Despite their enormous talent, many composers cannot live by artistry alone. Georgia Mann looks at the ones who had to graft to supplement their craft

The modernist musical genius Charles Ives once said that if “a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let them starve on his dissonances?” In this issue of the Idler there’s a piece on job hunting, and it struck me that many a composer would know plenty about that often disheartening task. From the earliest days to the 21st century, classical musical has been dotted with composers who knew how it felt to be “just a step on the boss man’s ladder” as Dolly Parton once sang.

We tend to think of classical composers as living a rarefied existence, moving from piano to manuscript paper as the melodies in the minds take shape. The reality is that many of them do things like washing glasses in pubs, installing kitchen appliances, or even inventing the odd scientific instrument to make ends meet. Alexander Borodin was a professor of chemistry, for example, and Philip Glass… well, we’ll come to him later.

It’s worth mentioning that the figures we consider the great-grandparents of composing – Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven – were all viewed as servants by their wealthy patrons. In Bach’s case, the job he was doing while he created most of the great works we know him for today – the position of Thomaskantor (the director of church music in Leipzig) – was given to him in 1723 only after a very grim application process. Appointing him, city councillor Abraham Christoph Plaz wrote, “Since we cannot get the best [Telemann and Graupner had declined the offer] we will have to settle for average.” It’s good to know that even the incalculable genius that was Johann Sebastian Bach could be underestimated by his boss.

One composer, a contemporary of Mozart, had a particularly impressive parallel career. William Herschel started off playing in a military band and penned 24 symphonies. Alongside that he became a renowned astronomer, constructing telescopes and managing to look through one on 13 March 1781 to discover a new planet, which turned out to be Uranus.

Not all composers were involved in such highfalutin alternative careers. The aforementioned Charles Ives wrote some of the most questing American music of the early 20th century, including his haunting The Unanswered Question. The experimental nature of his music makes it all the more surprising that his career started with a role as a clerk for the Mutual Life Insurance Company. His own company “Ives & Myrick” became the biggest insurance agency in the United States and he later said: “There was not a service that I could render to my fellow man that was more important than the business of life insurance, because it instilled in the soul and mind of my fellow man the responsibility of meeting his obligations.” Maybe insurance brokering and symphonic construction have more in common than first meets the eye… or ear.

Life insurance is one thing, but what seems to surprise people far more is that the co-creator of Minimalism, one of the greatest living composers of our day, Philip Glass, had to make ends meet with various day jobs, even after enjoying worldwide success with his music. In the mid 1970s, art critic Robert Hughes had booked a plumber to install a dishwasher at his loft home in SoHo. When the man arrived, Hughes was shocked. “But you’re an artist!” he protested, recognising him as the renowned composer of Einstein on the Beach, which had already played to great acclaim in Paris, Venice and New York. Years later Glass recounted his response to Hughes: “I explained that I was an artist but I was sometimes a plumber as well, and that he should go away and let me finish.”

A Radio 3 listener recently emailed me a story on a similar subject. The gist was this: Her husband was taking a taxi in New York one day in the late seventies and, as was his habit, asked the man behind the wheel what he did when he wasn’t driving a cab.

“I’m a composer,” came the reply.

“What kind of music do you compose?”

The man explained, and her husband said, “Oh, like Philip Glass.”

To which the driver replied, “I am Philip Glass.”

Glass’s music is now world famous. He has written for films like The Truman Show and The Hours, and created a symphony out of David Bowie’s Heroes album. A major new production of Einstein on the Beach is also in development for next year.

So what about side-hustles for composers starting out today? I asked the 28-year-old Ivor Novello-nominated Jasper Dommett, who told me that most composers have to have another job on the go, “for many reasons… the current cost of living, the reduction in funding, meaning commissions are fewer and further between, commission fees themselves not having kept pace with inflation.

“I’ve mainly worked in retail,” says Jasper. “I’ve also worked as a pot washer in a pub, in music publishing, website design… and as a freelance editor and typesetter. Currently, I’m balancing four jobs alongside my PhD and my composing.”

Are there any upsides to holding down another job while writing oratorios and concertos? Philip Glass said: “I was careful to take a job that couldn’t have any possible meaning for me.” In contemporary London, Jasper Dommett says: “One of the hardest things I’ve had to deal with is the emotional whiplash. One day you’re celebrating a premiere with a major orchestra and you’re on cloud nine; the next morning you’re back at your parallel job as if nothing happened. Scheduling can also be challenging. If you work full-time… you’re often tied to a rota… Music doesn’t work like that. Sometimes I can’t attend rehearsals for my own pieces… There are moments when it feels as though your composing career is being governed by the demands of the job that’s keeping it afloat.”

Georgia Mann presents Essential Classics on Radio 3.

This article is from Idler #111.

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