Newsflash: Music doesn't pay well

"The economy can be a cruel mistress, particularly, it seems, to performing artists," an unfortunate academic with a doctorate in musical arts lamented today in the Chronicle of Higher Education website's Career Forum. "I'm tired of fighting with academe and performing at poorly run auditions, but I'm also tired of running around in circles."

Really? I wondered. I never knew!

The real world, of course, can indeed be a cruel teacher, but our intrepid writer perseveres. First taking a job—gasp!—as a temp and then—double gasp!—as, of all things—Wait for it! Wait for it!—a public school music teacher.

I had always thought of music education at the K-12 level as dull and unchallenging, work fit for music majors who couldn't cut it in performance, theory, or musicology. However, faced with a tanking economy and three empty years on the academic-job circuit, I'm learning to swallow my pride and re-evaluate being a schoolteacher. It's still not my idea of a great job, but again, it pays.

The horror. But then again, if you're too good for the idiots in "academe"—the elitist sobriquet for what most people call "college"—and all those orchestras that can't put together an audition process that meets your exacting standards, then teaching music to young people (which, incidentally, is what you should have been interested in doing as an academic) would seem like the Ninth Circle of Dante's Inferno.

(In the interest of full disclosure: My grandmother is a former music teacher, some of my best friends are music teachers, and I once considered becoming a music teacher myself, so I find the author's sense of disgust and frustration to be more than a little galling.)

One of the greatest problems with academics lies in an exaggerated sense of their own importance, the philosopher king-like sense of entitlement that takes the sorts of career travails most people have to deal with—being under-employed, working with people who aren't as smart as you, doing stupid office work, and so on—and blows them into galactic crises.

Difficulty in finding meaningful work is par for the course for gifted people with interests that don't match the norm. The challenge is finding ways to make the journey to that destination meaningful as well, particularly because you may never get there.