Katy Hamilton

Happy 4th July, one and all! And to the staff and students at the Royal College of Music, where I have studied and worked for the last eight years, congratulations on reaching the end of another great adventure of an academic year. It’s been exhausting, exciting, challenging, fulfilling, and packed to bursting with new compositions, new performances and new research.

Which is why a lot of people have been rather bemused when I’ve told them that in fact, I’m waving goodbye to the dear old place and heading out into the utterly uncertain, definitely risky, totally unsupported world of freelancing. Why on earth would I go and do a crazy thing like that?! Why would I trade the security of an institution for life without a safety net?

Ironically, the one group of people who seem utterly unfazed by this path are the RCM students. Many of them will now be embarking on the very same path: a life of freelance work in which they have the freedom to make their way as developing creative artists, probably combining teaching, performance and other work to put together a sustainable portfolio as they build their profile. But for academics and writers, this is far less common. Indeed, the holy grail of many in the musical pen-pushing line of work is tenure, some kind of permanent association with an educational institution, venue, newspaper or journal.

I studied for a PhD which I completed in 2012, at which point my long-term career plan had developed a bit like this:

1. Get my BA and MA in Music. Ideally get a first and a distinction, respectively.

2. Get a place to study for a PhD.

3. In the process of writing this PhD, get as many articles and conference papers written as possible. Prove myself indispensable to my institution and the academic community at large. Get a niche, which only I could write about. Several, if possible. That, after all, is the only way that you might guarantee…

4. Getting to the end of the PhD, secure a job, a nice permanent lectureship to provide financial and long-term security. This is also the point where, if you haven’t managed it so far, marriage, property purchase, a car and a dog might reasonably enter the equation.

Yes, yes, of course this is a fabulously optimistic, not to say naive, slightly Hollywood-tinged vision of how one might Grow Up And Get A Job. But don’t tell me you never thought like that, even a little. We all do.

Actually, all things considered, by the time I’d made it to part 4 of my master plan, things were looking pretty good. The PhD was finished and I did get a job, a part-time position at the RCM working with their wonderfully rich collections of concert programmes, archives and artworks, as well as teaching and running public research events. So far, so good, and this gave me the chance to start looking for full-time professional academic positions.

And this was the point when I realised that actually, that wasn’t what I wanted. What I love doing best is, simply put, telling stories: the stories of composers and their music, the cultural and social universes in which music and art existed and exists… enthusing new audiences and bringing them brand-new research and access to information that they might not encounter any other way. I wanted to help others to do the same, give talented students support in learning to speak to their audiences as well as wow them with their compositions and performances. And I wanted to do my own research, too, and carry on playing (I’m a pianist, too! You can’t talk about this stuff with any kind of integrity unless you know what it is to be inside the music as a performer – this I believe very strongly).

I also realised something else. Technically speaking, I’ve been ‘institutionalised’ (in the educational sense) since I was three. From nursery to school to university to conservatoire, I’ve always been part of something bigger, a larger organisation to which I’ve been proud to contribute and work with. I’ve never been left completely to my own devices. And I began to wonder what it might be like.

So, being a trained researcher after all, I began to do some digging. What other work could I do? Who did I know who could give me advice? Who should I speak to? Was I good enough to make it fly? And little by little, the answers came back. Yes, I was good enough. Yes, I could write notes, give talks, look to contribute to education projects, consider broadcasting. The technological resources at our fingertips now are an immensely powerful tool. You’re reading this because I have been able to design my own website, create my own publicity, publish these posts myself. Watch this space, too: there’s a YouTube channel being plotted to go with the site as we speak. The possibilities are amazing, and there for the taking. And little by little, organisations and funders are beginning to react to this changing model. We live in exciting times.

So this is why I’m walking off the precipice, so to speak. I believe in what I do, all the various bits of it, and at the moment, no such job exists in a single institution. Nor should it, really – the independence of writers, broadcasters and artists is one of their most precious assets. In many ways, what I do is considered peripheral by performers and composers: neither the Incorporated Society of Musicians nor the Musicians’ Union support writers and presenters in music, because it is our writing and presenting, rather than our musicianship, that is considered our key skill sets. But personally, I’d say that what I do is absolutely not peripheral. Anyone who works in an area that promotes music and brings understanding and interest to a wider audience is part of the music scene, whether they be school teachers, instrumental coaches, curriculum creators, CD note writers, critics and journalists, radio and TV presenters, bloggers… Music, sounding music is an amazing, powerful, universal and endlessly varied thing, which gives us new perspectives on the world and our own lives, and evokes powerful responses from individuals and communities which completely transcend language. Now that’s something really worth talking about.