A message to students everywhere:
You don’t have to be a professional. That’s not why I’m teaching you! I don’t secretly hope that all my students become musicians any more than my math teacher colleagues are hoping that all of the students become engineers or my Spanish teachers hope you become translators.
Like them, I hope that you use the things I teach you to have a better life.
Moreover, there is a pervasive sense that it’s a binary choice: either I become a professional or I never do it again. That’s not true for learning Spanish – there are 1,000 ways to use it – and it’s not true for learning math – having solid mathematical reasoning helps you in so many ways, even if you’re a musician or a translator or an electrician or a philosopher. And it’s definitely not true of music-making, which can happen in countless ways, at any age.
I want my students to have a life that include music. That’s it. I feel like music is an essential part of our human existence, and that we all should have some in our lives. The one massive downside of recorded music is that we have collectively decided that a person is either a professional creator of music or is a passive consumer of music; in the past, there was a wide gradient in between.
Don’t major in music if you don’t want that life; but don’t stop making music. Sing in a choir, play in a band, join a cover band that gigs a couple times a month, learn to play an instrument a little bit, sing around the campfire, or do whatever other music-making makes you happy.
Just don’t think you can’t make music if you’re not a professional.