Kent, OH — From the classroom to the concert stage, the pandemic has presented both challenges and opportunities for schools of music and their students. Music graduates are facing a job market and performance environment that is vastly different from their peers who graduated just over a year ago. This has caused a rapid rethinking of how musicians perform, teach and study.
Kent State University Assistant Professor of Music Theory Joshua Albrecht, Ph.D., was recently featured alongside a panel of higher education experts discussing this new environment and some of the vital skills recent and upcoming music graduate will need. It was put together by Zippia, a company dedicated to helping people advance their careers.
Read Albrecht's portion, excerpted in full from the Zippia post, below.
Zippia: In your opinion, what are the biggest trends we'll see in the job market given the pandemic?
Dr. Joshua Albrecht: This is a tough one, because I don't know if anybody really has a good handle on what impact the pandemic will have on the job market. Many music majors tend to be music educators at Kent State, and given the impact the pandemic has had on remote learning, I suspect that many employers will look for incoming teachers to have thought well about how to teach a complicated subject like music remotely. Musicians who know the possibilities, limitations, and ideas for overcoming the limitations of remote teaching will have an advantage.
Zippia: If a graduate needs to take a gap year, what skills would you recommend they try to enhance and how should they go about doing it?
Dr. Joshua Albrecht: In the field of music, I think the most important thing to focus on in a gap year is maintaining and strengthening musicality. The easy thing would be to let your skills and experience atrophy during the gap year. If you can keep playing/singing, so much the better. Even better if you can keep gigging with other musicians. The best thing to do would be to use the freedom of a gap year to allow you to creatively and artistically explore new modes of expression and musicality; try creating new kinds of musical expression in light of the pandemic or composing new music that addresses the unique situation we find ourselves in.
Zippia: What general advice would you give to a graduate beginning their career?
Dr. Joshua Albrecht: I recommend that you ground yourself in who you are and what's important to you. Our society seems like it's in a kind of turmoil that it hasn't experienced in decades, and it would be easy to be swept away in the heat of the current controversies and conflicts. Discover what's really important to you and how you uniquely are interacts with, responds to, and grows from what is currently happening. If, as a musician and artist, you can find a way to grow from the current societal climate rather than be swept away by it, you'll likely find that you have something valuable to contribute to society, and people will want to listen to you.
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