Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?

Is mathematics about to enter the conservatory?
mbmccoy.dev

It really really does. Popular/rock/folk/classical musicians all earn much the same way now: a blend of teaching, occasional performance fees, functions performances like weddings and galas, music-related side-gigs (composition, arrangement and recording for commercial music), and non-music-related side gigs — teaching non-musical things, gardening, painting and decorating, bar work, office temp work, even full time jobs (doctors and lawyers, accountants). I know a couple of classical musicians whose actual money-making music is playing other instruments in funk/rock functions bands.

Even the "best" or most famous musicians, popular or classical, have side gigs. Approximately nobody makes their money only from performing or from recordings; that ended twenty-five or thirty years ago.

Elite soloists, maybe — but that is actually a pretty expensive life to live. I would be surprised if many of them risked a life where they had no other job.

The idea that a "conservatory" system exists that meaningfully supports classical musicians is nonsense almost anywhere in the world, I would think. Even the first-chair musicians and conductors have side gigs.

(ETA: I can't believe this is a workable model for mathematicians, either. Maybe for a couple of dozen the world over. But there is no performance, no regionality, little in the way of public dissemination, little in the way of reflected glory for benefactors. No, the "conservatory" will perhaps be the intelligence agencies, as it was before.)

Today classical music is filled with people who want to pretend to be superior to pop musicians because they keep their repertoire confined to academically acceptable areas.

And then the LARPers that want to make new music make complete and utter arhythmic and atonal trash that demands humans subdue our own aural feelings of beauty.

You'll find classical musicians who complain about this stuff are usually incompetent musicians who really stretch the definition of artist.

Sorry spent almost a decade of my young life in a somewhat competitive music school environment. Lots of the other kids were upset I played what I wanted to and people liked it.

Actual modern composers in the classical tradition (I.e. people alive today who compose music that is similar in feel to older composers) are well compensated because they're often hired to score films, video games, and other capitalist interests that the supposedly 'real' classical musicians would scoff their noses at.