What it's Like to be a Professional Classical Musician

One of the things I find most interesting about the fine arts is that they’re really mysterious to people outside them. When I tell people I used to be an opera singer and my husband is an orchestral trumpet player, they look at me like I just told them I make potions in my gingerbread house for a living. Jobs in the arts are just like other jobs: there are real, actionable, sometimes winding and sometimes straight paths to get them. And treating arts jobs as “out there” is a very North American construct that isn’t helpful to fostering creativity in our communities (let alone in the minds and hearts of individuals who would really like to pursue them).

We just got back from our hometown of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where Ryan was playing a concerto (that’s a solo in front of a symphony orchestra if you’re new here). As part of that engagement, he was also giving a series of talks to high school and university students about not just becoming an orchestral musician, but about following your curiosity and enthusiasm toward any career. I love this talk that he gives, because kids (and, let’s be honest, adults) are always amazed that something that sounds kind of pie-in-the-sky like “becoming a professional trumpet player” is actually almost as straight-forward as becoming something like a doctor or engineer.

So today, I’m going to tell you what the path to becoming a professional musician actually looks like. My hope is that (1) you might find out a little more about the world of classical music, and (2) that you might find some inspiration for your own main gig or side hustle path and see that, even when something creative and artsy and inspired sounds kind of crazy, it’s often actually pretty do-able.

To lay the groundwork, why don’t I tell you where Ryan and I got our classical beginnings…

Our very different musical beginnings

First, the road to classical musicianship. As I said (and as many of you already know), I trained for many years to become a professional opera singer. I have both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in opera performance. My husband, Ryan, is a professional orchestral trumpet player – his full-time job is playing in a symphony orchestra. Here’s how we got there.

Ryan’s and my paths to being professional musicians looked, well, a little different… at least at the beginning. I started piano lessons when I was five after falling in love with an old piano at some random relative’s house. I was a super piano keener, and excelled at music from the time I was really little. I sang in school choir from grade one on, joined band in grade six (first on flute, then bassoon, then trumpet, then percussion and french horn in high school, because I got bored each time I got too far ahead of the other kids…). In high school, I was big into musical theatre, kept playing piano at a high level, dabbled in classical guitar, played in jazz band, started taking formal voice lessons, and also joined a super elite girls choir that did long tours abroad and won international competitions. From there, I decided to major in music (after bailing on going to Harvard for an English degree… another story for another day), and settled on being a voice major (rather than major in piano, so that I could keep my non-university piano teacher and possibly capitalize on my super-loud voice/personality). That’s when I met Ryan: on the first day of my undergrad music studies.

Let’s catch up to this point with Ryan, shall we? Ryan was more of a sports kid than a music kid, playing baseball competitively through to high school, then switching to volleyball and badminton. He joined band in elementary school, choosing the trumpet because his mom told him he could only pick something that didn’t have reeds (which, for you non-band kids, are a disposable part of clarinets, saxophones, oboes, and bassoons that needs to be frequently changed and, thus, frequently purchased and picked up from a music store by your parents). He kept playing into high school, where a particularly inspirational and all-around awesome teacher told him that he was actually super talented at music, and that our local university had a great double-degree music/education program where you could get both degrees in almost the same time as just one. Ryan had never even considered that music education was a career, let alone one he might excel at. His band teacher got him into private lessons to prepare for his audition, and thus began his path to professional music (and, as it turns out, to me – thanks, music teacher!).

The basic path to becoming a classical musician

These are two pretty typical beginnings for classical musicians. Lots of us start out as wee children in group piano or violin lessons (like I did), and that begins our journey to being professionals. Others start later – often through school band and choir programs (like Ryan did). Heck, I know a music prof who didn’t really play piano seriously until we were in first year university (he was there studying music history). Other friends of ours, especially American friends, started intense, competitive orchestral training in high school or younger – way earlier than Ryan and I were accustomed to in the Canadian prairies. Like most careers, there are a lot of roads that’ll get you there.

Then, once you’re in undergrad, it all gets a bit more standardized. Most students on a trajectory to becoming professional musicians take a bachelor’s degree in music performance either from a university or a conservatory (which is often an off-shoot of a university, with more focus on music and music-related courses, and fewer liberal arts requirements). During this four-year degree, you take classes in music history, music theory, piano skills, listening skills, and lots of other classes on everything from conducting to acoustics. You also take weekly lessons from a teacher of your instrument, and have “studio classes” with the other students who study with that same teacher, where you play for one another for practice and to learn how to offer and take constructive feedback. Most programs have an “ensemble requirement,” meaning each student has to be in orchestra, band, choir, or another ensemble, and all programs have some sort of performance requirements, including, usually, an hour-long graduation recital in your fourth year.

During the summers of university music studies, students try to get into what are called Summer Programs, or Summer Festivals. These are essentially training institutes, run by other universities or by classical music festivals. Some are the whole summer long, and students either live in dorms or homestays, and others are just a couple weeks. The objective is to get into high-quality, prestigious Summer Programs that have world-class instructors to both improve your playing/singing and bolster your resume. Because then we have…

Grad school auditions. Most professional musicians these days have an MMus (Master’s of Music in performance), and many have a DMA (Doctor of Musical Arts). Auditioning for grad schools is a musician’s opportunity to find an ideal teacher and program that will support their career aspirations. For example, I chose a voice teacher of my own voice type who had sung all the roles I wanted to sing, at a program that offered me the most opportunities to build my list of roles, since my undergrad school didn’t have an opera program. Ryan chose a school that had an orchestral specialization with a teacher whose sound and approach to playing he liked. Plus, to be honest, you’re often looking for a school that will give you some funding (like any university application process).

Getting a professional job

Once you’re out of school, you start auditioning in the “real world.” For an opera singer, this means auditioning for opera companies’ Young Artist programs, which are like apprenticeships. For orchestral musicians, you launch headfirst into taking blind auditions for orchestras (called that because the auditioning musicians play behind a screen so the panel can’t be biased). Pianists and other soloists often continue along a circuit of competitions, hoping to win a recital tour or big gigs with orchestras to launch their careers.

Some musicians land a dream job right away, but most spend a couple years “gigging” – subbing with orchestras (playing one-off concerts to fill in for someone who is away), playing “pick-up” gigs (where there’s no set ensemble, like for a special event), playing weddings and funerals, being the paid weekly soloists/choir leaders at big churches, and teaching private lessons. Lots of musicians also spend the first few years of their careers moving up through a couple different “tiers” of ensembles (landing a small, regional orchestra first, for example, then continuing to take auditions until winning a job in a bigger city for more pay). Every road is different, and being a professional musician can look about a million different ways. Some musicians love gig life and decide that it’s better than being tied down. Some singers take a job in a professional choir because they prefer that type of music-making and hate all the travel of being an opera singer. Lots of musicians transition to full-time teaching/part-time performing because it fits their life better. All are great careers, and all are totally legit ways to be a professional musician.

What the day-to-day life of a professional musician looks like

Since musicians’ lives come in so many shapes and sizes, let’s hone in on one pretty standard way to be a professional musician: orchestra life. I know this one the best, of course, since Ryan is a professional orchestral musician (I could also talk about opera, but it’s a way weirder and far more variable day-to-day). First, let’s dispel a myth. A lot of people ask Ryan what his real job is. Like, we’ll be at a party with non-musicians and they’ll ask him what he does, and he’ll say “I play in the symphony”, and they’ll say “yeah, but what’s your real job.” Um, that is his real job. It’s his 9-5. It’s his JOB. When we applied for our mortgage, he wrote “musician,” because… that’s his job. And we don’t live in poverty. Now, truth be told, sometimes it’s hard to make it as a musician, financially speaking. If you’re gigging, or you play in a really small orchestra, absolutely – it’s harder to make ends meet. But most musicians find ways to piece together a pretty decent living from musical means, be it teaching, composing, working in arts administration, or supplementing their playing income with other non-musical side hustles. But – also good to know if you’re new to classical music – in big cities like New York and Los Angeles, orchestral musicians make an ever-loving boatload of money. Like, more than a dentist. So don’t think the arts are pure charity – these are skilled professionals. [Sidebar: I could go on and on about why the vast majority of musicians deserve to be paid WAY more than they currently make… but for now, I digress.]

So: day-to-day life of an orchestral musician. Most orchestras are based around two key pieces of scheduling information: the number of weeks their orchestra runs per year, and the number of services the musicians can be scheduled each week. These are both negotiated (musicians collectively bargain with their own orchestras – bet you didn’t know that!). Big city orchestras have a season length in weeks that is closer to a full year than smaller orchestras do. Small orchestras are “dark” (i.e., they don’t have rehearsals or concerts) more weeks of the year than big orchestras (fewer weeks of performances/operations/pay for musicians = less expensive to run). So, if you play in, say, a mid-range orchestra, you might have part of the summer off with no pay, like a teacher. 

Then you’ve got the number of services per week, which is usually eight (in North America, at least). That means that orchestra management can book the orchestra eight times in a week for, generally, 2.5 hour “services” (musicians are in a professional association, which is like a union, and that is how they wound up with these types of fixed agreements). Musicians will have a mixture of 2.5 hour rehearsals and concerts in a week, often on more than one “program.” For example, an orchestra might have one rehearsal and one performance of a special Pops show (like a Beatles tribute, or “the music of Star Wars”, or something like that), then three rehearsals and a three performances of a classical program (like a Beethoven symphony with a piano concerto). 

If you have a 9-5 office job (or a way-more-than-40-hours-a-week job), you might be thinking, “eight services at 2.5 hours each… what do musicians do the rest of the time?!” Well, they practice. All the time. You see, when a professional musician shows up at rehearsal, it’s a little different than you might remember high school band. Every musician is expected to show up “performance ready“ – well-prepared, confident, ready to go. Then, the rehearsals are about the conductor teaching the ensemble how he or she wants to express a specific interpretation of each piece, rehearsing with a guest soloist, and also allowing the music to gel as an ensemble. So musicians are essentially paid for two things: their preparation, and their time and contributions in rehearsal and performance. 

Each day, an orchestral musician has to get in a certain amount of solo practice time for two purposes: music preparation, and technical maintenance and development. Orchestral musicians are often preparing several programs at once, often far in advance. They know all their concert programs for the season a few months before the first concert, so if a musician knows that a particularly difficult piece is coming up (for example, one that has an exposed, tricky, famous solo for their instrument), they’ll start preparing it farther in advance than a piece they’ve played many times that doesn’t feature their section. Because orchestra programs butt right up against each other (as in the earlier example about 8-service weeks), or even frequently overlap (orchestras can have a rehearsal for one thing and a performance for another in the same day), time management and keeping programs straight for maximizing practice time is essential.

Musicians also need to do technical maintenance practice every day to keep up their level of ability. This varies by instrument, but is usually some combination of scales, etudes (short, super tricky pieces of music written solely for practice of specific skills), and exercises (like playing really long, slow progressions of notes with a metronome to build endurance, or practicing common bowing patterns across all the different keys). Some musicians include this part of practice in their warm-up at the beginning of the day, others break it down by techniques matched to individual pieces that utilize them, and others hive off a technique-only session late at night. Different strokes for different folks.

Finally, musicians also spend a lot of working time “off the instrument” – that is, not playing. Preparing music for a series of rehearsals and performances includes time spent listening to recordings of the piece (which is so easy now that everyone has access to the greatest orchestras in the world on YouTube and streaming services), marking up the score (some musicians like to add lots of pencil markings in their score while they listen to recordings to help them in rehearsals), and doing bowings (the heads of the string sections write in where they want their sections to bow up or down). Time off the instrument also includes maintenance time, especially for the reed players, who spend a huge amount of time making the reeds for their instruments (shout out to Ryan’s mom for making him play trumpet… though I personally find reed-making endlessly fascinating and think I’d really enjoy it). 

As well, many, many professional orchestral musicians also have solo engagements (like performing as the guest soloist for another orchestra), chamber music groups (like a string quartet or brass quintet), and teaching (at a university or in their private studio). Many musicians are big on health and fitness to maintain their physical stamina for playing, so they also spend time working out (running and yoga are both very popular, as is, perhaps surprisingly to non-musicians, CrossFit). And, regardless of where they are in their careers, many musicians continue to take auditions even when they have a great job in a good orchestra – both to keep their playing sharp, and to continue to push themselves toward bigger and better performance opportunities.

And that’s musician life! Not so crazy, right?

So that’s the life of an orchestral musician! As I write the end of this, Ryan has just gotten home from doing some teaching, and is on his third practice session of the day (two this morning before he left – one to prepare a concerto he’s doing with another orchestra, and one on his repertoire for tomorrow’s opera rehearsal). Now he’s onto a session of technique with a timer (I can hear the beeping signalling him to practice in intervals with short breaks, much like a workout… can you see the CrossFit parallels now?). After this, he’ll probably take most of the evening off, having played a lot already today, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he tucks in one more session on endurance playing after dinner. Hard to say, though – baseball playoffs are on, and musicians are, after all, only human.