What I Wish I Could Say…

Crispin Highfinger the Third

What I Wish I Could say…To the Power Holders

I occasionally meet with leaders within the music industry to discuss possible mental health structures for musicians. These are directors of training institutes and leaders of artistic institutions.

This is a representative conversation. But instead of staying polite and diplomatic and smiling a lot, I’m giving you the version where I say what I’m really thinking.

The following is a completely fictional exchange between the president of a music conservatory - Crispin Highfinger the Third - and myself.

CH: Good day, Ms. O’Donnell.

HOD: Hello, Mr. Highfinger. Thank you for taking the time.

CH: What’s this about? I’ve got twenty minutes… [looks closely at his wristwatch through his Schubert-glasses]

HOD: I’d like to talk about Musicians’ Mental Health, and how we might develop better supportive structures for students and the entire community.

CH: Ah. Well—don’t get your hopes up! We already have a very vibrant program here for mental health.

HOD: No high hopes here—I just want to hear your thoughts, learn what challenges you’ve encountered, and exchange ideas. What kind of support structures do you currently have?

CH: We just hired an Intimacy Coordinator for the opera program!

HOD: Congratulations. So, this enables directors to continue staging disturbing and occasionally dangerous works, and singers can be gently coached—sorry, gently coerced and gaslit—into compliance.

CH: Oh come now, everyone’s doing it. It actually started in Hollywood!

HOD: Fantastic. Any plans for broader education around Setting Boundaries? Something that might not only help a narrow range of students in situations involving stage intimacy, but Boundary Setting for the widest possible contexts: including contract negotiations, difficult conversations with colleagues, dealing with unprofessional and overbearing authority figures, and so forth?

CH: Setting Boundaries?! For students!? The professors would revolt. Next thing you know, students would start refusing to practice and protesting for Mushroom Coffee in vending machines! This institution would collapse!

 [Crispin yawns and examines his watch]

HOD: Some over-correction is a natural part of learning processes, especially for those who were primed to be overly-compliant. You could trust students to grow. Or—are you afraid of emotionally mature and resilient musicians?

CH: Heavens, no! Our students are very willful. It’s not like in the good old 1980s!

HOD: What’s changed?

CH: Well, the old guard is gone. Many of the folks who had a… let’s say… flair for liaisons [spoken with an exaggerated French accent and a salacious wink] have passed on.

HOD: So... you didn’t implement structural change. The predators just died.

CH: Some were arrested during that whole #METOO thing...

HOD: Woah.

CH: Students today are very free. Professors are always complaining about how entitled they are.

HOD: What do you mean by "free"?

CH: Demanding. When I was a student, if a professor told me to stand on one foot and bark like a Sea Hound for three hours, I barked. That’s how I got so good at the English Horn!

HOD: [wants to ask how barking helps with wind technique, but stays on topic]. So, now students tend to question extreme demands from their teachers?

CH: They don’t commit. They’re always on their phones. They won’t show up for anything unless attendance is required.

HOD: You have a point—as the first generation growing up on social media, there are considerable mental health impacts to navigate.

CH: It’s not mental health! It’s laziness. No commitment. In my day, you committed. Or you dropped out.

HOD: I’d argue that laziness isn’t to blame, but rather other mental health issues. We have decades of data showing that professional and student musicians are at higher risk for anxiety, depression, for addiction. Many young artists are very nervous about their professional prospects. There’s a lot of anxiety about the world they‘re entering into.

CH: oh, Buck up! The profession is hard! If you can’t handle it, Get Out. Not everyone is meant to be a World Star.

HOD: I’m not talking about the World Stars in the sector. I’m talking mostly about the others: orchestral musicians, freelancers, ensemble members, teachers—and the ones who cobble together a living across several of these areas.

CH: We’re here to train professionals. This is not a Kindergarten. We can’t help every little snowflake cross the street just because they have fragile feelings.

HOD: There’s a big difference between coddling and actually offering resources that match the demands of the profession. Would you like to talk about what these resources could look like? By the way, sports institutes are way ahead on this…

CH: [inturrupting] Sports aren’t the Arts!!

And—look, I don’t want to indulge in stereotypes—but a little suffering connects you to your soul. Think of Schumann!

HOD: Schumann had a debilitating and ultimately fatal mental illness.

I’m not advocating for sterilized life. I’m advocating for support.

CH: Honestly, our students do quite well. We have the highest placement in Military Bands in the country!

[Crispin leans back plumply into his arm chair]

HOD: Are you serious? How many students do you track? For how long? Because sustainable and satisfying careers are not the narrative that researchers—or therapists working directly with professional musicians—are coming into contact with.

CH: [clearly agitated] Well, we’re not therapists here, Ms. O’Donnell! We are artists! We deal in suffering, transcendence, excellence—not emotional hand-holding!

HOD: What if excellence and emotional intelligence weren’t mutually exclusive?

CH: [blinks rapidly] That’s… just a radical proposition.

HOD: Is it?

[A silence. Crispin’s left eye twitches slightly.]

CH: [suddenly louder] You have to understand—this institution was founded on tradition! Sacrifice. Rigor. It’s called legacy, Ms. O’Donnell.

HOD: Listen. I’m here because your students—and your staff—are suffering. Quietly. I hear about it in counseling sessions, but there is no way for them to express it here. There’s anxiety, injury, over-identification with the work, burnout. And the longer we pretend that excellence justifies everything, the more people disappear from the profession.

CH: [visibly sweating] You’re talking about… what? Yoga sessions? Therapy dogs?

HOD: [smiling] Could be, if that’s important to you and teachers and the students. But mostly: counseling, coaching or therapeutic offers from mental health practitioners with an speciality in working with artists, forums for open discussion, the development of an instituional culture in which openness about the realities of the profession – the good and the bad - is not only tolerated, but encouraged.

CH: [chokes slightly on his Peligrino] Encouraged?!

HOD: This building is haunted, Crispin. By unexamined assumptions about excellence. By all the young people who came here hoping to be shaped, and instead were broken.

CH: [whispers] This is not in the curriculum…

HOD: Exactly. That’s the problem. You can teach counterpoint, but not how to survive being invisible in your own life.

CH: [muttering] I miss the 1980s… we had ashtrays in the practice rooms…

HOD: And now you have an epidemic of performance anxiety and chronic injuries.

CH: [stares at the Steinway in the corner] I think the piano is judging me.

HOD: It is.

CH: [softly] …What do we do?

HOD: Let’s start with a conversation. And the a commitment to care. To the uncomfortable, ongoing, and difficult work of change.

CH: [long pause] I don’t know how to do that.

HOD: Not knowing is the beginning.

[Long silence]

HOD: You don’t need to become a therapist or a caricature of care. You don’t need to dismantle centuries of tradition. But you do need to start building something that isn’t perpetuating suffering, generation after generation.

How can I help?

Of course, none of this happened—at least, not like this. Crispin Highfinger is a fiction. But the avoidance, the deflection, the near-religious reverence for "suffering = greatness"—those are real. The music world is full of brilliant people doing their best inside shitty systems. But it’s time to admit that “doing your best” isn’t enough when students are burning out, when abuse is normalized, when vulnerability is treated as weakness, and when silence is safer than honesty.