Entrepreneurs in Music — and Don’t Forget about Mozart!

We are witnessing a dramatic shift away from the trend of specialization that was dominant for a large part of the latter half of the 20th century, not just in the field of music but across the board professionally. Imagine that just 15 years ago, if you had a physical ailment you’d call your family GP. Who has a GP anymore? If your toe hurts, you go to the toe doctor! And you’ll likely wait 3 weeks to get an appointment. In my opinion, this is a casualty of our hyper-developed, hyper-compartmentalized commercial culture. This mentality has taken its toll on the education of musicians, too. We are forced to decide very early on what “type” of musician we’re going to be, and how we’re going to specialize.
The artist-entrepreneur persona, and in particular the young generation of artists who are just emerging on the scene today, is challenging that supposed ethic of specialization (that you need to do one thing, and focus only on that one thing) to the core. We’re in the midst of a era in which performers are composers again (as they were for centuries of great music history before us); performers are improvisers; composers are improvisers; performers and composers are presenters and producers of their own work as well as that of their colleagues’ work; etc. Many of us start in one field and end up in another; many of us straddle multiple fields at once, blending them to create new fields.
In all of these cases, entrepreneurship is, for me, defined by deciding what you uniquely have to offer with your unique combination of skills and, equally importantly, realizing *where you’re needed.* We spend a lot of time thinking about *what* we do, how we can be better, how we can achieve more, but we generally don’t spend a lot of time in this culture thinking about where we’re needed, where what we uniquely do will have the most impact. Even without launching your own business or deciding to be an entrepreneur overnight, I think that shifting your way of thinking just slightly to include the question “Where am I needed?” can really help us all define for ourselves where what we do will mean the most to us and to the people around us.
Entrepreneurship is also about responding – with *action* – to the potential for change in a given environment. In my case, this meant responding to the changing landscape of ideas, the changing nature of the music itself that’s being written, the changing performance practices of that music, and to the changing needs of our 21st century audiences. ICE was a response to those needs, and I still look at it as a response, one that is developing and changing every day. Five years from now, the needs will be different, and so our response will need to be different.
Webster Dictionary’s definition of the word “contemporary” is “coming into being during the same period in time.” I love this description of what we do. It’s definitely appropriate for a new-music band, whose identity really does change every time our medium changes (which is just about every day!) but I think it’s also relevant for musicians and entrepreneurs of all stripes. All of this is a process. We are all continually coming into being, no matter what stage of our career we are in, and no matter where we think we’re headed. There’s great joy in this, and great potential for discovery.