PROFESSIONAL GROWTH
Click on the tabs below to advance your career by searching Contests & Awards, Schools, Festivals, Camps, Service Organizations, and our list of Services and Products, Scholarships and Grants and Events and Conferences.
And be sure to browse the excellent career advice offered by legendary Artist Manager Edna Landau in her Ask Edna blog and the entertainment law experts in their Law and Disorder blog.
US/Canada Arts Administration Degree Programs
Music Schools & Departments
Summer Music Camps & Special Programs
Services & Professional Music Orgs (non-profit)
Performing Arts Industry Events and Conferences
AskEdna: Career Advice blog
Scholarships and Grants
Send your questions to Edna Landau at AskEdna@MusicalAmerica.com and she’ll answer through Ask Edna. Click the links below to read Edna’s recent columns on the critical aspects of launching and managing and professional music career.
Communicating with Your Audience
During Edna’s 23 years as managing director of IMG Artists, she personally looked after the career of violinist, Itzhak Perlman and launched the careers of musicians such as pianists Evgeny Kissin and Lang Lang, violinist Hilary Hahn, and conductors Franz Welser-Mõst and Alan Gilbert.
Edna believes young musicians can grow their own careers, with “hard work, blind faith, passion for the cause, incessant networking and a vision that refuse[s] to be tarnished by naysayers.”
Special Reports
MA Top 30 Professional: Tigran Arakelyan
Conductor, Executive Director
Music Works Northwest
Tigran Arakelyan finds it hard to recount everything he’s accomplished in his 36 years without being overwhelmed with gratitude. He’s “been fortunate,” he insists. Or he’d sooner credit his many mentors—like his first music teacher in Armenia, or Ludovic Morlot, former music director of the Seattle Symphony—and his parents, who encouraged his “crazy ideas.”
Crazy to some, maybe. But many can’t imagine classical music in the Seattle area without Arakelyan. Recently named one of 425 Business magazine’s 40 under 40, Arakelyan has conducted numerous regional orchestras in Washington and California; he took the Federal Way Youth Symphony on three tours to South Korea in 2014, 2017, and 2019, and is known for finding unusual venues for all of his projects, from bars to cafes to homeless shelters. On his podcast, Let’s Talk Off the Podium, he has interviewed a huge variety of notables including George Walker, Vijay Iyer, Evelyn Glennie, JoAnn Falletta, Sharon Isbin, and Christopher Theofanidis.
Today, Arakelyan devotes virtually all of his energies to Music Works Northwest, a community music school in Bellevue, WA, that provides lessons, music therapy, and summer programs to individuals and schools, offering tuition assistance to the former and free instruction to the latter, as well as gratis public concerts by its professional faculty.
This may be his most personal project yet—a way of giving back. Arakelyan moved to the U.S. when he was 11, his family becoming part of the bustling Armenian-American community in Glendale, CA. He was born with a respiratory condition; his parents, also musicians, believed playing a wind instrument would help, and suggested he pick up the flute. Money was tight, but Arakelyan was able to keep studying music thanks to a scholarship from the Lark Musical Society, a music school in Glendale not unlike Music Works Northwest. “My parents think that music technically saved my life,” he says. And Arakelyan is making his own mark on many, many lives today.