Many careers have a clear path, through a degree, perhaps some additional training, and then a reasonably predictable trajectory through a fulfilling working life. Being a professional recorder player certainly isn’t such a job! I imagine your connection with the recorder players and teachers you encounter perhaps reveals just one or two facets of our working lives. With this in mind I figured you might find it interesting to come with me and explore what it is I, and others like me, do to earn a living.
Along the way I’ll share some of the decisions I’ve made through my working life - some of them by choice, others triggered by circumstances in my life. It’s been an interesting career so far, with plenty of twists and turns I didn’t foresee when I started out, and I’m incredibly lucky to earn my living doing something I truly love.
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.' – Steve Jobs
How does one become a professional musician?
When it comes to training, being a professional recorder player isn’t so different to any other musician. After A levels I had to figure out where I was going to study next. For music there are two options - studying at a university or a conservatoire. After weighing up the choices I chose to go to Triniy College of Music so I could study with Philip Thorby. I took the Graduate Course, which earned me a graduate diploma - the equivalent of an honours degree. At the time there was another option - the Performers Course - which was less academic and based around performance. While it was tempting to spend more time playing, I wanted a degree to allow me more options when I emerged into the world of work. These days all students going through a conservatoire training follow a degree course. This is an undoubtedly a positive development in today’s fluid working environment. I followed my GTCL with a postgraduate year, focused entirely on performance. This was an absolute joy after the long slog of my finals, where I had lots of academic work, including a full length thesis to write. During my postgrad year I also passed my LTCL teaching diploma.
What comes after the degree?
Graduation is a tricky moment for musicians. You’ve received an intensive training, learning to play your instrument to a high level, but that doesn’t necessarily reveal a clear path into working life. For players of orchestral instruments, there’s the possibility of an orchestra post, although few of these are long term salaried jobs today. For a recorder player this isn’t an option unless you happen to double on another baroque wind instrument, which might allow you to follow life as a woodwind player in a period instrument orchestra. Instead, most recorder players have to pursue what’s often called a portfolio career - in other words, a bit of this, a bit of that and a bit of the other!
A performer’s life
Without the possibility of a career as a full time orchestral musician, recorder players have to get creative and find other ways to perform. Occasional orchestral opportunities will arise, particularly in Baroque repertoire. I’ve played the recorder in Handel’s Acis and Galatea, Telemann’s Water Music, Purcell theatre music and many other pieces, but such performances are pretty irregular.
Another occasional pleasure is the experience of performing concertos with an orchestra. I’ve probably performed around twenty different concertos over the years, but for a recorder player, doing so is never going to provide an income large enough to live on. There are many pianists and string players working the concerto circuit, performing all over the world, but our chosen instrument is likely to remain a niche addition to the concert scene by comparison.
The most common route when it comes to performing on the recorder is to join friends and colleagues to form an ensemble. I’ve played with the Parnassian Ensemble for over 25 years now and it’s truly wonderful working with a group of friends I know so well. Finding performing opportunities is always a challenge though, demanding a lot of proactive work to seek out venues and concert series.
As a chamber musician you have two choices. The first is to find and book a venue and promote the concert yourself, hoping you’ll attract a large enough audience to cover your costs and make a surplus to pay all the performers. It can be a nerve wracking experience, but if you know you have a following in the area where you’re playing it can be reasonably successful. The second option is to find promoters and/or venues who have concert series which consistently attract audiences. In this situation the venue or promoter usually pays a fee, so you have a the pleasure of giving a concert without the worry that you’ll walk away empty handed. Unless you’re a big name this sort of performing work is rarely the path to a large income, but it’s tremendously rewarding playing to an appreciative audience. For most recorder professionals this performing work will go hand in hand with other jobs which offer more consistent remuneration.
Those who can, teach
Teaching is by far the most common career path for musicians. I struggled to find a specialist recorder teacher when I needed one as a teenager, so I knew there was scope for me to return to my home patch in Sussex when I graduated to seek work locally, teaching privately and in schools.
It was already clear to me that I wouldn’t be able to teach recorder for the local music service - a situation which has only worsened in many areas over the last three decades, as music services have been pared to the bone by cuts. Instead I set about contacting as many local private schools as I could to ask if they needed a recorder teacher. One came good almost immediately, and many more said they’d keep my details on record in case they needed someone in future. Three months later I got a phone call from the Prebendal School (Chichester’s Cathedral school) whose recorder teacher had been taken seriously ill. They needed someone to teach 29 students immediately. I was delighted to say yes, and that filled out my timetable and finances very nicely just six months after I’d graduated. The original teacher returned part time the following term, after which we shared the work for another year. She then retired and I inherited her remaining students permanently - a post I continued for twenty years.
Over the next twenty years or so I taught the recorder in three or four different schools each week. It was mostly one-to-one teaching, but I also worked in a village state school teaching whole classes. This was a tiny school, so classes rarely exceeded a dozen children, but many recorder teachers will routinely teach classes of up to thirty children. This takes enormous skill and I have huge admiration for teachers who do it well, enabling children to have a great first experience of the recorder.
Instrumental teaching in schools is a very variable thing today. With increasing financial pressures, music has gradually been pushed out of the curriculum in favour of more academic subjects. This is in spite of research proving that learning a musical instrument directly helps children in their other subjects - maths in particular. I’d like to think that as our new Prime Minister is a musician himself (Keir Starmer studied recorder and flute in the junior department of the Guildhall School of Music as a teenager) perhaps his own understanding of music might encourage him to allocate more funds to music teaching. Whether this is even possible in the short term is highly debatable, but I live in hope…
Pupils young and not so young
Over the last thirty years I’ve taught the recorder to pupils from the age of 8 to 80, covering all standards, from complete beginners to those considering becoming fellow professionals one day. These days all my pupils are adults - many of them people who learnt the recorder as a child and have returned to it in adulthood.
Teaching adults demands a different approach to educating children. Children happily try new things without fear of failing - after all one of the key ways we learn is by trying, failing and trying again. Adults come to learning an instrument with the baggage of life experience. We’re usually experts in our own field of work, and to fail at something makes us feel like, well let’s be honest, a failure! Because of this adult learners are often more cautious and less willing to try new things for fear of getting it wrong. If you’ve read some of my other blogs here on learning you’ll know my advice is to have a go and not worry about failure. No human is perfect and, yes, sometimes we all make a hash of things.
Working with groups of adults
Of course recorder education doesn’t come in just one size and the world of amateur music making is a wonderfully varied ecosystem. When I was at school I was the sole serious recorder student so my only opportunity to play in an ensemble then was to join an adult group in Worthing. I was at least three decades younger than any other member of the group, but I loved making music with them and it opened my eyes to the world of adult recorder players.
At 16 I attended the Recorder Summer School for the first time and discovered a thriving community of adult recorder players. I was so excited by the 150 strong massed playing sessions I even sent a postcard to my parents to tell them about it! It was here I first learnt about the Society of Recorder Players and I can draw a direct connection between this experience and the work that occupies much of my working life today. When I graduated I was invited to join the tutoring team at the Recorder Summer School and I’m still there, 31 years later!
One of the most significant elements of my working life today is conducting ensembles and working as musical director for three recorder orchestras. Doing so would have struck me as highly unlikely during my choral conducting classes at Trinity College - I spent most of those feeling utterly terrified. Fortunately, teaching at the summer school put me in front of groups of sympathetic musicians (many of whom still remembered me as a teenage student on the course) who forgave my early technical inadequacies and gave me the time and space to develop my skills.
When I first graduated, this work, conducting and teaching on courses, was largely the province of more mature professionals and for a long while I was significantly younger than most of my fellow tutors. I’m delighted to see this is now changing. Most of the recorder professionals who graduated around the same time as me simply didn’t view working with amateur musicians as a viable career path. This was partly because it was badly paid or done for love rather than income. Over the last twenty years this has gradually changed, and today I’m delighted to see more young professionals getting involved in this rewarding field of music making.
Working with adult amateur musicians is an area of my work which has expanded greatly over the last ten years - largely due to personal circumstances. In 2013 we moved 120 miles to the Hertfordshire/Essex border and, despite my best efforts, I wasn’t able to replace the school teaching I left behind in Sussex. More invitations gradually came in to visit SRP branches, conduct ensembles, teach evening classes and run other workshops. Eventually this part of my working life expanded so much that I came to the conclusion I’d rather be working with adults than teaching children - a decision I’ve never regretted.
Music isn’t the only road…
It’s not uncommon for recently graduated professionals to seek out work completely unrelated to music while they wait for their portfolio to develop. Of course, for some the experience of conservatoire life brings the realisation that they either don’t want the pressures of life as a working musician, or perhaps they see that their playing just isn’t good enough. But for these people, that music training is far from wasted.
This 2013 article in the Guardian describes how music graduates, through their training, acquire skills which are valuable in any number of different careers. Being a musician requires you to be self-reliant and good at working alone, able to use one’s time efficiently, great at working in a team, proficient at communicating with an audience, taking care of one’s own administrative tasks, developing IT skills and much, much more. Ok, we might not be much use at removing a brain tumour or plumbing in a central heating system, but the skills we do have can be applied to a huge range of jobs!
I was lucky enough to pick up sufficient teaching work fairly quickly, so my only non-teaching or performing job for a long while was working the occasional day in our local music shop. When we relocated in 2013 I was left with a large hole in my income, so I took on a job at our local National Trust property - Hatfield Forest.
Standing in the car park (often in a gale or pouring rain) welcoming visitors doesn’t sound scintillating, but it frequently demanded good people skills (especially when faced with irate visitors who couldn’t find a parking space) and I really enjoyed my eight years there as a Visitor Welcome Assistant. I met so many interesting people (not to mention making a fuss of the dogs who were taking their humans for a walk!) and made lots of friends along the way. Working outdoors was so far removed from my musical work, but I wouldn’t turn the clock back and change that career choice. Ultimately I handed my notice in with the National Trust, not because I didn’t want to work there any more, but because my musical life had once again taken a different direction and I was struggling to find time for a day off each week.
Musical entrepreneurship
If there’s a skill that’s required of all recorder professionals, it’s the ability to think creatively and laterally. Yes, teaching and performing are often the staples of our careers, but there are plenty of other creative outlets for our skills if we look hard enough. I’ve come to realise this ever more in recent years and, if you’ve visited my website before, you’ll perhaps have sampled the fruit of my creative efforts.
Build it and they will come?
When I first graduated I was delighted if someone invited me to work for them - perhaps doing one-to-one teaching, or tutoring on a course. The thought of branching out and setting up events for myself didn’t even occur to me. Why would I want to take the financial risk if someone else was willing to deal with the admin and pay me a fee?
The first project that really opened my eyes to the entrepreneurial possibilities was Bravo Bonsor! - a CD recording I masterminded with the support of the SRP in 2012. Brian Bonsor was a big influence on me, encouraging me to work with amateur musicians and inviting me to teach at the Recorder Summer School, so when the SRP asked me to oversee a project to create a CD of his music I was thrilled. Little did I realise it would take over my life for a whole year!
For this project I took on many different tasks. These included choosing the music, selecting a suitable group of musicians to play it, writing the programme notes for the CD insert booklet, shooting the album artwork and finding a venue and an engineer to record and press the CDs. Then we just had to rehearse the music and record it all over the space of two weekends, approve the final edit and the begin selling the CDs! In reality I could have passed some of the tasks on to others, but I was totally committed to the project and relished the way it stretched my administrative and musical skills. I learnt so much from the experience and, over a decade later, it’s still a highlight of my career to date.
The skills I gained through that project have been instrumental in much of the work I’ve taken on over the last few years. In 2016 I set up the Mellow Tones Recorder Orchestra, an eight foot recorder orchestra (tenor recorders and lower) which meets four times a year. I had no idea how many people might join, but today between 40 and 50 enthusiastic musicians attend each rehearsal. This gave me the confidence to dip my toe into administrating recorder courses and workshops of my own, and today I work as administrator and tutor for three residential courses.
Two of these courses are ones where I took over the administration from other people, but the third evolved because a venue which had employed me to tutor courses for many years closed permanently. It seemed a shame for the course to disappear entirely, so I took a leap of faith and set about figuring out what was required to make it happen without outside help.
At music college there’s no module teaching the skills needed to organise events - finding venues, setting budgets, advertising, devising timetables etc. Fortunately, years spent teaching on other courses, observing and learning how they were run, along with a decent slice of common sense, served me well. I’ve discovered I really enjoy the process of putting these administrative jigsaws together, even if there are moments when I feel like tearing my hair out!
Of course, the move from hired tutor to course administrator/director isn’t without its nerve shredding moments. Covid 19 proved a particularly worrying time. At one point in 2020 I was faced with the possibility of having to cancel one course while still being liable for the venue costs alongside refunding the people who’d booked - an eye watering potential loss of around £12,000. Ultimately the Covid regulations came to my rescue, preventing conference centres reopening until after my course was due to run - phew!
That terrifying prospect aside, I’ve always been cautious when planning budgets in case events aren’t fully booked. Yes, the moment when you open bookings for a course always brings a nervous buzz (“What if no one wants to come?”) but I’m lucky enough to have built up a supportive community of musicians who attend them. I’ll never take this for granted and it’s thanks to people like you that I’m able to do this work.
Putting pen to paper
It’s not uncommon for musicians to compose and arrange for their chosen instrument, and I think this is particularly prevalent among recorder professionals. Having composed your piece the next step is to find a publisher…. or perhaps set up your own publishing house instead!
For a long while music was mostly printed by big publishing houses - Schott, Universal, Faber, OUP and the like. These are companies with large overheads and they’re happy to publish works that’ll sell millions of copies. But the cost/benefit balance doesn’t work so well when you’re talking about an edition which might only sell a handful of copies each year. Sadly a lot of recorder music falls into this latter category. In the 1980s small, homespun publishing houses began to spring up - Oriel Library was the first one I became aware of. These editions were often handwritten (beautifully so in the case of Oriel Library) and then copied. Because the company’s overheads were low the music was often modestly priced and they were in a much better position to take a risks publishing pieces which might only sell in small numbers.
With the advent of computer programmes to typeset music (Sibelius being perhaps the best known) several recorder players began creating their own editions - names such as the Clark Collection, Hawthorns Music, Willobie Press and Mayhill Editon. The recorder world is now probably one of the most abundant in terms of small publishing houses and I feel sure our repertoire of both original music and arrangements has benefitted in terms of quantity and variety. When Ruth and Jeremy Burbidge bought Recorder MusicMail in the early 1990s they too created their own publishing house (Peacock Press). As larger publishers have chosen to drop recorder pieces from their catalogues they’ve often been saved from oblivion and subsumed into Peacock Press. Without this flourishing DIY publishing market who knows what gems we might have lost from our repertoire forever?
While I’ve never had any skill for composing, I’ve enjoyed arranging music for recorders since I was a student. A number of my arrangements have been published over the years by several of our DIY recorder publishers and more recently I’ve begun to offer PDF download editions via my own website. This work will never make me rich, but opens up my arrangements for others to use them, as well as being another small contribution to my financial bottom line.
Words as well as music
I may have no compositional talents, but one thing I do particularly love is the written word - as you may have realised from my lengthy blogs!
As part of my preparation for the occasional recorder technique workshops I run, I created a comprehensive handout for my students as a reminder of everything we covered during the day. A few years ago I realised this handout might form the basis for a book so I could share my knowledge more widely. This began life as an ebook which could be downloaded from my website for a small sum, but I soon received requests for a printed version too. Such a volume is never going to be a bestseller, so I took the self publishing route, typesetting the text myself and getting them printed by Blurb and, more recently, Mixam. I take copies with me to recorder events as well as selling them via my website.
Passive sources of income like this are a really useful boost for any musician, and without too much day to day work I receive a small but steady stream of income from my book. The only demands on me now are trips to the post box to dispatch them and occasionally ordering more books from the printer. I’ve sold around 1000 copies over the last decade, in ebook and print format, so I think my book has more than repaid me for the work it took to create it!
Finding one’s feet in IT
Our world has changed enormously in my lifetime. We’ve gone from being an analogue society, with much of our working lives based around paper, to one where it’s almost impossible to avoid at least a degree of interaction with IT. This has opened up many new avenues of possibility, but that same technology can also be a hard task master. Email, for instance, is a wonderful communication tool but the endless flow of inbound messages can be overwhelming at times.
The internet has opened up many new ways to reach the recorder community with our musical offerings - websites, email, social media and other electronic channels such as YouTube. The recording world has been particularly deeply affected. Not so long ago people purchased CDs to listen to the music they loved, but today streaming is the dominant force. This makes it much easier and cost effective for the listener to explore fresh music, but for performers the income derived from recordings has slumped to a pittance - fractions of a penny per track streamed on most platforms. By comparison, the sale of a CD may typically net the performer around 10% of the sale price - still a small sum but a huge amount more than streaming. Ultimately, recording and selling albums of music isn’t a route to huge wealth for most classical musicians, but it nonetheless remains an important way to gain visibility and allows us to leave our own small musical legacy.
Music on video - learning to master the algorithm
Beyond traditional audio formats we have the world of online video streaming - YouTube being the most familiar. Many musicians have taken this route to build a stronger connection with their audience and in the recorder world Sarah Jeffery is probably the best known personality. Her Team Recorder YouTube channel is now eight years old, with over 200,000 followers - an amazing achievement for what many would deem to be a niche, minority instrument. Don’t let Sarah’s relaxed and informal demeanour fool you though - achieving and maintaining such a following while not compromising one’s principles takes a huge amount of work!
Running a successful YouTube channel can create a useful amount of income but with it comes a fine balancing act. YouTube’s financial rewards are greatest when you produce content that draws lots of views for the advertisers. That’s fine if you can create the right sort of content on a regular basis, but taking a break or changing the type of material you share can impact your income. Another YouTuber I follow, sing-songwriter Mary Spender, has talked about how the type of videos she enjoys making most aren’t necessarily the ones that generate the greatest income. Continually churning out exactly the same thing may be financially rewarding, but this has to be balanced against retaining your own enthusiasm for the project and not burning out while trying to meet your audience’s demands for a never ending flow of new material.
I see this exact effect on much a smaller basis with my own electronic offerings. I find it fascinating to track which of my videos and blogs attract lots of clicks and downloads. I now know that smaller scale Baroque consorts are usually most popular, while the larger pieces or repertoire outside the recorder’s natural territory get less traction. Yes, I could keep churning out more and more of the same, but I know some of my audience enjoy those more unusual items and I want help them too. It’s also important that I retain my own level of interest if I’m to continue doing my job as well as you expect.
Problem solving and lateral thinking
'When you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, 'Certainly I can!' Then get busy and find out how to do it.' – Theodore Roosevelt
From a personal perspective, I never planned on creating my own digital resources but a certain virus pandemic led me to this route. In the course of a couple of weeks in March 2020 my entire working life was cancelled and I suddenly had lots of free time, but what to do with it?
Looking back, I never considered that IT might be a part of my working life when I was studying. During my college years the only computers I’d ever used were prehistoric ones at school where you loaded programmes via a cassette tape, and the marginally less ancient BBC machines we had in the Trinity College computer suite. My experience of them was unremittingly awful, and by the time I graduated I had absolutely zero interest in anything IT related. When my partner bought his first PC in the mid-1990s I tentatively began to explore the world of computers. I’ve never taken any sort of course in computing, but I have a curious mind and a willingness to try new things, so I’ve picked up skills piecemeal as I’ve needed them.
Over the years I learnt enough about word processing and music typesetting to keep up with my work, and later I began to create simple websites for my projects. I still have zero coding skills, but thankfully there are tools which allow me to drag and drop text and photos into ready made templates to create clean, easy to use webpages.
After a few weeks of pandemic restrictions I’d explored every inch of our village and the countryside surrounding it with my camera and, like most recorder players, was missing my musical activities. I’d seen a few playalong resources online, but felt I could offer something different if I could find a way of doing it. I enjoy exploring new technology, so I did some research to find the right solution. This proved to be the Acapella app on my iPhone and, after lots of experimentation, I found a way to create my multitrack videos, including a view of me conducting to help those who needed it.
But where to share my offerings? I certainly didn’t want to step on Sarah’s toes on YouTube. My solution was to create a page on my website and I used Facebook to encourage people to visit….
Around this time I’d started an ongoing conversation with David DuChemin, a Canadian photographer whose work and teaching I love. I mentioned my new musical project and he suggested that using social media to publicise it was a flawed plan - only a tiny proportion of your followers ever see what you’re sharing because of the algorithms in use. What I needed was an email newsletter so I could contact my audience directly. As you’ll have realised by now I like a challenge - I thrive on solving problems - so this was just another project to run with. I had no idea how best to create a mailing list so I jumped onto the internet and found out! David was incredibly generous with his advice too and the result is the Score Lines emails I send out every two weeks, which continue to this day - yet another element of my portfolio career.
Of course, arranging music and creating videos kept me busy and brought the feel-good factor because I was helping others, but it wasn’t necessarily going to help my newly Covid-impoverished financial situation. I was left with a conundrum - should I give them away free, charge per download or find another route entirely? I was conscious that many people were in a similar financial situation to me, so I finally opted for a donation system. Those who wanted to use my consort music and videos could do so free of charge, but for those who saw value in them and could afford to do so, they had the option to make a donation toward them.
Back in 2008 writer and editor Kevin Kelly said the following in a blog post:
“To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.”
His logic was that if each of your 1000 true fans spent $100 on your concerts/music/art each year you’d earn a comfortable living. Even that level of income is a mere pipe dream for most grass roots music professionals, but I can see the sense in his words. With the donation system I chose for my consort videos I’ve seen this in action firsthand. They are downloaded by hundreds of people each month, but the income I receive from the few who really see value in them and choose to donate brings in sufficient income to allow me to keep creating more of them. Did I make the right choice on this back in 2020? Without a time machine I’ll never know, but I stand by that decision. Either way, those first few videos changed my working life forever and for that I’m grateful - a positive outcome from something as destructive as a pandemic.
Always moving forward…
Life should never be a static thing and the most recent addition to my working portfolio has been this Score Lines blog. As the Covid virus began to recede I assumed use of my consort music and videos would probably wane because recorder players could once again get together with friends to play in person. Having built up a small but loyal audience (heading towards 1900 at the time of writing), I wanted to continue that connection, offering something they would hopefully find useful in the long term. I’ve always loved sculpting the written word, so sharing my knowledge in text format was a logical way to go. Every two weeks I enjoy a this wordsmithing and I hope the result is something you find enjoyable and educational too. Coming up with a continued and varied selection of topics certainly challenges my curious mind and I think I’ve probably learned as much as any of my readers along the way!
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So there you have a glimpse into the world of this particular professional recorder player. Such is the nature of the world that each and every musician you encounter will likely have a different combination of jobs contributing to their career. Some are more musically or financially rewarding than others, but together they make up our working lives. There’s never a dull moment as a professional musician. One’s income can be unpredictable and it’s rarely the career to follow if you wish to be rich, but the counterpoint to that is that it’s tremendously varied and immensely rewarding. Let’s face it, given the choice between the myriad of tasks I do and a job spent in an office 9-5 every day there’s simply no competition!