I tried to come up with numbers once and landed about 250 as well. But salaries for 'major' symphonies are all over the place, and I'm pretty sure the number is less with a 'decent' salary (to me is over 50k). It's certainly very difficult (but possible) to live off of 25 or 30k, but not very fun especially with the cost of living being what it is. I would also hazard a guess that if your cutoff was 50k for a salary, you'd probably have 100 orchestra jobs and maybe 100 university jobs (avg. of 2 per state). Of course some states like New York or Texas or California may have a dozen or two horn teachers that make more than that, so 150 could be a fairer number. Some argue though that landing a university job is more difficult, others less difficult, so I don't know. 250 sounds right though. I'm one of those people that decided to concentrate on a career outside of music instead of going further into debt trying to learn how to play the horn better. I think I'm comfortable being an amateur horn player for now. Plus, it's nice being around different groups of people who aren't talking about music all day long :) Someone should give a lecture or something at every horn workshop for horn students so that they are aware of the reality of landing a job, the financial costs involved in auditioning everywhere, and so they know it's ok to have backup plans. I know way too many good players who are up to their eyeballs in debt and have no way out. That's no way to live. -William In a message dated 3/18/2010 12:26:56 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, [email protected] writes:
The American Symphony League criterion for "major symphony" yields a list of about 27 organizations in the US. If each of these 27 had a section of six horns, there are 162 positions in the US. There are other positions that would be similar to a major symphone - studio work in Los Angeles for example. Make a guess the total in the US is 250 give or take. There are probably that many people graduating from schools with music degrees across the US. I thing you could play around with the numbers and show that the chances are that there are good horn players that don't have gig's with a major symphony. Not great ones, but good ones. With such a small number of positions, my guess is that there are lots of pretty darn good horn players that don't have jobs with major symphonies. Might even had decided that they didn't want to wait for an opportunity to audition and have gone on to other careers. _______________________________________________ post: [email protected] unsubscribe or set options at https://pegasus.memphis.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/options/horn/valkhorn%40aol.com _______________________________________________ post: [email protected] unsubscribe or set options at https://pegasus.memphis.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/options/horn/archive%40jab.org
