Performing Classical Music is not Art

Also, the truth about Curtis

Last week, I had a wonderful conversation with someone who is currently a classical musician. We broached a topic that I was excited to discuss (for maybe the millionth time in my life) which is the idea that classical musicians are athletes and not artists.

I feel very strongly that this is true and will list my reasons below.

• The mechanics of playing an instrument or harnessing your voice are purely athletic.

My little brother is an elite sprinter. He holds records at our high school for the 55 meter and 100 meter dash, is a two-time NJ 55 meter champion, and is running Division I at SUNY Albany next year.

His training is exactly what my training was as a young classical musician. Warm up, drills, repetition, and a few run-throughs. Rest days, variation between workouts, cross-training. This was my college education in flute performance.

A recital, competition, or audition is no different from a sprinting event. You warm up and have one shot to get it right. 10 seconds or 20 minutes, you have one chance to perform and some people podium and some don’t. (Sure, there’s no winners at a recital, but how different is a personal record from your “best” performance possible?)

• There’s a roadmap to greatness that must be followed to the T.

High schoolers are thrusted into a world of has and has-nots. Meet the right coach, make sure they like you. Meet the right professor at the most prestigious conservatory, make sure they like you. If you have rich parents, they better donate. Honestly, it would be better if music conservatories were ranked. Juilliard, Curtis, etc. are D1. State schools like Temple are D2 at best. Local colleges are D3. It would help demystify that world for those who don’t have musicians as parents.

• Speaking of parents, children of athletes and musicians get special treatment.

Your dad’s in the Philadelphia Orchestra? Great, a spot at Curtis is yours. Look at the NFL. Way too many father-son duos than statistically possible.

• Sexual abuse runs rampant in college (the most vulnerable phase of skill development) for both classical music students and athletes.

Penn State. Curtis. Indiana University. Michigan. Hundreds more. Need I go deeper?

• Privilege is everything.

The more money you have, the more freedom you have to train and explore. Most working class Americans can not take a week off of work to audition across the country for a major symphony posting. It costs that much and more to try and go pro. It’s the same financial burden that is wrongfully labeled as “sacrifices” for young musicians. Having to choose between affording rent and pursuing your career is asinine and impossible for those without access to wealth.

• The “greats”.

Both classical music and sports have a hall of fame. At least the athletes own it and hand out trophies. Instead classical musicians talk (and talk and talk and talk) about their heroes, and force their students to play exactly as their heroes did.

• Fragile egos and male domination.

Men dominate both classical music and sports. How is a speckling of womens chamber groups and a handful of women principal players really any different from the WNBA? There’s progress, slow, and about a lightyear behind the rest of the artistic and creative world. Women dominate fine art. Classical music? The door is barely open.

• The “grind”.

Classical musicians took a page out of the athlete’s playbook and adapted a grindset mentality to the nth degree. Work harder, do better, practice more, and you’ll win. I remember seeing a ridiculous poster outside a very prominent music professor’s office “If you’re not practicing, someone else is, and they’re beating you”.

Athletes and classical musicians worship the grindset in what is almost a masochist fetish. Pissing competitions outside of practice rooms are frequent. “I practiced for six hours yesterday.” “Oh yeah?” “I practiced for seven.”

It’s sick. Rest and repair are looked down upon as weakness. Which, hilariously, is the reason nobody wants to go see the symphony. Nobody wants to hear the same chopped version of Ravel’s La Valse performed by a bunch of 40-60-year olds who do nothing but teach, practice, and teach some more. It’s boring, forced, and has no statement about the world or humanity. I honestly think many worshipped composers of the past would be rolling in their grave to know that their music gets played over and over while new music gets pushed to the front of a program and only performed by 2nd chair orchestra members and subs.

• Orchestras and professional sports teams/individual athletes don’t give a flying fuck about what’s going on in the world.

For all of his annoyingness, look what the NFL did to Colin Kaepernick. The same goes for any performer wanting to speak up/pushing orchestras to do something about the technocracy currently taking over the United States. I was punished over and over at Curtis for wanting to speak up. It “wasn’t appropriate” for us to say anything when Roe V. Wade was overturned because “some of the board members are religious”.

Well, fuck your board members and their backwards religion. They took my rights and the rights of every woman in this country away. I don’t care if another 50 million dollars is on the line. The money is stolen from the working class anyway. Anyone who has 50 million dollars to donate to a classical music institution probably has employees working for slave wages. So yeah, fuck that guy (or gender-traiting woman).

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There’s plenty more. And if this offends you because you think picking up your instrument and playing all of the notes correctly in the right order while being restricted a to set of mandated creative liberties is art, sorry. Sit in that insecurity for a bit and get back to me.

Oh and don’t get me wrong, there are musicians making art every day. But it sure is hell is not taking place in the concert halls.

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On another note, I need to share that I was punished at Curtis Institute of Music for attending a protest supporting Cara Kizer, a rape victim who was silenced by the New York Philharmonic.

The Vice President of Public Relations at Curtis Institute of Music took meeting time with senior staff to try and get me fired for attending a protest supporting a rape victim who was silenced by the New York Philharmonic.

Nevermind the fact that Curtis couldn’t pay me a respectable wage for doing great work while Roberto Diaz rolls around in almost a million dollars a year. I made about 55,000 a year which is just a micron above a living wage. It was a great wage to keep me fed but still insecure enough to search for another job.

They also punished me over and over for speaking out when I was being verbally harassed by my coworker. I shared that he was calling me pet names via email and all I got was a “so-and-so thinks this is unacceptable”. They fired him eventually, but not because he was harming me. It was because he wasn’t working hard enough. He called me baby boo in a fucking email. Worse in person and other names in our 1-1 chats. How nasty is that?

(And then they gave me all of his work and forced me to hire my own boss, a man, who I then had to train and babysit until my departure)

Despite the conflict I had great achievements at Curtis. I doubled our social media following across nearly every channel, launched Curtis on TikTok, created multiple content series, and copy wrote every single social post. Despite that, they told me year after year that employee raises would not be determined by performance.

We did performance reviews and were told they were just “practice”. It ought to be illegal. To force employees to self-review (oh yeah, we had to review ourselves) and then give them absolutely nothing for it.

I wonder if they miss me now that their growth is stalled. Numbers do not lie.

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That was a lot, but I’m happy I got it out.

You now know that I’m angry, and I’ll always be angry about it. And I will not stop talking about it. And no revenge for what happened will ever satisfy me. Sue me. I don’t care anymore.

I’m out now, happy, safe, paid, and fulfilled. I am so grateful for that. But there’s a deep anger for the injustices I faced and the far worse injustices that my former peers face every day.

It’s time for classical music to see itself for what it is. A sport. A sport that needs regulations to protect athletes and employees.