A principal player (I don't think anyone beyond high school band calls them 'first-chair') in a major symphony orchestra in the United States makes $250k-400k a year. These are extremely competitive jobs and they are paid well. Certainly enough to live on if you wanted to.
These people often teach, but not really because they need a "side-gig." If you ask them, they will likely tell you they feel a certain duty to prepare the next generation, they like teaching, and their rehearsal/performance schedule affords them the time.
I said "approximately nobody".
At a first approximation, no musician who does it for money makes a living out of it. Classical, pop, rock, whatever.
Nobody in music, basically, makes real money. Fifty, maybe a hundred violinists in the entire world do earn a pure living. Perhaps another twenty five of each other instrument. A few international soloists in other instruments. But musicians in those jobs are often burning as much money as they are making. (Even Anouskha Shankar has a portfolio career).
This is essentially nobody. Everyone else in classical music is earning just the same way as popular musicians — and society doesn't "support" popular musicians at all! The perception that rock musicians make money touring, for example, is just that: perception. The vast majority of tours either just break even or lose money. Working in music production and staging makes better money than musicians make.
Everyone else, essentially, has another job.
> (I don't think anyone beyond high school band calls them 'first-chair')
Snark noted, though I have no earthly idea why you felt it necessary
There are at least 20 such orchestras in the US alone, not to mention all the orchestras in Europe and Asia. There’s also a very long tail with compensation down to $50k for players.
The US BLS has 35,000 paid musicians listed, with another 10,000 music directors (a lot of church organists are in this category). Median wage of $40/hour, mean of around $52.
So. Not a living then, for most.
Also note that churches, which are a hub for working-class musicians, are exempt from BLS reporting.
Maybe I’m just off the mark but this doesn’t seem like the kind of job you clock in at 9 and stay till 5.
But just because the numbers are small doesn't mean society does not support them. There just isn't a need for a lot of them. It would be like saying society does not support professional athletes. Clearly it does, but only at the highest level. And at that level, it supports the very well.
> Snark noted, though I have no earthly idea why you felt it necessary
I apologize. I come from this world, have close friends in major orchestras and experience on the world's opera stages. This culture is full of shibboleths: referring to works as "songs", clapping in the wrong place, hell, even pronouncing 'Don Giovanni' the same way you pronounce "Don Draper" lets people know you are not from around here.
An observation I made is that the tournament career system is supported by the entire cadre of players and families, of the kids who won't win one of the prize jobs. One reason is we just don't know which 18 year olds will rise to the level needed to win a symphonic audition a decade later. I've always been ambivalent about this, but don't have a good idea for how to reform it.
I majored in math and physics. My parents didn't cringe, at least quite so much. I became, quite honestly, a mediocre physicist at a time when you had to be a research superstar to apply for a tenure track job at a third rate college. The consolation for me was that a mediocre physicist could still earn a decent living doing something in industry, and I'm now at a late stage of a satisfying career.
I also work on the side as a jazz bassist.
Corporate sponsorship pays the bigger amounts: that is a side job with its own commitments. Prize money: by definition not available to most.
Directed pay is a tiny fraction of it (stipend level), even at the highest levels.
Athletes have other jobs.
Again: a bad model for mathematicians. None of them are going to be signing merch deals. Most aren’t winning prizes. I am afraid that mathematicians are just going to have to keep doing all the other jobs they already do.
At least some countries have programs where (candidate) Olympians get professional support and a stipend.
See for example https://www.uksport.gov.uk/our-work/investing-in-sport/how-u..., https://www.dosb.de/en/themen/athletes/services-for-athletes
Coming from Vienna, that can't be right. This city alone breaks that assumption with it's largest 4 orchestras combined.
In Germany every small town has a (state-funded) orchestra. I know someone who plays the violin in such an orchestra, he has a solid salary, big house etc.
He has a side gig, he has a quartet with some friends of his, but it's for fun, not for money.
Yes, they really did. Getting to that level requires training at an intensity that closes off the option of training for an alternative career.
So, even though you try hard to become a pianist, if you don't become famous, you're ok.
A friend of mine did this, he lives in a massive house and just enjoys his music, teaches occasionally.
Today classical music is filled with people who want to pretend to be superior to pop musicians because they keep their repertoire confined to academically acceptable areas.
And then the LARPers that want to make new music make complete and utter arhythmic and atonal trash that demands humans subdue our own aural feelings of beauty.
You'll find classical musicians who complain about this stuff are usually incompetent musicians who really stretch the definition of artist.
Sorry spent almost a decade of my young life in a somewhat competitive music school environment. Lots of the other kids were upset I played what I wanted to and people liked it.
Actual modern composers in the classical tradition (I.e. people alive today who compose music that is similar in feel to older composers) are well compensated because they're often hired to score films, video games, and other capitalist interests that the supposedly 'real' classical musicians would scoff their noses at.
Classical music was somewhat elitist even at the time, coexisting with popular/folk music traditions. The Romantic period definitely saw music and art break away for traditional forms and conservative mores, but it wasn't a free for all.
The people who enjoy classical music today are largely the same people who enjoyed it at the time. Educated and 'enlightened' upper/middle classes, who sought music celebrating their aspirations. Freedom from political oppression and aristocratic control. A world where people could succeed based on talent, hard work, intelligence, and propriety. Where the middle class would have the power to reshape government and social institutions to advance their interests rather than those of the nobility. A personal experience of the religious rather than state ordained. The music pivots to natural, romantic, mystical themes as these people lost faith that industrialization will deliver for them.
Compare modern popular music which deals with universal themes - love, loss, sex, money, partying. You can enjoy pop music and still feel that these themes are not important to you.
People don't fake enjoying classical music to convince you that they're smart and cultured. They just gravitate to music which represents their idea of smart and cultured. The same is true for a lot of art.
As somebody with classical training and a brother in the industry, it pains me to read this misinformed opinion of yours. Top-tier symphonies world round are doing crossover concerts with pop artists, play pop songs, modern and experimental music, and regularly feature works by living composers. In my high school orchestra, circa '98, we played stuff like music from Star Wars and West Side Story -- not just the ancients.
Down the foodchain, it gets even weirder. The favorite gig I played involved interpretive dance featuring waterboarding, gallons of fake blood, a live chicken race, and more.
Where you certainly will find a subset of afficionados of any genre who scoff at anything but their extremely narrow definition of "good music," if you take the time to rub elbows with mature classical musicians you'll find many to most of them quite open minded.
Your experience with young artists, finding them to be idealistic and purist, does not extend to the whole field. I know people who only listen to a single narrow genre or decade of pop music. How are they different?
Edit to add:
> And then the LARPers that want to make new music make complete and utter arhythmic and atonal trash that demands humans subdue our own aural feelings of beauty.
Oh, no. No, no no. I've been to a circuit-bent punk show. I recently went to an ambient music festival. I've heard glitch pop. Angine de Poitrine is blowing up because they use a semitonal guitar (though as a bit of a noise snob, I find their use of semitones milquetoast and rather uninspired).
Here you are, narrowly defining music, and excluding what you dislike. But it's not just "classical" living composers doing this.
The same has been true to some extent in the past for popular music. Up through maybe the 70s and even 80s, a lot of the instrumental parts for the "hits" were recorded by trained jazz musicians.
And they have been for a long time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerto_for_Group_and_Orchest...
Outside church settings, classical music of the Baroque, Classical and early Romantic eras was for the elites, and the masses had their own musics. This only changed gradually over the 19th century.
It's also weird to still be hung up on atonality in the contemporary classical world, when the pop-music world has for decades now had acts like Merzbow that are often farther out into noise.
>I threw all my past music career in the garbage. There was no longer any need for concepts like 'career' and 'skill'. I stopped playing music and went in search of an alternative. — Masami Akita
Pulse Demon is the only Merzbow album with any cultural importance, and that's mostly because the eye-catching cover art let it replace Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music as the default "check out how extreme this is" meme album. Only a tiny minority of music listeners will enjoy listening to it, and there is no establishment pushing it as the future of music.
I don't care for the genre myself, but having been to events and seen pleasurable crowd reactions and met people who traveled some distance for it, I can't deny it has at least some real following. Who cares if it isn't discussed as the future of music? There are punk, metal, and hardcore subgenres that draw the same narrow audiences and don't aim to shake the world, but claiming that disqualifies them as part of the popular-music world would be silly.
What an incredibly cynical take. I’ve done several chamber music collaborations with a violist who also plays pop music gigs on keyboards.
There are arrogant pricks in classical music. And in software engineering and every other discipline. Personality is orthogonal to field of interest.
Anyway you complain that classical musicians look down on pop music while you yourself do the same about modern composers.