The Bad News Bell Curve

| Jul 8, 2014 |

Most students accepted into university music programs as performance majors have the talent and potential to succeed as professional musicians. Yet far fewer than fifty percent end up making a good living as performers. Why is this? A look at the bell curve may help to shed some light on this.

The bell curve represents what statisticians call a “normal distribution.” What this means for performance majors is that most of them fit somewhere in the middle. A few on one side of the curve are extremely poor, while a few on the other side are superior. In most professions, you can be in the middle of the bell curve in college and make a fine living after graduation. But if you are a music performance major and are in the middle of the bell curve, you have relatively little chance to succeed as a professional. Only the truly superior students will have a chance, and they will be competing with the top students from other schools. In addition, when they audition for jobs such as orchestra positions, they will be competing against top students from other countries. That’s the good news. The bad news is that these superior students could also be competing against seasoned professionals who may be at the level of their own teacher.

The problem arises when the student confuses talent with skill, and those are two completely different things. Talent is what we are born with, but skill is far more important – it is basically the final product that we offer. And the only way to develop talent into skill is by working very hard and also working very smart. Since most college students do believe they have the talent, the ones that end up at the superior side of the bell curve are simply the ones who have a better and more intelligent work ethic. Many top professional musicians use the phrase, “Hard work trumps talent.”  That is what it takes to get to the far end of the bell curve.

Unfortunately, most students don’t seem to realize how difficult it is to become a successful working musician. They feel comfortable in their college or conservatory music program and expect their success to continue. But in music performance, good or comfortable is not good enough. Sometimes it’s not even close to being good enough. This may sound brutal, but in fact it’s brutally honest. If you want a career in music performance, you’d better be at the far end of the bell curve. Being in the middle of the bell curve probably will not get you a career in music, or at least a successful career in music.

So, if you are a music student and feel comfortable at school… beware the Bad News Bell Curve.