This week, Susan and Ingrid recognise that classical music is an industry that often causes psychological harm, in a way that other industries do not. Fortunately, it is very possible to unlearn harmful practices, and to make choices that change the way our organisations operate – the rapid development of hearing safety in orchestras is a good example of this. The idea of suffering is central to many of our musical cultures, and we need to start having the conversation about what actually helps people thrive in the classical music industry.

🤐 Many of us learn that in order to stay in the system, progress in the system, and succeed in the system, we need to stay quiet about our suffering.

🚀 Suffering escalates: first it becomes invisible, then normalised, then necessary, then competitive.

🧑‍💼 Some good questions to ask ourselves and our colleagues: “What would an outsider see here?” “What other ways might there be of doing this?”

If this conversation has brought up awareness of suffering that you have experienced, know that this doesn’t have to be the reality in our industry. Seek support, and support those around you in their own experiences, as we work together to improve the way we support everyone in our industry to thrive.

LINKS

Pelletier, B. (2025). Effects of Sleep Extension on Musical Performance Skills. Music & Science, 8. "While further research is necessary to establish causality and explore long-term effects... the findings underscore sleep extension's potential to significantly enhance musical skills and psychological flexibility among musicians, potentially opening new avenues for optimizing performance and fostering resilience in creative pursuits."

Bergen, P. (2024). Substance use in Australian orchestras: a scoping study "Previous research has established that musicians use a range of substances to manage performance anxiety, with beta-blockers and alcohol reported as the most common. To discover current patterns of use, we distributed an anonymous, online scoping survey to all professional Australian orchestras. The survey response rate was 17% of musicians, and representative of orchestral instrument groupings, with just over 50% of participants reporting using substances to manage performance anxiety. The most used substance was beta blockers, but other drugs and recreational substances were also reported. Notably, substance use does not noticeably ease for musicians with permanent orchestral jobs as they age."

Find Ingrid at Ingrid Martin and Conducting Artistry

Find Susan at Notable Values

PODCAST TEAM

Production support and audio engineering by Thomas Grayden

Theme music composed by QiQi

Theme music performed by QiQi and Darby Lee

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This podcast was recorded on Waawiiyaataanong Country and produced on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and acknowledge the ongoing impacts of colonisation on Indigenous communities.

This week, Susan and Ingrid dive more deeply into a question that came up frequently in Susan's recent workshops on feedback with the League of American Orchestras: what do I do when a colleague takes feedback badly? Susan and Ingrid discuss what might be going on under the surface for those around us, how to give feedback effectively, and what we actually mean by 'taking feedback badly.'

🤕 What might people really be reacting to when they react to our feedback? Our training model in music can be an unsafe place to receive feedback, which sets us up to react to things we’ve experienced in the past, rather than the thing in front of us in our workplace.

📝 How we frame feedback matters. We need to be aware of how our choice of words can help the people around us feel safe enough to receive feedback with clarity and openness.

🛠️ Praise = specific notes on what was good, constructive feedback = what to do differently next time, destructive feedback = what was bad this time. Destructive feedback by itself is not useful and can cause harm.

🗺️ Within constructive feedback, feed BACK = what happened, feed UP = what happens next, feed FORWARD = what we’re working towards. Research indicates that 40% feed back, 60% feed up and forward, is the optimum balance.

They are not giving you a hard time. They’re having a hard time.

LINKS

Gary E. McPherson: Feedback in Music Performance Teaching (2022 article in Frontiers in Psychology)

Find Ingrid at Ingrid Martin and Conducting Artistry

Find Susan at Notable Values

PODCAST TEAM

Production support and audio engineering by Thomas Grayden

Theme music composed by QiQi

Theme music performed by QiQi and Darby Lee

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This podcast was recorded on Waawiiyaataanong Country and produced on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and acknowledge the ongoing impacts of colonisation on Indigenous communities.

This week, Susan and Ingrid discuss how each person's version of success differs, but these versions can exist at the same time within an organisation – in fact, for a thriving organisation, that diversity is crucially important. They talk about the mismatch between what we might believe we signed up for and the actual reality of a role, and how organisations can make this clearer for better outcomes for everybody.

Some good questions:

🎻 When auditioning or interviewing for a role, are we representing that role accurately with our process, and our choice of excerpts and interview questions? This is our first chance to set people up to succeed, by choosing the person who is best for this actual role. Also, clear expectations are vital for psychosocial safety.

🎓 Educators, are we providing opportunities for young musicians that represent the reality of a modern music career? Are we doing education concerts, playing with click tracks, learning to play live with a film? Sometimes we don't even have to teach it – but we do need to talk about the things that make a career in music sustainable.

👥 What is it for, and who is it for? Our training model sets us up to expect a certain set of motivations, but the reality is that our work is mostly for the audience. We need to be united as an organisation around a clear shared purpose.

Find Ingrid at Ingrid Martin and Conducting Artistry

Find Susan at Notable Values

PODCAST TEAM

Production support and audio engineering by Thomas Grayden

Theme music composed by QiQi

Theme music performed by QiQi and Darby Lee

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This podcast was recorded on Waawiiyaataanong Country and produced on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and acknowledge the ongoing impacts of colonisation on Indigenous communities.

This week, Susan and Ingrid share some thoughts and stories about blame, diverse roles, and the fact that everyone is trying their best. It can be so easy with our efficiency-seeking brains to quickly mark out whose "fault" something is, and use simple reductionist language to describe complex situations. In our complex organisations made up of complex people, we need to honour complexity!

🔑 Key Takeaways:

🫵 Avoid binary, 'blameism' language that reduces complexity and generalises experience - us and them, right or wrong, always or never.

🌺 A blame-free environment is an environment that allows people to take risks for constant improvement, and allows everyone to focus on the big picture of success.

🏔️ Remember that we are on the top of Mt Stupid, and that's ok. Assume competence, assume good will - and be aware of what other assumptions we might be making.

LINKS

Mentioned this week:

Brene Brown (Feelings)

Feelings Wheel tool

Adam Grant (Mt Stupid)

Find Ingrid at Ingrid Martin and Conducting Artistry

Find Susan at Notable Values

PODCAST TEAM

Production support and audio engineering by Thomas Grayden

Theme music composed by QiQi

Theme music performed by QiQi and Darby Lee

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This podcast was recorded on Waawiiyaataanong Country and produced on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and acknowledge the ongoing impacts of colonisation on Indigenous communities.

This week, Susan and Ingrid discuss the way just about everybody in an orchestra can feel like they're the only one who knows how hard their job is. This is an intense environment, and it can be easy to forget that the systems in a classical music organisation are as finely tuned and interrelated as the ensembles they support. Join Susan and Ingrid for a chat about how we can appreciate the difficult work of those around us, and gracefully let others know about the work we're doing in our own roles.

🔑 Key Takeaways:

🔎 Everyone's job has its own complexity - we need to be able to broaden our lens to see what is going on for those around us.

🧩 Everyone starts with just their piece of the puzzle - as leaders, our job is to show the lid of the puzzle box to let everyone know what we're doing, and trust that everyone is playing their puzzle piece to their full potential.

🔧 It is vitally important to recognise the expertise and preparation of offstage staff, in the same way as we recognise the expertise and preparation of instrumentalists.

LINKS

Find Ingrid at Ingrid Martin and Conducting Artistry

Find Susan at Notable Values

PODCAST TEAM

Production support and audio engineering by Thomas Grayden

Theme music composed by QiQi

Theme music performed by QiQi and Darby Lee

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This podcast was recorded on Waawiiyaataanong Country and produced on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and acknowledge the ongoing impacts of colonisation on Indigenous communities.

This week, Susan and Ingrid discuss feedback: what it is, what it isn't, and how to give it to those around us. They discuss how poor feedback is often baked into our pedagogical lineage, and Ingrid shares a story of how an exemplary piece of feedback has shaped her journey as an educator and leader.

🔑 Key takeaways:

🕵️ It's important to be aware of ourselves and our situation, and how that may impact how feedback is received.

🏃 Feedback is actionable – never just a list of mistakes. It's easy to get this tangled!

📨 The way we give feedback matters for everyone in every situation, from the podium to the office to the boardroom.

LINKS

Find Ingrid at Ingrid Martin and Conducting Artistry

Find Susan at Notable Values

PODCAST TEAM

Production support and audio engineering by Thomas Grayden

Theme music composed by QiQi

Theme music performed by QiQi and Darby Lee

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This podcast was recorded on Waawiiyaataanong Country and produced on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and acknowledge the ongoing impacts of colonisation on Indigenous communities.

Join Susan and Ingrid as they launch Season 6 of Change Your Tune, a collaboration between the Change Your Tune Podcast and the Conducting Artistry Podcast. In this first episode, Susan and Ingrid welcome you to this new series of conversations about how to make classical music better for everyone. They discuss their own musical, professional and creative journeys leading to this point, from emergency wards to band rooms, and give you an idea of what you can expect from Change Your Tune in 2026.

LINKS

Find Ingrid at Ingrid Martin and Conducting Artistry

Find Susan at Notable Values

PODCAST TEAM

Production support and audio engineering by Thomas Grayden

Theme music composed by QiQi

Theme music performed by QiQi and Darby Lee

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This podcast was recorded on Waawiiyaataanong Country and produced on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and acknowledge the ongoing impacts of colonisation on Indigenous communities.

In episode 2 of Change Your Tune's collaboration with the Conducting Artistry podcast, Susan and Ingrid discuss the sentiment behind the phrase "Nobody dies at the orchestra", unpacking both its positive motives and its potential for unwanted consequences. They offer some different ways of communicating about acceptance of imperfection in an organisation, and dive into some of their own experiences of perfectionism in the world of classical music.

The main takeaways?

🤔 Think deeply about the words we use

🎻 Be aware of when our words might be excluding those around us by speaking incorrectly about their experience

👷 Make sure we have systems in our organisations to back up our catchphrases

LINKS

Find Ingrid at Ingrid Martin and Conducting Artistry

Find Susan at Notable Values

PODCAST TEAM

Production support and audio engineering by Thomas Grayden

Theme music composed by QiQi

Theme music performed by QiQi and Darby Lee

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This podcast was recorded on Waawiiyaataanong Country and produced on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and acknowledge the ongoing impacts of colonisation on Indigenous communities.