This passage talks about the people should develop their ability in many kinds, shouldn't just constrain in study field. I really believe it
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
Published: December 12, 2004
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Correction Appended
FOURTEEN years ago, Chad A. Alexander took his bassoon and headed east from a small California town, assumed a coveted place at the Juilliard School and began training for a job in one of the country's great orchestras.
"Everything seemed possible," he said recently. "Going to Juilliard makes you feel very special and privileged and in awe of the history of the school." He graduated and quickly won a three-year position in the New World Symphony, a training orchestra based in Miami. But his career fizzled with a succession of fruitless auditions, dwindling freelance gigs and mounting debt.
He needed a day job. But a Juilliard degree had not prepared him for much besides playing. "When you go to a conservatory, something as specialized as that, you're basically from a different planet," he said. He cast a wide net, but the only outfit that offered him a job was an insurance company in Long Beach, N.Y., on Long Island. He played a few jobs in the evenings. But he was earning his living as a customer service representative.
Last May, Mr. Alexander finished out of the running in yet another audition, for the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and saw his finances on a precipice. So in what he called a heartbreaking moment, he sold his bassoon for $5,300 to pay credit card bills. "It was time," he said. "It got to the point where you're just tired of being poor." Now he lives in Phoenix and works as an assistant underwriter.
Eric Crambes is another former resident of Planet Juilliard. A charming French violinist and a native of Lyon, Mr. Crambes studied at the Yehudi Menuhin School in Britain as a child and then with the teacher Tibor Vargas, living at his home in Switzerland. Ready for a change at 17, he broke away from Mr. Vargas and came to Juilliard.
Since graduating, he has moved smoothly into a flourishing career. He has forged a role as a fill-in concertmaster with respected European orchestras, and he commissions pieces, directs a music festival and plays as a soloist with dancers from the New York City Ballet. "I don't want to label myself," he said. "I have a very large spectrum of activities, and I like it that way."
Both Mr. Alexander and Mr. Crambes graduated from Juilliard 10 years ago. Their stories suggest just two of the many varied paths that superlatively trained musicians can travel after leaving one of the world's premier conservatories, which next year celebrates its 100th anniversary. To give a more comprehensive picture of those paths, Arts & Leisure took a close look at the Class of 1994, whose members are now solidly in their 30's and mostly embarked on careers and family life.
The results suggest how hard it can be to live as a classical musician in a society that seems increasingly to be pushing classical music to the margins, even as Juilliard and scores of other music schools pour out batches of performers year after year. Orchestras and chamber ensembles are under increasing financial pressure as subscriptions have dropped and government arts financing has dried up, the recording industry has shrunk and the median age of classical audiences is not getting any younger.
Sometimes the struggle is just too much, and many drop out, perhaps disillusioned with a once-sacred endeavor that has come to seem a cold, unforgiving trade. Others, like Mr. Alexander, are simply sick of the financial grind: the low pay, the lack of benefits, the scramble for work. But many others make it, and what also came clear from the analysis of this class were the high levels of dedication many of the graduates maintain and the satisfactions and excitement of expressing oneself through one of the purest forms of communication: the making of music.
The class of 1994 includes Justine Flynn, a French-horn player who has battled alcoholism and, after bouncing from job to job in and out of music, now plans to become a tax preparer; Mark Inouye, a baseball-loving, happy-go-lucky trumpeter with the Houston Symphony; Gwen Appel, a clarinetist who gave up the grind of public-school teaching for a diamond grader's job at Tiffany's; and Ittai Shapira, an Israeli dynamo with a flourishing solo violin career.
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Best Wishes!
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