The Ins & Outs Of “Selling Out” | The Millennial Edit

In a world where selling is key to survival, why do we demonize “selling out”?

“Selling Out” (verb) 1. The compromising of a person’s integrity, morality, authenticity or principles in exchange for personal gain, namely money.

Historically, the relationship between classical art forms and success has been at the very least rocky.

It is the OG music world trope for centuries, true artists won’t be recognised until they are dead, success must happen upon you, god forbid you recognise your own potential or indeed that you use it!

This is a harsh take on the way that the classical world responds to stories of commercial success, but in many ways it isn’t far from the truth.

The message fed to the young generation of musicians is to be authentic. To be individual, but not try to be individual, to be savvy, but not try to be savvy.

In fact in every example we are setting to the next generation, it is that you must be a lot of things but you mustn’t try to be any of them. Almost as if trying in itself negates any preexisting affinity with your work.

It is absurd!

Because the job “musician” comes under the remit of the entertainment industry (which will be a sad realisation for many) it is only natural that people should be searching for new ways to attract a wider audience; especially if the given narrative of classical music is that it is an art form intended for all people whatever their age, race, ethnicity or religious beliefs.

The fact that we are doing work that can bring inspiration, happiness and unity to people, no matter their level of understanding of our work, is a huge privilege and one that we should be taking very seriously when it comes to crafting our careers.

We should not be wasting time worrying that we, or that other people that share our line of work, are compromising morality, integrity or their basic principles by playing music, when we could be enjoying the process and the sharing of our craft.

Even the notion that playing the first 4 bars of a piece of music out of rhythm, or from the “wrong” edition means a person must be either foolish or morally bankrupt, is massively problematic.

Firstly because the idea that your human principles could be compromised by playing in a way that other people perceive to be “wrong” is just ridiculous.

Your playing is part of your work, not your personality.

Your worth as a person has nothing to do with your playing, and your work style and your work goals have nothing to do with your morality.

Yes, you might be playing Bach on the electric kazoo, but no, you aren’t hurting anybody. No matter how you play something, “bad” or “good”, nobody should be assuming anything about your personality because of how you play.

Not least because from one person to the next, it would be nothing short of arrogant to assume that we have more idea than anybody else in the world about the ‘should’s of classical music.

Music is an explicable life force, through which time and world travel are possible, and at the base it is something that we aim to share.

Surely we are not hoping to tour the world just to be able to write it on our websites?

We can begin by pulling apart the judgement we create around people who are canvassing for our art in the larger world circle. Perhaps we can look to those we class as “sell outs” and search for the wonderful features of their work, remembering that whatever we personally enjoy is not a written law.

After all, life is not a competition, there are no winners and no losers.

“People who hold important positions in society are commonly labelled ‘somebodies,’ and their inverse ‘nobodies’-both of which are, of course, nonsensical descriptors, for we are all, by necessity, individuals with distinct identities and comparable claims on existence.”

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