oboeinsight

I was reading the blog of Zachary Lewis, and he said he was writing for the US edition of MUSO magazine. Since I hadn’t heard of it before, I did a search on it. I was taken to a page that has this on it:

Welcome to the online arm of Muso — the magazine for the younger, more open-minded generation of classical music fans.

I honestly don’t know what to think, but my first reaction was to laugh.

I think of myself as fairly open-minded. But I guess they don’t want to include me because I’m older.

It goes on to say:

Designed for young professional musicians, students or music enthusiasts wanting to keep up with the latest news and gossip, Muso provides essential advice on courses and careers as well as celebrity interviews and great competitions.

Ah-hah! It must be about the gossip. Yes indeed, I want to avoid gossip if I’m able. (I’m not very good about it, though.)

Anyway, I just thought it was a bit insulting, but then I’m not young, and I guess they assume that means I’m not open-minded. In their eyes maybe I only fit the “professional” and “musicians” portion of their list. Oh … and I think of myself as a “music enthusiast” as well.

But what the heck do I know?

Of course some of those young open-minded professional musicians will end up sitting next to us old close-minded oldsters and, well, we just might have something to say about tenure. So they might want to be nice to us and bring us hot water bottles and arthritis cures, help us with our walkers, and bring anything else we old folks want and need. (I’ll take reeds!)
—–

Back to the Wolf Trap Opera bog of Kim Pensinger Witman. Today she blogged about classical music, the future, whether it (we?) matter or not. Lots of stuff. (And she and I are the same age, too … so whatever she says and thinks must be right … right?!) But anyway, the blog entry ended with this:

What a great game those Lady Terps played. I taught briefly at Maryland, so I feel as if I can take vicarious pride. But would I enjoy basketball as much if my daughter hadn’t played in high school? If I hadn’t spent all those hours at scrimmages, games, and practices? No. Got the parallel? It’s not the only reason that sports audiences are far larger than music audiences, but if our kids don’t get close to the music, there’s less of a chance they’ll find a reason to make room in their lives and hearts when they grow up.

Yep!

Oh yeah … I’m not practicing OR doing taxes yet. Sigh.
—–

Argh. I really have to finish up our taxes. It’s not anything I look forward to, and each year it gets worse.

Being a musician means that taxes are fairly complicated. Some of my income comes from self-employment (private students) and some is from performing and of course some is from university teaching. I have to take all expenses and figure out what percentage goes on Schedule C and which goes on A. I have to go through phone bills. I have to look through the entire calendar to find out when I drove from one job to another for mileage purposes. The list goes on and on. Sometimes I think about not teaching privately only because it’s so darn difficult to figure all of this out. (But I love teaching too much to do so, so that will never happen!)

And I just read this:

“Americans with annual incomes of $1 million or more, about one-tenth of 1 percent all taxpayers, reaped 43 percent of all the savings on investment taxes in 2003. The savings for these taxpayers averaged about $41,400 each.”

And I’ll owe money. I’m just sure of it. I have to pay social security taxes for my private instruction income. This is, I’m guessing, social security money I’ll never see.

Ya think?

[Musicians] talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every time. They really are interested in music and art.
Jean Sibelius, explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his home.

Oops … sorry! I’ll stop whining now. Time to practice anyway. Or maybe do taxes. Which should I choose, hmmm?
—–