Money Matters is a NewMusicBox x I CARE IF YOU LISTEN collaboration, supported by New Music USA.
By 2012, Eighth Blackbird had been together for 16 years. We had two Grammys, ongoing residencies at the University of Richmond and University of Chicago, and were about to start a three-year residency at Curtis. We were touring the world, playing big houses like Sydney Opera House and Carnegie Hall. We had commissioned Steve Reich a few years back, and he won a Pulitzer for the piece. By any chamber music standard, we had Made It™ and proven our longevity.
So why did it still feel like I was living paycheck to paycheck? If Eighth Blackbird had “made it,” why didn’t it feel like it?
Beginnings
There’s no playbook for new chamber groups, especially when it comes to handling money. Many subtract expenses then divide the remainder evenly among ensemble members, but Eighth Blackbird handled it differently from the start. The very first payment we ever received — the Fischoff Award money for winning the Wind Division in 1996 — we put half into a checking account for the group, and divided the other half six ways, each of us taking home $208.33. This continued into the first gigs we did.
We quickly discovered that, for a group of six musicians there are a LOT of costs people don’t think about. Plane tickets alone — seven, with the cello — ate up a huge chunk of every fee, as did gas and tolls when we didn’t fly. Early on, we kept a spreadsheet of how much each person had paid for gas, as we couldn’t yet pay everyone back, let alone have a credit or debit card for the expenses. We were banking on the fact that we could hopefully pay that back, which we did several years later.
We eventually got the point where we could afford to pay ourselves a salary: $90/mo, in 1999. This was huge: not the dollar amount, but the fact that we had enough steady work, enough solvency, and enough foresight to be able to plan to pay ourselves evenly throughout the year. And hey, it could only go up, right?
The Costs of a Touring Career
Most readers know this, but touring ain’t cheap. Eating out is the big wallet killer, but even Starbucks vs. making your own coffee every day adds up. That after-concert hang and the bar tab that doesn’t quite add up, so you make up the shortfall. Forgetting your computer charger in Europe. Forgetting your clothes or shoes and replacing them hours before the show. Endless Ubers to and from the airport. Emergency instrument repairs.
All things considered, the take-home pay is far lower than you might expect, which came as a shock to a cellist who was contracted to sub for me on tour while I was on paternity leave in 2012. About a week before the performances, the sub cellist demanded to be paid thousands more or they wouldn’t go on the tour. The group showed them what the fee was, and the costs to both prepare and perform the show: seven plane tickets, taxis, hotels, overhead for our rental space to rehearse, etc. They weren’t making less than any of the musicians, likely more. Turns out, they got bad advice from their former teacher, thinking that we were undercutting their fee. But that’s just the math of touring. No one’s making any money.
Real Wages
In my classes and talks at music schools, I like to point out that you can look up what people in our industry actually make. If the ensemble is a nonprofit, they’re required by law to post their 990s, which often have salary info, especially for smaller groups where people are employees.
ProPublica’s site (free with no signup) has 990s for most organizations stretching back years: for Eighth Blackbird, it goes back to 2003, when each member of the group was making $19,100 a year on $262k of revenue. 2016 was our biggest year revenue-wise: $1.3 million, with individual salaries of $41,306.
Reviewing recent 990s from a few prominent new music groups highlights the range of salaries paid to musicians who are W2 employees. This can often be found in Part VII and Part IX of any nonprofit’s 990. In 2024, Alarm Will Sound reported $787k in total revenue, with salaries of $20,790 for its musicians. A similar size ensemble, the International Contemporary Ensemble, reported $1.4m in revenue in 2023 with musician salaries ranging from $5,400 – $51,137.
Third Coast Percussion reported $1.1 million in revenue in 2024, with musician salaries ranging from $75,500 – $77,500. The year prior, Ethel String Quartet reported $476k in revenue with musician salaries ranging from $62,000 – $65,250.
Kronos Quartet, arguably the top of the new music heap for decades, group reported $2.9 million in revenue in 2023, with individual members making an annual salary of $131k. Which sounds great –but guess what salary, according to a 2024 Consumer Affairs article, is needed for a single adult living in San Francisco? $131,050.81. And this doesn’t even factor in their individual, global touring costs. All those meals across the world. All those coffees.
That’s the top of our food chain, folks. Making it, indeed.
The Inevitability of Institutions
So, you may be asking yourself at this point: if it costs so much to tour, how does anyone make this work?
The answer is often institutions. Sure, there are a few ensembles that don’t have residencies (Kronos and International Contemporary Ensemble, for example). But for many, institutional backing in the form of long-term residencies — and the individual income that goes with it — has been crucial to their survival. Sō Percussion has Princeton, Alarm Will Sound has long-standing ties with the University of Missouri, and Third Coast Percussion and Ethel String Quartet have Denison University.
Eighth Blackbird was no different. We landed our first residency at Northwestern University by offering to be the ensemble-in-residence in exchange for tuition-free master’s degrees. While there, we were contacted by the University of Chicago to play on their composers concert. This led methodically and organically into us being the ensemble-in-residence there for many years. Just as we were finishing our master’s degrees, we were hired as ensemble-in-residence at the University of Richmond, a post we held until 2020. That residency provided a stable salary base, as well as – for the first time for any of us – health and retirement benefits. Without that residency, I don’t know how long Eighth Blackbird would have survived, certainly without each of us needing to find other work and not being able to devote as much time to the ensemble.
Post-residencies, Eighth Blackbird’s model has shifted. Four of the six members now receive 1099 income as contractors; and founding members Lisa Kaplan and Matthew Duvall are paid W2 salaries as admin and performers, a model found elsewhere in groups such as the International Contemporary Ensemble. But for more than half of my 24 years in Eighth Blackbird, the two incomes from the Universities of Richmond and Chicago routinely made up the bulk of my income. And I know that for many other chamber groups, long-term residency work makes up the bulk of their individual incomes as well.
The Myth of Making It
Some people reading this may also be hoping to support themselves doing new music, even though it’s unlikely that they got into new music for the money. None of this is meant as discouragement from attempting a career in new music. I believe there has never been a better time, and more groups doing it successfully: look at the proliferation of successful percussion and sax groups in the last 20 years.
What I’m trying to get across is this: “making it” is a process, not a destination. There is no arrival, no identifiable point when you can take your foot off the gas and coast. That’s as true for people at the top as people starting out. The people I know that are flourishing in new music are always hustling, always thinking about the next opportunity, and planning heavily. That hustle culture is real and can grind you down, but it can also hone you to a knife edge.
Focusing more on “making” the best art you can, in the artistically and financially smartest ways you can, and less on the “it” — fame, money, or status — is not a sure path, but it remains the only real path forward.
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