Join the CIA! Classical Independent Artists
The CIA is a secret, underground group of highly disciplined people who can perform amazing feats all from the privacy of their practice rooms. Yes, I’m speaking about Classical Independent Artists: able to leap tenths in a single bound, faster than a speeding bullet at three octaves of scales, able to make tones that will melt ice! Yes, you! You can join the CIA. There are tons of websites and resources for you if you are willing to be a Classical Indie Artist.
Statistics tell us that classical musicians have very little chance to make it into the superstar market going the traditional route.
We have such bleak career prospects that many wonder if classical music should even be studied anymore. Well, that is a load of negative vibrations that we cannot handle here in California. Of course, classical artists should be trained.
We have about a thousand universities in this country alone that are training and graduating hundreds of young classical artists every day. The competition for the few jobs available is wicked.
During Covid, many opera companies and symphony orchestras closed their doors.
So what is a classical artist to do?
Join the CIA!
Become independent of your university, your orchestra, your opera company, or your private teacher and strike out on your own with some friends. Creative Indie Artists make between $30,000 and $50,000 per year. Since 2011, classical artists have been striking out on their own. Since Covid, if you didn’t already know how to get your music to people via the Internet, you didn’t get to sing at all. Here’s what they said in 2011: If you can persuade 1000 fans to give you $50 each, you can make a living! No, it’s not the superstar market, but a classical artist can live on that! Patreon, TikTok, YouTube, Vimeo, Crowdcast, Bandzoogle, etc. will all help you get busy with your Indie career.
As Bayles and Orland say in their great little book called Art and Fear, “What’s really needed is nothing more than a broad sense of what you are looking for [to create], some strategy for how to find it, and an overriding willingness to embrace mistakes and surprises along the way.”
You can do it. Join the CIA. Become a Classical Indie Artist.
Get busy recording your work. You can get a pretty nice USB microphone for about $25. Every Apple has Garageband and it’s pretty easy to use. Take a video of your jury and post it, do guerilla classical music on the street like Pittsburgh Opera did with the Hallelujah Chorus in the shopping mall, send audio holiday or birthday cards, and create a fan page on Facebook. Tweet for goodness sake!
Not being traditional is the new traditional even in classical music.
