A teacher tells a room full of young musicians: if you’re serious about an orchestral career, you need “x.” “X” could be almost anything; a better instrument, a specific piece of equipment, or an incredible opportunity.
A student who has “x” turns to the student beside them, who doesn’t, and asks, without malice, “why don’t you have ‘x’?” The answer: “I can’t afford it.” A brief, awkward silence follows. Then we move on.
This exact exchange played out at a masterclass I recently attended. The same frustrations around finances came up later, when the topic turned to auditions, and the advice was: take as many as you can. Afterward, talking with peers, the consensus was resigned. “In an ideal world, sure, but how am I supposed to afford to travel to auditions multiple times a year?”
I’ve heard versions of this conversation constantly since I started my university education. Ironically, these conversations happen in universities and summer music programs, spaces where you already need a level of financial privilege to participate.
Increasingly, I hear from young musicians who feel the barriers to an orchestral career, during and after all that education, are only getting higher. What frustrates them most isn’t only the cost, but also that professors, instructors, and administrators do not seem to understand the precarity of their situation.
I’ve dealt with some of these frustrations myself. Institutions and teachers are well-meaning, but they haven’t grappled with the fact that, since the pandemic, the barriers between young musicians and the careers they’re training for have only grown.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe, and what I wish someone had told me earlier: the people who see the most success in reaching an orchestral career are increasingly the people with the most financial privilege — not necessarily the most talent, or the most hard-core work ethic.
I want to spend the rest of this post doing two things: laying out what these barriers actually look like, and how they’ve worsened in recent years, compounding an existing mental health crisis among Canadian musicians; and then looking ahead with more optimism. There’s a cultural shift underway among the youth of my generation, a growing recognition, after growing up around technology, that the human experience should be defined by in-person connection, by doing things ourselves, and by using our own minds rather than outsourcing our decisions to artificial intelligence. I think young musicians are well positioned to take advantage of this shift, and to help reshape our cultural institutions around it.
The Post-Secondary Education Funding Crisis
If you have attended a university music program in music performance in Canada in the past few years, you are most likely aware that these programs and the institutions where they are offered are in crisis.
Public post-secondary institutions in particular are struggling since the federal government capped international student numbers. These students had been a major source of university funding, largely because of the higher tuition rates they paid. They also became a convenient scapegoat for the housing shortage — a narrative I don’t think holds up well under scrutiny, but one that stuck regardless, and helped justify the cap.
Because of this, and despite provincial caps, tuition rates for domestic students have risen, despite an overwhelming number of students disagreeing with proposed increases. In 2023, for example, the University of British-Columbia’s tuition consultation survey showed that 92% of students rejected a tuition increase. The increase went ahead anyway, and UBC has since stopped sending out a tuition consultation survey.
Some programs have weathered this better than others. Music programs are not among them. In a private conversation with a dean a few years ago, I was told something that’s stuck with me since: music programs are some of the most expensive programs to run per student, while the research output, career outcomes, and broader societal “impact” they produce are, by the university’s usual metrics, small. That’s one dean’s framing, not a fact I can prove — but it matched everything I was already sensing, and it says a lot about a system that has long undervalued the place of art in our lives. Music programs get cut first because they’re seen as the least essential.
The response varies by institution, but in conversations with music students across Canada, a clear pattern is emerging: services that used to be free have been reduced, cut entirely, or turned into things you now must pay for. This runs the gamut, from access to performance spaces for rehearsals, to collaborative pianist funds, recital recordings, and the number of private lesson hours you’re allotted.
On the surface, these shifts can look minor, but in practice, they stack into a real barrier to full participation. Here’s an example of what this might look like in dollars, if you’re a student at one of these universities applying to a summer program:
- Application fee: up to $150, before you’ve paid a cent for the program itself.
- Hall rental + recording technician: roughly $300 for a two-hour session, if you want your audition recording to sound like it was made in a real performance space, which auditions require.
- Collaborative pianist: another $300 or so, if you play an orchestral instrument and need someone to accompany you through rehearsals and the recording itself.
That’s nearly $800 — just to apply. Not to attend. Not for tuition. Just to be considered.
Multiply that choice across every student without financial cushion, across every program, every year, and you start to see how the field sorts itself.
Given that music programs are already some of the most expensive to attend, these extra costs can be the thing that tips a talented, hardworking student toward recording in a worse space, or skipping an opportunity altogether.
None of this is to say students aren’t resourceful. With the technology available now, it’s easier than ever to produce a solid recording without a concert hall. But the students who can access more premium resources still tend to have an edge. And that edge compounds audition after audition and program after program.
This compounding effect has been well illustrated in a revealing Substack article by Alfredo Muñoz. In “Why so many of us didn’t make it,” Muñoz proposes the “Prestige Tournament Model,” a three-stage system that demonstrates how advantages compound across the orchestral career pipeline. By the time musicians reach postsecondary education, they have already been through the first gate, what he terms, “Early Access and Development.” In my opinion, this is where many artistic institutions across Canada have done a great job in ensuring broader access whether it be to musical opportunities, to instruments, or to instruction.
However, the focus of this blog post is on the second stage, what Muñoz coins as “Elite Institutional Sorting.” Here, he is looking specifically at the top music schools in the US, and whether you have access to these programs can affect opportunities for growth, through access to teachers, alumni networks, and resources. While the context in Canada differs slightly, Muñoz’s system is useful as it illustrates that better-resourced institutions produce better results for aspiring musicians.
In conversations with musicians of my age, reaching this second stage is somewhat of a shock to the system. Not only do we enter programs with a higher cost of entry and ever more limited resources, but we are also entering a stage in our lives where our individual responsibilities increase. Many of us move away from home to attend school and assume greater financial responsibilities. It is here that the second set of barriers emerges.
The Cost of Everything is Up
Beyond tuition and fees, many of the most sought-after music programs in the country are in the cities with the highest cost of living. Students move to these cities to study with renowned orchestral musicians, to build a network in the local musical ecosystem, and to see high-caliber performances. But as the cost of food, rent, and transportation rises every year — and scholarships and fellowships don’t — the margin for affording city life keeps shrinking. Indeed, Canadian students experience things like food insecurity at a higher rate than the national average. In 2023, 29% of Canadian students said they experienced food insecurity.
Other university programs, like the sciences for instance, provide facilities, equipment, and labs as part of tuition. Music programs often don’t offer resources beyond rehearsal and performance space. On top of an already exorbitant cost of living, students absorb the cost of instruments, equipment, and maintenance themselves.
These costs haven’t been immune to inflation either. Take the clarinet, which happens to be the instrument I play: ten years ago, a Buffet R13 cost around $3 500 USD. Today, the same clarinet runs over $5 000. Many instruments aren’t produced in Canada, so they’re also exposed to an unpredictable global trade environment. More than one professional musician has told me and my colleagues that it’s more worthwhile to fly to Europe to buy an instrument than to buy one in North America.
At a certain point, the math stops making sense. Many of my peers work multiple jobs during the school year and over the summer just to afford tuition, let alone anything else. That means they can’t participate in summer programs, can’t take gigs, and have fewer opportunities to network. It also means less time for schoolwork and practicing, because there are only so many hours in a day. These stressors have real effects on young musicians.
The Effects: Mental Health
These barriers have real effects on the lives of aspiring orchestral musicians. No data has been collected specifically on pre-professional musician mental health in Canada, but the 2026 Soundcheck report offers a reasonable proxy: 94% of professional musicians in Canada agree that mental health issues are widespread in the field, and 86% have lived with, or are currently experiencing, mental health challenges.
Gen Z has also been shown to be disproportionately affected by the broader mental health crisis. Researchers point to the pandemic, financial insecurity, and technology as contributing factors. A Gen Z musician, then, is contending with a generational mental health crisis while entering a sector with an already poor track record on mental health outcomes.
Many of us see the writing on the wall. I’ve sometimes been discouraged from pursuing a professional career in music, because I have a hard time envisioning a career that comes at the cost of my mental wellbeing. Even if we reach a career in music, we know we may face working conditions that harm our mental health, without the resources to cope. In the Soundcheck report, only 10% of musicians felt that sector leaders supported their mental health.
The bottom line is this: if orchestras want to hire musicians who represent the diversity of their communities and want to encourage youth to engage with orchestral music, they need to be part of the solution — reversing the trend of orchestral careers being accessible only to the fortunate and financially well-off.
That solution doesn’t have to start big. For post-secondary institutions it could be a return to subsidized or shared access to recording spaces and collaborative pianists, so $300 rehearsals aren’t the price of entry. Scholarships and fellowships offered could track cost-of-living increases, instead of staying flat while rent climbs around them. For orchestras and summer programs, it could be need-based waivers for application and audition fees.
None of this fixes the whole system, but it’s the kind of thing an institution or an orchestra could commit to this year, not someday. Alongside it, orchestras need to build workplaces with real policies around wellbeing, and real limits on harassment and bullying, because getting more people in the door doesn’t matter much if the profession still burns them out once they’re inside.
If I was in a masterclass and one student said, “I can’t afford it,” I don’t want that student to be met with silence. At the very least, professional orchestral musicians and administrators need to acknowledge our reality. From there, I believe we can start to have real conversations about the status quo, and about what it would take to give young musicians a fair shot at contributing to Canada’s cultural ecosystem.
Optimism in the Age of AI
None of what I’ve laid out gets solved by hope alone, and I want to be honest about that before I end on a hopeful note. But alongside the practical asks above, I do think there’s a longer-term reason for optimism, one that has less to do with fixing budgets and more to do with what might make the arts matter more, not less, in the years ahead.
We’re entering a world that will be reshaped by artificial intelligence. I understand the real challenges this technology poses to musicians’ livelihoods, but I also think it puts music, and the arts more broadly, in an unexpectedly strong position to make the case for our own value. If AI can generate a passable string quartet or a technically competent painting in seconds, the thing that remains scarce — and therefore valuable — is the human being who spent years learning to do it slowly, imperfectly, and with intention. That scarcity is an argument, and artists should be making it.
Here’s my take: in the future imagined by AI’s most enthusiastic boosters, artificial intelligence will be able to do most things for us, write, design, compose, even converse. If that future arrives, what’s left to human agency?
I think the answer is connection, and I think my generation is already reaching for it. We grew up with technology, but we’re also old enough to remember something slightly less connected, a childhood before WiFi was everywhere, before a screen answered every question and filled every idle minute. Since the pandemic, a lot of people my age have started to notice what that constant connectivity actually costs: how much emptier it can feel to be endlessly reachable and still lonely. That’s produced a real hunger for the opposite: for in-person routines, shared rooms, activities that pull us away from screens rather than deeper into them.
This is where I think performing arts have something rare to offer. If AI keeps absorbing more of the tasks we used to do ourselves, then the deliberate, slow, effortful work of making art becomes one of the few places left to practice human agency at all. Learning an instrument, rehearsing a piece, performing it in a room full of other people can take an indefinite amount of time. It is a process-oriented activity, rather than product-oriented. It doesn’t optimize anything. But that’s exactly the point: an activity with no purpose beyond itself, that demands your full attention and rewards patience over speed, is a rehearsal for staying human in a world that will keep offering us shortcuts. And unlike most solitary hobbies, it comes with something AI can’t replicate: other people, in the same room, making something happen together in real time.
That’s the case I want to make. Performing arts sit at the intersection of human connection and human agency, at exactly the moment both are becoming harder to come by. Advocating for the arts on those terms — not as decoration, not as “enrichment,” but as one of the last places where people practice being fully present and fully skilled at something — could raise both the visibility and the perceived value of what musicians do.
None of this changes what a young musician in Canada is up against right now: the audition fees, the instrument costs, the thinning scholarships, the mental health toll. Optimism about the future doesn’t pay this year’s tuition. But I think it’s worth naming anyway, because it points to something the field can build toward, a version of making music that matters not despite the world AI is building, but because of it.
Simon Proulx is a McCall McBain Scholar at McGill University, completing his Master’s in Clarinet Performance. He worked as a summer student with Orchestras Canada as Communications and Member Services Coordinator. Simon envisions a career at the intersection of performance, research, and music advocacy.
Halifax, Canada
Speaking about the Award, jury chair Jaelem Bhate noted, “Yvonne DeRoller’s remarkable career is a testament to her unwavering commitment to the arts and her community. Her dedication to nurturing young talent through decades of teaching and leadership, combined with her passionate advocacy for music accessibility and inclusion, has left an indelible mark on Nova Scotia’s cultural landscape. Her resilience and generosity continue to inspire both musicians and community members alike. It’s an honor to recognize her outstanding contributions, which exemplify the values of the Betty Webster Award—courage, compassion, and a deep belief in the transformative power of music to enrich lives and build stronger communities.”
OC’s Executive Director, Katherine Carleton, commented, “Yvonne’s lifelong dedication reminds us of the profound difference one person can make through perseverance, generosity, and a genuine love for music. Her gifts, her courage and her determination have affected countless lives through her performances with Symphony Nova Scotia, her work to establish Halifax’s first Suzuki School, her behind-the-scenes work on behalf of musician colleagues, and everything she’s done to support and mentor young musicians and newcomers to Nova Scotia. It is a privilege to honor her extraordinary contributions—and her inspiring example of what it means to nurture the best in ourselves and others through music.” 
During my (ongoing!) master’s in management studies at HEC Montréal, I learned about the “Baumol cost disease.” – Sounds scary, I know…! 
Calgary, Canada
As a graduate of McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management, fluent in English, French, Vietnamese, and German, my career as a professional photographer and artist is shaped by a global perspective and a genuine passion for classical music. This passion is rooted in a family legacy of cinematographers and photographers, driving my dedication to capturing moments that tell a meaningful story.
The most important driver of emissions in the concert business is not the travel of the artists, but of the audience. However, not putting on concerts cannot be the solution! 
