Introduction

In 2018, I received the first prize at the Hamamatsu International Piano Competition. The next morning, I was directed to a large room where two gentlemen were sitting. They introduced themselves as “artist managers.” I have rarely felt as helpless as I did in that encounter: I didn’t know what to expect, what to ask, or what to do. It took me a long time to understand how the invisible side of being a musician interacts with the business aspect. This is what I will try to examine in this lecture: to argue that the life of a classical musician is not governed merely by coincidence after coincidence. There is, I believe, a broader horizon for artistic expression, one that goes beyond simply playing at the world standard. To uncover this horizon, I will frame this lecture in two parts: first, the reason — an exploration of the role of the artistic personality in society; and second, the method — the tools and concrete actions that can bring that role to life.

I stood before an agency change when Drazen Domjanic asked me if I would be interested in speaking to the scholarship holders of the Music Academy in Liechtenstein, where I was a student as well, about how one could survive and thrive in the classical music market. This was a couple of years ago, and I was feeling lost. Drazen’s request paved the way for a few vital questions: “What is it that I steer my life towards?” and “What is a successful career?” For the purpose of this lecture, I will focus exclusively on a soloist career. However, I believe it is important to note that defining success by such volatile and inconsistent terms sets the stage for a damaging psychological state. Success is best defined, in my opinion, as fulfilment and the belief that the activity one is pursuing is overall for the betterment of the world. It is a fascinating discussion, but for brevity in this lecture, I will leave it at that.

The conditions around that time obliged me to revisit my childhood, my adolescence, and finally the crucial points which brought me there. Although music is taught in universities, I find it has the most similarities with athletics. As in athletics, those who are so inclined are put under enormous pressure to bring forth quantifiable achievements. In athletics, this is perhaps more justifiable as competition is raison d’etre for them. They thrive on winning. For music, on the other hand, there is no institution, no competition that can measure competency objectively. This being said, competition success is, one can with relative certainty say, paramount in a classical musician’s career. This incongruity is damaging. I see musicians talk about competitions as if they were the pathway to lifelong activity in concert life. Rarely is the question ever asked: what happens 5 years, 10 years, or 20 years after a competition success?

Of course, at this point, counter-examples will be provided: Seong Jin Cho, Alexandre Kantorow, Yunchan Lim, or even a few fortunate ones who were discovered without ever having won any prize. “Isn’t Yunchan Lim the proof that going out there, playing so marvellously is enough to warrant success?” I ask myself. For one Yunchan Lim who is so deservedly conquering the world’s greatest stages, how many are there scrambling for a tiny bit of recognition? In broader terms, why do we take outlier examples of “breaking the system” and try to turn them into a model?

This was indeed the reason I’d been feeling so lost. Since the beginning, I was a fortunate person. I put in the necessary work and made the necessary sacrifices, yet I never had the feeling that it was in vain. This was the first time that I thought Fortune might start turning her back to me. I was putting in the same amount of work as before, or perhaps more, but for the first time I saw doors of opportunity closing. It was very tempting to blame it on misfortune, on an agency which was perhaps doing less than what they could have been doing. Even more tempting was to enter another competition, pry those doors of Fortune open once more: roll the dice one more time in hopes that it may land on a 6. Yet what if Fortune had indeed turned her back on me by that time? What would I do then? Would I bitterly look back at the graveyard of dreams, thinking how close I had come to making it? Then I found a second question forming quietly but incessantly: “Making what?”

In an attempt to find an answer, I started writing what would later become a sort of artistic self-portrait. The more I wrote, the more contradictions surfaced: if what I wanted was to play for people, I shouldn’t have disregarded social media, PR, and promotion. If I wanted to play for myself, I shouldn’t have gone to competitions, which have the sole purpose of presenting one’s music to a larger audience. I didn’t believe that most classical musicians have an opportunity to affect people’s lives in a meaningful way, but also at the same time knew no better than to play the game in hopes of winning.

I had to find an answer to the philosophical question of not what I wanted to achieve, but rather what I am, or rather what role I was meant to play on the theatre stage of real life.

Only then would we find a method, which was mine and mine alone to follow. The method is inseparable from the reason. That is why the title I have chosen for this article rests on two separate islands that are connected in a specific way: the question about the relevance of old art—which establishes the reason—and the career path lying ahead—which establishes the method.

The Reason

A great majority of classical musicians deal with artworks that are hundreds of years old. Performing these works is shrouded in rituals which would appear downright bizarre to the uninitiated. Take a very probable comment from a newcomer to the classical scene:

— I have been chatting in a classical forum. I really like Glenn Gould’s Mozart recordings, but they told me that it is sacrilegious what Gould plays. First I should listen to them by Mitsuko Uchida to discover “real” Mozart. I don’t quite understand what “real Mozart” means.

Take a moment to reflect on that expression. It almost has a religious fervour to it: those who are initiated know what “real Mozart” is, and we should trust their visions because it is the truth. One witnesses this approach in nearly any review or commentary. Do listen to Dave Hurwitz on YouTube; a very telling example.

Classical music has a long and crushing tradition, which is often conflicting in itself. A musician can and will get sucked into endless debates about whether it is more appropriate to play the first note of Beethoven’s First Sonata longer or shorter. This is important for the integrity of our work; however, we have to keep in mind that the listeners’ attention is not diverted there. There has been a personality cult around classical music. I don’t praise or criticise it, but rather merely point it out. Alan Walker quotes Liszt: The cult of personality is less harmful to the music than the cult of anonymity. In that sense, we have to remember that our artistry does not consist only of the notes we play but extends to our entire being.

The question then becomes: “What role do I assume as an artist in society?” There might have been a happier time when the body of work spoke for itself and became a sort of artistic mask to hide the person behind it. As literacy for musical understanding decreases in society as a whole, the body of work (especially in the case of an interpreter) loses its significance as well. I’d argue that most of the “classical” audience is oblivious to the fact that any professional musician’s skillset and intellectual prowess usually goes much beyond playing the score.

Music is not just music. It has historical, sportive, sociological, and psychological aspects as well. The fact that certain tunes have withstood the test of time doesn’t mean that the way those tunes have been perceived hasn’t changed. Here, I make a broader point. For all the novelty of pop music—the new hit, the newer hit, and the newest hit—the enduring endearment of certain older music, Freddie Mercury, Michael Jackson, Pink Floyd, and more, reminds me a lot of the myth-building of classical music. Nostalgia is a powerful feeling, and it is one that shapes our musical preferences. When we talk about the relevance of classical music in the 21st century, we must think in these terms: in what ways does the music speak to the audience? My grandmother always spoke fondly of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, despite otherwise knowing little about music, simply because her music teacher played a vinyl during their music appreciation class at school. How can we help create these connections through music?

Perhaps due to the rather insular nature of classical music, we shape our artistry directed towards the inner market: to agents, recording labels, reviewers. We don’t really acknowledge our audience. The primary question, when it comes to reaching people, is thus: “Whom do I want to communicate with? Who is my audience?” In that aspect, playing with prestigious ensembles in prestigious venues is much, much less important.

If we were to talk to aspiring musicians and ask for their dreams, we’d hear about their dream halls, conductors, ensembles, labels. This is how we define success in this field, and this is also how we construct our CVs. I think this is not the correct approach. Provided that the required competence and proficiency are met, if an invitation comes from Wigmore Hall or Carnegie Hall, it is essentially because Fortune brought us in front of the right decision-makers at the right time. On this, we can have no influence. Competence is not a unique trait; it is a prerequisite. The traits that we have beyond competence—the cult of personality, the unique contribution to our public’s lives—are what would make the invitation from Wigmore or Carnegie or elsewhere inevitable, as soon as the other conditions are met.

If Fortune wills so, the cards fall in place—remember the example of Yunchan Lim from earlier. The thing is, a stroke of Fortune that one encounters the right people, the right audience, at the right time, only facilitates the process of assuming a certain role in society as an artist; it doesn’t guarantee it. The issue always remains: how to yield Fortune, as best as we can, to our will. If we revisit the “rolling the dice” analogy, in order to forge a career path, we must ensure that we don’t bet randomly on outcomes. That means, in concrete terms, that none of our actions should work to undermine our answers to the aforementioned questions of the role in society that we wish to assume, in what ways our music speaks to the public, and whom we are seeking to engage with.

The Method

The classical music industry is perceived to be in a perpetual identity crisis. This took form especially after the 1980s debate on whether classical music is dying and continues today in the form of how it adapts to a world of new communication mediums. There is a lot written and said regarding social media and the internet; that is a different discussion. What concerns me for the question at hand is the way the industry itself deals with the issues arising from the new reality. The answer I have to that, today in 2025, is that the industry hasn’t yet come to terms with this new reality but can’t disregard it either. So, what is the new reality?

The new reality is that the traditional gatekeeping institutions have been eroded or disappeared altogether. Critics don’t have the power anymore to make or break a career, the few surviving labels with a certain reach are restructuring to maintain their relevance in the streaming era, and the mighty impresarios are no more. No middleman is willing to invest in concert tours of an unknown artist anymore in hopes of a good return. There is not enough financial security net for that, and most people who have that sort of expertise are not in the business anymore.

Because of this erosion, for the majority of artists there is too little capital for too many different fields of proficiency. Here is a breakdown of these fields relevant to anyone who strives for a concert career:

• Administration, which includes travel arrangements, visas, contracts, tax, negotiations with the organisers, etc.

• Marketing, which includes social media strategies, streaming services, content creation, audience creation, and advertising on social media platforms.

• PR, which includes print media and visual content. Actually, marketing should encompass PR as well; however, in practice, they fulfil different roles.

• Sales, which includes pitching projects to orchestras, recital series, etc.

Out of my own experience, it is a full-time job to take care of these four fields. That would mean that one would actually need a full-time manager per artist, which is impossible. That’s the crucial point: the milestones that we’d associate with great leaps in our careers — signing on to an agency, recording a debut CD, getting good reviews — are becoming less and less impactful, although not altogether unimportant precisely because there are so few structures which manage the windfall of these events. I am not claiming that a career is possible without an agency or a label. However, the threshold of “making it” it also becoming more and more blurred.

In this sense, seeing the importance our own actions (as opposed to those taken on behalf of us), I want to return for a moment to the concept of “Cult of Personality,” Alan Walker mentions. Think of any successful musician who has left a legacy. Chances are, you’ll associate a certain way of being with them, perhaps certain apparels or recurring traits. There is Gould’s gesticulations, Horowitz’ flat fingers, Trifonov’s hunched back, Rubinstein’s nobility…

This is where the reason and the method merge. If there is no artistic manifesto, there cannot be a method. No asset, never more than today, should contradict the artistic manifesto. One could say the method is the visible (and often quantifiable for the expert eye) symptom of the rather metaphysical artistic philosophy. To illuminate with an example: the mediant relationships in Schubert’s music are the manifestation of a certain psychological state which can’t be precisely defined. The effect should be that the audience is able to recognise an artist’s fingerprint without necessarily knowing why; just as they can say a piece sounds like Schubert but cannot explain why.

It is a certain truism that the process by which a philosophical idea takes form through a certain method also changes its essence. When the method becomes apparent, the subject can turn into a parody of itself. We must walk this thin line at all times.

When a certain aesthetic has been set — what would be known in marketing as a brand identity — the next step is to find the audience that resonates with this aesthetic. Here, the transient nature of the classical market necessitates a hybrid approach. It is crucial to utilise the existing structures to the maximum: to take on concerts, recording projects, agency offers, teaching positions, while simultaneously moulding them with our unique aesthetic. There are very few classical musicians, perhaps none, who can pull off venue hire, promotion, and ticketing by themselves. Even if this were theoretically possible, it is not how the classical music industry traditionally works: there is a clear hierarchy between the impacts of events. That means: playing in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall is not simply playing in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall. However magnificent a self-produced album might be, in the current state of affairs, it will never have the impact of an album from a major label, neither within the industry (intendants, reviewers, promoters) nor in terms of audience reach. The emancipation we were hoping for during the Covid pandemic hasn’t taken form. The only way forward is to utilise the existing structures while retaining the aesthetic integrity I mentioned earlier.

Of course, the argument against the merits of freelancing can be applied here as well. There is, indeed, an incongruity between the definition implied by the term “General Management” and the real-world scenario, where a management is everything but “General.” This leaves musicians, especially young musicians, very vulnerable to fluctuations in the concert market and forces them to regulate the volatility of the market through almost non-existent means. Especially within this flux, the importance of staying true and close to the ideals of the previously mentioned artistic manifesto cannot be overstated. The question: “What can I do today which will help me a minuscule amount to approach my broader goal?” is the single most important question. Answering that question and following through daily is our best line of defence against fickle Fortune.