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Kreisler's comment in another thread about a contemporary Mozart being steered away from music by his high school guidance counselor made me wonder what experiences people here have had with guidance counselors regarding music. If any. If you had such a counselor, did you talk about potential careers in music? Did they have any clue at all?

When I had my "career discussion" with our counselor, he sat me down, shuffled some test result materials around on his desk, and said, "Well, you can do anything you want, but if it involves math, it might be a little more work than otherwise. Not that you couldn't do it if you wanted to. Any questions?" I think I mentioned one lame career and he just reiterated that I could do whatever. And that was pretty much the extent of it, and the whole thing took probably less than one minute! I just didn't really know what to ask or say. So, how about you?

I wouldn't encourage anyone take up music as a career. If you need encouragement you're not going to be happy.

Interesting reply KbK, I think that should go for any career though. A little discouragement on the other hand I think could help make your mind sure, and make you think about difficulties you might have to overcome. At least the little discouragement I had from pursuing a music career made me even more sure to try hard to show that I could do it, and I'm well on my way.

As a side note, how often do highschool guidance counselors know exactly what a 'music career' is when you don't give specifics? Any path when you give a subject like 'music,' or 'math,' or 'english,' could have many different ways to take. Music: getting an education degree to teach in a public school, a bachelor's of music for private instruction or perhaps teaching in a private school, going on for masters and doctorate for college instruction/ performance, and so many others including composition, musicology, and the expanding field of ethnomusicology.

After my guidance counselor suggested I take up underwater arc welding as a career, I pretty much forgot what she said about anything else.

I would think that any discouraging statements they make would be a strong disservice to you.

In 11th grade, she asked every student to fill out a form with 3 possible careers we might be interested in, so that she could arrange for us to shadow someone in that field for a day.

I must have been the only one who wrote "concert pianist" in all three spaces, and it took her a year to find someone for me to talk with (who would later be my piano teacher through college).

My guidance counselor was very excited that I wanted to go into music, and encouraged it. Music in general was always encouraged in my high school, and quite a few students went on to music school.

I grew up in a rural community. My school district had approximately the same # of square miles in it as the Bronx burough. In that school district, there was one high school, and that high school had 98 kids total (freshman, sophmore, junior and senior) the year I graduated.

Now that we have established the level of podunk to which we are referring:

My high school teachers (the English teacher doubled as the 'guidance counselor') basically said to me, "You're good at music. You should be a music teacher." (by which she meant, 'classroom music teacher' as private piano studio was not considered viable).

Since I was 'obviously' going to stay in rural Kansas (the thought we might leave and move to a city wasn't much credited), and the only real 'career' open to a girl (this was in the 70's) was a school teacher, that was it.

I actually did a couple of years as a music ed major...before coming to the realization that I loved music but did NOT want to be a school music teacher. And that I didn't have to!

During my freshman year in college, when I was uncertain about continuing as a music major, a career counselor suggested that I could always play the piano for my own enjoyment and at rotary club and church functions. So I took his advice and changed my major to English. An intensive one semester survey course in Medieval English literature did me in .....and I went back to music and stuck with it through grad school. Funny thing - 44 years later I'm now playing the piano for my own enjoyment and at community and church activitres.

Where there is a will, there is a way! My parents said no to a musical career but I'm quite sucessful, and now they're starting to see that I was right after all!.

Meri

I think a music career is a tough thing for a counselor (or a parent) to recommend. There are massively talented musicians who are unable to make a living at their music. Lots of kids want to grow up and be rock stars, and some will. But the vast majority of those who want to will not succeed, for reasons that may have nothing to do with their ability. (In fact, sometimes it seems there may be in inverse relationship between ability and success!)

I did have a successful music industry career (as sound engineer, not a musician), but I cannot say that it came from a formal path that a guidance counselor would recommend. It required an awful lot of being in the right place at the right time, lots of relationship-building, and a lot of skill-building that had little to do with academics. In fact, it was probably antithetical to academics, as while I was supposed to be studying in college, I was out doing sound for local "bar bands". (You can go to school for sound engineering, but oddly, none of the most successful engineers I know were graduates of those academies. The best ones are people who spent untold sweat learning the business and making their place in it.)

And even at the peak of my career, when I was touring nationally and regularly working with and for A-list artists, my parents wondered when I'd get a "real job".

I know lots of people make a good living at some aspect of the music business, but it's a far smaller number than those who would like to, and it's a circuitous route to get there. I can see how counselors could reasonably not understand how to deal with music careers.