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The Musician Centric Podcast
Two professional violists, Liz O'Hara and Stephanie Knutsen, explore diverse perspectives in the music field through conversations together and with friends. Whether gaining fresh insights from industry innovators or laughing their way through a show like Mozart in the Jungle, Liz and Steph hope to inspire musicians, particularly freelancers, to feel a sense of agency in their lives.
**Note: This podcast was formerly titled the ViolaCentric podcast**
The Musician Centric Podcast
Extra-Classical with That Viola Kid, Drew Forde: Strategies for Success in the Modern Music Industry, Part 2
Stories? Questions? Thoughts? TEXT us here!
**This is Part 2 of our conversation with Drew. Be sure to look for Part 1 in our feed to hear the whole glorious episode!
Ever wondered how to carve out a successful career in music, with or without the classical repertoire? That Viola Kid, Drew Ford, rejoins us to unravel the secrets of thriving as an “Extra-Classical Musician" in today's dynamic indtry. We start off with a little Valentine's Day banter and a nod to the eerie allure of "True Detective," but the real heart of our conversation is Drew's savvy advice for musicians navigating the economic challenges and opportunities of the modern landscape. Whether you're a musician feeling the pinch or a music lover curious about the industry's inner workings, you're in for a treat!
Drew doesn't shy away from the tough topics—we're talking hard numbers and the stark financial realities for those in the classical music trenches. We talk about knowing your worth and the art of negotiation for better compensation, while also serving up some fresh takes on personal branding and direct audience engagement. If you're itching to connect with your fans on a deeper level or to navigate the music industry with finesse, tune in for strategies that hit all the right notes.
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Mentioned in this episode:
Drew's newsletter, Grace Notes: https://thatviolakid.com/gracenotes
wholesoul, a string quartet with attitude: https://www.wholesoulmusic.com/
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Episode edited by: Emily MacMahon and Liz O’Hara
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Hey everybody, this is part two of our conversation with Drew Ford. If you haven't caught part one yet, make sure you go back and listen to that. But otherwise, thanks for joining us for part two of this conversation with Drew Ford. Welcome to the Musician-Centric Podcast. We are two freelance violists living and laughing our way through conversations that explore what it means to be a professional musician in today's world.
Speaker 2:I'm Steph and I'm Liz and we're so glad you've joined us. Let's dive in, as you're describing, this whole crossover connotation, the culture of that sentiment that you couldn't make it. That sentiment is perpetuated by all the people who aren't making it. Like you said, none of us are making it and we all perpetuate that sentiment at an early age and I had that belief within myself for a while. But the truth is my ability to play classical music is better because I don't only play classical music anymore. That is 100% true or my skill set.
Speaker 2:I use this example when I talk to students about quartet music, because my quartet likes to play music by living composers and we do so at least one piece on every program we perform, and it's a different vibe. There's different skills that are needed than are needed to play a Mendelssohn quartet, and when we first started out, all we wanted to do was play like Mendelssohn and Beethoven and all this stuff, and we're like you know. We're never going to be able to find a place in the market with this. We're fine at it, but we're not particularly great at it. It's just like something we were trained to do.
Speaker 2:Now, when we go back last year, we did a commission and then we played Mendelssohn and we tied the whole program together and it was all cultivated in this way. But when we played that quartet, I listened back to the recording I'm like, oh my God, we're 100% freer as musicians playing Mendelssohn than we were five years ago, not pushing ourselves to play this other music that's different and has its own place right now in the musical community, and I think that's so true. Even just like you mentioned in the extra classical article skills that musicians need to be extra classical, and one of the things you mentioned is improv, and we've talked actually quite a bit this year about improv and those kinds of skills I can only imagine that they make you an infinitely better classical musician because you have an understanding of the music that wasn't there if you don't have that skill right.
Speaker 3:It's so true I can't play classical music now without thinking, oh man, so since we violas are playing the major seventh, we should probably be a little stronger, because it creates that tension against the tonic. Or if we're playing the minor third, we need to make sure that we also are present. So the minor mode really sounds like just understanding the theory of it. It's like so critical but not classical music theory. Jazz theory.
Speaker 1:Is that something that you were trained in, jess? No, okay, so tell us about how that evolved.
Speaker 2:Hey, YouTube can be a great teacher.
Speaker 3:I am a student of YouTube. I'm a student of YouTube, so I watch a lot of musicians on YouTube who are not string players. I don't watch any string players. Actually, I watch a lot of guitarists and pianists and how they talk about jazz and how they talk about improvisation. I was just watching a video on tritone subs last night. I was like kind of get it. I still really don't understand it. It's just so divorced from what we do here. So now I'm like I go back in a practice and I'm like oh, these are tritone shapes, oh, this is a major seventh shape, chordal shape. And then when I play Bach, I'm realizing oh, if I just write jazz theory with Bach, I totally understand what's going on. So if you look at my manuscript now, I've just got like oh, this is a B7, that goes to an E7, that goes to a D diminished, that goes back to E major. Oh, there we go. That's what he meant.
Speaker 2:Like find a Neapolitan every once in a while.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah, Neapolitan.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, it's a flat two.
Speaker 3:No, it just means nothing when it's divorced from the playing, and I think that the way we're taught in the classical realm is like here is theory, you're going to do your shinkiering analysis and you're going to write down the chord shapes away from your instrument.
Speaker 2:rather, than the two. And then there's instrumental technique and like the two are totally separate from each other. That is really true. It's crazy.
Speaker 3:We have to be more. We're so siloed I think that's the conclusion we are so particularly siloed and specialized that we're actually blind, and I think that if we kind of like remove the blinders a little bit, we really seek the context a little bit more and it makes us more powerful. Maybe we're not Ray Chen or Augustine Hadelich or or Hillary Haan or Yodemah or Alyssa Wilderstein, maybe we're not there, but that doesn't mean we're not valid and we can't really make beautiful music.
Speaker 1:So you're going into a lot of these educational organizations and talking with students. Is that what you end up doing when you go to these places?
Speaker 3:I've been over the past decade of making content. I will get periodically invited to go give talks at schools about entrepreneurship or about just my perspective of being a professional musician, and just try to tell kids the truth. I'm not trying to like, oh, what's going to be great, you're just going to make so much money once you win your audition, that's not you got to. Or if you get that, you get your DMA and you go teach. You get a ten year position at an institution to teach other people just like you.
Speaker 3:You have to do exactly what you're doing right now.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm curious about what the students who are coming out of music schools that you're encountering these days. Do you feel like it's changing? You feel like some of this is getting through?
Speaker 3:depends on the school, depends on the school. The conversations that I have at Pepperdine University and the Juilliard School are very different, like still to this day. I'll talk to Juilliard kids and I will say something very simply. You need to look at your music as a product. I know art is art and self expression, yes, but it is also a product because people consume it. And I had a little hand raised from the back of the back of the room and it was violinist and she was like but doesn't that make the art? Doesn't that tarnish the art? Doesn't it make it less pure? And I'm like and I literally just responded to her, I was like how does thinking about how people will receive it make it less pure? What's wrong with making things that other people might want to listen to? Because otherwise the please excuse my language but otherwise the process is masturbatory. If you're just doing this for you in front of other people, that's kind of weird.
Speaker 2:But like you got it, yeah we've had that conversation so many times that, like there are often experiences we've had on stage, like in orchestra, that feels that way, because it's like who are we really connecting with here? You know ourselves, each other on stage, yeah who is this for?
Speaker 2:Who is this for? Yeah, but that's a really valid product. Market fit. It should be on a fact somewhere on a website of, like how to be an entrepreneurial musician, like. But what happens to my art if I try to market it? You know, if I try to create a product out of it, it just becomes a thing that people can connect to. Better right, like that's I need to make a post just giving you newsletter ideas.
Speaker 3:I just I'm tired of answering that question.
Speaker 2:Honestly, I'm right down right now.
Speaker 3:I'm right. There is something to that, though.
Speaker 1:I mean, when you're trying to find yourself as an artist, you have to kind of not make things for other people, but, like, make what you truly believe in. And there is a part of the process of figuring out who you are as an artist that is just for yourself, right, wouldn't you agree? Yeah, discovery, yeah, the discovery, and then maybe the figuring out how other people relate to it, putting yourself out there and then knowing that it has value. There is something to the creative process that is just, like you know, produce the art. And that's the part of the process you can control, right, Produce the art, produce the art, produce the art. And then what you're talking about is the other end of it. Okay, promote the art, market the art, you know. Package the art.
Speaker 3:Let me be clear about what I'm advocating for Produce the art and then, just like, before you release it, just like, look at it again, just be like, hmm, who's this for? Okay, is there a way that I can not change the heart and soul of it? But is there a way that I can, kind of you know, chisel it down and shape it to where, instead of it just being my pure brain, waves, like put it in a package that other people can immediately hook onto and see, oh, I get what they're saying, because if it's unintelligible, it's not effective. Right, if it doesn't speak to something that's relatable, if it doesn't speak to something that we all experience as humans, or if it doesn't, it doesn't have to always be relatable either. It could be something brand new. That's that's also valid.
Speaker 3:I've seen art installations where it's like I've never looked at the world that way before. That's wild, but there's all. There's always a reference point back to something that I do understand, and I think that's where it. That's where things like serialism and atonal music. They often lose me and there's no reason why. I mean, there is a real reason why it's used, often in horror, so discomfort Because it's just, it's not.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's so uncomfortable?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we were talking about the barber string quartet and how, you know, nobody really knows the outside movements unless you've played it, because they're so difficult to listen to. I mean, they're difficult to listen to. My quartet was like, yeah, it's just like nothing compared to the middle movements and I said, well, you know, I mean, everything has its time and place, like that was written in 1949. Yeah, I mean, what was everybody going through at that time? I bet that music really resonates in certain ways. However, just kind of pull it back to the initial start of this conversation, which is that there is no money in classical music. The general population of human beings out there in this world right now cannot connect to the majority of what we do, and it's very difficult.
Speaker 3:It's because we don't tell stories. Yeah, you can't.
Speaker 2:Just that's like it is. You guys have just kind of ironed out this two prong part of the process. It's like discovering who you are as an artist and your voice and what's important to you, and then you're not done. You're not done there. Then there's the piece of okay, who is this for, why am I doing it, what am I doing it for and what do I want that person to gain from this experience that I'm giving them? That is a very important piece that we don't learn how to do. We just don't learn how to do it. And unless you are, in and of yourself, entrepreneurial and you go out there and you figure it out for yourself, which a bunch of us are trying to do, wouldn't it be nice? That's just the standard.
Speaker 3:Oh, it'd be real nice.
Speaker 2:The standard of your career training was that. It's very interesting. Located in a historic mansion in Tacoma Park, Maryland, you might get the impression that the team at Potter Violins are as formal as the breathtaking building that they work in, but when you go inside instead, you'll find the most relatable, skilled and friendly staff.
Speaker 1:Yes, the people at Potter's are what really make it a special place. I love visiting because I know that whoever I work with is not going to make me feel like I'm crazy or just being picky. They're kind of like your favorite bartender. They're great listeners who give you what you need without judgment.
Speaker 2:Yes, their technicians are not only super talented, creative and resourceful, they take the time to collaborate with you so that the process of getting your instrument at its best really feels like a partnership.
Speaker 1:So if you're in the area, definitely stop by and introduce yourself to Chris, rob Kimberly, derek, jim, melissa and the whole team, or visit PotterViolinscom to find what you need online.
Speaker 2:It's so fitting, then, that their shop is in this beautiful old house, because the staff at Potter's really makes it feel like home. You have this follow-up article, which I feel like we've got to mention, so I think maybe the moral of the story here is for anybody listening to subscribe to your newsletter, because there's some great material on here.
Speaker 3:Please do We'll?
Speaker 2:put a link in the description. Please do, thank you so you discuss the seven skills every artist entrepreneur has and needs to have. Some of them are just like integral to business things like networking and sales and marketing. I love that. The first one you put was writing. It also made me go, I know.
Speaker 1:I'm literally like oh, no Writing. That's why the blog page of our website is hidden right now.
Speaker 3:Me too. Me too, look, I'm 32. I've been doing social media for over a decade and I'm now just starting to write, because I saw a video a couple months ago that changed my world, and the video maker was like. He was like.
Speaker 3:There are fundamental skills when it comes to creating content on the internet and just business in general. Writing is one of those indelible concepts. Everything is writing.
Speaker 3:When you are trying to get investors or donors, you need to write a business proposal. You need to write a pitch deck. If you need to get people to buy your stuff, you need to write ad copy. If you need people to follow you on Instagram, you need to write your captions. If you want people to follow you and subscribe to your YouTube channel, you need to write your script, because it's all about how you convey your message. If you can't convey your message in a way that's compelling and gets people to listen, it all starts from writing, and writing helps you collect your thoughts and organize them in a way that other people can understand them. And if you don't develop that skill like I haven't for so long, like my poor girlfriend, she, half the time before I started writing, she was like I don't understand what you're talking about and I was like it's in my head, why aren't you just reading my brain? And I realized, oh, I'm just not clear.
Speaker 2:Writing helps you get more clear about your thinking. I'm an external processor, and so that's true for me too. Really, a lot of times I'm like, I'm like dude. I'm saying a thing. How do you not understand what I'm saying? And then, when I write, it makes so much more sense because I go back and read it I'm like, oh, that didn't make any sense, I should rephrase this, I should rephrase this and I should.
Speaker 3:That was unintelligible.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wonder if, oh, it's so interesting that I know there are people who don't feel as comfortable with writing.
Speaker 2:I actually do feel I feel comfortable with writing, but it takes a lot of energy. That's the problem I have with it. It's like it takes a long time to like I'll just dump a bunch of stuff down and then I have to go back and re that I'm trying to say and move things around and whatever. But yeah, I wonder where that skill like maybe some of us, that skill develops out of necessity, though. I get complimented on my email writing a lot and I'm like I think it's just. I think it's just because I had to find a way to communicate clearly, and this was the easiest way to do it.
Speaker 2:It's good, though.
Speaker 3:It's true, but it also works when you're working as a freelancer. If you write well, you'll build better relationships with your contractors. They're going to want to work with you. If you're concise. It's one of those skills that I said. It has a compounding effect and it stacks upon other skills that you already have, or that you will be developing in the future.
Speaker 1:I love that you make it relatable to the people who are coming up in today's world, because you know how informal writing has become Like emails are where texts once were. Texts are like. I mean sometimes I can't even understand what someone texts is so underrated. There's no subject of a sentence anymore. It's like so informal.
Speaker 3:Yes, it's just emojis and gifs. We all have that one friend, that all they do is send emojis or gifs. It's a reference of a reference, of a reference.
Speaker 1:It's the most inside of it. But it is still important that you have these skills, because this is how you're going to present yourself in the world. This is how you're going to market yourself. I love that.
Speaker 2:It is. It's really good. Yeah, it's inspiring to me because I've been a little bit stuck of like OK, where on earth do I start? And I don't want to gloss over too. This is a really big pivot, I think, to hear you talk about the social media content and the algorithm game and how you can use social media to build a large audience. But that audience isn't necessarily your audience at the end of the day.
Speaker 1:You don't own it yeah.
Speaker 2:So how do you get your audience? And your answer is to be more personal. I mean writing a newsletter and sending it to people. That is a very personal thing. Not that your content online was not personal Of course it is but it's like fed through the machine as opposed to delivered directly to the person getting it.
Speaker 3:And that's what I was so excited about it, because I really feel like my audience has become pretty informal in the last at least five years because I haven't really been. I look back at my old posts and I was writing a lot of personal stuff in my captions Because I did it because I wanted people to know me, I wanted people to feel me. But when I got a bigger audience I found that if I don't want that many people knowing something personal about me because I made a post.
Speaker 3:It was after Philando Castile was murdered by police and I made a post called Are you Gonna Shoot Me Too?
Speaker 3:And I got some real racist stuff in my comments that I was not ready for at the time and it's kind of like colored my perception of social media that were. You know I could be me and like people can see me, but they see a black man first and then they see a violist, and then they see me as a human, and so I'm like I need to change the way I communicate, and so I did for a long time, but it didn't give me the satisfaction. So with this newsletter, I really am developing systems where, if you subscribe to my newsletter I haven't done it yet, but I want to tell my story from the beginning. I want you to know who I am, the type of like my fears, my convictions, like what I'm really going for, so you can like trust me and understand where I'm coming from, because I think people they don't really fundamentally know me or my integrity or where I come from as a human being, and I want to develop that more.
Speaker 2:So that's why I'm excited about the newsletter and also, again, that observation just goes to show that you know, in a social media kind of setting, like everyone will love you as long as you're posting the things they want to see.
Speaker 3:Yes, yes, but you know, the things that are controversial get the most eyes.
Speaker 1:I know, I know that's true, we know that from our news media.
Speaker 3:I don't think controversy is necessarily bad, like you guys asked me on here because I said there's no money in classical music and the fact that that's a controversial take is hilarious.
Speaker 1:No, you're just saying the quiet part out loud. Yeah, that's right. Everybody knows it's true, we're just not talking about it, we're dancing around it and yeah like, how am I going to say, how are we going to save this organization, how are we going to save this orchestra?
Speaker 3:Yeah, Well, let's talk about it first.
Speaker 2:Let's not pretend that the house is not a fire, let's just start, so such a fascinating thing to be years out of the shutdown of our industry, and that time was so engaging and there was so much, I would say, revitalized energy of like, okay, we could do things differently, we can try this, we could try that, we do all this stuff. And there was all this promise. There was all this like idea that this promise that we're going to do it differently and now we're going to bring in the big bucks, and now it's not going to be a struggle. And I think we're hitting a point this season where arts leaders in particular and leaders of organizations and just in general in our field are starting to say, oh no, it's still just the pandemic was still just as bad as it was beforehand, even though I'm trying everything I know right now.
Speaker 3:Part of it is the economics. Like I said, we have to learn business. We have to learn economics. If you are a non for profit based institution that relies on donations, in times of higher interest rates, in times of economic contraction, when companies profit margins are receding, they don't have to protect their profits from Uncle Sam, which means they don't have to donate to you, which means they have fewer money to donate anyway, which means your salaries you can't keep them up with inflation. There's so many, there's so many things working against us as artists. We don't even realize that we are employees.
Speaker 3:If you work for these institutions that have no bargaining power to increase your income, oftentimes they'll just cut the size of the orchestra, and I saw this back in 2011, 2012, 2013 with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and so, seeing this, you know, 13, 12, 11 years ago I was like man, this might not be the game. I might need to go into business for myself, because there are too many things that are working against us. So we need to build more skills. That is my thesis. That is really when I'm going for it. We need to build more skills that give us more autonomy, that allow us to thrive in a decentralized manner away from institutions, so that we can perform on our own terms.
Speaker 2:Here here Real quick you mentioned. I just want to ask this. You said the word unionism wants in this conversation, but we kind of like went, we kind of like left it.
Speaker 3:Yes, put that here.
Speaker 2:Yes, you know, in terms of how unionism impacts us in a positive or negative way, and related to and this is this is really what I'm getting at related to this concept of how we know our value at any given stage of our careers. So we're talking about okay, you have a kid that is in high school and is tutoring a student and they're making 30 bucks an hour doing it. I'm not charging 30 bucks an hour to teach. I'm never those days are. I'm not sure those days ever existed, but if they did, it was a very long time ago. How do we get to a point where there's a more universal expectation of the setting of value for what it is that we do, or is that so individualized that it's? You can't quite come up with a system Like at what point does the system work against us or has its own part to play?
Speaker 3:It's very complex because we're no longer working with the global marketplace and now the value and like the quality varies. You know, if you're going to Budapest, you're going to London, you're going to Melbourne or Sydney, or if you're going to Czechoslovakia or Prague, you have to realize like everybody in the world is now competing to record for movies. Everybody in the world is competing to write strings for big artists. So you know, I don't think there is a way to like collectively bargain globally. Yet I think that that is what would be required because you know there will always be somebody that will take the gig for 100 bucks. You know there will always be a person who they just want exposure, right, they just want to say that they recorded strings for Justin Bieber to help them get bigger gigs and maybe make money down the road. So there always be those opportunities and I don't think anyone union can can stop it.
Speaker 3:But I'm optimistic that you know, if you build yourself a brand that is valuable, that provides a unique value proposition to the marketplace, you won't have to play a commodity game. And I think that is a true conversation. Are you replaceable? The answer is yes. Figure out why and fix it, because at the end of the day, like we need to be able to charge more than minimum wage to be able to sustain ourselves. And not everybody's going to be able to do it, and that's okay. But we're all on a journey and if you're not there yet, if you're still in the commodity tier, build your skills, build your moat, make yourself indispensable, and then you will have very different conversations when the time comes.
Speaker 1:That's great, that's a great way to leave it Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Thank you, drew, this was amazing.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 3:This was so much fun Always such amazing thought provoking my discourse that we have here.
Speaker 1:It's good.
Speaker 3:I really enjoy speaking with you guys. Definitely Let me know if you have any questions or topics that you want me to talk about. On Grace Notes, my newsletter I definitely want to write this newsletter for people like us who are definitely we're relieving the matrix a little bit and we're trying to build our own path.
Speaker 2:How can people subscribe to Grace Notes Drew?
Speaker 3:you can go to my Instagram at that viola kid. Tap the link in my bio. You can click join my newsletter and put your email in there. Or you can go to my website that viola kidcom and click on Grace Notes tab and put your email there and you'll get a new email every.
Speaker 2:Friday Everybody go, subscribe, you won't be disappointed. I am Thank you again, Drew.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much for having me guys Appreciate you.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for listening today. If you loved this episode, consider writing us a five-star review on Apple podcasts, amazon music, spotify or wherever you listen.
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Speaker 2:Our theme music was written and produced by JP Wogerman and is performed by Stefan myself.
Speaker 1:Our episodes are produced by Liz O'Hara and edited by Emily McMahon.
Speaker 2:Thanks again for listening. Let's talk soon.
