From “failed musician” to innovative entrepreneur

CHRIS HATZIS
Eavesdrop on Experts, a podcast about stories of inspiration and insights. It’s where expert types obsess, confess and profess. I’m Chris Hatzis, let’s eavesdrop on experts changing the world - one lecture, one experiment, one interview at a time.

You’re studying to be a classical musician. You’ve done your training, and you’re pretty good at it, too. But you just miss out on that gig in the orchestra that you wanted so bad, or maybe you don’t quite get to the next stage of your development. Now what? What else can you do with all that knowledge and skill? How do you turn setback into success? It’s not really about failure, but more about reassessment, realignment, and reinvention. It's also the realisation that you probably already have all the ingredients you need to change and succeed.

Today we meet a person who has trodden this very familiar path. Susan de Weger is a French horn player, in fact a self-confessed “failed musician”, who sidestepped and went on to establish a multi-million dollar IT consulting practice in Europe. She sidestepped again and found her way back to Australia, and is now associate lecturer in Music Entrepreneurship at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music at the University of Melbourne.

Completing a Masters of Music in Performance at the Conservatorium as a mature-age student sparked Susan’s passion and talent to reframe music education for the 21st century. She also created and heads up IgniteLAB, a world-class professional development program which supports students of the Conservatorium to dream and design sustainable creative careers. Susan is a vocal and passionate advocate for entrepreneurship and innovation; a living, breathing example of the transferability of music education to success across industries.

Susan de Weger took some time out to chat to our reporter Dr Andi Horvath about her life, her choices and her work.

ANDI HORVATH
Let's start at the beginning, Susan. Tell us about the French horn player studying in the music faculty.

SUSAN DE WEGER
Andi, I grew up playing in brass bands, which a lot of brass musicians do, with my dad and my sister, and that's what music making was for me, it wasn't about necessarily high-level orchestral aspirations of winning a job in an orchestra, it was really about making music with other people. I was very fortunate to get an offer to go do an undergraduate degree at a conservatorium and went in there and had a really good experience making lots of music with other people but knew that making music is only part of the job of a professional musician, and all the other parts of it like the high-level performing that's incredibly stressful, that was really not the right part of the world for me.

So, I looked - it was thinking about how I could use my musical training to be involved in music but that wasn't high-level performance in an orchestra because at that point that was really all that was presented to young musicians about an outcome out of a music degree was a job in an orchestra. I'd been lucky to be involved in doing a bit of box office management and stage management as a side gig when I was a student and could see that there was a lot that went on in the back end of putting performances on and was lucky enough to have a realisation at that stage that I was good at organising things, there was probably opportunity for people who were good at organising things and I was really passionate about making music and helping musicians.

That was where I thought I was going to go when I finished my degree, but I failed my first attempt at that degree, which is not an uncommon thing to do, and was really left at that point pretty adrift about who I was as an artist, because I wanted to remain a performer but a performer in a way that was about making music in the community and being involved in putting stuff on rather than high-level professional orchestral experiences.

ANDI HORVATH
So, you felt like a failed musician?

SUSAN DE WEGER
I was a failed musician, and this happens a lot and it's not just for performers. I think it happens a lot for young people, is their self-identity and their professional identity are really mushed together and it's very hard for them to separate those two things. My thinking went along the lines of “I've failed my music degree, I am a failure”, and that was really the internal story that stuck with me for the next 16 or 17 years - that I was a failed musician. It was so bad at that point that I actually had to walk away from music altogether.

ANDI HORVATH
You told me earlier you become the story you tell yourself.

SUSAN DE WEGER
Mm.

ANDI HORVATH
That's what happened.

SUSAN DE WEGER
It was, yeah, and I didn't have anyone who had a broader experience of what employment in music could be to say to me hey, it's okay. It's okay to not want to be a professional performer, there's lots of other opportunity for people with music degrees, not only in music but outside of music because the kind of training we have is really distinctive and unique and the way we think is really original. Yeah, and I just didn't have anyone who had that sort of expertise to be able to guide me.

ANDI HORVATH
You know what, I think we're birds of a feather because I felt the same, except I was a failed scientist, and so the same deal. I was lost at sea with what do I do with all this science, so what did you do with all that music? You said you left it behind; where did you go to next?

SUSAN DE WEGER
I actually moved interstate, I had to get out of Dodge [laughs]. I had to get away from the life - all the cues that were surrounding me about failure, which were really strong, so I had to get out of town. Again, this is a very common story, it still happens, I see it in students all the time. I ended up getting a job producing an event called the Rock Eisteddfod which was a pretty big event in the '90s in Australia. Many of us would have seen the TV specials, Sydney Entertainment Centre, and I got into large-scale tour management because that was involved in the music industry. It was involved with working with very creative people, it was organising very complicated things, so it was all the stuff I thought I wanted to do for orchestras but ended up doing it in more of a commercial sector.

ANDI HORVATH
Wow.

SUSAN DE WEGER
That was really exciting, I got to tour around Australia and I got to create this event for Indigenous communities in the far north of Queensland which was the biggest scale live event that had been put on in that part of the world. We had the Governor-General coming in a helicopter and we had broadcast to Channel 7, it was super exciting. So, I did all that for a couple of years and then I was very lucky to get offered the opportunity to go to the UK and be the manager of that business as well as the producer. I did that for a little bit longer and introduced the event into Northern Ireland.

I was very lucky, I had to work with the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a lot of health and social justice issues and education, so it was a really broad opportunity to see hey, my training is really incredibly valuable to do all this other stuff and it's given me great skills like I can listen really well, I can put myself in other people's point of views. I was starting at that point to get a gist of actually I've really not just been taught to train [sic] the French horn, my mind has been trained to think in quite a distinctive way.

Then I was pretty burnt out from touring for a while and my business partner had started an IT practice that was going pretty well and they needed a general manager for that and I thought, hey, I'll have a crack at that, that looks okay for me, and ended up getting started with that business. At that point I think there were six staff and then we within three years had about 30 staff and a turnover of a couple of million pounds with clients right across Europe. That's how I ported my music training into business was that I'm good with people, I can listen, I can organise complicated things, I don't flap under pressure, because as performing artists you can't do that. That's how all of my music training transported into being a founder of this multimillion dollar IT practice.

ANDI HORVATH
All right. You're in the UK, you're in a multimillion dollar business; how do you make your way back to a music faculty?

SUSAN DE WEGER
I had small children at that point and had wanted to come back to Australia so my boys could be educated here. Another amazing opportunity that I was granted through that career was actually negotiating a sale of that business, so working through the due diligence with the lawyers and the business brokers and being acquired, so that acquisition process was really fascinating, actually. So, the business was acquired and I moved back to Australia at that point and went back to the city where I'd done my undergraduate degree and again had all these cues coming at me from the Susan who was in the early '90s as an undergraduate degree, and the pain or the needing to resolve this self-identity as a failed musician just became too much.

I also looked at my little children and I thought I need to have a much better attitude to who I am as a creative person than I currently do, because I'm so hard on myself about the - about my creativity and the need to perform and I've just squashed that in a box because two dudes on a panel in 1994 said I was not very good and I chose to believe that. I just thought maybe those dudes weren't right after all, you know? Maybe 15 minutes of my creative self is not enough to make an accurate assessment about what I'm capable of doing and who the heck makes these decisions anyway about what's good or what's good enough instead of - all that sort of stuff. It was a time for me to come back and really say I just don't want to have this story going on in my head anymore about that.

So, I picked up the horn and was noodling away a little bit in my - it had sat in a cupboard for 16 years on the other side of the world, so I had to get it out and give it a bit of maintenance; it was a bit sad [laughs] it had been left alone for a little bit longer. Then I did an audition and passed an audition to work with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, so at that point I thought yeah, maybe I can actually play this thing, maybe the dudes were wrong after all and who knows what was going on in their world for that 15 minutes 20-something years ago.
I started working with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra and the Queensland Pops Orchestra playing professionally and moved to Melbourne for personal reasons and thought, I don't know why but I just want to go back and study and go a little bit deeper into what this might be, and so in my early forties with two young children I decided to tackle a performance master's degree, which is not a very common thing to do. I was double the age of everyone else in that course. I didn't know why; it was one of those... just I have to, I don't know, but I know I'm going to figure out because I've been challenged before. I've not been fearful of challenge and I've not been fearful about discomfort in all my other career choices, I've been able to stick in that place of being fearful and unknown and feeling unprepared and unready so I know that I've done it and I know that I can get through it to figure out what's going to happen.

I came back and started my performance master's degree and on about day two of that journey had this just lightbulb moment where I thought I see now how all the crazy things I've done that are not connected around the perimeter of the circle are connected to the centre of the circle by this need to help other people to have - to know what success could be for them and to equip them with the tools to go do that. That's how all the little bits and pieces fell in the one place. Then I looked at it and I thought again, there's opportunity, it fits with my personal values and I'm really passionate about that thing and so it totally made sense. Yeah, that was a real revelation for me.

ANDI HORVATH
So, Susan de Weger reinvented herself in this expertise that collected everything she'd learnt up until then, and your expertise is of course helping musicians become entrepreneurs. Now, in some ways, musicians really are familiar with the gig economy. They are familiar with the notion of the side hustle, that is, being a musician, or the other way around, so they're a musician by passion but their other work is a side hustle.

SUSAN DE WEGER
That's right. I think that's an important thing to distinguish for artists is your - and we can replace music with anything, this equates just as much to science graduates or to law graduates, if your craft, whatever that craft it, I think we've got to figure out whether that's going to be for fun or for funds, because those two things are really, really different. What I love - I do a lot of work at secondary school and I say to our young artists, I would love nothing more than for you to come in for music, for you to train in music and for music to remain always for fun for you performing and let's use your training to create funds in different ways. Being a musician does not mean having to get paid to play or having any of these external markers of playing with a famous symphony orchestra. There's wonderful value and meaning in lots of different ways of expressing our creativity. So yeah, I was able to connect those two things back together.

ANDI HORVATH
Now, you've redefined the notion of concert. Tell us about that.

SUSAN DE WEGER
Yeah. I think particularly for our young artists who are training today, there's this trope about classical music is dead and it's been going on for about 30 years now, and I don't think it's true. It's just changing and it's evolving. Our performers are changing and evolving and our audience is changing and evolving as well. In the same way that if you maybe went to a barbecue at someone's house in 1980 you'd expect some curried eggs and some asparagus out of a tin, that would not maybe cut the mustard at a barbecue in 2018 where we're expecting haloumi and chorizo kebabs. Well, it's the same sort of thing; we're still classical music in some areas, they're still serving up asparagus in tins and chunks of ham and Coon cheese stabbed into a pineapple. It's really important that we look at actually what our audience might like, what our competition is for their attention, how they like to spend their disposable income, what's meaningful to them and then how we curate to that.

ANDI HORVATH
The whole digital era.

SUSAN DE WEGER
Exactly.

ANDI HORVATH
That means you can go on YouTube and just watch a concert.

SUSAN DE WEGER
Exactly. So, the notion of concert does not have to mean that the musical performance sits at the centre of everybody's attention. It doesn't have to mean it's in a hall at seven o'clock on a Saturday night, doesn't have to mean the audience have to sit there and be punished for their lack of knowledge about sonata format or the recapitulation of the modulation of the key change, and that's a lot of what has gone on and is still going on in a lot of the larger institutions is we're so smart and we're so clever and we know this thing that you don't know very much about and you must sit there and be performed at and be grateful for the opportunity instead of it being much more loving and immersive.

We are here to curate and create an emotional experience that we're going to share together because as performing artists that's what we crave is connection with an audience. It's not always easy to do that in a traditional concert format and audience appetite for that. If we look at the audience of 2048, it's currently 2018, they want the same kind of experience and perceived value for their dollar spend out of the musical performances they do for Food Truck Festivals and other things they go to.

We need to be curating experiences that have an emotional connection through music to people and delivered in ways that they want to attend, otherwise - that's what live music is all about. If they want music, they can listen to Spotify for free. What they want to pay for is experience and connection and so that's what I'm really trying to help our young artists to understand is that the craft of their performance must be amazing, but secondly, that the commerce, the understanding of what audiences want in 2018, must support that, so the two things go hand in hand.

ANDI HORVATH
In some ways it's almost the very early notions of how music functioned in communities, small villages, tribes. It's the experience of togetherness.

SUSAN DE WEGER
Yeah. Also, I think for our young artists, when they really get in their head that making an impact means they can make an income, that's a real turning point for them. Because they've often only - the only notion of musician they've ever seen is a photo of some person in a tuxedo playing an instrument on a stage and they haven't really had an opportunity to experience the range of employment in music and to have a sense of - particularly if they're high-level musicians at high school, most of the structure of their performances is organised by other people and their role in that has been to listen to an instruction and play an instrument.

When they come into, particularly the work that I do at the conservatorium, we're saying to them that's the kind of - that's the entry point, you must be able to play the instrument really well but look at all this other stuff you can do to actually make a connection to people. So, about our responsibility to the audience, that's something that's maybe been a little bit put to the backburner in higher music education in the last couple of years.

ANDI HORVATH
Let's talk about music education. There's a lot that's changing in the industry and you've just given us stories about that. What surprised you about how the industry has evolved?

SUSAN DE WEGER
I think the way that the internet has actually changed live music, because everything is for free and I think the consumers, customers or audience members of 2018 have an expectation of getting a certain amount of things for free. So, if we don't do a better job of showing them that live music is a very different thing to streaming something, then that's the real challenge for us is that young audiences, they may not - because music education has been taken out of primary schools, a lot of people have not participated in music-making in their school journey or they maybe haven't had any incursions from some of the really great music education programs that go into schools, so they just don't know that it's different.

It's our job as artists not to say come to my concert of Shostakovich No. 12 because it's in important piece of music. Our job should be hey, if you really like the music of video games and computer games and that just kills you in that final bus scene and that music amplifies the emotional experience, hey, this is another experience where you get to see that happening IRL, in real life, and come and share that with us and let us show you how you can feel this with all of your senses in a live environment. I think that's the way that education is starting to change in helping our artists to understand, like I said, about curating to an audience and understanding that the challenge for us is being competitive with Netflix and computer games, because that's the other thing that people are spending their disposable income on in that younger age bracket.

ANDI HORVATH
There's a lot of good music in movie soundtracks and computer games.

SUSAN DE WEGER
Yeah, and especially if you - like with the World Cup's on at the moment, if you turn the volume off on the ads, there's no emotional experience, you're just watching some dudes kicking a ball around a field, right? So, music is the emotion and the connection to the visuals and so when we can say that - like make that connection, say the reason that you feel so much when you're watching Friday night footy or you're watching Formula One or whatever it is you're watching that's making you feel something, it's the music that's amplifying and making you feel that, so come and have an experience of that in a different environment.

ANDI HORVATH
So, shall I tell my producer Chris Hatzis to put a backing soundtrack to this, and what would you choose?

SUSAN DE WEGER
Oh, Foo Fighters.

ANDI HORVATH
Okay, Chris, noted.

SUSAN DE WEGER
I'm not your typical classical musician [laughs].

ANDI HORVATH
Fair enough. Now, part of what you teach, and I know it's called IgniteLAB where you get students mentored, immersed into the world of entrepreneurialism and business to help them thrive in the future. How do you mentor students? What do you tell them?

SUSAN DE WEGER
I think it's really important to - when they come and see me for mentoring they have a pre-meeting questionnaire. I have to understand where they are; that's the most important thing. It's not my job to change anybody's mind or convince them that their ideas aren't valid or realistic, it's not my job to do that. It's my job to get a really well-rounded picture of who they are as a human being, the role that music plays in their life, the role that they see that music may play in the future for them and what impact they can make in their community through their music-making.

Then we talk about okay, how do we map between here to there, what are the steps to do that, how long is it going to take, what are the skills you're going to need, where can you acquire those. Yeah, so it's working with them on that kind of a basis, is really meeting them where they are, helping them to clarify an idea of where they might want to go and then mapping the here to there.

ANDI HORVATH
You encountered a life full of obstacles and trying to readdress the story in your head. Who actually inspired you or mentored you or were there moments where a particular event made you rethink things?

SUSAN DE WEGER
When I turned 40 I wanted to go to horn camp [laughs]. I didn't want to party, I wanted to go to horn camp in America because there's this incredible artist called Jeff Nelsen, who's a horn player.

ANDI HORVATH
A French horn player?

SUSAN DE WEGER
French horn player, yep. He plays with the Canadian Brass, which a lot of non-classical music people may know. Just the way that Jeff thinks about our responsibility as artists to the world in which we operate and to ourselves is really unique. So, I went to go to horn camp; it was also to deal with my performance anxiety which at that point was pretty - dialled up to 11, again not an uncommon story not only for musicians, this notion of communicating something that's important, being performance, whether that's in - you're a lawyer or you're a teacher in the classroom or you're an executive in the boardroom.

ANDI HORVATH
A podcaster.

SUSAN DE WEGER
Podcaster, science communicator, all this stuff. Jeff's thing really is about performance and connection to the audience, and I had lost that and I'd lost myself in the journey. I just was so - when I stood up to play I was probably delivering about 20 percent of what I was capable of doing in the practice room, and again, we talked about change happening, when the pain is so great, I couldn't live with standing up in front of people and only being able to give them 20 percent of what I could do.

So, I went to see Jeff and had stood up in front of him and played something for him and it went really terribly, 20 per cent, and he looked me in the eyes and he said “Susan, that was really great”, and I just sprayed back at him, “Oh, you don't know anything, it was terrible, the E flat was out of tune and I missed this entry” and I just gave - you know, the same thing when people try and praise us for what we've done. So, I was just spraying at him this whole self-pity, woe is me, it's all about me story, which all of us do, and Jeff just looked me in the eye and he said, “Why are you here? I don't think you care one single thing about me” and it was like bam, oh, dude, you've just taken a can opener to my head.

That precise moment was I realised I'd just been so caught up in me, me, me, me, me and I'd just completely forgotten - he - he genuinely loved what I did. Okay, there were technical things to fix but if the starting point for me was that everything that I did was so terrible, I was never going to be able to - yeah, I was self-limiting so badly at that point and so that was the real turning point was him saying actually, you - and you see that in a lot of performers where they'll finish their performance and the audience are clapping and they're shuffling their music or they're halfway off the stage.

As performing artists we're not taught how to make that connection and accept with humility and gratitude and love the thanks of an audience because we're so fine-tuned to “it's got to be perfect or I'm going to die”. We're a bit of binary outcome, particularly in a classical musician, it's perfect compliant copying or it's completely wrong, they're the only two places. Therefore, if it's not perfectly completely compliant, it's wrong and I've failed.

ANDI HORVATH
If you had a Susan de Weger when you were a French horn student in the music faculty mentoring you, what would you say to you?

SUSAN DE WEGER
I think I would say - and I say this to pretty much every student that comes in is that you have everything you need inside you. You have everything you need to dream and to build and to achieve a life that is artistically and financially rewarding.

ANDI HORVATH
That's beautiful. Susan, next time we hear some music or see a French horn, what would you like us to think about?

SUSAN DE WEGER
I don't want you to think about anything, I want you to feel. What does it make you feel, where does it take you? So, feel something. I think in this Insta-worthy life we lead of visual gratification, of commerce and objectifying stuff, we're losing the ability to feel and to connect with each other. So, I'd like you to, if it's a person making that music, stop and have a moment to connect with them and let yourself feel something.

ANDI HORVATH
Susan de Weger, thank you.

SUSAN DE WEGER
Thank you, Andi.

CHRIS HATZIS
Thanks to Susan de Weger, associate lecturer in music entrepreneurship at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne. And thanks to our reporter Dr Andi Horvath.

Eavesdrop on Experts - stories of inspiration and insights - was made possible by the University of Melbourne. This episode was recorded on July 3, 2018. You’ll find a full transcript on the Pursuit website. Audio engineering by me, Chris Hatzis. Co-production - Dr Andi Horvath and Silvi Vann-Wall. Eavesdrop on Experts is licensed under Creative Commons, Copyright 2018, The University of Melbourne. If you enjoyed this podcast, drop us a review on iTunes, and check out the rest of the Eavesdrop episodes in our archive. I’m Chris Hatzis, producer and editor. Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.