Make A Career In An Orchestra | Zalmen Pollak

If you want to make a career playing in a professional orchestra, cast, big band, or other kind of already established professional ensemble, the path to your success might seem simple at first.

Zalmen Pollak

1. Choose a music program featuring a renowned teacher who plays in an orchestra. The program should also be linked to a major orchestra for maximal exposure to this profession (like Juilliard and the New York Philharmonic, for example).

2. Practice 5 hours a day throughout the course of a, and possibly a Doctoral program. Learn your craft thoroughly and artistically.

3. Pay lots of money to attend and study with famous musicians at summer music programs, like Aspen. They look exceptional on your resume’.


4. Audition for every possible orchestral/ensemble opening when you are out of school, or while you are in graduate school, and hope for the best.

This kind of basic mentality seems to make sense at first, right? It can be easily made analogous to someone who is pursuing another field in college, like mechanical engineering.

Mechanical engineers go to college, study 5 hours a day through one or two degree programs, take internships in the summers, and when they are out of school, apply to every single job opening possible. They usually can get a job that pays well relatively quickly, especially if they had experience as an intern.

It makes sense that this applies to music and with orchestras, right?

It Absolutely Does Not

Zalmen Pollak will teach you how to play and then after that .Getting a job in an orchestra is one of the most brutally competitive jobs ever. And in America, only 20 or so pay above $55,000 for a starting salary. $55,000 is a good salary for one person, but it might be difficult to support multiple people on just that salary alone. I guess it depends on where you live though.

A full-size orchestra has about 100 musicians, and there are about 20 good paying orchestras in the US. So, in America, that means about 2,000 musicians are employed in an orchestra that can pay well.

There are also over 100 music schools, conservatories, or departments of music that teach classical music that cumulatively graduate 10,000+ students every single year in the US alone. So if you are look in to get in to the music and playing on an orchestra band you can contact Zalmen pollak by email and we will help you how to get your best knowledge.