When you support yourself through odd jobs, you can make bolder artistic statements, and show a middle finger to the art world, if you will. When an artist is a professor/teacher whose job is to teach the tradition in the mainstream way, they end up being immensely conservative. Just look at someone like Schoenberg who is -- of course -- considered an iconoclast by the academic art elite but his music is an extremely conservative extension of Western counterpoint and late German Romanticism in a very predictable way: make it more harmonically adventurous/experimental within the 12EDO framework... It's been everyone's go-to since forever, I mean Chopin made a fortune (and a mountain of novel piano music) off of it. Schoenberg simply refused to see what was right in front of his eyes, even though he clearly had gigantic artistic talent, spirit, and motivation (he is also one of my favorite composers, so I'm biased, granted). I really think teaching is not very compatible for artists who first and foremost want to be artists. Someone who wants to create, first and foremost, something new, profound, and personal... Of course, you'll find countless people who'll disagree with me staunchly...
When you support yourself through odd jobs, you can make bolder artistic statements, and show a middle finger to the art world, if you will. When an artist is a professor/teacher whose job is to teach the tradition in the mainstream way, they end up being immensely conservative. Just look at someone like Schoenberg who is -- of course -- considered an iconoclast by the academic art elite but his music is an extremely conservative extension of Western counterpoint and late German Romanticism in a very predictable way: make it more harmonically adventurous/experimental within the 12EDO framework... It's been everyone's go-to since forever, I mean Chopin made a fortune (and a mountain of novel piano music) off of it. Schoenberg simply refused to see what was right in front of his eyes, even though he clearly had gigantic artistic talent, spirit, and motivation (he is also one of my favorite composers, so I'm biased, granted). I really think teaching is not very compatible for artists who first and foremost want to be artists. Someone who wants to create, first and foremost, something new, profound, and personal... Of course, you'll find countless people who'll disagree with me staunchly...