For the last few years I’ve referred to NEO as an experiment in musical utopia, but haven’t fully defined for myself what that means. We spend a fair bit of time examining the traditional hierarchies of classical music in an attempt to great a more egalitarian form of music making, which I suspect is part of the “utopia” vibe, and last year participants started calling NEO an anti-professional space, and speaks to a different kind of idealistic artist space.

This year, part of the festival conversation was around the concept of self-actualization, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and art’s fraught relationship with capitalism. The conversation centered around the question: what happens if we invert the pyramid and place self-actualization as the fundamental basis for building our life?
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​The question comes from this article by Teju Ravilochan, which charts Maslow’s own influence in creating his hierarchy of needs, which some research suggests may have been influenced by his time with the  Blackfoot tribe.

I presented the outline of this idea as part of a broader suggestion to artists that we have to invest our time and resources into our work first, looking at the perennial question of ‘what is enough’ in our lives, in particular the material aspect of our lives, and once we’ve achieved enough putting our energy towards fulfilling those other needs. My thought was to reclaim the idea of the starving artist from a person who can’t make a living with their art to one who chooses to live simply so they can put their time, energy, and resources into what matters most.

It seems simple enough, but humans are inherently wanting creatures and our sense of what is enough is always expanding. Maybe it’s in our nature to always want more, or maybe it’s because we fear scarcity and want to hoard what we can to secure our future. Probably it’s a bit of both. 

This desire for more doesn’t just apply to our material needs, it’s true for the other needs Maslow lists out as well. For artists, our sense of belonging and esteem can become an un-fillable hole, always seeking higher levels of prestigious association, bigger gigs, and greater renown. Seeking validation from others isn’t the only way we move the goal posts to our own sense of enoughness though. What could be the act of developing our creative voice as a way of unveiling our most authentic self, and as a step towards building a fully expressed and authentic community/culture, is too often subsumed by a mentality that our work is only valuable if it meets certain criteria. It needs to make enough money to meet our needs, or have a certain number of audience members, or be reviewed by a particular publication, and on and on. 

That’s capitalism baby! 

So, can we actually invert Maslow’s hierarchy and place our self-actualization as our priority and assume the rest will fall into place? Perhaps so, in a society that takes care of each other and considers the health of the whole over the desires or ambitions of individuals. Ravilochan shares this story from "Dana Arvis…when she asked Native communities in the Cheyenne River territory about poverty:
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“They told me they don’t have a word for poverty,” she said. “The closest thing that they had as an explanation for poverty was ‘to be without family.’” Which is basically unheard of.”

This might imply that a capitalist environment, one where with an increasingly large wealth gap where those without are forced to focus on acquiring basic needs, makes self-actualization (especially through art) an opportunity for the privileged few.

But here’s another perspective, one that comes from looking at impoverished societies who have placed the value of self-actualization at the center of their culture: self-actualization is a process that runs alongside fulfilling our other needs. It’s not a luxury that comes after everything else, it is a mentality we bring to every activity in our lives. 

Cynthia (psychotherapist extraordinaire and also my wife) says that anytime we try to create strict linear progressions like this, we run into trouble. The stages of grief, for instance, aren't experienced in a straight line, and the hierarchy of our needs is similar. In fact, Ravilochan includes the following caption as important context to the above image: “Because Maslow never himself depicted his hierarchy as a pyramid (Kaufman, 2019) and the Blackfoot did not draw their worldview on a tipi (Heavy Head, 2021), this diagram should not be read as an exact comparison or as capturing the nuances of both lenses. However, I have included it here to help those of us mired in Western thinking see the different emphasis of First Nations perspectives.”

Instead, Ravilochan shares a circular model of needs based on the ideas of Terry Cross:

​This is remarkably similar to a chart I have shared during NEO for years, which is a sort of mapping of the Japanese concept of Ikigai, which roughly translates to your purpose (another way of saying self actualization).

The circular nature of the Ikigai flower also resists the idea of a linear progression of needs, instead saying that we must find an expression of our life that satisfies all of these aspects as part of the process of self-actualization.

I’ve come to realize that I see the NEO Festival as an experiment in utopia because it's a space where we focus on Self and Community Actualization as the primary goals of our work and explore how we might bring that kind of focus into the music world as a whole. Every year I go through this set of topics, I hear feedback from folks that they’d love to hear more about the practical logistics of actually making money with music, and I get it. Maybe your needs aren’t being met and music is all you’ve got to rely on, but what if, along the way, we put our energy into the human aspect of being an artist, how it feeds us and others, how it connects and builds bridges from meaning, how it not just fulfills but makes manifest the realist parts of our humanity, and then understand that all of the above is a practice we can bring to everything we do, we might just find we aren't making art, we're making a world.

About 10 years ago I made a concerted effort to create more transparency around finances in the music world. The lack of financial transparency within a profession is a leading factor in pay inequality and how we end up with exploitive labor practices and being in the awkward position of needing to negotiate our own pay.
This movement started in the tech world among programmers, specifically to address the gender pay gap, and it was popular trend on social media under the tag #TalkPay.

I’ve made it a regular practice to update these numbers based on where I am in my career, and inflation has also changed things dramatically (or not…) in the last 10 years. It’s also worth noting that these numbers are from work mostly within the largest coastal cities in the US and might not translate to places with a different cost of living.

If you're curious, you can compare what I've written here to my last TalkPay update in 2019. I'll also offer a little analysis at the end, but for now here are the numbers.

Composer

• Choral Commission from professional ensemble, 5-7 min: $5k
• Choral commission from a university (5 min) with a two day residency: ($1,250 + transport, meals, housing, etc)
• Guest Artistic Director Fee: $5k (for me) $15k towards the production itself
• University residency: $500 per day, $2k for the week (housing included + per diem and travel)

Performance

• Chorus work, $100-$150 per call, typically $500-$1000 total
• Solo or small ensemble  (opera, oratorio, etc), $150-$200 per call, typically 800-$1000
• Film soundtracks (indie): $75-$150 per hour, 3 hr minimum call
• Solo show: $150 - $1000 (depends on size and scope of show and organization)

Music Directing

• Assistant conductor, church ensemble: $46 / hr
• Choral conducting, chamber professional group: $200 / call
• Opera music director, small-size company: Typically about $200 per call, about double what the singers make.
• Opera music director, mid-size company: $7k per show
  • This was a weird situation that was a combo of specialized vocal coaching and music directing

Teaching

• Private composition lessons, though community college: $65 / hr, 50 min lessons
• Fitness classes (capoeira): $45 / class
• Guest lectures (university): $200-$500
• Guest lectures (small org): $150

 Admin

• Film score contracting: depends on the number of singers, but often one singers pay or if it’s just a couple of people, 50% of one singers pay
• Chamber choir contracting: 5-10% of total singer budget

Some thoughts / Analysis

Comparing this to five years ago, numbers are generally higher. Partly because I've continued to grow in my career, and partly because things have change since covid and the inflation of recent years.

Things that have stayed consistent (some since 2011, which is kind of wild...), in particular community choir like conducting gigs and  private lesson teaching at collegiate institutions. Conducting is one of the kinds of work that seems to have the least consistency. Some places it's once a week and pays about $10k a year, other places it's the same time commitment but only $2k.

For a long time, $100 per call was a decent average for gigs, usually 3 hours per call, so about $33 an hour. At this point in my career that's starting to feel like and $40-$50 average hourly rate feels more appropriate, especially when it's work with groups like HEX who are more of a 'premiere' ensemble. I've sometimes paid less, $50-$100 per rehearsal for choral gigs that are community based passion projects.

My commissions are few and far between. It's not a big source of income and I don't pursue it heavily preferring to stick to projects that I REALLY want to do. Because of that I often create new work for nothing.

Performance fees are somewhat similar. Most of my low paying gigs are evening length solo events where I can do whatever I want, and I use those opportunities as a chance to experiment and explore (like what I do at the PRS). The higher paying fees are generally more visible gigs with higher expectations (like a recent gig at LACMA).

As you may have seen in the past, I’m pretty big on creating more financial transparency in the arts and have posted the various amounts of money I’ve made doing different kinds of work. I do this primarily because I think this kind of transparency is necessary to create a more equitable culture for the arts (it was a trend that originally started in the tech field to address the gender pay gap), but I also see a number of artists, especially in the early part of their careers, trying to get a handle on what it costs (and how to raise money) for their ambitious projects. Such transparency among the people immediately around us can help clarify what’s within our reach and how we might be able to accomplish it.
 
So, in the same spirit of transparency, I wanted to share with everyone a general breakdown of expenses for the initial production of Conference of the Birds, which was a multi-part development process. The below financial information is focused on the workshop performances and culminating premiere at the Broad Stage,  both of which had about a 4 week rehearsal process with about 2 full cast rehearsals and 2 principles-only rehearsals each week. I hope it helps!

EXPENSES

• Performer fees - approx $25,000
  • This is the biggest part of our budget. There is a cast of over 20 performers. Each was paid a flat rate based on the scheduled number of rehearsals based on a rate of $50 a rehearsal. Each performer was paid the flat rate regardless of whether or not they missed a rehearsal or two.
  • these flat rates were about $500-800 per person for each set of shows (including an initial week of workshops that was poorly attended due to covid).
  • For context, Each full cast rehearsal costs over $1k and each principles-only rehearsal about $400. About half of this was for the workshop performances including presentations at Scripps College and A Noise Within, the other half is for the Broad Stage.

 

• Creative Team - TBD (but probably should be around for $15k for composer, music director, librettist, and director/choreographer. This doesn’t include a commissioning fee, which was originally going to be another $15k before COVID and now is $0).
  • With a self-produced project of this size, the creative team is the last to be paid. We werecompensated about $2,300 each for the week long residency at Scripps as part of them presenting the workshop performance, but we also donated it back to the show to make sure we could cover the performer costs. There are additional unavoidable costs for the director/choreographer who came from out of state including travel and lodging. Luckily, we received support from the institution where he works to cover those costs (or he paid for them out of pocket directly).

 

• Rehearsal Space - Donated. 
  • This was HUGE for us. When we couldn’t get the space donated it cost about $100 per rehearsal. If we had to rent a space for every rehearsal and workshop the cost would have been around $5,000
• Designers and Crew -  $6,000
  • Includes lighting and costume design, production manager and stage manager
• Costumes - $2,000
  • Materials and additional labor for costumes
• Other Production expenses (broadstage) - approx. $25,000
  • I’ve included this line item to capture the general production costs for the Broad Stage. In a typical production agreement,  we wouldn’t need to worry about these expenses at all. Because this is a co-production, however, the Broad Stage is essentially taking a risk on the show and is covering these expenses through ticket sales. If ticket sales surpass their in-house production costs, we will split the excess 60/40 (we get 60%).

 

• Other production expenses (ANW and Scripps) - ?? (But probably $10k-$15k for each venue)
  • These producers provided full production support for our workshop presentations including rehearsal/performance space, front of house staff, technical staff, health/covid support, lights, box office, custodial infrastructure, marketing and PR, program design and printing, and probably a bunch of other stuff I’m not even aware of.

INCOME

• Foundation Grants
  • New Music USA gave us $5k for an early workshop not including in the above budget.
  • The Farhang Foundation (a major supporter of Persian culture related programming in Southern California) supported a good portion of the performer fees for the Broad Stage show as well as additional marketing support.

 

• Government Grants
  • The Resonance Collective didn’t receive any grants directly, but our presenting/performing partners did. C3LA received money from the Department of Cultural Affairs towards this project and Scripps College received NEA funding for it (some of which will go towards a future recording!)
• Institutional Support
  • Scripps and A Noise Within properly produced the workshop productions at their institutions including paying the performers. Scripps also supported the show by awarding an O’Brien residency to the creative team and we used both our fees and additional residency funds towards the production. Our main soloist also used her faculty recital funds to support the cost of the show
  • In addition, the University of South Carolina covered all of the director/choreographer’s travel and lodging over the last 3 years of workshops and development.​
• Individual Donations
  • We are in the middle of this part right now :) we have a CharityBuzz campaign going and a crowd-funding both of which directly support our expenses. Our goal is a total of about $15,000 between the two platforms. 
  • Normally, the division for most performance based non-profits is an equal split between individual donations, grants, and ticket sales, but for us individual donations are a relatively small part of the overall budget. Still, that $15k we are hoping to raise will ensure all expenses are covered and might even all the creative team to get paid a little too :)

It’s worth noting that all of the institutional/foundation/government support came from various artists and community members involved with the show who really believed in the message and story of this piece. I can’t stress enough how important developing a strong community of like-minded folks is to bringing a project to life and there is absolutely no way this could have happened without many people stepping up, offering their resources and the resources of the institutions with which they are associated. 

Any questions? Add them to the comments below.

I'd like to share with you the the serendipitous story of how our telling of The Conference of the Birds came to be:
 
In 2018, when my friend Anne Harley approached me about setting Attar's The Conference of the Birds to music, I had a sense the time had come to finally give it a try. I took a trip to the Last Bookstore in DTLA to see what translations were available. 

Browsing along the shelves, reading the various spines, one book caught my eye. Unlike the other books on the shelf, it was turned out so I could see the simple but beautiful cover. I picked it up, seeing that it had been published only a few months earlier and that the writer, Sholeh Wolpé, happened to also live in Los Angeles. It was at this moment that a child, no higher than my hip, ran by, craning his neck upward at all the books and started yelling "It's so big! I'm small! I'm small!". 
 
Dumbfounded by what seemed like a mystical revelation coming from this young person, I turned to a random page in the book. The modern poetry, both elegant and straightforward, engulfed me immediately.
 
...But if you come to it as a pure drop,
you will lose yourself in the Ocean,
becoming one with its vast water.
The Ocean's currents
will become yours, too –
its shining beauty, yours.
You will be and not be.

How can that be?
It's beyond mind's comprehension.
 
I knew this was the right translation, so I bought the book and immediately emailed Sholeh telling her I was interested in putting it to music. She responded the same day and invited me for some tea in her neighborhood, walking distance from where I lived at the time. We hit it off, and I told her the story of how I came across her translation and she said:

"I did that. I went to the Last Bookstore to make sure they were carrying the book and I pulled a copy out and turned it so the cover was facing out. I put it there so you could find it."

While I've wanted to create this piece for 10 years, It's only now, with the help of my incredible collaborators, I finally feel ready to bring to life Attar's story of the Conference of the Birds. The entire process of creating this work has challenged and enriched me throughout, but serendipity has also followed the process along way – a series of astonishing coincidences that have amplified the size and impact of the piece until it grew into the fully staged, movement-driven oratorio. If you haven't yet, you can buy your tickets using the link below.

Buy Your Tickets Now