driven by that desire, no matter how strong it is, can free our music from this.  ¶ 10:19 AM