We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Eric Salazar. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Eric below.

Eric, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?

After about 15 years of work, I am excited to be living my dream as a full-time musician! As a clarinetist and composer, I started my journey by going to college for music. I then went on to graduate school to earn a masters degree in clarinet performance. In my early twenties, I was freelancing and taking every gig I could get and… I hated it. I was burnt out before I was even two years into my career. I then took a step back and took some time to really think through what type of musician I wanted to be. I realized that I’m not the kind of musician who is happy to just show up and play whatever I’m told to play. I really need to have creative control, and also be able to control operational aspects of music-making (like, the venue, the music we are playing, and the people I am playing with).

This led me to arts administration, and I was employed as a hybrid administrator-performer-composer for about 10 years at a couple nonprofits in Indianapolis, IN. I learned a lot, and greatly enjoyed being able to ensure that the non-musical aspects were going smoothly – things like paying musicians on time, ensuring reserved parking for musicians with large instruments, etc. I did this for a while, but since I was continuing to perform and compose I was also securing more and more work for myself as an independent artist. Eventually, the dam broke, and I had to choose between the safety of a full-time admin position, or chasing my dream. Guess which one I chose?

I started my own LLC, and I’ve been a full-time musician for almost two years. I’m proud to say that I’m not just still going strong, I am expanding both my business and my artistry! The number one piece of advice I can give to anyone who is looking to have a full-time career as a creative is: you have to understand that no one gets to spend 100% of their time in the act of creating. No musician gets to spend 100% of their work hours playing music. No painter gets to spend all of their time painting. No dancer is dancing 24/7.

We all have to do non-creative work in order to make the creative work happen. If you can embrace that concept, then you can have a better relationship with the administrative tasks that absolutely need to happen in your career. Don’t feel guilty that you aren’t “creative” 100% of your work week. It’s ok to have days where you are just doing business tasks like sending invoices or coordinating schedules. I’ve found that the difference between someone who is creative as a hobby and creative as their career isn’t at all about how talented they are at their artform – it’s about their willingness to do business tasks (or hire people to do them). If you can absolve yourself from the guilt of “not creating enough” art, you can feel empowered to find the balance between business work hours and creative work hours.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My name is Eric Salazar, and I am a performer, composer, and career coach. I perform recitals and concertos of classical music that I feel connected to. Sometimes what I play isn’t all-classical, but a merging of different genres, like jazz and ambient. As a career coach, I focus on teaching people who don’t consider themselves to be “business people” how to be effective managers or leaders in the business world, while still staying true to themselves.

I perform as a soloist and as a chamber musician, mixing together classical music with spontaneous improvisation. I also compose music, both for the stage and for film. Through engaging in these different activities I have emerged as a leader of creative projects, creating spaces for effective collaboration that produce invigorating results for musicians and audiences.

When performing, I embrace being vulnerable on stage as I share stories in a way that makes the listener feel like they can be vulnerable too. I always jokingly say “I owe you an explanation for what you’re about to hear” when I present music that I write, but at the heart of it all, I simply write music that will tell you a story, so you can feel seen and feel connected to those around you. My music isn’t necessarily in the classical style, though it is cinematic and merges inventive electronic sounds with familiar instruments.

As a career coach, I focus on teaching people who don’t consider themselves to be “business people” how to be effective managers or leaders in the business world, while still staying true to themselves. A lot of people think that you have to be an aggressive extrovert to be successful in leadership positions, but I take a different approach. It is entirely possible to run a business purely based on authentic connections and gentle sales tactics – and I’d love to show you how.

I earned a B.M. in Clarinet Performance from Ball State University and an M.M. in Clarinet Performance from Bowling Green State University. For a while, I thought I would be an orchestral musician or a clarinet professor. After trying those things, though, I realized there could be a different path to fulfillment. I ended up diving head first into arts administration, all while continuing to perform and compose.

Now, I’m working for myself full-time and I’m loving every minute of it!

I’m also a fun-loving nerd. I’m a tea drinker, I play soccer, and I get lost playing Dungeons and Dragons. Ask me to tell you a joke sometime! I am a Pereira 3D Artist. I play on a Pereira 3D printed clarinet and ligature.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

I really believe that if we are going to have a thriving creative ecosystem, we should provide that ecosystem with the resources and infrastructure it needs. Of course, more money always helps, but what I’m really talking about is a shift in mindset with how we view creatives.

I think that most of society understands that art and culture are essential to our lives – or, at least, most of society engages in art and culture on a daily basis. What would your day be like if you couldn’t listen to music, watch a show on your TV, or wear your favorite clothes? We intuitively understand that we engage in art and culture all the time, but for some reason we don’t treat artists like they are laborers in a workforce that is essential to maintaining our quality of life. We just take for granted that artists make art and don’t particularly think critically about the resources they need to provide us with the outputs we consume regularly.

If we shift our mindset away from viewing artists as magical unicorns that create art and culture out of thin air and instead view them as a workforce that produces outputs directly correlated with the amount of resources available, we can start having much more effective conversations about resource allocation and impact.

In other words, we all consume art and culture on a daily basis. Whether you have thought about it before or not, art and culture are an essential parts of our quality of life. This means that art and culture are desired outputs for our society. Those desired outputs are created by a workforce. Any workforce has a “most valuable” laborer within it, and artists are the most valuable laborers of the creative ecosystem (no artists, no art). Since that is the case, society should be ensuring that these most valuable laborers are provided with the resources they need to produce the outputs (art and culture) that are essential to our quality of life.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

The biggest lesson that I’ve had to unlearn is that you don’t have to be the best at what you do to be successful. When you’re classically trained like I am, there’s a huge emphasis on being the best. It’s highly competitive and it’s impressed on young folks that they have to be better than everyone else in order to “win” a job. That’s right, in the classical music world, we call it winning a job instead of getting a job.

Really, though, there are three basic things people are looking for when choosing who to hire: being the best, being reliable and consistent, and being a pleasure to work with. While it would be wonderful to have all three of these, you really only need two of them. If you aren’t the best at what you do but you show up on time, consistently do the same quality work, and also are a pleasure to work with, you’ll get plenty of gigs.

I think this mindset can be applied to any field. If you really are the best at what you do (or have the aptitude to truly become the best), then that’s wonderful – but everyone else should just focus on being reliable, consistent, and a joy to work with.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.ericsalazarclarinet.com/
• Instagram: @theclarinetguy
• Facebook: @theclarinetguy
• Other: Spotify Artist Page: https://open.spotify.com/artist/1GV33OpN5snlf0iO5ILREN?si=cAnAQo53T4GhrU9at0t7sw

Image Credits

12 Stars Media
Indy Ghost Light
Emory Hensley