3
The Ability and Willingness to Work For Free
Most early opportunities are extremely poorly paid or completely unpaid. The kinds of companies who will employ you first are small semi-professional or amateur organisations with very small budgets. If your plan is to do so many of these that you can make a living from it, good luck to you, but I would urge caution. Even if that plan goes really well and you find yourself doing loads and loads of very low paid work and unpaid work, you'll be getting lots of experience but still might struggle to pay your rent.
There's a reason lots of conductors come from rather well-off backgrounds (this is true of the arts more widely too) - it's because you need the ability and security to not have to worry about earning money from conducting for the first years of doing the job. If you have family money and a nice safety net underneath you - congratulations, these first few years will be much less strenuous for you. If not, you'll probably have to do something flexible that earns enough money to live on, then on top of that, as much conducting work as you can get to build your experience. This sucks and it's exhausting. I am lucky to have relatively robust health in general, but I probably over-did it in these early years, and at one point I made myself fairly ill from running myself into the ground. So there's a balance to be struck.
With me, it was because I lucked out in getting a job in the LSO Music Library that was not only hugely beneficial for the job I wanted to end up doing, but also was flexible enough to allow me to take on low- and un-paid conducting work, and not worry (too much) about paying my rent.
Most early opportunities are extremely poorly paid or completely unpaid. The kinds of companies who will employ you first are small semi-professional or amateur organisations with very small budgets. If your plan is to do so many of these that you can make a living from it, good luck to you, but I would urge caution. Even if that plan goes really well and you find yourself doing loads and loads of very low paid work and unpaid work, you'll be getting lots of experience but still might struggle to pay your rent.
There's a reason lots of conductors come from rather well-off backgrounds (this is true of the arts more widely too) - it's because you need the ability and security to not have to worry about earning money from conducting for the first years of doing the job. If you have family money and a nice safety net underneath you - congratulations, these first few years will be much less strenuous for you. If not, you'll probably have to do something flexible that earns enough money to live on, then on top of that, as much conducting work as you can get to build your experience. This sucks and it's exhausting. I am lucky to have relatively robust health in general, but I probably over-did it in these early years, and at one point I made myself fairly ill from running myself into the ground. So there's a balance to be struck.
With me, it was because I lucked out in getting a job in the LSO Music Library that was not only hugely beneficial for the job I wanted to end up doing, but also was flexible enough to allow me to take on low- and un-paid conducting work, and not worry (too much) about paying my rent.