Be a Clone, But Better: The Quiet Sin Inside Music Training

We train young artists to erase themselves, then act surprised when they burn out. AI just made that a much more expensive mistake.

At the ISME World Conference in Montreal this summer I sat down with Brian Kai Chin — former chair of the Moores School of Music at the University of Houston, immediate past president of the College Music Society, and founder of Common Tone Arts. He said one thing that I have not been able to get out of my head.

"I don't mean that in a demeaning kind of way. Our conservatories are awesome. They're designed on a trade school model though, and we just have to be aware of that. We're training them to do a specific thing. And that thing is awesome."

He wasn't throwing a punch. He loves these schools. His point was subtler, and honestly harder to argue with: the trade-school model is one model. And when thousands of institutions offer music, there's no reason to keep photocopying the same one. In his words — diversify it.

There is no one pathway

Here's what the single model quietly does. It narrows the definition of success down to a needle.

Train a theater kid, and everyone outside her world expects Broadway. If she doesn't get there, she "quote unquote failed." But we don't do that to anyone else. English majors don't all become English teachers. Biology majors don't all become doctors. A degree in the arts proves you can think critically, go deeper, and create better — and success for an arts graduate should be defined as broadly as it is for every other major on campus.

Chin put it plainly:

"There's no one pathway to being in music. There's no one pathway to success."

He and I are both living proof. Two people who built careers in music, neither one riding on a performance salary today. Nobody would look at either path and call it a failure.

"Be a clone, but better"

The deeper problem isn't the curriculum. It's the message.

"It's not just what I'm looking for as a director in a student," Chin told me. "It's also what I'm messaging to that student that we value. Every little thing you do as an institution messages what success is and what success looks like."

And the message — baked into accreditation, prestige metrics, big-orchestra placements, selectivity rates — comes out sounding like this: be just like everyone else, but a little better. Be a clone. Don't be yourself, but be better than everyone else.

So students are told to bring nothing of where they came from, to arrive as a blank slate, to become a flawless technician, and only at the very end are they allowed to be a little bit themselves — "if you still love music when you're done." Chin calls that the biggest sin in higher education music. He points to the old cartoon of the orchestral violinist thinking, "I must be a professional because I don't enjoy this at all anymore."

Now run that through AI

Here's why this stops being a philosophy debate and turns urgent. Technology homogenizes.

Chin's example stuck with me. Put on a recording from the 1940s and you can name the Boston Symphony instantly, or pick out Roger Voisin's trumpet in a second. Set it next to the Berlin Philharmonic of the era and it's a different world. Today orchestras sound far more alike, and players are interchangeable across a global industry.

"That homogenization is my biggest fear with AI," he said.

He uses writing as the tell. Grammar tools and suggestion engines are useful line by line. Compounded across everyone, they flatten language and quietly delete the unusual phrasing that made it yours. On the little inline suggestions in his inbox: "90% of the time I actually hate the suggestion because it doesn't sound like me, it sounds like someone else."

I've seen the same thing from the other side. In my ISME talk I described running my nephew's college essay through an AI. It came back better. And the kid had vanished from it.

Two flattening forces at once

Sit with the collision. If technology flattens us toward the average, and the training model already asks students to erase themselves on the way in, we're running two homogenizing machines at the same time, pointed at the same young people.

The only response is to come back to the human. Here's Chin on training an artist instead of a technician:

"Who are you? Where are you from? What makes you unique? You are valued for that. We want that in this room."

And the line I keep quoting since: "Fitting in is putting on whatever costume you need to join the club. True belonging is when your unique voice, as exactly who you are with all of your weirdness, is what makes it special."

Why this rewires recruiting

More directors are telling me the same thing: they want to know the student as a human before the audition. Technical accuracy still matters. So does the artist behind it.

But there's a tension, and Chin named it. We say we want to know these kids, then the audition process tells them to stop being themselves. Ask a student their favorite music and they say "Beethoven," because that's the safe answer. The audition system and the metrics of success are part of the problem, and you can't fix that from inside the fight for the recruit. As Chin put it, on the day recruitment opens "there's blood in the water." Real change needs neutral ground — organizations like the College Music Society, and platforms that sit outside the recruiting war. That's exactly where we built CommonTime Pathways.

When schools can see students as whole people, and students are actually encouraged to show their humanity, the funnel gets wider, and both sides get to assess fit honestly — including the freedom to decide they're not a fit.

What Houston is doing about it

Chin isn't just diagnosing. At Houston he led an eight-year curriculum redesign that flips the sequence. Instead of years of theory and history as an obstacle course a student has to survive before she's allowed to make anything, students walk in thinking about the projects they want to build, and the coursework hands them the skills to build them.

"The goal is to have a student leaving with their career already started."

The ask

This is what I mean by Artistic Intelligence: the specifically human capacities that music training builds and no model can fake — as long as we stop training them out of kids on the way in.

So here's the ask. To schools: change what you message as success. To students: show us your growth, not your polish. The perfect take is cheap now. The human reaching for it is the whole game.

My full conversation with Brian Kai Chin, recorded at the ISME World Conference in Montreal, is worth your time [watch it here]. We also get into his nonprofit Common Tone Arts, where the College Music Society goes next, and the athletics idea of documenting a student's growth over time instead of freezing them at a single audition.