Young singers are always seeking advice for building a career. A new book provides excellent information for launching a professional career in music.
Ian Howell
Ian Howell’s career in music has always been multi-dimensional, from performance to teaching to research. Those familiar with his work as an author—through his widely read doctoral thesis and journal articles—will welcome the recent release of his first book, Advice for Young Musicians (Embodied Music Lab Press, 2023).
Each chapter contains brief maxims that offer concise lessons—some only a sentence or two, none longer than a paragraph. In the interview below, Howell discusses the motivation behind his writing and how his younger self may have benefited from this book.
The description of Advice for Young Musicians refers to the content as realistic and compassionate, but also motivating and actionable. Therefore, the book is not intended solely to inspire contemplation but to get young musicians moving forward. Why was that such an important part of your approach?
It was really important to me that this book balance broad ideas that welcome contemplation with practical realities of trying to build a career in music. I have been in and out of academia and the performing world so many times at this point, as a student, a professor, a performer, and as a teacher. One of the things I took seriously as an academic teacher, because I received this as a student in at least some of my own education, was to provide actionable career advice.
It is far too easy to center platitudes about how important art music is, how much we have to love it, and how the quality of it is its own reward. That’s great. Don’t get me wrong. But at the same time, I have always thought that the single most important thing necessary to advance in the music industry is to not leave the music industry.
Or, put another way, I do not see automatic virtue in working a temp job in an office or being a waiter five nights a week while waiting for your big break. That promotes the idea that the only successful career is the moonshot career. For the singer with a complete education, this means the ability to learn your own music, understand rhetorical and interpretive patterns, and most likely to be able to operate in more than one genre.
There are jobs one can take within the music industry the day after graduating with a bachelor’s, master’s, or doctorate so long as you train for those jobs rather than “aim to be famous.” There are aspects of how we train singers especially that rob them of those sorts of goals while simultaneously implying that students are on a reasonable and likely profitable path.
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Again, if you want to be a musician, go make music. Wherever I have taught, and when I have shared basic advice for navigating the early parts of a performance career, I have found the students relieved. So much of the messaging they receive is artistic and emotional that when they are presented with the opportunity to make a list and start checking stuff off, they feel like they are (and they actually are) making progress.
The landscape for launching professional careers in music is different now than it was just a generation ago, and in many ways is even more challenging. How much of the advice you provide in the book would you say is specific to the current generation of young musicians versus advice that is of a more timeless applicability?
It’s great that you bring this up, as this is likely the central tension in every academic music program. We tend to hire faculty, at least at the conservatory level, for their exceptional career achievements. Not always in the past, but even those still active and working frequently are better examples of survivorship bias than achievable careers. Ultimately, I think that the effects of the demographic/enrollment cliff are going to heighten the narrative that if you study at school X, you will get career Y, because that is what the faculty did.
As you point out, the problem is that most of those faculty members did not come of age in our current economic and political environment. So, a lot of the advice that I give about the practicality of building a career is actually to warn people about accepting advice from mentors, which maybe sounds confrontational on its face, but I don’t mean it in a confrontational manner.
In strictly realistic terms, no one whose career was solidified prior to the housing crash of 2007 through 2008 understands what it is like to try to build a career post-housing market crash. So, you may have a very successful singer whose advice practically boils down to “just walk down the street in Berlin, and someone will pull you into a Deutsche Gramophone recording session.” Or just work a food service job until you manage to win competition X, Y, or Z. It’s great if it works out, but it does not work out for far more people than it does. It is just not how the world works.
So the advice that I give is very process oriented. For example—with technology—I came of age just as YouTube was created. I was able to build an amazing career (that took me all over the world) that was both financially and artistically satisfying in part by leveraging this tool for promotion. The worst advice that I could give to somebody in 2024 would be to just start a YouTube channel. Because Sony is also there now. I was there before Sony, so I was able to exploit its novelty.
So, good advice would be to use whatever technology is currently emerging to differentiate yourself in a crowded market. That kind of advice is timeless, and it points out the pattern rather than getting hung up on the specifics, which will certainly change year to year.
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You have said that this is the book you wished you had when you were starting out in your career. Do you think access to this advice would have changed your path, your perspective, or both?
There are things I would’ve taken seriously a lot earlier. Networking well is one of them. I feel like my professional networks kind of restarted every five years or so, and that I was never great at keeping long-term relationships. The truth of it is that this is a people business, and you always have to be setting up the next relationship even while enjoying the fruits of your current ones. Everyone always says some version of, “make your own opportunities,” which is true. But if you don’t have a group of people you can actually work with outside of large, legacy institutions, and if you cannot learn your own music without the help of a teacher or coach, you will have a hard time creating anything on your own.
I think reading this book when I was younger would have encouraged me to see my successes along the way as the successes they were, rather than devaluing what I was capable of because of a fantasy I was entertaining regarding what a career could be.
Review
The opening line of “Auch kleine Dinge,” part of Hugo Wolf’s Italienisches Liederbuch, offers simple yet profound advice. Paul Heyse’s text encourages us to find joy and delight in small things. Pearls, for instance, fetch a great price, despite being diminutive in size.
Author Ian Howell takes these words to heart, offering his own pearls of wisdom in a new book titled Advice for Young Musicians. Laid out like a book of poems, he presents bite-sized bits of guidance gleaned from his experiences in the music industry and in academia. Though it can be read fairly quickly cover to cover, it is not so easily digestible. As voice professor Karen Brunssen states in the foreword, Howell is not just providing tips. Rather, “He is challenging young musicians and their mentors to think deeply about their craft, the realities of their profession, self-discovery, and the very ethos of music-making.”
The chapters cover a broad range of topics. A few focus on career practicalities and key understandings, such as “How Careers Unfold” and “Business, Networking, and Relationships.” Others focus on building specific expertise or proficiencies, as in “How Music, Practice, and Performance Work” and “Necessary Skills, Behaviors, and Outlooks.” Still others encourage inner exploration, as in “Becoming Who You Are.”
Howell acknowledges the complicated nature of advice in his chapter titled “Mentors and Teachers.” He admits that “people give advice based on their lived experience,” and this book is no exception. Understanding this, he asks those who pick up his book to “dip in and out, dog-ear pages that speak to you, or argue with what I share here.”
Readers should not expect the book to be a treasure map leading to guaranteed success. Instead, as Brunssen states, “It’s an invitation to journey into the heart of what it truly means to grow in a life in music.” As such, in Advice for Young Musicians, Howell provides invaluable, thought-provoking reflections, worthy of consideration by both the young and not-so-young.
