A Last Lecture ossia Implementing Change

First, watch Graham Weaver's YouTube on "How to live an asymmetrical life".

It might seem like a lecture just for business students, but it is not. It's applicable to classical music, the training singers get, how to focus on goals and career aspirations, and how to walk towards those goals. Here's the video:

I thought I'd frame this "Last Lecture" (a series that happens at Stanford Business School) for anyone out there graduating this spring, or entering into a new program this summer or fall, around the concepts Weaver shares in the lecture as they might apply to young classical musicians.

Beyond the main outline he speaks about - Do the Hard Thing / Do Your Thing / Do it for Decades / Write your own Story - there are many nuggets of wisdom. I'll get to the main outline below, but first there are a few things I take away from his talk:

1) Don't play small. Limiting yourself to a handful of rep, one teacher, a few performances, in order to “save” your voice, or to “work on” your voice in isolation, or with just your teacher, is playing small. The more you play, the bigger your playing field and the more other players will enter into your network, resulting in more opportunities. Playing small means lost opportunities.

2) There’s no safe path, there’s no path of ease.  “Life is suffering, so choose something worth suffering for.” You need passion for everything about the career, not just for performing in front of others, or specific rep like Mahler or Rameau or Kaminsky. You need an absurd amount of passion for exploring diverse rep - new and old. You need passion to be alone learning an absurd amount of rep. That's how you'll be able to write your own story. You need passion to do hard things.

3) Before anything in life gets better, it’s usually gonna get worse. Like the rowing metaphor, the biggest shift upwards or forwards occurs in the first few weeks of changing the regimen. So arriving onto a different campus or teacher's studio brings a new focus to practice, new performance opportunities to prepare for, new energies. Just like at a summer festival where the first few weeks are gruelling and many think “how can I keep this pace up?”, starting a new program takes energy. It's usually when many begin to understand that a life in classical music is a grind. It means learning tons of music, practicing it alone, coaching it with others, rehearsing it for a long time, but with very little time off. You have to love the grind part, not just the scores you get to perform. You have to love the alone part, not just the collaborative part. You must not live just for the applause because it is fleeting and a minor percentage of what we do.

4) Don’t write the story as it happens or after it happens. Instead, write your story and make it happen! Put out into the universe what you want to happen then put on blinders to where you want to go.

5) If things aren't turning out the way you want, change the story. Much like Don Draper from the tv show Mad Men whose mantra was “Change the Conversation”, this is an incredibly important part of the equation. Vocal technique not what you want? Change teachers. Repertoire not impressing the panels in auditions? Change the repertoire. Hanging around a lot of negativity and whiners? Change your friends and peers. Not getting enough performance opportunities? Change who is gatekeeping those opportunities by becoming your own gate keeper - make your own opportunities. Entrepreneurship is at the core of all success stories in and out of classical music.

BUT WHAT ELSE IS AT PLAY HERE?

I listen to Weaver's lecture and think about how those on the Outside create - composers, playwrights, artists, poets, designers, sculptors, entrepreneurs, visionaries. But those on the Inside implement - artistic administrators, executive directors, CEOs, managers, coordinators, producers, development directors.

In classical music, Implementors gives the illusion that they're creating the art. But it is the Creators who do. It's important to understand this difference.

What do I mean by 'those on the outside'? Throughout history, creators were almost all on the outside of the privileged society. Opera composers from Mozart to Donizetti to Tchaikovsky to Britten were outsiders. Most were not aristocrats, few came from monied or "good families". Some ended up with venereal diseases because, well, they were living in a different arena of accepted societal norms and conventions. Many were literal outsiders, as they were gay or atheists in times where those who were were often imprisoned or killed (Marc Blitzstein was beaten to death outside of a gay bar, for instance.) The few women who managed to compose did so under extreme circumstances. (Poor Clara, taking care of Robert and the fam while holding down the fort, playing concerts as a solo pianists, yet she still managed to compose.) Nowadays many think of classical masterpieces being written by rich, well-to-do, world famous, fabulously wigged privileged white Europeans. Not quite. They were people who worked hard to scrape by commission to commission. They were people who couldn't marry into polite society. They were outsiders who did the Hard Thing, did it Their Way, and did it for Decades (prodigies like Mozart too.)

Even the famous singers, but especially the women, were seen to be immoral and often died a pauper's death. Remember the scene from "Downton Abbey" where Kiri Te Kanawa played the famous opera diva Nellie Melba? The Earl of Grantham was shocked that his family wanted dear Nellie to be invited to sit at their dinner table. How shocking! Even today, some opera companies treat their singers like 18th century servants - making them enter and hangout in the kitchen before singing for the VIPs, often not letting them eat in the same room as the guests.

Outsiders. Creators. Performers.

But here we are in 2025 still working, performing, and learning to be Creators while it's becoming harder and harder to implement any creations - old warhorses or new works. There's a superficialness to how we dress up for patron receptions and opening nights, how we wear tuxes and gowns for recitals that people attend in jeans and teeshirts, how our orchestras still dress as if they are attending a Downton Abbey dinner in 1925 instead of 2025 where no one, outside of high school prom attendees, debutants, or evil Bond villains attending museum galas wear tuxes and gowns.

So in this wacky world, how to implement our creations? I'd suggest we should think of ourselves as one-person fringe festivals. Those great weeks in many of the major cities where creators come together and share their work with arguably the most eclectic audiences out there. I'm not suggesting starting your own festival for real, I'm suggesting you think of yourself as a festival where you're the creator and the producer.

Stay with me. A personal fringe festival allows you to flex, be experimental, and allow yourself to fail. It allows you to showcase you. Seeing yourself as your own personal fringe festival is a way of energizing both your creative and producing parts of yourself. Sounds tough, eh? Sounds like "but I wasn't trained to do that!"

Why should we have to both implement and create? Teachers usually tell their students to just work on being the best performer possible, i.e. sing to the best of your ability (the prima la voce bullshit). Why am I suggesting you need to think beyond that simplistic advice?

Because the opera sector, the classical music business, the young artist pathways to careers, the literal market of music has changed, permanently.

Unlike any business school, where entrepreneurship is at the essential core of the equations for quadratic results for investors, classical singers and pianists, opera composers and librettists, conductors and directors are simply not educated or trained in entrepreneurship. This is not helpful in 2025. It's a bad business plan for anyone trying to be successful. Being able to implement art, especially your own, takes those skills.

I learned this by living it - in both the creation and implementation worlds. I did the hard thing. I moved into the opera world as a young coach pianist trained in the smallest of towns, Indianola, Iowa (the home of Des Moines Metro Opera.) By the time I left for my master's degree, I knew huge swaths of operatic and song rep courtesy of a most eccentric renaissance teacher Robert Larsen. In fact, I was shocked at just how little my peers at graduate school in Kansas City seemed to have learned in their bachelor's degrees. No one seemed to know about Romantic poetry or painting, no one seemed to know much about musical forms and structures, no one seemed to know anything about literature or how western civilization evolved through musical history. People seemed myopically focused on their own instrument - pianists, violinists, singers.

All the while, I was spending my time as the grad ass in opera playing opera classes and opera rehearsals. But I was also winning solo piano concerto competitions, researching the Hal Leonard Musical Theatre Anthologies, and being the assistant editor of the G. Schirmer Larsen Opera Anthologies. I spent one of my summers at Santa Fe as an usher watching all of the shows, hanging out at the parties with my fiancé, meeting tons of people in the business. I spent multiple summers as an assistant conductor at DMMO (after spending four summers on their house staff) finally being trusted enough to conduct a performance of "Albert Herring". I spent a summer as an editing intern at Hal Leonard publishing in Milwaukee working for a terrible boss who was the biggest sexual harasser of my entire career - a real asshole - who also hired me to be the pianist on a series of brass methods recorded by none other than the Canadian Brass.

That was all before I ever got to Juilliard. Before I ever got to the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Before I ever really "graduated" from my two piano performance degrees.

But looking back, I was my own Fringe Festival. At the very least, I was creating a portfolio career way before the phrase was ever coined. I implemented doing exactly what Graham Weaver talked about: Do The Hard Thing. Do Your Thing. Do It For Decades. And I was writing my own story at the time without knowing it.

The Hard Thing #1: So surprise! I have learning disabilities that are language based. Yet I work in a field where we perform in multiple languages. I am dyslexic yet I write libretti and I am a blogger (my old blog has over 330,000 views). My languages suck, but I've developed other ways to be a successful coach. In my master's degree I totalled my car and a few months later had a case of carpal tunnel syndrome in my right wrist so severe I was advised to stop playing for a year and get an operation. (I didn't do surgery, I stopped playing for a semester and at the end of that semester, won the school's concerto competition.) Almost twenty years later, I developed thoracic outlet syndrome in my right arm that caused me to wake up most mornings with a dead arm that wouldn't move. I resigned my music director position at Ithaca College and took the director of artistic administration at Florida Grand Opera (learning to manage a multi-million dollar artistic budget.)

The Hard Thing #2: Recovering from not being able to conduct or play the piano. That was very hard. I did it while at a desk job at FGO while swimming in the ocean as often as possible. Twenty years later, I continue to still play and conduct, at the ripe old age of 60. My right hand has a tremor, but that's residual nerve damage from those old injuries. Yet I just played a faculty recital a few months ago that was quite successful.

Do Your Own Thing: Before they coined the term "portfolio career", I had one. A collaborative pianist, a singer (made my professional singing debut when I was 23), a conductor, an editor, a chorus master, an education director, a young artist program director, an artistic administrator, a stage director, a blogger, a producer, a librettist, a professor of music, a specialist in Handel, in bel canto, in operas based on Shakespeare's plays, a board member, a masterclass artist, an adjudicator for voice competitions. I was criticized by friends and strangers in the business for not "specializing"; my career was "confusing". I heard whispers about my being able to do many things well, but sadly unable to do one thing especially well.

Sigh.

But I'm not the only unicorn out there. There are LOTS of us. You're probably one too. Unicorns don't know they're unicorns. They don't know they're rare and mystical. Often they feel just the opposite - their talents scare people (really, this is a truism - big talent scares lots of people.) Often they're told to hide these other "skills", like producing recordings for other singers, being a photographer, creating databases for software companies, doing voiceover work, being a background actor for film or television. Don't hide! Fly your freak flag high!!

Do It For Decades: Maybe not. But I do believe in the 10,000 hours of practice and application (read Malcom Gladwell's book "Outliers".) It worked for the Beatles. It works for successful classical solo violinists and pianists. It worked for me. I got my 10,000 hours in before I got to my master's degree.

But as a singer, 10,000 hours is hard to put in. The math looks easy: Just put in 14 hours a day, every day, for two years and you'll get to 10,000 hours. However, that's not possible. For active singing, lessons, practicing, rehearsals, and coachings, a singer at the bachelor's degree level might put in 6 hours a day for 5 days a week. 30 hours a week of active singing is 1,560 hours a year. It will take about 6.5 years to achieve the 10,000 hours. That's every week putting in 30 hours a week for almost 7 years. That's a bachelor's, a master's, and multiple summers of programs, basically no time off.

I have another idea: Consider everything and anything as part of your implementing your artistic creation goals. Going to a movie? You're watching actors act. Same for theatre, opera, musical theatre - you're watching, listening and learning. Same for scrolling on YouTube channels about last century's singers, attending Taylor Swift concerts, reading biographies of Goethe or Stravinsky, spending time networking the business, teaching online lessons to high school students, talking about singing with singers, attending other student's lessons, attending masterclasses, attending the symphony, etc. etc. etc.

You don't have to always be actively singing to learn about being a singer.

Anything and Everything that might possibly be connected to your career goals helps to focus your mind, talent, curiosity, and skills back inwards toward you. Entrepreneurship experiences (from volunteering at a friend's startup recital series to managing the social media for a new arts org) count for double or even triple the hours. Until you try to coordinate your own recital tour, or apply for a grant to workshop a new opera, or apply for non-profit status, you have no idea how much time, mental energy, and effort that goes into those sorts of experiences. That's why I recommend them for everyone. It puts you into the middle of this whole Implementation and Creation nexus.

And it's in that nexus you'll find quicker access to your true artistic self, you'll find insights that may change how you learn or sing music, and so many other unlooked for "AHA" moments. You might not need decades. Maybe a decade. Maybe less than a decade.

But write your own story NOW. Don't wait to write your own great novel "someday when I have time" or when you're "successful". Start outlining your chapters now. Start journaling. Start today.

And focus on the BEST parts of you, not the worst. Judge the BEST parts of yourself, your talents, your skills, don't pull yourself down by looking only at the parts of you that aren't quite there yet.

Of course, work to make those parts better, but if you only focus on the bad, that's what will grow. Believe me in this! Focus on growing your very best parts and they'll outshine everything else. Everyone - every single person - has parts of their talent, their voice, their intelligence, that could be construed as somehow weak. Sadly, too many programs and teachers talk about "fixing" this or that. Instead, find people who will nurture everything that is right and good about you while helping to shore up the other stuff.

I believe that's the true secret.

Do the hard thing because applying effort to your talent creates skills that will - with more effort - help create talent that leads to success.

Do your own thing because you need to be authentic. Don't be a packaged chocolate chip cookie when you're a gluten free tiramisu Swiss roll.

Do it for decades or at least as much as is humanly possible. And commit to the doing for years. Don't give up.

Write your own story because no one else can. No one else will.

No One Else Should.