So Many Options for Music Grads

By Yoshi Kato I Sep. 5, 2024

A career in music isn’t just playing onstage. These four professionals prove it, from left: Jody Espina, JodyJazz Mouthpieces; publicist Lydia Liebman; producer and manager Matt Pierson with Samara Joy and Pasquale Grasso; Sunny Sumter, DC Jazz Festival.
(Photo: Courtesy JodyJazz; Courtesy Lydia Liebman Promotions; Michael Jackson; Fritz Photographics)

Beyond performing and teaching, what can one do with a music degree? Plenty.

From festival presentation, album production and artist management to publicity and mouthpiece design and manufacturing, creative people with music degrees are thriving in their careers.

Sunny Sumter (Jazz Festival President and CEO)

“I knew since about 9 years old that I wanted to have a career path as a singer,” says Sunny Sumter, president and CEO of the DC Jazz Festival. Studying classical voice at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in D.C., she was set to attend Howard University and further pursue her passion and talent for singing.

“I wanted to major in music performance, and my father said, ‘Why would you do that? I’d think you’d want to learn how to run the business of it,’” she remembers. Sumter saw her father’s point and initially started as an accounting major.

“But I spent a lot of time in the School of Fine Arts, and it was there that I realized I could major in music business,” she says. “The music business program is out of the School of Fine Arts at Howard, so it really opened my eyes. Not only did I learn accounting, but many other aspects of the industry. It was really a wonderful opportunity to immerse myself in the arts.” She added jazz studies as a second major.

“I was eventually able to get out and do internships where I could utilize that music business knowledge,” she adds. Sumter joined the DC Jazz Festival in 2008 after working at the Rhythm and Blues Foundation and The Aspen Institute. “So many of my colleagues who are executive directors and CEOs of nonprofit cultural arts institutions or performing arts centers started off as ballerinas or drummers.”

Asked about her most surprisingly useful course, she mentions one in entertainment law. And it actually came in handy when she was a vocalist.

“It taught me to understand how to read a legal document,” She says. “And that actually protected me from a few potential setbacks early in my singing career.”

Matt Pierson (Record Producer, Artist Manager)

“I wanted to be Jerry Hey,” declares Matt Pierson, talking about the legendary trumpeter and session musician. “So I planned to get into the recording studio to play and arrange.” Producing albums with Blue Note Records and then Warner Bros. in the late ’80s through early 2000s, he worked with everyone from Bobby Watson and a young Benny Green to Joshua Redman and Brad Mehldau.

But when he entered the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music as an undergraduate, Pierson planned on being a Studio Music and Jazz double major. “Initially, my idea was I wanted to just make a living as a musician. But once I got there, I started to get exposed to all different aspects of the industry,” he says. Writing album and concert reviews for the school newspaper and working at its radio station expanded his horizons.

Upon graduating, Pierson worked at Peaches Records and Tapes in South Miami while gigging at night. By reporting sales to Billboard and interacting with record label representatives, he learned about the industry from behind the counter.

Once he moved to New York City, he was able to parlay his work at Peaches to a job at Tower Records and then an entry-level position in Blue Note Records’ promotions department. After working his way up to executive positions there and at Warner Bros., Pierson went the independent route in 2003. His collegiate newspaper criticism experience came in handy when he was penning liner notes for compilations he was curating, and he eventually expanded his professional portfolio to include artist management alongside album production.

Pierson’s current roster consists of vocalists Samara Joy (whose Grammy-winning Linger Awhile he produced), Stella Cole and Lucía Guitiérez Rebolloso plus vocalist/fellow trumpeter Bria Skonberg. “It’s kind of a niche that I ended up working in,” he reflects. “So no matter what you study, there are elements of your education that are going to show themselves in ways you didn’t expect.”

Lydia Liebman (Publicist)

Lydia Liebman counts Lakecia Benjamin, Gonzalo Rubalcaba and Catherine Russell among her publicity clientele. She was named to the Forbes 2021 class of 30 Under 30 for music and is on the faculty of the Roc Nation School of Music at Long Island University.

The daughter of saxophonist and NEA Jazz Master Dave Liebman and jazz oboist and English hornist Caris Visentin Liebman, she sang jazz and was involved in musical theater growing up in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. “My dad, being the professional musician, told me, ‘You should also be studying something else. You need to double major.’ And I agreed, because I had a lot of interest outside of just performing music,” she recalls.

Liebman was accepted to Emerson College, which was in a consortium with five other local schools including the Berklee College of Music. She entered as a Political Communications major but switched over to Producing, with an emphasis on film, television and radio, after her first semester. (Her initial area of study may have informed her successful Grammy promotional campaigns for several happy clients.)

WCEB, Emerson’s student-run radio station, was an instant home. She went from hosting a jazz show soon after she arrived on campus to being operations manager the next semester. She quickly ascended to general manager from her sophomore to senior years.

She also ended up spending more time on the Berklee campus than at Emerson, taking advisor-approved courses in subjects such as harmony and ear training. But she’d welcome her Berklee friends onto her radio show to promote their gigs and had a revelation: “‘We need to get more people to these shows. Let me make you a flyer.’” After learning photoshop and posting flyers around Boston and Cambridge, she caught the eye of Danilo Pérez and Marco Pignataro of the Berklee Global Jazz Institute, who became her first official clients.

After graduating and later moving to New York, Liebman eventually launched her own company. “The main thing that I got from college is the networking. And in the end, what really made my college experience worth it were the extracurriculars like the radio station.”

Jody Espina (President, JodyJazz Saxophone and Clarinet Mouthpieces)

“From the age of 14, I had my plan: I decided to be a professional musician,” shares saxophonist, clarinetist and businessman Jody Espina. “I studied classical clarinet for two years at University of South Florida, not because I loved it but, because I thought it was good for me.” The next step was to transfer to Berklee, from which he graduated magna cum laude with a degree in performance.

“Everybody told me, ‘Don’t major in music. Major in something that you can fall back on in case music doesn’t work.’ Luckily, I didn’t listen to them,” he says. While living in New York from 1985 to 2008, he pretty much did it all: perform, record, teach, tour and even substitute in Broadway pit orchestras. He founded JodyJazz in 2000 and pared down his other endeavors to focus on it five years later. JodyJazz acquired Chedeville mouthpieces in 2018 and Rousseau Music Products in 2020.

“I started thinking differently, that I could be creative in any area instead of only in music and not tell myself, ‘Well, I can’t run a business because I’ve never done anything like that,’” he says. “And as far as the music products business, which is what I’m most involved in, most people don’t come in with an MBA. They fell into it the way I did, from a music point of view.

“We have 24 employees, and half of them are musicians. With my musicians who deal with the public, that’s critical,” he continues. “I can’t really have non-musicians interfacing with people.”

As for continuing with music, Espina reassures that it’s rarely binary. “Most of these jobs you can still be a player. With my employees here, if they have a gig I let them off to go do it,” he says. “And if you just think about the larger picture of what music is, it might be better than being a paralegal just to have steady work.”

Beyond the Degree: Lifelong Learning

“The overall exposure to a lot of different things that you might not think of yourself, and the opening up to so many different people and philosophies and ways of life other than your family, is an important aspect of college,” Espina declares. “You never know when a philosophy or English class might help you.”

“The music industry changes so much and so fast,” Liebman points out. She teaches every spring and has “to rewrite parts of my curriculum every year because things are changing so quickly.”

“The education never stops,” Pierson concurs. “Doctors do this. They keep doing these refreshers about whatever’s happening in their specialty area. I think we all have to do this. Continuing education never stops.” DB