Orchestral Musicians Being Short on Cash

As an amateur pianist who’s still studying in the music school of an Academy, of course, forging a career in music is one of my future plans after all my studies. However, there’s one thing that I don’t need to worry about (which most of my friends do), is to choose whether they want to aim at being a soloist or an orchestral player. But there’s a bad news for the ones who have chosen the latter, uh-oh, wages for orchestral players have stagnated as many funding cuts take hold nowadays.

According to Michael Kidd, who plays French horn with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, ‘wages are increasingly depressed.’ This just affects us musicians so much. I personally don’t think anybody enters music for the money, but we still do have to earn a living, for ourselves and for our instruments. Yes, earning a living for our instruments is no joke, as ‘a lot of the string players are basically having to take out a mortgage to buy an instrument on top of a not very good salary,’ said by Kidd. Musicians study for five, six, seven years, putting the tuition fees or student loans aside for now, the process is tough, and getting a job as an orchestral player is very competitive. You think you’ve won the battle when you finally get a job as an orchestral player? No, you still need other jobs to earn your living.

It is becoming increasingly obvious to me that playing our instruments is just a small part of the salary in this music industry, and teaching is where most musicians end up. However, all we’ve learnt in our music colleges is performing arts, which refers to the way we play our instruments, but not too much about pedagogy, at least not all of us did. This affects the communication between teachers and students, and thus the quality of music of the future young musicians. In conclusion, obviously, we are all very passionate about what we do. But if you are one of us, do you inevitable have the fear of ‘will this survive?’