Testimonials
 A lot of you only know me as a business person. Some of you may know me from clarinet conferences of other venues over the years but we have never really connected or talked a lot. Others of you were told to call me to get a new clarinet by someone you really respect and know, nothing more. Others of you might be interested in starting a business in a creative field and want to learn more. I am writing this to help you know me better and to help you understand why I do what I do that perhaps you only know as a "businesss" now.
I started a business my senior year in Northwestern University, called National Clarinet Suppliers, Inc. Clarinetists Julie DeRoche, DePaul University, started it originally in the spare bedroom of her home and decided when she became pregnant with her son, to sell it. Clarinetist Todd Nickow and myself were customers of National Clarinet Suppliers, Inc. and we were both interested in buying it. I bought it and Todd went on to run his parents business, which he is still running today.
When I bought this small business, I was at the top of my class at Northwestern in the middle of my senior year, winning many solo competitions and significant prize money, while studying with Robert Marcellus. Mark Nuccio, New York Philharmonic, David Jones, Kennedy Center Opera Orchestra and Richard McDowell, University of Texas- Austin were some of my stand partners in orchestra and wind ensemble. I was certainly prepared to pursue and win a professional orchestral audition or teach at a prestigious university, as my peers have.
Yet, while I really enjoyed playing the clarinet and was extremely good at it, I realized I was not interested in playing in an orchestra or teaching. I was interested in using my clarinetistry as a tool to be creative. I was interested in helping others further their creativity and I was also interested in making money; if for no other reason then to be another to break the barrier that the arts are not lucrative. I am at heart a rebel but with a good cause!
The reason I bought the first business I had, National Clarinet Suppliers, Inc. and went on to build International Musical Suppliers, Inc., Music Starts Here as well as several others business's resulting in over a 12 million dollar enterprise over a twenty year period of time, was because of my core beliefs which still drives me today.
Creating music is important to the core of a human being's development and is extremely important for others to witness and experience. We all grow in life from the being either an active participant or a listener of all artistic expression. Many who are artistic in this country are fighting for survival or the respect they deserved. Wanting to see the world change to respect and handsomely financially reward the creative artistic people of the world; I felt and still feel passionately committed to helping artists thrive.
Creativity is a fuel that makes great ideas and the world needs us! My goal is to ensure that every person who wants to be creative can to their highest potential and that those who want to build a life founded in their artistry can economically flourish!
I hand select instrument to ensure that every person who wants to be creatively expressive can with the best possible tool available for their specific desires and needs. This is one of my creative contributions to creatively Entrepreneur the Arts that I am extremely passionate about and good at.
You will find in my book about Entrepreneurship in The Arts, soon to be published and still untitled, new insights and ideas about artistic development and career building. This book will teach you techniques to develop your skills that students have told me have never been shared with them before! Additionally in my speaking and teaching about Artistic Entrepreneurship you will find an interesting, informative, fresh approach to helping artists define who they are and what will best serve their hard earned skills and gifts in life.
I am available to schools, small business development organizations, not for profit and for profit organizations to give workshops and presentations on how best to use your artistic creativity to further you or your company, school or organization's mission. Life is too short to not earn a living doing creatively something you love.
Feel free to call or write for more information.
Lisa
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 My name is Lisa Lisa Canning and I am a musician- a clarinetist- first and foremost. I fell in love with playing music as a child and could not live without it in my life, so I decided on a career in music as my profession. I was fortunate enough to have parents that could afford to send me to Interlochen Arts Academy for high school and fortunate enough to get in to Northwestern University to study clarinet with Robert Marcellus. I was at the top of my class and thought I could accomplish anything I wanted in music.
When I look at the musicians I studied with at Northwestern, I can honestly say that most everyone has made a living in music either performing in a major orchestra or combining playing in a second tiered orchestra with teaching or freelancing or teaching music to kids full time at the middle school, high school or university level. There are a few of us that did a few other things out side of "the box", like myself, but by and large "in the box" is where everyone has made their careers.
Yet as I look around me today at the young students graduating from university level music schools, the future of graduating music majors thriving in music as a career, as you and I have, is uncertain. With symphony orchestras folding at alarming rates, benefit cut backs for most musicians in major orchestras and temporary salary freezes such as is the case with The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, in addition to music programs across the country being threatened due to cut backs and lack of support for the Arts- all of this information just begs the question: What are we doing to teach our students how to take something they love- music- and ensure that they can transform it into a full time career?
Is it right that on any level we either directly or indirectly take a students' money to either teach them how to play better or teach them the skills they will need in the music classroom, but not teach them the life tools they need to survive in their chosen field- music- which they love?
As someone who has spent the past twenty years in the music industry earning a handsome living as a self employed entrepreneur, and having spent the past ten years in the classroom at DePaul University teaching students how to utilize and develop their talents to ensure that they can build a life in music that they want; the answer to the question is undeniably that students are extremely hungry to know how to build a life in the music industry and want to be told what they need to do that! I applaud schools like DePaul University, which just last year made a commitment to an undergraduate degree in Arts Management, as an option for its performance oriented music student body, in addition to offering a course on career development in the arts.
Each and every one of us who are living lives in music as a career is here because of the love we have for music. For the past eight years I have been a founding member of my own chamber music group, The Pilgrim Chamber Players that has its own resident composer, Donald Draganski. We have an annual budget of over 100,000 and perform all around the city of Chicago. I love the audience, that averages over 200 a concert, that we have built who enjoy our music and performances immensely. Additionally, I ran and owned International Musical Suppliers, inc. for 20 years. I started it in my dorm room at Northwestern, grew it into a Top 100 retailer nationwide and was forced to sell recently as a result of my divorce. However for those of you who do not know, the products side of the industry, is facing collapse and is under extreme financial pressure in every market segment. Music stores are closing at alarming rates and there have been more mergers and acquisitions then in the past thirty years or more, according to others who have been at retailing longer then I. Then consider the recording industry and the affect that anyone's ability to download free of charge a mp3 has had on royalties to artists and CD sales? I could go on and on here but I think you see my point. Now think of your student who has just graduated. How many of them will make a living in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd year exclusively working in the music industry? A modest few at best I am afraid is your answer. Our industry is not in good shape for our future generation.
Personally, however, at 43, I can still not imagine my life without music at its core nor can I imagine not endorsing to others the joy of being in a profession I love, despite my grim report on the state of the music industry. While I have just recently started another business selling clarinets, as you know since you are reading this on my site, with twenty years of developed relationships with customers, my business is immediately flourishing. However we both know that someone new to the field with few contacts would not even have a chance to survive.
Perhaps you might answer differently then I why you still spend your day focused around music, but the one thing I am sure of is that both of us truly would like to be able to offer the next generation of music career oriented students the exact same opportunity, to build a life around music, as we have had. After all our passion and love for music should be universal and each of us should be able to experience a life involved fully in music if we so desire. It's not enough, however, in our business to know your craft, as you well know, in today's economy or competitive environment. I know I thought music was competitive over twenty years ago and now it is almost grid lock or like playing The Lotto to get or "win" a job.
I do however still believe that if a musician develops fully and is well rounded in life skills the chances of their succeeding in the music business improves dramatically. Yet surprisingly most schools and teachers are still not well equipped to ensure that their students get these skills because of the demands put on what is already required, and needed, for you to teach. Unlike other professions, the arts take you in a direction that isolate you from the rest of a university student body, usually because of the demands to rehearse, practice and study music. Because of the competitive nature of music, there is little time devoted to defining and shaping the skills one needs to survive and thrive in general in the music field itself.
So what life skills am I speaking of that need to be taught?
Music students come in all sizes and shapes and skill levels. As someone especially interested in helping students develop their musical careers, and having spent ten years designing course work to help musicians build their chosen careers based on their individual interests and skill strengths (and weaknesses), here is a list of the most basic areas that students need to address in career development:
What is the value of money to you? How much do you really need to live? Will that be enough money when you are 30, 40 and 50? What kind of lifestyle do you want and how will you support it? We all know students live on a shoe string budget and do not really comprehend that in a few years this style of living will become old. While every person's financial needs are different, exploration about a students views on money from their experiences in the past and desires for the future are needed to help them plan the needed career steps based on those financial requirements. If this work is not done early in the development of a student's career, the likelihood they will leave the industry is extremely high because of the financial pressure they will face due to their lack of planning and understanding of their future needs.
What tangible skills do you have that you ignore or take for granted that could be developed to help you in your career? If awareness of ones natural and developed skills are completely lacking there are career development tools/tests that can be given to help a student recognize their areas of strength and weakness. Students need to learn to identify and develop two kinds of skills: Soft Skills and, what is commonly referred to as, Hard Skills. A soft skill, as an example, would be ones aptitude for speaking or communicating. Or ones ability to organize or multi task. Or ones ability to be punctual. An example of a Hard skill would be defined as experience in marketing to the arts or knowing how to assemble and or read a profit and loss statement or balance sheet. Both soft and hard skills need to be identified in an individual, and sometimes required to be developed, to help them be utilized to enhance and then progress in the development of their career.
All students need quality internships in areas that interest them in music to build skills from their sophomore year on. These internships need to be strategically identified based on the needed skill sets students identify that they need to develop. I have seen thousands of resumes from both having hired recent university music school graduates for my former business as well as assisted students in developing resumes at DePaul. I can say with certainty that 95% of all music majors have extremely little to no work experience in the field of music prior to graduating at the university level from a music school. Most have no performing experiences outside of school as many also do not have any private lesson or group teaching experience outside of school requirements.
These facts are simply shocking.
A mentor. Students need someone to role model and to talk to regularly about their career development and progress, just like they need this kind of mentoring when learning to play a musical instrument better. Students need help identifying and understanding what kind of role model they need based on their current and future career goals.
The know how to put together a 1, 2, 5 and 10 year career game plan to ensure they can develop the career in music they want. This may require additional school, internships even post graduation to develop skills and or a series of jobs to build skills that cumulatively will allow the student to find the right job in the arts after several years of strategic job choices.
Additionally students need to really know how to network, to identify opportunities in the music industry that others have not yet seen-entrepreneurship 101-, and to be willing and to know how to develop a few different combinations of income producing endeavors that as a whole will allow them to stay in the industry instead of winding up as a teller in a local bank. Success in the music industry requires career development training in today's economy and market place. While being a bank teller may be a fine job for a high school graduate it is not for a university trained musician. It would be like saying you were trained to be a lawyer but you are working at Office Max instead. This would be unheard of in the legal profession and it should not be occurring in ours.
If we want our students to become gainfully employed in the music industry in the future, regardless of if they want to play or teach for a living or do something else in the arts, it is our responsibility to make sure they fully develop as human beings and graduate with tangible life skills to ensure their success.
If your school does not actively have a music business or arts management program and/or a career development course for your music students to benefit from, let me help you develop meaningful coursework that meets the needs of your student body's interests and talents.
Please do not hesitate to call or write to me to further discuss your school's needs. Working together we can help those in the arts financially thrive.
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