A singer recently wrote to me with a common dilemma: deep in student loan debt, he wondered how to support himself. If possible, he wanted to do so using the skills and degree he’d spent so much money acquiring. He’d been lucky enough to be hired for a year-long show right out of his undergraduate education, but with that gig over, he needed options for making a living and paying off his loans.
We started by looking at long-term, living-wage performance gigs—nice work if you can get it! This month, we explore more flexible short-term or part-time gigs in music-related fields, the kind that many professional musicians put together to support themselves full-time while continuing to pursue their performing careers. We’ll also look at some potentially lucrative non-music gigs.
Professional, paid choruses—such as Conspirare, the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, Seraphic Fire, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, or the Chicago Symphony Chorus—often offer opportunities to travel and/or perform on some of the world’s most distinguished stages, be a part of Grammy-winning recordings, work with many of the world’s greatest artists and conductors, and enjoy unique and challenging musical experiences. Professional choristers must possess soloist quality voices and be excellent musicians—in some cases, pay scale may be tied to your grade on a music theory exam! Many choruses also provide cover and solo opportunities.
You could, as my friend soprano Stefanie Moore does, perform with a number of different choruses. Stefanie is a member of Conspirare (Austin, Tex.), Seraphic Fire (Miami, Fla.), the Simon Carrington Chamber Singers (Kansas City, Mo.), and New York Concert Artists/New York Philharmonic—and she will soon be performing with the early music vocal ensemble Chantry (Washington, D.C.). She also does solo work such as concerts, CDs, and recitals. (See www.StefanieMoore.net for more information.)
Smaller ensembles such as Seraphic Fire contract on a show-by-show basis, providing flexibility. Last fall, I worked with an opera singer who takes such choral gigs between his solo engagements. Rehearsal periods tend to be short and intense, with singers flying in from their home bases for rehearsals and performances, just as you would for an opera. (Seraphic Fire pays for their singers’ flights, lodging, and rental cars, as well as a per diem.) A single contract isn’t enough to support yourself and it pays less than solo symphony gigs—$1,000 to $2,200 per gig as a ballpark figure—but string enough of them together and you’ll find yourself making a living wage. Find a list of professional choirs at www.choralnet.org/list/choir/558.
Seraphic Fire is also associated with a summer program sponsored by the Professional Choral Institute, which trains singers and conductors interested in professional choral careers. See
www.professionalchoralinstitute.org for more information.
Start your own event entertainment business. As mentioned in Part I of this article (“The Day Job Dilemma,” May 2013), freelancing offers the best flexibility. If you’re a self-starter, you may be able to form your own events entertainment business and sing at weddings, corporate events, funerals, private parties, art gallery openings, and more. Hire a few friends and offer specialties like Christmas caroling (better yet, do it in rented costumes). You need relatively little overhead to get started—a basic website (which you can create for free on sites like www.Wix.com), inexpensive business cards and fliers, and a demo CD with a few clips. Your major financial investment will probably be in marketing your business, but you can always start with word of mouth and free or inexpensive advertising such as social media outlets.
As you grow your clientele, you can get better materials and invest in booths at bridal shows, fliers and demos for events coordinators, and print or online ads. Start off with people you know—contacts you may have through church jobs or local businesses. But be prepared to also do tasks like filing for a DBA, bookkeeping, taxes, research, mailings, cold callings, and booking. You’ll have flexibility for other types of gigs, but you’ll also have to stay on top of your business, and it’s a lot of work.
Start a private voice studio (if you can teach piano, music theory, and other subjects, so much the better). Teaching at the university level almost always requires advanced degrees, and the positions are not easy to get. But a private voice studio provides more flexibility—and also résumé experience, which you may be able to use if you decide later to earn advanced degrees and go for a university position.
To develop your private studio, approach local high schools and large local choruses or church choirs. Advertise in concert programs. It will take time to build a studio that is financially rewarding enough to support you and allow you to pay off loans, and you will still have to do bookkeeping, scheduling, and other small business tasks, but you will be able to set your own teaching hours and may even be able to leave town for periods of time to take performing gigs, as well as perform locally. As your studio and your solo performance careers grow, develop a network of colleagues who can take your students temporarily while you’re out of town, or mentor a less experienced student to be your teaching assistant.
Tutor. If your music theory or history skills are good, you may be able to tutor university and even high school students. Contact local universities, community music schools, and high school music programs to offer your services.
Be a church music director. If you have piano or organ and conducting skills, you might be able to land a job as a church music director. If you’re insecure about your abilities, start with a small, undemanding congregation and build your way up to one of the bigger churches in your community. Some of these positions pay very well and offer a lot of artistic fulfillment.
You could be in a position to start your own concert series, give other singers an opportunity to perform, and even do so yourself. You might even be able to take leaves of absence from time to time for gigs, especially if you were able to train a good assistant director. Summers are also usually fairly light duty times for church musicians. The drawbacks, of course, are that you must be there every Sunday morning and usually at least one night a week for rehearsal as well as all church holidays like Christmas and Easter.
Work at a conservatory, university, or community music school in administration. You might not be using your performing skills directly, but you will be gaining skills and knowledge which might come in handy for your performing career. And you may be poised for great opportunities to perform with campus groups. Perhaps you’ll even have access to campus facilities for your own performances. You may find, working in a music field, that your employers would be more sensitive to your need for the occasional leave of absence to attend a Young Artist Program or take an out-of-town gig.
Intern or work full time in a manager’s office. Many agencies are staffed with former or aspiring singers. You’ll learn a lot about how the business works, and maybe even climb the corporate ladder. Smaller agencies may not be able to pay much, and you may find yourself suffering from ego-damaging envy when you see other singers getting gigs you’d like to have. But when you’re ready to re-enter the singing side of the business, you’ll have made valuable contacts and be armed with a great deal of insider information.
Work in administration for an arts organization or a classical radio station. Marketing, finance, development, house manager, even box office—again, you can learn a lot about promoting yourself and make many valuable contacts. And your employers might tend to be more sympathetic to your needs as a performer than the average “civilian” would. Check here for a listing of arts organization job openings in New York City: www.nyfa.org/opportunities.asp?type=Job&id=94&fid=6&sid=54.
Try stage management, if you have a cool head in a storm and are good at managing people. (You’ll need additional training as well.) Again, you’ll learn a lot about the theater and the business. If you work in opera, you’ll be around singers who are having careers and can pick their brains. You’ll also make connections at companies and get to see their inner workings. Opera stage management is often a freelance job; many stage managers travel from company to company just like singers do. Others have regular positions. If you’re stage managing successfully on a freelance basis, you might be able to combine that work with singing gigs.
Other Ideas
Depending on the skills you already possess or could easily acquire, some of these music-related jobs might work for you:
• Orchestra librarian/archivist for a symphony
• Typeset or transcribe music (you’ll need a computer program like Finale or Sibelius)
• Arranger/copyist
• Freelance music critic/blogger (selling articles to magazines, newspapers, and websites)
• Grant writing
• Sound engineer/assistant
Even with all these ideas, you may not be able to find a position that allows you to work exclusively in a music-related field. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and take a job that pays the bills and lets you sock some away.
A friend of mine realized he was not going to pay off student loans through singing, and so he looked around to see what he could train for, quickly and relatively cheaply, to support himself. He ended up taking a three-week-long course in truck driving and drove big rigs for several years to pay off his loans, see the country, and decide where he wanted to settle to continue his pursuit of a singing career. (He’s in good company—Met tenor Carl Tanner famously did the same thing, while moonlighting as a bounty hunter!)
I know other singers who work from home, selling prepaid legal plans, insurance, or real estate. I know of one who works as a computer consultant. None of these people sings full time, but all do sing.
Of course, the “danger” with any of these careers is that you might find yourself becoming so wrapped up in them that you no longer want, or are able, to pursue an opera career. That may not be a bad thing, in the long run. You may find the compensation, both financial and personal, outweighs your dreams of a spotlight at the Met. And that’s OK.
But if you really want to be a professional performer, it’s important to realize that while you’re working to pay off your loans and support yourself, you’re not taking time out from your dream. Life is not on hold. This is your life, and if you want to pursue singing, you must find a way to do it regardless of what else you are doing with your life.
Build your life so that you can sing. It may not look like what you thought it would as a starry-eyed undergrad—but guess what? Even if you’d gone straight into full-time performing, it wouldn’t have matched up to your dreams. The truth is much harder, uglier, and scrappier than our dreams let on and, ultimately, only you can decide if it’s worthwhile.
Nevertheless, you cannot wait for everything to be perfectly aligned. That will never happen. All we have is the now. If you want to be a singer, sing. Otherwise, you’ll wake up 50 years from now and realize that you’ve spent your entire life waiting in the wings.
