University of the Pacific, Photo Courtesy of Their Twitter

Like those of most musicians, my career is a jerry-rigged jigsaw puzzle. Like for so many of us, key pieces of that puzzle involve adjunct teaching at the university level. As a somewhat extreme case, I’ve been juggling four part-time, non-tenure track posts this past academic year – at the conservatory of a private liberal arts school (a rather under-recognized gem), and on three different campuses of the University of California system.

This was dizzying enough before COVID-19. Now, as individual artists, organizations, and large institutions all continue to reel, I’m trying to use this vantage point to contribute to the conversation: how is musical higher education responding? What’s the impact for students and for their teachers? What comes next? How do we get by?

The gig-less economy

Had I not landed the new job last summer, I would be in much deeper trouble right now. More than 40% of my average income has vaporized, but the teaching remains – at least for now. That uncertainty, which was a given even before the pandemic, cuts to the heart of the weakness of the adjunct model.

If any one of those four posts featured job security, affordable health coverage, and a robust retirement plan, I would do well to streamline. (The driving alone is unsustainable: lockdown has brought into stark relief just how much gas, and how much of my life, I was incinerating.) It’s telling that I can work at three schools within the same public system, in ostensibly the most progressive state in the nation, totaling more hours than a typical full-time teaching load, and not have them add up to any semblance of the stability that’s afforded tenure track faculty.

Adjunct teaching & labor struggles

Musicians are far from special in this regard. Increasing precarity in higher education employment has been a creeping trend – one could argue an insidious strategy, inherent to Neoliberalism – for decades now. One campus was embroiled in disheartening labor strife months before shelter-in-place began. I get a constant stream of emails from multiple union representatives fighting to ensure that our jobs remain, that we can be safe while doing them, and that our workload doesn’t double without compensation as we stumble into online teaching.

But applied music instruction is a tough case within this context. Bean-counters in administration understandably chafe at the lopsided expense of a one-to-one student/teacher ratio. Often, part of the solution involves students paying for their lessons (ideally with scholarships and partial subsidies available) on top of their tuition. How do I calibrate solidarity when refusing to cross a picket line means denying an individual student the close mentorship they’re paying for out of pocket?

This is unlikely to get much simpler in the coming months. We need to stay vigilant against the inevitable calls for austerity falling primarily on the backs of lecturers, students, and staff. Since most of my applied music colleagues and I commute great distances and on different days of the week, maintaining a cohesive sense of community and shared purpose can be an uphill battle. In general, I’m grateful to have the impression that my immediate supervisors have my back. The larger the institution, however, the more faceless the successive tiers of administrators become, and the higher the anxiety mounts.

Making lemonade…

And yet, we grovel for these jobs and rejoice when we get them. While we agitate towards how things ought to be, we also have to contend with how things are. I view my tangled web of adjunct posts as, above all, access to resources. Precarious as it is, the tightrope act is still a privileged position from which to advocate for my students and my community – for the music and musicians I love. As a particularly restless New Music specialist, I care most deeply about music that has inevitably limited value on the “free” market. It’s far easier, and more impactful, to get it made with some help.

…and panning for gold

A crucial leg up in my career was a recent faculty recital – a one-time gig, but with a reasonable fee. More to the point are the ancillary benefits: excellent documentation, and BMI royalties for playing my own work. It was also a perfect excuse to play with – and pay – a dear friend and faculty colleague whom I’m otherwise lucky enough just to run past in the halls. And a few key composers I admire greatly were in the house, incrementally advancing the likelihood of direct collaborations one of these days.

Another case in point is my new album, Triptych (tautological), out June 1st on Carrier Records. It features compositions I developed on a different campus, thanks to hours of playful experimentation in the electronic music lab and free sessions with the staff recording engineer in the acoustically glorious recital hall. The final push to release it was made possible by a Scholarly/Artistic Activities Grant from yet another school.

The quarantined conservatory

At the moment, of course, the priority is leveraging such resources on behalf of the students. If there’s anything artists are good at – because we have to be – it’s hustling. I repeatedly tell my students that anyone who doesn’t make resilience and grit part of their daily practice (right along with the long tones, and scales, and self-care…) is highly unlikely to still be playing five years after graduation, even in the best of times.

The empathetic view is that everyone is doing their damnedest. While the tenor varies from school to school, overall I’ve been blown away by my colleagues’ resourcefulness and generosity. My inbox remains flooded with tips, cries for help, stabs at best practices, offers of reassurance, and invitations to departmental discussion boards and video meetings to mull over all of the above. (An indispensable early example regarded setting up video lessons to help ensure your students sound like they’re playing, say, an oboe, rather than a 90s dial-up modem.)

We’re about to spend our summers clawing our way up to speed regarding livestreaming (with all its still-developing technical, aesthetic, and socioeconomic implications), and hopefully even credible telematic performance. Departments are scurrying to connect us with the gear and training we’ll need. But even as we do so for the nefarious purposes of our own creative work, we’re equipping ourselves to equip our students for new realities that are likely to stick around long after we’ve got our miracle vaccine. If we’re smart and lucky, we can start moving beyond crisis-management mode and begin imagining how to creatively rise to the occasion of these new artistic media.

Zoomed out: teaching music remotely

Yes, students are pissed – but, from what I’ve seen so far, not at us. They appear to understand that no one asked for this, and that the faculty is just as anxious as they are to return to face-to-face instruction ASAP. The big questions that remain: if remote teaching (or tortuous social distancing protocol) continues in the fall, will they return? And if so, how do we make sure it’s worth their time and tuition dollars?

I won’t pretend I’ve yet seen around the conundrum of students missing out on large ensemble performance. But until it’s no longer a horrifically bad idea to spew fomites packed together onstage, there’s no shortage of creative ways to stockpile chops, repertoire, musicianship, and maybe even inspiration while locked in our respective woodsheds.

I’ve been amassing a pile of Baroque duos, recording one voice for students to study and play along with. I’d like to think that this is not just a pale workaround, but a modality that can actually prove even more useful than our playing side-by-side for a few minutes a week – something I now see I could have been providing all along.

Our student chamber ensembles have also gotten crash courses in the world of the recording studio, learning the hard way about click tracks, time feel, latency etc. while attempting multi-tracking at home. It’s obviously not the same as a string quartet learning how to inhale together, or a young wind quintet’s epiphany the first time they realize they can peripherally watch each other’s fingers. But any pro who’s ever recorded a session overdub knows the drill of precisely matching a recorded track (in time, intonation, tone, style, etc.) the second time you hear it – and those skills apply everywhere you take your axe.

I keep annoying my students with the tale of the semester of grad school I “lost” to a clumsy bike wreck, left hand in a cast. For weeks, I fingered the one note I could – and learned to double tongue and circular breathe. I finagled independent study credit to generate parts for a professor’s orchestral score. I strapped my cast to the bellows of a dilapidated accordion and drilled modal improvisation in mixed meters. I fiddled with synthesizers. I listened, closely, to hours and hours of recordings. A bit nuts, perhaps; not exactly what I had in mind when I moved cross country; and sure, my Mozart concerto atrophied. But with 20+ years of hindsight, guess which skills factor more prominently, day to day, in the musical niche I’ve carved out of a glutted field?

Supporting our students

I don’t mean any this to sound glib. I won’t minimize the direness of anyone’s circumstances, or shame anyone into the sort of frenetic alleged “productivity” that my mental health seems to require. In a recent interview regarding the characteristically virtuosic “pivoting” she and the organizations she’s involved with are busy doing, New Music juggernaut Claire Chase correctly cautions artists against becoming unwitting cheerleaders for disaster capitalism. Disruption on the current scale can only smell like “opportunity” if you’re already safely on the top floor of the tower and equipped with cauldrons of boiling oil. (I’d argue that this skepticism should be applied to the entire discourse of “arts entrepreneurship,” but that’s rabble-rousing for another time.)

My colleagues and I are painfully aware that some of our students are, quite simply, not safe – physically, emotionally, and/or financially – at home. It’s absurd to assume everybody’s got the needed hardware and internet connection speed to be reliably online, all day every day. Then there’s simply the heartbreak of a student having to play their senior recital alone in their apartment. (I’ve been proud of the lengths University of the Pacific in particular has gone to, including delivering upright pianos to students sheltered nearby.) I know what a privilege it is that my family and I are, so far, healthy and remaining solvent; I wouldn’t dare tell my students “hey, just make lemonade!”

What I do dare to do is make myself vulnerable. I remain as present and compassionate as I can muster, modeling “grown up” behavior: I’m scared too, and persevering anyway. I’m asking for help where I need it and offering it where I can. I have no delusions that I can – or should – have all the answers or get by on my own.

Kyle Bruckmann, Photo credit: Lenny Gonzalez

About Kyle Bruckmann

Oboist Kyle Bruckmann’s widely ranging work as a composer/performer, educator, classical freelancer and new music specialist extends from conservatory-trained foundations into gray areas encompassing free jazz, post-punk rock, and the noise underground. His creative work within an international community of improvisers and sound artists can be heard on more than 80 recordings, on labels such as New World, Hat Art, Carrier, New Focus, Entr’acte, Not Two, Clean Feed, and Another Timbre. Current ensemble affiliations include Splinter Reeds, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, sfSound, Eco Ensemble, Stockton Symphony, and Quinteto Latino. He is Assistant Professor of Practice in Oboe and Contemporary Music at University of the Pacific, and also teaches at UC Santa Cruz, Davis and Berkeley.