Studying music often feels like a rather solitary career. Whether you are training to become a performance musician, perfecting your skills in any instrument, becoming a composer, or essentially any path that you decide to take in music, you will be facing hours spent alone in practice rooms, home studios, desks, or at the library. While this is an essential and very necessary part of building your career, there are several other things that you should consider adding to your to-do list.
Building a community can help you enhance your studies. From being part of an orchestra to forming study groups, networking can benefit everyone involved.
The importance of networking
Knowing people is almost essential to progressing in the music industry. For example, if you are a composer, you are going to need performers to bring your music to life – unless you decide to work with electronics, of course. Even then, you’re probably going to need some help if technology is not really your thing or if you need to borrow specific equipment.
Building a career in music implies working with other individuals. From the moment you ask for feedback about your piece or performance to seeking venues or music production services, networking can result in many possibilities.
Listed here are only a few of the many ways in which networking can enrich your music career.
1. Learning from other people’s perspectives and experiences
Music careers can vary: everyone goes at their own pace and time, and this can be very helpful while building your career. Talking to others, whether they are more or less experienced than you, is always a great lesson. From learning new practising techniques to experimenting with new composition systems and strategies, learning from others can be a very enriching experience.
2. Generating new knowledge
New knowledge often comes from experimenting with others. If you are building a career in music (or any other field, really) working with other people and finding new ways of creating, performing, or investigating specific subjects, is a great way of both learning and generating knowledge that, at the same time, will be useful to other people.
3. Getting feedback and constructive criticism
A very important part of working with other people involves giving and receiving feedback on every piece of work and discussing it too. Feedback can be constructive and enlightening, and sometimes, it can come with the answer you were looking for: creative blocks are much more common than they seem, and discussing your work with other people and taking in their thoughts on it can help you get over it.
4.Learning new skills and gaining new knowledge
Something that I find fascinating about working with other people is sharing knowledge. In music, as in the arts in general, there are always new theories, new thoughts, and new technologies circulating. Talking to other people regularly can help you exchange knowledge. Maybe they recommend an author you didn’t know. Maybe you told them about a piece written specifically for the instrument they were looking for. Exchanging knowledge is one of the most gratifying parts of working with other people in the arts.
The awkward bits
As beneficial as networking is, it can also be a tricky task. The key is to remember that you’re most likely not the only one in your situation. Talking to other people, getting to know each other, and bonding in different activities can be helpful here. Stepping out of your comfort zone (as hard as it seems) can result in enriching and lasting friendships.
Once you start talking to people and getting to know them, it is essential to stay in touch and reach out regularly. Maybe they know about a string quartet seeking to record new music, and you are composing for a string quartet right now. Maybe they need a piece for violin and piano for an upcoming concert and you can write one especially for them. It’s about who you know, and who, the people you know, know.
It is important to keep in mind that networking often comes with a back-and-forth of favours, especially as a student. Being willing to give and accept help is an essential part of successfully working with others.
In practice
As for my experience going through my final year at college, I can affirm that I’ve learned the most from practical experience with other people.
Last year, I was invited to compose the music for a short film called "Los Amantes" (The Lovers) with a group of fellow music students. The film was a project developed by a group of film students from our arts faculty, seeking original music for their short film. As we started work on the music, we realised how much we were learning about composing for audiovisual media.
Thinking about how much we, as music students and the film students, had learned from this exchange we created Superspectivas, meaning a ‘superposition of perspectives’. By contacting friends and other art students, we brought together two departments that didn't usually work together despite being contained in the same institution.
Through networking, we managed to create a community and shape relationships between students from both fields. With the desire to take it further, we think of this space as an opportunity to experiment with new ways in which music and film can relate to each other: as we learn from each other, we also seek to generate knowledge. Superspectivas has a very systematised organisation where everyone has a specific role, whether they make music or film, from managing our social media to carefully organising our schedule.
Superspectivas is almost a year old and we’re getting ready for the premiere of the short films created by the different groups of nearly 60 musicians and filmmakers within the community, taking place in July. In organising this event, networking has been essential to find the right venues to project our films and even contact people who would be interested in attending.
A few networking Tips
Here are some tips that can help you improve your networking skills.
Be kind and approach others respectfully
Keep your portfolio and social media profiles updated
Keep a contact address specifically created for networking purposes. i.e. an email address that’s only work-related and attached to your social media profiles
Keep an address book with contacts and notes about who the people in it are, if you’ve worked together, what you worked in, and what they do — it can be really helpful for finding the right people for a project!
Keep your contacts updated.
Useful Resources
There are many apps that can come in helpful for keeping in contact with others and see what their up to work-wise:
Slack: a messaging app that connects people within the same work team, making it easier for information to reach everyone involved
Pinterest: essentially a platform for image sharing, it allows users to visit some creator’s profiles and contact information.
LinkedIn: a social media platform focused on skills, knowledge and experience. You can use LinkedIn to find the right people for a project, and to network with people in your field.
SoundCloud: this audio streaming platform allows creators to upload and share their music with the world. It is a very useful resource for both finding new music and composers, as well as sharing your own.
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