What comes after a conservatory education? Performing artists encounter this dilemma when they begin their training as they start shaping and articulating their goals—and begin to understand what it takes to achieve them.
Part of the answer involves integrating into conservatory training entrepreneurial principles and practices that artists have for too long had to learn on their own. The Peabody Conservatory created both coursework and professional development resources, such as the Breakthrough Curriculum, LAUNCHPad, and the open-educational resource The Path to Funding, to prepare students for multifaceted careers as 21st-century citizen-artists.
Peabody artist-entrepreneurs provide both inspiration and a glimpse of the various paths artists create for themselves. What follows are a few snapshots that underscore just how essential the business of the arts has become to an artist’s creative practice.
JULIETTE JONES: ‘Making a Table’
Juliette Jones (BM ’08, Violin) came to Peabody to become a classical musician. But a life-changing wrist injury suffered during her sophomore year offered advanced degrees in resilience and character as well.
Finding “a new perspective” was essential as she healed. “I was forced to think about music in a different way,” Jones recalls. “I was forced to think about myself as a musician in a different way.”
Over the past 16 years, her new perspective has blossomed into a transformative success story. As the founder of the production company Rootstock Republic, Jones redrew hitherto narrow boundaries of what it means to be a Black string player in American music to create a landscape at once more dynamic and equitable.
The idea for Rootstock took shape as Jones watched a musical act on television in 2012. She noticed that all of the string players hired for the gig were white.
“I wanted to create a safe space for string players who felt they existed on the margins, or didn’t have platforms to be seen, heard, and celebrated,” Jones says. “A space where I could not just have a seat at the table, but I could be making a table for my community.”
JULIETTE JONES: ‘Making a Table’
Juliette Jones (BM ’08, Violin) came to Peabody to become a classical musician. But a life-changing wrist injury suffered during her sophomore year offered advanced degrees in resilience and character as well.
Finding “a new perspective” was essential as she healed. “I was forced to think about music in a different way,” Jones recalls. “I was forced to think about myself as a musician in a different way.”
Over the past 16 years, her new perspective has blossomed into a transformative success story. As the founder of the production company Rootstock Republic, Jones redrew hitherto narrow boundaries of what it means to be a Black string player in American music to create a landscape at once more dynamic and equitable.
The idea for Rootstock took shape as Jones watched a musical act on television in 2012. She noticed that all of the string players hired for the gig were white.
“I wanted to create a safe space for string players who felt they existed on the margins, or didn’t have platforms to be seen, heard, and celebrated,” Jones says. “A space where I could not just have a seat at the table, but I could be making a table for my community.”
“I was forced to think about myself as a musician in a different way.”
Jones’ talents keep her in lofty and diverse company. She has played with (and arranges for) a dizzying array of artists in a multiplicity of genres—John Legend, Lady Gaga, and Solange among them. She has worked on Grammy-winning projects, Oscar-nominated films, and Emmy-nominated programs.
After nearly a decade, her growing ambitions inspired Jones to rebrand the company this past year as Wondersmith Entertainment. The decision also marked a commitment to community-centered work rooted in artistic excellence. Jones’ commission to create Passing the Crown—a dynamic blend of orchestra, breakers, and DJ celebrating women in hip-hop—was a highlight of Lincoln Center’s 2024 Summer for the City season.
Jones’ talents keep her in lofty and diverse company. She has played with (and arranges for) a dizzying array of artists in a multiplicity of genres—John Legend, Lady Gaga, and Solange among them. She has worked on Grammy-winning projects, Oscar-nominated films, and Emmy-nominated programs.
After nearly a decade, her growing ambitions inspired Jones to rebrand the company this past year as Wondersmith Entertainment. The decision also marked a commitment to community-centered work rooted in artistic excellence. Jones’ commission to create Passing the Crown—a dynamic blend of orchestra, breakers, and DJ celebrating women in hip-hop—was a highlight of Lincoln Center’s 2024 Summer for the City season.
Creating companies that are an engine of opportunity has required more than business acumen to accomplish. “It’s also understanding your value,” she insists. “I think that artists often forget that when someone reaches out, it’s because you add value to what they are working on.”
Jones points to former faculty member Bill Nerenberg’s Business of Music class as a key moment in her Peabody entrepreneurial education. “It really prepared me for what it was going to mean to graduate and become a working musician,” she recalls. Jones also observes that Nerenberg answered her queries after she took her degree and began to work in New York City.
“There’s an entrepreneur inside of all of us,” she says. “And what it means today to be a student in conservatory has really changed. Your technical proficiency is important. But I’d say your story also matters. And who you are as an artist really matters.”
Jones finds a resonance of her own evolution in Peabody’s recent decision to add a hip-hop track to its curriculum. “The thing that I love about Peabody is that it’s an institution unafraid to evolve,” she says. “And I think that it’s crucial to think forward.”
ADAM HOPKINS: ‘Do a Million Different Things’
Click on the Out Of Your Head (OOYH) Records website and you’ll see a logo created with funds from a Peabody Career Development Grant given to Adam Hopkins (GPD ’08, Jazz Double Bass).
Hopkins received the grant when he co-founded a now-inactive collective with that same name near the conclusion of his time at Peabody. “I paid [Baltimore artist] Matt Bovie $250 to make that for the collective and those performances,” he says. “And that’s still the logo that we’re using now.”
Yet Hopkins’ career has not stood still over the past 16 years. Out of Your Head provides a distinctive and diverse ecosystem for new music releases, including Nick Dunston’s “Afro-Surrealist Anti-Opera” Colla Voce, and Hannah Marks’ sly and sweetly dissonant debut Outsider, Outlier.
The label’s first release was Hopkins’ own 2018 record: Crickets. (A 2023 rerelease contained new music from the bassist.) “I get to choose the music that my music is associated with,” he quips.
The opportunity afforded by this approach has allowed him to “release some music from some of my personal heroes dating back to Peabody,” he says, including saxophonist Tim Berne, whom he met through his studio teacher, bassist Michael Formanek.
Watching and learning from Formanek and other Conservatory faculty offered a career road map for Hopkins before there was a Breakthrough Curriculum.
He recalls that one particular Formanek exercise was to name five bands you might want to join, and discuss what was necessary to do so. “It was a big part of what we talked about in lessons,” he recalls.
Initially, Out of Your Head sold music exclusively on vinyl and CD, before embracing streaming. “If you don’t have your music on streaming,” Hopkins says, “there’s a whole lot of people who are just not going to hear it.”
ADAM HOPKINS: ‘Do a Million Different Things’
Click on the Out Of Your Head (OOYH) Records website and you’ll see a logo created with funds from a Peabody Career Development Grant given to Adam Hopkins (GPD ’08, Jazz Double Bass).
Hopkins received the grant when he co-founded a now-inactive collective with that same name near the conclusion of his time at Peabody. “I paid [Baltimore artist] Matt Bovie $250 to make that for the collective and those performances,” he says. “And that’s still the logo that we’re using now.”
Yet Hopkins’ career has not stood still over the past 16 years. Out of Your Head provides a distinctive and diverse ecosystem for new music releases, including Nick Dunston’s “Afro-Surrealist Anti-Opera” Colla Voce, and Hannah Marks’ sly and sweetly dissonant debut Outsider, Outlier.
The label’s first release was Hopkins’ own 2018 record: Crickets. (A 2023 rerelease contained new music from the bassist.) “I get to choose the music that my music is associated with,” he quips.
The opportunity afforded by this approach has allowed him to “release some music from some of my personal heroes dating back to Peabody,” he says, including saxophonist Tim Berne, whom he met through his studio teacher, bassist Michael Formanek.
Watching and learning from Formanek and other Conservatory faculty offered a career road map for Hopkins before there was a Breakthrough Curriculum.
He recalls that one particular Formanek exercise was to name five bands you might want to join, and discuss what was necessary to do so. “It was a big part of what we talked about in lessons,” he recalls.
Initially, Out of Your Head sold music exclusively on vinyl and CD, before embracing streaming. “If you don’t have your music on streaming,” Hopkins says, “there’s a whole lot of people who are just not going to hear it.”
The label’s reach expanded when it started an “Untamed” series of accelerated digital releases that put money in artists’ pockets when they couldn’t perform during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“‘Untamed’ actually brought quite a bit of visibility to Out of Your Head that we didn’t have before,” continues Hopkins, “because we were putting this stuff out super-fast.”
Hopkins weaves in other musical ventures—including recording session work—as he runs Out of Your Head. “I write less music because of the label, because there are only so many hours in the day,” he says.
Yet ensuring that the artists OOYH selects get heard means working all the levers of the machine. “Sending 500 emails is not my favorite part of the job,” he says. “But modern musicians have to do a million different things to make a career in music work.”
Hopkins believes that learning those “million different things” is essential, and he is delighted that this education is now a part of Peabody’s curriculum. “So much of [attending a conservatory] is training you to play your instrument well,” Hopkins observes, “but that really only gets you so far toward an actual career in music.”
BERGAMOT QUARTET: Lots of ‘Pinch-Me’ Moments
A desire to work deeply with new music unites the four Peabody graduates who comprise the acclaimed Bergamot Quartet.
“We all love playing chamber music, but realized that we hadn’t had a lot of opportunities to play recently written chamber music,” says Sarah Thomas (BM ’17, MM ’19, Violin).
Active engagement with new works has led the Bergamot Quartet to a number of successes over the past eight years, including rich collaborations with contemporary composers—such as the 2024 world premiere of Sky Islands by Filipinx composer and percussionist Susie Ibarra. The quartet also was named as the Graduate String Quartet in Residence at the Mannes School of Music from 2020 to 2022.
Grappling with new works also has pushed the quartet to expand its approach to playing — and broaden its vision of what can be accomplished with their instruments.
“We’re getting into a lot of things that I never really learned in music theory,” says Irène Han (MM ’18, Cello).
Ledah Finck (BM ’16, MM ’18, Violin; MM ’18, Composition) says the bonds between the players intensified during the “Evolution of the String Quartet” program at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in 2018. By the end of the experience, she explains, “We said: ‘Let’s commit to this.’”
The quartet took shape as Peabody’s entrepreneurial culture took a more formal shape in 2017 with the adoption of the Breakthrough Curriculum. Its members say establishing the Bergamot Quartet as a thriving enterprise has been a pathway to increasing professionalization, but they also have found it essential to create a useful framework for recruiting and paying collaborators in their artistic work.
“The art is so important,” says Amy Huimei Tan (MM ’19, GPD ’20, Viola). “But logistically, and practically speaking, we live in a world where we have to manage and make money to do all the fun things.”
Bergamot is pushing the genre forward not only through performance, but also by commissioning and recording new works, and teaching other artists how to do that as well. The quartet is also blazing trails by making the challenging enterprise of enlarging the repertoire sustainable.
Toward that end, they’ve tackled the complex paperwork necessary to gain state and federal nonprofit status to further their efforts as an artistic and educational group. And Thomas says that their success at translating entrepreneurial principles into practice informs her work as a member of the professional staff at Peabody’s LAUNCHPad, a career center focused on opportunities for Conservatory students and alumni.
“All of my colleagues in LAUNCHPad are performers,” she observes. “I think is really important to our team and to the office that everyone has experienced doing the work that we’re trying to help our students learn how to do.”
Curiosity and adventure are at the center of the enterprise, and Tan says that finding innovative ways to continue their journey has resulted in “a lot of ‘pinch me’ moments” as Bergamot’s momentum grows.
“I think we all feel like we’re getting to create and participate in something that’s really meaningful,” Finck says. “And really unique to us, too. So it could go anywhere.”
“. . . we all feel like we’re getting to create and participate in something that’s really meaningful.”
CRYSTAL ZHEYU JIANG: ‘Imagining a Community’
As a doctoral candidate at Peabody, Crystal Zheyu Jiang already is blazing a brilliant performing career on global stages. She won a gold medal at the 70th Wideman International Piano Competition in 2021 and a grand prize at the 78th Naftzger Young Artists Competition in 2022. Her first album, Crystallised, appeared in 2023 and is available on all major streaming platforms.
So is there room to create a new business as well? Jiang is already well on her way to making it happen through the channels available to Peabody students.
CRYSTAL ZHEYU JIANG: ‘Imagining a Community’
As a doctoral candidate at Peabody, Crystal Zheyu Jiang already is blazing a brilliant performing career on global stages. She won a gold medal at the 70th Wideman International Piano Competition in 2021 and a grand prize at the 78th Naftzger Young Artists Competition in 2022. Her first album, Crystallised, appeared in 2023 and is available on all major streaming platforms.
So is there room to create a new business as well? Jiang is already well on her way to making it happen through the channels available to Peabody students.
“I love being on stage,” Jiang says. “And I especially love being in a community [and] playing with an orchestra.” Yet, even for successful young soloists, fierce competition and prohibitive costs mean “that opportunity is very scarce.”
Enter KaraOrchee—a platform she hopes will offer musicians access to AI-driven orchestral accompaniments at a level of increased sophistication in which the accompaniments adapt to an individual player’s tempo and dynamics.
Jiang’s brainstorm came after she was chatting with a friend. “I love singing,” she says. “And we were talking about going to a karaoke [club] to sing.” She found herself wishing aloud to “have something like that for classical music” as a performer.
“That hit me strong,” she recalls. “I said, ‘Yes. We gotta do this.’”
Practical steps quickly followed. Her initial research revealed that what is available now to musicians are largely recordings that offer “no freedom for us to change tempi or interpretation.”
So Jiang pursued her vision of an alternative at Peabody’s LAUNCHPad. “I highly recommend that everybody check out its resources,” she says. “There’s no shame in asking any question there—and they are very supportive.” She also had a meeting with Peabody Dean Fred Bronstein, which helped lead to a Dean’s Incentive Grant.
Jiang also took her idea to the Pava Marie LaPere Center for Entrepreneurship, which placed her into the orbit of students in Johns Hopkins University’s Whiting School of Engineering.
“Peabody students have to go outside of the realm,” she says. “And we have more stages available atJohns Hopkins.”
As a member of a Pava Center Spark cohort in Spring 2024, Jiang found talented partners who shared her passion for music and possessed the technical skill to make KaraOrchee a reality.
Jiang quickly discovered that they moved just as fast as she wanted to go with the project. “We were just chatting,” she recalls. “Some of them were nodding and listening, and didn’t say much. But by the next week, I was already seeing a small prototype.”
The KaraOrchee team took home an Audience Choice Award in the first round of the Spring 2024 Spark Showcase at Johns Hopkins. And Jiang and her colleagues are taking the next steps to develop KaraOrchee into an innovative platform for musicians and make it a viable business.
Ultimately, Jiang’s vision for KaraOrchee is much more ambitious than a platform for playing alone. “I am imagining a community,” she says. “We could connect with other musicians. We can share our recordings. We can cater to our fans. We can develop a lifestyle online.”