Performing Creativity

When I was starting out as a composer, in Canada in the early 1990s, being a composer was the opposite of being a business person. A few composers devoted a small amount of attention to promoting their work, which seemed both admirable and quirky; but if anyone was too self-promoting, it seemed like they were openly admitting that their music couldn’t stand on its own merit. Now we’re all supposed to be entrepreneurs all the time, it seems, and not only that, we’re supposed to be excited about it. (For further reading on this topic, composer Aaron Gervais has written a great pair of articles about the essential incompatibility between art and entrepreneurship, available here and here. And Andrew Lee and Alex Shapiro have an interesting exchange on whether entrepreneurship is a part of the arts on NewMusicBox, here, here, and here.)