The Musically Educated Client from Hell

As composers who offer creative work as a service, we have to get along with many types of clients. Most commonly, we work for people who have an intuitive understanding of music but have no professional background on this which usually sets the relationship into a comfortable situation where the client can communicate what they want but leave the execution to us.

However, every now and then there is this client with some musical background who fits perfectly into the Dunning-Kruger Curve near the peak of Mt. Stupid. Basically, this curve draws the relation between experience and confidence in any subject and outlines that people with a little experience in something often have an incredible amount of confidence in this subject.

In my professional career, I had a few of these instances where the client with obviously just a little knowledge about music and composition was making absurd requests with an unbareable amount of confidence. I even had one instance where the client requested to get the Sibelius files of the music that I wrote so they could make changes. As I was quite young back then and was kind of overwhelmed by the behaviour of the client I agreed to send them over and I basically got back a file where the client edited the entire structure of the music, cutting out bars, copying passages around in the piece and altering lines, sending it back with the comment "I did some changes, now it's your job to make the transitions of the new edits smooth".

A little more recently I had a client who hired me to arrange their music for orchestra. As a base to work from, I got a Sibelius file where they had written in the main musical ideas and some additional lines for select instruments like horn/trombones etc. All these additional lines were super busy, walking on top of each other, diving down too low to not cause low interval limit problems and generally not melodic masterworks so I decided to throw most of them out of the arrangement for the sake of more clarity for the main idea. In the feedback round I got a long email demanding to put all the lines back in and it took about 5 emails back and forth until I was able to convince them that it is not going to work orchestrationally and musically like that. 

The amount of energy that is needed to convince such clients that you know what you are doing and and the same time remaing polite enough as is mandatory in a client-composer relationship can sometimes be nerve wrecking.

In one of such occasions a while ago I lost my temper and asked "Listen, why don't you write the music?" which caused some irritation at first but eventually caused them to back off a bit. There is no universal recipe how to deal with such clients as depending on their personality it might be really tricky to even gently make them aware of their lack of deeper knowledge but one thing that has helped me in some occasions is to indirectly make them aware of their deficiencies by asking specific questions that clearly go beyond their understanding of the subject. "Sure, no problem, but what should I do with these many thirds in the voicing that are happening here?" etc. This sometimes helps, but not always.

Personally, I feel these types of clients are the most problematic to work with and in spite of experience in handling all sorts of clients, they can be a particular challenge. It is depending on your own personality on how much you give in to nonsensical requests. I tend to reach a point in such discussions where I  feel like I have given my best to  argue for the in my opinion best solution but don't want to invest more energy into useless discussions. At this state I  just want to get the job done and move on and never mention the project anywhere and (in one case so far) removing my name from the project all together.