Simone Maurer has been playing the flute since she was 10 years old, and she now spends up to 28 hours each week practising and perfecting her skills.

She is a fourth-year honours student studying advanced performance at the Queensland Conservatorium, and her ultimate aspiration is to establish a career as a performing orchestral musician.

But this is a feat that not many students accomplish.

Each year, roughly 250 students begin their studies at the Queensland Conservatorium, with 200 of those students studying a performance degree.

Director of the Queensland Conservatorium Research Centre Professor Huib Schippers estimates about five per cent of those students go on to establish a career as a performing musician – that is, those who make a full-time salary purely by playing music.

To make matters more daunting for Ms Maurer, establishing a full-time job as a classical musician is particularly difficult to achieve in Australia due to the country’s underfunded musical landscape.

According to Professor Schippers, music has a lower prestige in Australia in terms of government funding compared to European countries.

“If you look at the access that musicians have to money and grants and the chances they have of making a decent living, they’re more limited here than they are in Europe,” Professor Schippers said.

For Ms Maurer, it’s a fact that weighs heavily on her mind.

“There’s not enough funding for orchestras to stay afloat,” Ms Maurer said.

“So definitely that’s a bit of a worry for me as someone trying to crack into an orchestral career.”

Nevertheless, Ms Maurer has high hopes for achieving just that, and her outlook on the reality of her situation is both realistic and sensible.

“I make myself as versatile as possible, and I think I always had that attitude going into uni, unlike a lot of other students,” she said.

“I will always want an orchestral career; I will always want a crack at it.

“But I know that I won’t be able to just have an orchestral career in my life; I will have to get another source of income and do something else.”

The ability to find alternative ways of earning an income is exactly what the Queensland Conservatorium is attempting to teach its students, according to Professor Schippers.

“We’ve changed the curriculum to include a whole strand from beginning to end called My Life as a Musician, which aims to make the young musicians not only excellent performers but also cleverer entrepreneurs,” Professor Schippers said.

“Most of the conservatoriums were founded about 200 years ago as a provider to the orchestra.

“The idea was to learn there and get a job with the orchestra, but because of the sheer numbers we produce and the limited numbers the orchestras take, that’s not really the career path for a conservatorium student anymore.

“We see many of our graduates being very clever with starting small ensembles or finding niches, and that’s something that we want to stimulate.”

But for a lot of music graduates, the decision to dedicate the endless hours required to succeed in the industry is a difficult one.

University of Queensland specialist flute tutor Patrick Nolan said most of his students showed a level of concern regarding job prospects, but for him it was important they understood where they were in the general field of things.

“I never ever express to someone that they’ll never get a job as a performer,” Mr Nolan said.

“The way I express it is, this is the work you need to do and the results you need to achieve to get there, and along the path people end up working out the equation of what effort they want to put in to achieve these results and they make a decision over how they want their life to be.

“Some of them don’t want to have it totally consumed by music over the next 10 years by just doing this, they want many other facets to their life, and so they change their minds and go in other directions.”

Mr Nolan said he was concerned for students who were disappointed at having failed to achieve their aimed performance career.

“I think an inability to face the reality of a situation is sometimes hard and I really fear for that situation,” he said.

“I have known people who have been many years after finishing their tertiary degree and still hoping for a permanent position in an orchestra but it’s not forthcoming.

“It places an unnecessary dark colour over their life, and I think that’s a real shame.”

But it’s an outcome that is generally rare, according to CEO of the Australian Music Centre John Davis, who said a lot of skills acquired from a music degree are transferable across many other industries.

“The way your brain works when making music or creating music provides you with skills that others who don’t have that experience won’t have,” Mr Davis said.

“All the skills I learnt as a musician and all the skills I learnt from my compositional training, I’m using every day in terms of from a business administrative point of view.

“So whether it be about how to interact or collaborate with people or how to organise mega-resources to gain maximum kinds of outcomes, they’re all skills that I would apply in my day-to-day life.

“And I think anyone who’s been through musical training and gone on to other areas would make similar kinds of comparisons.”

But Mr Davis admitted very few music graduates end up working purely in the music field because the market place is not big enough.

Head of education for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra Kim Waldock said the limited number of opportunities to break into the classical music scene was part of a larger problem with the Australian musical landscape.

Ms Waldock said Australia only offered a limited number of pockets in which graduates could work as instrumentalists, because music was not given the priority it should.

“If you go live in Europe and work in Germany, every town has its own orchestra,” Ms Waldock said.

“I think in Finland, they’ve got five times as many orchestras per capita than most other places in the world.

“It’s extraordinary, it’s just given a priority right from the beginning, so it’s something that the whole society thinks is important and values.”

According to Ms Waldock, this lack of priority in Australia was reflected in the reduced level of funding for the arts at tertiary institutions.

“I think music education in Australia, particularly at a tertiary level, has taken such a cut in terms of funding,” she said.

“Music is a very expensive thing to learn; you have to have instrument lessons, you have to study a whole lot of different skills, it’s not just about being able to read music and play your instrument.

“It’s quite expensive because it’s very labour-intensive and requires certain amounts of one-on-one training.

“So I think that, compared to the 34 face hours that I had when I went through the Conservatorium each year, I think students now have about 12.”

But this lack of funding has not closed the door completely for hopeful orchestral musicians.

Ms Waldock said the rise of the internet was providing students with new opportunities that had previously been unavailable, including the ability to participate in master classes held at the Manhattan School of Music in New York via the web.

“As the internet and online opportunities become more and more and universities rely more on connections they have with other international universities, I think that’s possibly going to open up a whole new era, which will be really exciting,” she said.

Department of Education and the Arts Principal Education Officer Mike Tyler said access to overseas travel and study was also much better and more affordable than ever before.

“I think there’s probably a general acknowledgement in the tertiary music sector that in order to become a well-rounded orchestral musician, ideally you would spend some time playing overseas,” Mr Tyler said.

“While we might like to keep everybody in this country, that’s a bit insular as well in development of standards.”

Mr Tyler said students were given plenty of opportunities to engage with music at a high level by travelling overseas.

“While we might not have the orchestral or classical music landscape that some of the European countries might, we certainly have access to them,” he said.

For university student Ms Maurer, the decision to study overseas is a logical one – she is travelling to London herself in August to attend flute classes – but she does have concerns that it is part of the larger attitude Australians have towards their own musical culture.

“It’s just sort of accepted that as soon as you’ve done your Bachelor you have to go to Europe,” Ms Maurer said.

“I’m not saying that’s a bad thing – obviously we are so far away from where all this music originated.

“But as Australians, we’re sort of almost ashamed of our cultural background, and we all go overseas and we come back to Australia, and I’m a bit worried that we’re not producing anything uniquely Australian.”

But the reality is, travelling to Europe could do wonders for Ms Maurer’s career, and she’s well on her way to achieving what so few students manage.

“I think I just know what I want, and that’s music and having a big academic career, being in the community, having a presence and being involved.”