Lessons From a Street-Wise Professor: What You Won’t Learn at Most Music Schools
By Ramon Ricker
Soundown Inc., 2011
Most music schools teach students how to perform on stage, but they don’t teach skills for performance in the business world. Ramon “Ray” Ricker (BME ’65) fills in the missing notes to help aspiring musicians avoid becoming starving artists in his book Lessons From a Street-Wise Professor: What You Won’t Learn at Most Music Schools (Soundown Inc., 2011). Ricker’s 50-year career has included gigs as a music professor, composer, arranger, studio musician and stage performer. He has performed in hundreds of radio and TV commercials and was a member of the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra for 38 years. Ricker’s arrangements have been commissioned by symphonies around the country, and his works have been published around the world. In Lessons From a Street-Wise Professor, Ricker says musicians should include entrepreneurial thinking, a strong positive brand, a proactive attitude, versatility, flexibility, business savvy, familiarity with technology, people skills and networking as instruments to achieve success.