During an online gathering to celebrate the graduation for the UMass Lowell Music Department Class of 2020, the topic of career paths and the challenges that current and upcoming graduates face in starting their careers in the midst and aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic came up. One of my colleagues mentioned the long path, including several careers that her life had taken. I followed up by mentioning that I also had a very unique career path. I thought I’d take a moment here and talk a little about that for the students who couldn’t attend. This is long, so you can hotlink to the summary.
You are wrapping up your studies and starting your careers in an unusual time. There is so much going on that it is hard to imagine what kind of world might exist on the other side of this, much less, how you might navigate the first steps on a career path. I can imagine for a few of you, there is a sense that there is no viable path to your dream career, and that can be devastating – it feels like mourning because you are actually mourning the imagined death of your future career. I know. I’ve been there. Obviously not exactly like this, but the emotional effect is the same. I’ve been at points in my life where I lost faith that there was a career path forward, after having invested everything into it.
I also made it through. While things didn’t work out exactly like what I thought they would, and it was not a straight and simple path, I built the career I wanted. What I can tell you is that this doesn’t have to be the end of anything. At worst, it might be a diversion or a slight delay. At best, it might actually be the exact time that you need to properly prepare yourself for what comes next. Let me share some things about my career path to explain what I mean.
Undergraduate Studies
I initially went to school for commercial music composition. I wanted to score films, or so I thought at the time. By the end of my first year of undergraduate studies, I realized that I wasn’t connecting with the world of commercial music as it was taught in the program. I was most interested in the stuff being taught in the 20th Century Music classes and in the traditional Composition program – the Neo-Viennese composers, American experimentalists, sound mass composers, etc. I changed to a traditional composition major and embraced the avant-garde in my work. I wrote a lot of post-tonal music, game pieces, process-as-form pieces, and a lot of really weird rock and popular music that was heavily influenced by all the rest.
During the senior year of my undergraduate degree, I started to have a lot of the same panic and concern that many students have about careers. I was approaching the end of a degree in music composition, which basically made me qualified for nothing. I had spent my undergraduate mastering an array of skills required to write contemporary “experimental” (quotes since most of my music wasn’t really an experiment, but rather propositional music in the David Rosenboom sense) music, which it turns out usually doesn’t bring in a lot of money.
Unlike my performance major friends, I hadn’t spent 6-8 hours a day playing my instrument – I spent that time composing. When it came to the kind of chops required to get gigs in a city with a healthy roster of well-established players, I just wasn’t at a competitive level to get the good stable gigs. There wasn’t a lot of classical guitar work, and while I enjoy a lot of jazz, I’m just not well versed enough in the traditions to be a competent player. I was a proficient performer in my own performance traditions – rock (especially heavier styles), contemporary chamber music, improvisation, etc. etc., and I was gigging in various formats, but nothing that was going to bring in stable money and pay bills. My original music was not viably commercial, so most of my pieces ended up costing money rather than making money. I had started an online record label, Mystery Cabal in 1996, which was basically a break even proposition if I didn’t count my time. If I did, I was losing money. I was waiting tables, and taking side work as a recording engineer – generally barely holding my head above water.
Like many of you, I also had a sizable amount of student loan debt that was inching closer to coming due. Also like many of you, I didn’t come from affluence. My family was encouraging of everything I wanted to do, but there wasn’t any money to help out. My family wasn’t able to contribute to my college or living expenses, so I had to pay for everything through working, scholarships and grants, and student loans. I also knew that my family wouldn’t be able to contribute to supporting me after graduation, so moving to an expensive city to do a long period of unpaid internships or unpaid work wasn’t going to be an option. While I was ok with the idea of living the life of a starving artist, I was also confronting that fact that creating music that often doesn’t recoup gets expensive. I needed a stable way to support my weird.
Supporting My Weird
In December of my senior year, I saw an ad for an apprenticeship in body piercing. This was in the ’90s, and the modern piercing trend was still fairly new in a lot of the country. I had some piercings, and I realized that working in tattoo shops is a better way to feel connected to the music scene than waiting table in a pizza joint. At least it felt way more alternative and rock and roll. I started my apprenticeship, and by the summer, I was working full time as a piercer. It was a great job for a 22 year old musician. I hung out in a shop where we were either really busy and making great money, or we were slow and it was like hanging out with friends.
I eventually was doing well enough with it that I was able to buy into the shop where I worked. I moved to Venice, CA and worked at a shop on the boardwalk for part of a year. While working LA, I started learning to tattoo. When I came back to Denver, I started a second shop with a partner in another part of Denver metro. I eventually opened a tanning salon in the same shopping center.
For a while, it was good. I was making good money, and the lifestyle certainly fit for me. I was still spending my days in the shop, and I was out in bars most nights promoting the shop, my band, and generally being a part of the scene. But, I was also working seven days a week, and I wasn’t writing much music. Little by little, my long term plans involved less music, and more about how the shop and other businesses could grow. Slowly, the fun gave way to stress – stress to grow the business, stress from dealing with business partners with increasingly different long term goals, stress from realizing that the goal of owning a shop to free me up to create music full time wasn’t playing out at all. I was increasingly depressed. I felt trapped. I had invested everything, every penny. I had worked every day for years building this business, and in the end, all I could see in front of me was a lifetime of working in a career that increasingly looked less like anything I wanted.
One night, out of the blue while sitting on the couch watching TV with one of my best friends, he turned to me and said, “You know, man, I’m really disappointed that you haven’t been writing any music.”
Sometimes, someone says something to you, and it opens something up in you in a far more profound way than even they intended. As I sat thinking about that, I realized and admitted to myself for the first time that I was miserable. The whole idea of using the tattoo business as a way to support my music had failed, and now I wasn’t doing music at all. Mystery Cabal was on auto-pilot, with no new releases in several years. I just worked seven days a week on a tattoo business that I had grown, but that tied me to a business partner with whom I increasingly didn’t get along, and a life I increasingly didn’t want. Worse, in the midst of all of that, I had lost the one thing that had been at the heart of all of this: music.
Sometime in life, things line up. Two days later, my business partner offered to buy me out. It wasn’t a great offer considering all I’d put into the business, but it was enough to justify walking away. Later that day, and pretty much out of the blue, I was offered a job teaching guitar as a mid-term replacement at a community college. Again, it wasn’t much, but with everything else, it was enough that I could make the jump.
Back to Music
I sold out to my business partner, took the teaching job, and started focusing on making music again. I kept tattooing for a while after that, working as a regular employee at another shop. I did ok as a tattoo artist, but as I started to clear out some of the stress from my shops, I realized that tattooing itself gave me a lot of stress. I worried about tiny mistakes in tattoos that no one else even saw, but I knew that I had made. I eventually stopped doing it, and took a job at a bookstore. It was mostly an excuse to get cheap books, but it also brought me back to the world of normal jobs.
By the spring of that year, I was back to music, but I was also recognizing that I needed to start thinking about next steps. Teaching at a community college was a challenge. I realized that I enjoyed teaching, but I wasn’t great with the beginners. My college experience was in a conservatory environment, and I really wanted to be teaching in a more serious music school. That wasn’t going to happen with just an undergraduate degree, so I started to look at Masters programs. I also needed to start thinking about making some more money in the meantime. I took a job at the local Guitar Center. With more musically happening in my life, discounts on equipment was more important that discounts on books. Within a month at GC, I had moved into management. I had built up a solid skill while running and managing several successful businesses, and that made me an asset to the company. During the fist six months I was a department manager, we were up 42% from previous year, which made me a rock star in the company.
During that time, I formed Kallisti, and we built Fairest One Studios. I had periodically been doing concert recording, and some mixing and mastering throughout the previous few years, but very little session work. Fairest One Studios was built on a premise that used to be more common. We bought previous generation recording equipment on the cheap, and focused on a more DIY driven model than the commercial studios. We were running ADATS and a Mackie 32×8 in the early 2000s so it was far from state of the art; however, we had 24 tracks, plus the ability to run a few extra tracks using an Alesis card for the studio computer. We could also transfer one or two tracks and do some digital editing and process the audio. It was slow, so we rarely did it, but it was there.
It looked very different from the life in tattooing. It seemed far less alternative and counter-culture, but it ended up actually being closer to my dreams than what I would have thought four or five years earlier. I was making music. I had access to studio space for my creative work. I was getting access to a lot of gear. I was playing music and spending all my time around music people.
I was also applying to graduate programs to start a Master’s Degree in Music Composition. Truthfully, I was mostly doing it to get a better teaching job than the community college, but once I started looking into it, I decided I really did want to make sure that I found a good program. After my undergraduate degree, I had really never considered graduate work as teaching wasn’t on my road map, and I mostly saw graduate degrees as a pathway to teaching in academia. But there I was, years later thinking about graduate school, and I realized why it was such a common career path for composers. Academia offered the possibility to be a part of a musical community, including the next generations of musicians, and offered more access to creative outlets and assets than most other options.
I was mostly looking at programs on the West Coast as I had really enjoyed my time in LA and wanted to move back. I was offered admission into a couple of programs, but none of them offered the financial aid package I needed. At the last minute, a faculty member at my alma mater mentioned to a friend that they had an extra teaching assistantship in theory open. I hadn’t planned to apply there, but the offer was the right package for me. Also, it didn’t feel as weird to go back to the same school as most of my undergraduate faculty had retired in the intervening years, and the school was even moving into a new performing arts complex back on the main campus. It felt like very different place.
Yet, at the time, I was still disappointed. I had really wanted to go back to the West Coast, and I was surprised that I hadn’t fared better in getting into programs and getting assistantships. I felt that I was behind the curve in my development because of my diversion into tattooing/piercing. Other composers who I went to school with had gone straight on to graduate school, that made me very aware that the skills of my peers had been developing and mine had not. I felt like I’d lost a lot of time.
Grad School
Early in my masters work, I was asked to define my goals for the degree program. I found myself thinking about a lesson I had learned in my time as a tattoo artist.
No one wants an experimental tattoo. It’s not cool when someone looks at your tattoo and says,”What is that supposed to be?”
While I was developing as a tattoo artist, I focused on craft. The visual art was a distant goal that only seemed achievable once I had mastered the skills of the craft. Art and creativity was something distinct from the craftsmanship required to make things.
I decided that I wanted to spend some time as a composer mastering the full array of skills required for musical craft. I had picked and chosen what I wanted to work with as an undergraduate. I studied and wrote good counterpoint because it was important to my work. I didn’t spend a lot of time writing music in any period styles. I didn’t learn anything about jazz arranging. I was great with contemporary orchestration, but again, I couldn’t take a piece and orchestrate it in the style of Beethoven, then Brahms, then Debussy, etc. In the end, I felt that I wanted those tools in my toolbox, even if I rarely pulled them out.
For the first time in a while, I didn’t feel that I was off track. I understood that my diversion into tattooing opened me to a view on creativity and craft that I never would have learned before that. It wasn’t just a conceptual understanding of it. It was meaningful. In the tattoo world, there was a widespread view that you were really still learning for the first ten years you were working. When you were working to get good line work, you didn’t expect to get it overnight. I watched as people around me, my mentors, were still learning and developing, and being mentored by the generation before them. Learning to tattoo taught me the patience to really learn a lifelong skill. I never had to work at anything as hard as I had to work at tattooing. It didn’t come naturally at all to me.
I also had the chance to score a couple of students films during my master’s degree. I was very happy with the music that I wrote, but I had a terrible experience working with the filmmakers. I felt they didn’t have any respect or trust for my musical ideas, and I got my feelings hurt when they chopped up my music, used it in different sections than I had intended, and mixed the music so quietly that it was hard to even hear. It seemed to confirm what many composers had told me about scoring film – it wasn’t easy for concert music composers used to deciding everything about their own music. I realized I didn’t have any interest in doing it again.
All of that focus on craft paid off. About a year into my grad work, I started composing music on contract, often collaborating with or ghostwriting for other composers. By the end of my second year, it was my main source of income. Again, it wasn’t actually the composition career I thought I’d wanted when I started my journey, but I was making a living writing music, and I was working on my craft. In fact, I was now getting paid to do it. I was asked to write or orchestrate in the style of certain composers, and got paid to go study scores and practice doing it until the client was satisfied.
Doctoral Studies and More Rejection
As I approached the end of my Master’s, I started looking at doctoral programs. By this time, I had realized that the composition career path I wanted, one in which I would be getting good commissions under my own name, went through a pretty limited set of doctoral programs. I chose the eight best music compositions doctoral programs, and applied.
I was rejected by all of them. No waitlists. Just flat rejections. It’s hard to even begin to express how devastated I was. Again, I’d invested so much, pretty much everything I had. I’d worked really hard to put together what I thought was a competitive portfolio of my strongest work, and I got nothing.
Thankfully, I had also been working on my teaching. I was offered a one year position as a sabbatical replacement, and I had my contract composition work. I decided to just knuckle down and try again next year.
The following year, I applied to 14 programs, this time ranging from the really top-tier ones, down through a couple of fallback schools, where I really didn’t want to attend. I ended up getting into my top choice, and the fallback schools, one of which started offering me increasingly better financial aid packages. Then, they announced that they had hired two new, very successful composers on the faculty, and overnight, it went from a fallback school to a top choice.
That said, I was still pretty sure that I was going to have problems when it came time to hit the job market. If I wasn’t competing at a top level to get into doctoral programs, how would I beat out those same people for even more competitive academic positions. The seeds of self-doubt sown by that first round of complete rejection had taken root. Deep inside, I was pretty sure that I was just going farther down a path that wasn’t going to payoff.
But at least I had good contract composition work.
Collapse and Recession
In 2007, my contract composition work took a huge hit. One of my main clients had some personal issues that kept him from working much of that year. I took a 18% drop in income that year. It wasn’t like I was living well. I was working a lot to make ends meet. My other clients didn’t have any more work for me to make up that gap, so I downsized my life. I cut all of the extras, and got my expenses back down as low as I could. I learned to do without a lot of things. I scraped through the year, and that only by taking out student loans to help cover living expenses. It was a hard year, but I was still working, and making progress on my doctorate. I was hopeful that things would bounce back, and I would be getting more work again the next year.
Then, the markets crumbled in 2008. Within weeks, most of my upcoming contracts had been cancelled. Much of the work was being funded by people relying on the stock market. Projects disappeared. I ended up taking a 37% income drop that year. That was after the previous year’s 18% drop. There was nothing left to trim in my budget, no way to be more frugal. I had done all of that to get through the previous year. There was nothin more to cut back.
It got so bad that I started looking at temporary solutions like Guitar Center again. I applied for all kinds of jobs, and couldn’t get anything. I had no choice but to take out more student loans, and that still wasn’t enough to make ends meet.
It was a pretty dark time. I often had to go a day or two each week without food, and a lot of meals came from the charity of friends and family. I helped a lot of people out with household projects and yard work because I knew they’d feed me, and I will forever be grateful to those people.
The other thing that happened was that I realized that if I wasn’t going to be on a career path to an academic position in composition, than I was free to write whatever I wanted. Between the contract composition work, and the need to craft a “good portfolio” (I’m not going to get sidetracked here about the cult of the portfolio – another article, perhaps), I had pretty much been writing music for clients, or based on what I thought would help me the most getting into a good graduate program or getting a good job. For the first time in a many years, I started writing for nothing other than my own satisfaction and creative goals. The result was a set of pieces of which I am most proud, and that probably represent the purest manifestation of my creative and philosophical ideas about music. While they are far from my most financially successful pieces, they are the ones that I feel the most strongly connected to, even now.
I was approaching the end of my doctorate, and I started narrowing down topics for my dissertation document. I found myself increasingly interested in the semiotics of music, recorded music in particular, since much of my music was for recorded media. Throughout the previous 15 years, I had been working part time in audio, mainly as a way to supplement my other income streams. It had never been a primary career goal for me, but I realized I had a lot of experience.
I went ABD and started applying for full time faculty positions. As I feared, I had no luck. I wasn’t even getting phone interviews for jobs that were a perfect match for my skillset. Finally, after several years of applying, including a year and a half of being ABD, I finally got my first interview. I did well in the phone interview and was asked to come for an in-person. During my first in-person interview, I realized they were way more interested in my recording and technology background than they were in my theory and music composition background.
I realized that there was a path forward. I had been working in studios, doing freelance work, mixing and mastering audio, for a long time, and I had academic credentials. That combination was increasingly in demand as more music technology and recording programs were being developed.
More Grad School
While I was writing my dissertation, which presents an approach to understanding the semiotics of recording production, I asked if I could concurrently start another program in recording arts at our sister campus. My goal was to formalize much of the knowledge that I had learned on my own, and to study the pedagogy of music technology and audio recording. I did 30 credits of post-graduate work while ABD and in the semester after that.
While I was there, I worked with a great teacher for Audio Post Production for film and television. About half way through the year, he approached me about writing music for a video project. I had started out my college career wanting to write music for film, but then lost interest. Then, I did a couple during my Master’s degree, but they were both very disappointing to me.
But in the years in between, I had been doing contract composition work in which I was writing to meet someone else’s vision and design. After fighting with a few clients early on, I realized that my job in that world wasn’t going to last if I faught with clients and told them no. In the end, the work I did in that world weren’t my pieces. I was just a crafts-person helping someone else shape their art.
When I worked on that video project, I had no need to get territorial with the director or post-supervisor about the music. I was used to trying to understand what someone else wanted to complete their vision, and then crafting it for them, to their satisfaction. That project didn’t leave me with any of the same frustration or hurt feelings as the earlier film projects. I had no problems when cues were rejected, or I was asked for revisions. The analogy that I started using was that in concert music, I’m the artist. When I write music for film, the filmmakers are the artist – I just make paint. The relationship with the filmmakers was really good, and after we wrapped, that teacher mentioned that he loved working with me, and asked if I would mind if her referred me to some other filmmakers. I said yes.
I started focusing on applying for faculty positions in music technology and recording. In the spring of that year, I was offered a tenure-track position in Music Technology.
During the next few years, I worked with that former teacher on a number of film projects. In 2012, I was awarded a Heartland Emmy and was nominated for a MPSE Golden Reel award for one of our projects, and in 2013, I was nominated for another Emmy for a second project with that filmmaker. I have had the chance to work on a number of films which have shown at hundreds of film festivals, and been broadcast in dozens of markets around the country. All of those years as a contract composer had made my craft strong, and gave me an incredible set of resources.
After five years in that first full time position, I left to take my current position at UMass Lowell.
Summary
To sum up, I started a composition degree hoping to make a career writing music, including music for film. I started working recording studios to make extra income to support that, with little interest in a career in audio beyond as a tool for my own creative goals. When it became obvious that composition wasn’t going to be a viable way for me to make a living, I spent several years as a tattoo artist and business owner before that career fell apart. Then, I worked for Guitar Center and had a career path forward in the corporate-side of that company, but decided to go back to graduate school for an academic career in music. Then I got rejected from graduate programs, and ended up at a different school than I thought I wanted. Then, after finishing my Master’s, I got rejected from all of the doctoral programs to which I applied, and eventually ended up in a program that I didn’t think was the right one. Then, I couldn’t find a job teaching music composition and theory.
But in the midst of all of that, there were incredible moments of serendipity. John Storyk likes to say that serendipity isn’t just luck. Serendipity is what happens when you get lucky, but you have the exact set of skills to take advantage of that lucky break. In sports terminology, everyone occasionally gets a lucky break, when the ball just bounces your way. Serendipity is what happens when you have put in the years of work to develop the skills to be able to make a play when that happens.
All of those various detours and setbacks in my career (or really careers), while they were really hard to experience felt like my world was coming apart, had also been a chance for me to learn new skills, develop new resources, and to continue to get stronger, better able to make the play when the ball bounces my way. When I went into tattooing, I changed and developed as an artist. It is a world in which your creativity serves another person who wears that art, and so the most important things are craftsmanship to execute a great piece, and understanding that the art isn’t’ just for me. When I didn’t get into the Master’s programs I really wanted, I ended up in a place that was fostering and supportive of my growth, and opened the door to a chance to work and make my living as a freelance composer. That supported me financially for years while also allowing me to practice and develop my craft writing in musical styles that I probably would not have explored had I not been paid to do it. When I didn’t get into the best doctoral programs, I again ended up in a place that was supportive and allowed me to continue to chart my own path, leading to some of the pieces of which I am most proud. When my freelance composition business crashed, it pushed me back into audio, and made me realize that there was an entire set of academic opportunities available to me that I hadn’t even considered. That led me to work with the people who later opened the door to my Emmy win.
I like that idea of serendipity. It seems especially important right now for all of you, as you are in the midst of some incredible bad luck. Luck is out of your control. Sometimes, the ball doesn’t bounce your way, and there isn’t anything you can do about that. That is out of your control, and we must all learn to accept the things outside of our control. What is in your control is how you continue to train and prepare for the future, so that when your luck changes, you are ready.
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