Deducting musical instrument on tax forms

[ghmerrill]

As a once-upon-a-time tax accountant, I'd be very surprised if you could find any legal claim to a medical deduction here. Not saying that a medical deduction should or shouldn't be permissible, but just that I don't think one is.

Agreed. I wouldn't even try it without being able to display a prescription for it (similar to physical therapy).

Also ... in reaction to an earlier comment ... beware of the "no one's come knocking at my door" argument. I'm very familiar with a case in my own family where no one came knocking at the door for 15 years -- and then they did (both federal and state). At that point the interest and penalties you're assessed will likely dwarf the original amount and you won't get anything like a sympathetic review of the case. But we all work on the basis of our own risk/benefit assessment.

[John Morgan]

This depreciation and tax stuff can be a deep dive. But it is starting to scratch another intellectual itch of mine. I was wondering how many musical people (using this forum as a sampling), are financial type people by day (or were before they retired).

In the US, it is common to get "put in a box" based on what you do. Working in accounting/finance, or otherwise with numbers suggests you are of a particular personality type and temperament. And being musical or playing an instrument (or being involved with other performance arts), suggests another. The two are seen as being very far apart. Yet experience has shown me that people are multidimensional and often would fit in several boxes, if allowed. Which life does not give much opportunity for. Too out of the box that would be....

I am not an accounting/finance person, although I did have accounting in college. I majored in math (numbers), then a masters in computer science. Studies have shown that it is not unusual for a person to be both a mathematician and a musician . So a person can be a left brain type AND a right brain type (and survive!!). That is me, I guess. I suspect accounting/finance and music would be similar. I am very persnickety with numbers and finance (if my check book is off by 1 cent, I will spend hours finding the error; I always take the receipt at the pump - puzzled why many others don't; can add and subtract entries in my check book faster than is humanely possible; am a constant counter of things; etc.). And then I am creative with music, love music, am emotionally involved with music, and on and on. So, these two types of brains, left and right, can coexist, and do, because that is pretty much me, and I suspect many others.

[ghmerrill]

This depreciation and tax stuff can be a deep dive. But it is starting to scratch another intellectual itch of mine. I was wondering how many musical people (using this forum as a sampling), are financial type people by day (or were before they retired).
- Sara

I'm not sure that there's a particularly strong correlation here, and in fact I suspect that there's not. However, if you look at anecdotal evidence, you do run into a number of "musical people" who are also "financial type people by day". But I think there may be a temptation to "over-intellectualize" this phenomenon and look for some deeper connection that isn't there. There may be an alternative, but much more mundane, reason for this apparent phenomenon.

It's quite possible that there's nothing particularly esoteric involving brain function or cognitive abilities, but some things that are much more practical. And in several cases I know this to be the case (and you can even see this in recommendations that have been offered to students in this forum). I think that the reasons this financial/musical association exists (to the degree that it does) are simply practical.

Going into one or another "financial area" as a career has a couple of major advantages. First, it's easy to do -- by which I mean that it's easy to get the requisite training either in a fairly intensive formal education program or in a less intensive way over time by collecting courses and certifications and degrees as you go. And no matter where you live, it's not very difficult to find quite adequate training/education opportunities that aren't particularly expensive. What you have to learn in order to be employable and successful is quite well-delmiited, and the requirements and techniques are well known. And you can find employment in several different types of companies (ranging from very large ones of almost any sort to small accounting firms, part-time work, or self-employment). So as a career path it provides a broad range of opportunities and a clear path to the goal. It's not like, say, biomechanical-engineering where the specific education requirements are more demanding, more rigid, and more expensive. And unlike many technology fields, going into a number of financial areas doesn't drop you onto a fast and intensive treadmill where not only are you working all the time, but you're constantly having to keep up with new technologies and methodologies that develop at a dizzying rate. This isn't an "intellectual" comparison of financial occupations with (just as an example) engineering occupations, but is a straightforward practical comparison of how you get there and how you stay there and the array of opportunities you have.

I know probably a dozen or more people who've taken advantage of these features of work in the "financial" area and became "financial people". Some of these were, for example, military musicians who managed to get their financial training while still in the military, and others were women who originally got their financial training at a fairly young age, dropped out of the work force to raise families, and then 30 years later easily returned. I saw my mother do the same thing (in the early 1970s) in the area of underwriting in the insurance industry. There are just a lot of occupations you can't do that in. These very practical considerations are what make "financial occupations" so attractive (and possible) to a fairly broad set of people who, I don't think, necessarily share a lot of deep "intellectual" attributes.

To some degree, you can see the same thing happening more recently in such areas as software support and other areas of "IT", or documentation -- not particularly the areas of software development (which has it's own kind of intense treadmill), but in the areas surrounding and supporting it.

[dsurkin]

[snip]Studies have shown that it is not unusual for a person to be both a mathematician and a musician . So a person can be a left brain type AND a right brain type (and survive!!). That is me, I guess. I suspect accounting/finance and music would be similar. [snip]

I was a math major in college - that was to be my backup profession to being a musician. Somewhere around calculus of several variables, I realized that I was not in the same league as some of my fellow math majors, who were destined for academic careers. So I wound up in law school and became a tax lawyer. I serve as treasurer of a local community orchestra, so I guess I eventually found some way to keep music in my life and support my family.

[davewerden]

The recent posts here remind me of the fact that in computer programming you often find people with music backgrounds. I suppose vice versa would apply.

In CT, the wife of one of the band guys was a music teacher. She was educated at Eastman and was also an excellent accompanist on piano (she studies that specifically). But in the mid-1970s she was recruited by one of the Hartford insurance companies to work for them in the computer department. They provided all training while they were paying her as an employee. They recognized that musicians' minds are very compatible with computer logic. After all, we are trained to respond to a symbolic language, which is a good start, but I think there is also a strong "math" connection in the brain as well.

Then when I was looking for jobs in the Midwest, while still in the band in CT, I approached some of my music friends in the Midwest looking for technology contacts. Jerry Young, then at Eau Claire, pointed me to a few companies. One or more of them had actually come to the music school and recruited some folks out of the school. Same logic as the example above.

[John Morgan]

I was a math major in college - that was to be my backup profession to being a musician. Somewhere around calculus of several variables, I realized that I was not in the same league as some of my fellow math majors, who were destined for academic careers. So I wound up in law school and became a tax lawyer. I serve as treasurer of a local community orchestra, so I guess I eventually found some way to keep music in my life and support my family.

Dean, I actually did get my degree in math, but have I used it since? Well, not much. My bachelor's degree was sandwiched around 6 years in the Army Band. Then 14 more years as a commissioned officer doing things like flying helicopters, then getting a master's in computer science and doing something sort of related to that degree, but not too much, then back to flying, then retiring. And mostly computer stuff (as a programmer, then manager) after that. I actually did earn a living with music while in the Army Band. But never a living with just math.

I second Dave's assessment that computer programming and music are not strange bedfellows. And MIDI is a real nice marriage of music and computer programming. I was intently interested in that for years.

Dave - where did you pick up your computer programming chops? Independent study? Classes? I know I started originally in the 80's while in Europe and when IBM came out with its personal computer. I had to have one. I learned a lot sort of teaching myself. But then I got an MS in computer science compliments of the Army.

[davewerden]

Dave - where did you pick up your computer programming chops? Independent study? Classes? I know I started originally in the 80's while in Europe and when IBM came out with its personal computer. I had to have one. I learned a lot sort of teaching myself. But then I got an MS in computer science compliments of the Army.

I was self-taught. I started in 1981-2 with BASIC on the Atari 800. I programmed it to help run Whaling Music Publishers. The 800 was based on the same chip as the Apple II. Then I moved up in around 1985-6 to the Atari ST series, which used the same chip as the Mac. The BASIC implementation was not great for that one, and I moved to a dBaseIII clone and learned to base the program on SQL. In both the 800 and ST I got into managing the printer output, so I learned how to use the codes to control various printing features. In the USCG Band I was put in charge of our network of Macs, and was responsible for emulating the official CG forms we used for travel and other things. I also trained the other users.

Upon leaving the band I had no job as we moved to the MPLS area, but it was a fertile market in 1996. I applied for a job at a .com startup called INTxx. They wanted a project manager, web designer, and web programmer. I had done some good PM in the CG and of course had some programming. I was familiar with graphic programs to some extent. So INTxx gave me a floppy disk each for ColdFusion (one of the early languages that let web browsers interact with databases) and Microsoft Front Page (web building software). They told me to build a site with multiple pages that was hooked to a database, so that users could read/write/edit data. Any "subject" matter was fine. So the only DB I had handy was my Euphonium Music Guide. I build the demo site based on that. Got the job!

That was basically an audition! Afterward I expanded the demo site and put it on the web. The original design was quickly replaced with a little fancier interface. You can get a peek at it here:

https://web.archive.org/web/19990203...m/toc.html-ssi

[John Morgan]

Thanks, Dave! I have been curious over the years to learn of your start in your second career after the Coast Guard Band. The web archive is also a very useful thing. I do websites, not much now, more previously, and it was very useful to be able to go back and look at a website in some past point in time.

Not disparaging you at all, but I suspect you were sort of a computer nerd as was I. I can even remember with excitement watching the little squares get filled in when doing a disk defrag back in the 80's. it was pure magic! And took forever! Ah, the good old days....

[ghmerrill]

They recognized that musicians' minds are very compatible with computer logic. After all, we are trained to respond to a symbolic language, which is a good start, but I think there is also a strong "math" connection in the brain as well.

I have to dispute this, despite the offered empirical evidence. Your point about the symbolic language is a good one. And for many musicians it goes deeper than than in their understanding and use of music "theory". But I've run into way too many musicians who seem simply incapable of logical thought. They're (very much) like football players: highly trained in certain very specific ways, but completely adrift outside of that narrow context. So in my experience, a lot of musicians' minds aren't compatible with computer logic at all.

If you start with the idea of "Let's look for musicians who have some sort of mathematical inclination and see how many we can find ... Wow, there seem to be a lot of these." Then you may incorrectly conclude that there's a strong correlation between being a musician and mathematical ability (very vaguely characterized!).

If instead, you start with "Let's look at the population of all musicians, see what categories (Careful there! How do you decide on how many categories and which ones?), and then see if any obviously high and unusual correlations pop out," then you may get a very different result. And it depends not just on how you slice and dice the categories -- and what counts as demonstrating mathematical ability/interest, but how you determine the "reference set" of what counts as a musician.

I think that a casual and admittedly non-scientific survey of several other musical instrument forums will very quickly demonstrate a significant population of musicians (self-described, amateur, academic, and professional) who appear to have little ability (or even tolerance) of mathematical or logical reasoning or thought.

[ghmerrill]

Not disparaging you at all, but I suspect you were sort of a computer nerd as was I. I can even remember with excitement watching the little squares get filled in when doing a disk defrag back in the 80's. it was pure magic! And took forever! Ah, the good old days....

When I was working at Bell Labs in that period, the central processing switching systems were either VAX 780s or AT&T 3B20s with a maximum of 12 Meg of memory. The individual memory cards, as I recall, held 4M and were about 10"x12" in size. I don't own (and I think have never seen) even a USB stick or SD card with anywhere close to that little memory.

[davewerden]

I have to dispute this, despite the offered empirical evidence.

Right back at'cha, Gary! This is something that I've seen reinforced tons of times in my latter career. But of course that is still anecdotal.

But from my two examples, I came away with these tidbits:

1. The I.T. department of a major corporation chose to recruit previously unknown candidates from the pool of music teachers.
2. A successful regional tech company deliberately went to a music school to recruit people they did not otherwise know.

[ghmerrill]

I was self-taught. I started in 1981-2 with BASIC on the Atari 800. I programmed it to help run Whaling Music Publishers. The 800 was based on the same chip as the Apple II. Then I moved up in around 1985-6 to the Atari ST series, which used the same chip as the Mac. The BASIC implementation was not great for that one, and I moved to a dBaseIII clone and learned to base the program on SQL.

I was originally self-taught as well, and at precisely the same time -- but a slightly different path. I was 9 years into an academic career and an Associate Professor of Philosophy (with tenure!) at Loyola University in Chicago. I started to get interested in computers, in large part because I saw a sequence of students in my logic and philosophy of science classes graduating and getting jobs at Bell Labs that paid about twice what I was making. I was also pretty bored with the academic life at that point.

Of course, the computer I had access to was an IBM/370 mainframe -- so not exactly much like an Atari. I took a quick look at BASIC, wrote one short program in it (on punch cards!), and decided that it wasn't worth wasting my time on. Took a look at FORTRAN, but it was clearly too special-purpose and cumbersome. Looked at COBOL and was repelled. Then found PL/1. Kind of needlessly complex, but rational and general purpose. I ended up writing a computer-aided instruction program in it that I used in a couple of my logic courses.

Then I decided that I might blow out of academia and do this computer stuff. But I needed more knowledge and experience. The first step was to work with the chairman of the math department and put a LISP interpreter/compiler on the 370 mainframe. Then use that to teach an AI course. At that point I decided to get some formal education and got into the MS/Ph.D. program in the Department of Information Engineering at U of I/Chicago Circle. No cost -- they gave me a tuition waiver. That's where I discovered C and UNIX and DEC computers, and the rest was history. I left the University after the spring semester of 1982, when to work at Bell Labs, and never looked back. Also never got the MS in Information Engineering: Too busy with the family (3 kids, one with a serious heart condition), although I finished all the course work and in fact finished the thesis project (a vastly improved version of that original CAI program for logic, written in C). Not getting that degree was the first and only academic/professional project that I never finished, and I regret that to this day. But it was the only reasonable choice.

[davewerden]

...I took a quick look at BASIC, wrote one short program in it (on punch cards!)...

Remember the Lily Tomlin routines where she played the telephone operator, with lots of gags about Ma Bell? I bought the album way back when. The last track (as I recall) was about getting even with the phone company. She gave this recipe for a liquid (including bleach and a few other ingredients), said to put it in a bread baking pan, then put in the punch card that you are supposed to return with your phone bill payment. Then once it's wet you back it for a little while. Then you return it with your bell. The closing statement from the routine way (again, going from memory): "The holes [in the punch card] will shrink just a little...tiny...bit."

[RickF]

I definitely think there's a connection with playing music and it helping with mathematical skills. My son played piano, euph and trombone and math was always easy for him. After getting his PhD in electrical and computer engineering he worked at IBM's Thomas J. Watson research center in NY for about 6 years and is now prof at NC State. My grandson who played euph and trombone middle school and high school is now majoring in computer science. He got a summer interneship with Microsoft.

I myself never got to go to college. My parents didn't have the money so I enlisted in USAF in 1966 with a promise of electronics training—since I aced the math portion of their skills test. This was good training for me for my eventual career job with the FAA where I was Systems Specialist (hardware and software). My main responsibility was the Air Traffic Control computer and radar at Palm Beach Int'l Airport.

[davewerden]

...My main responsibility was the Air Traffic Control computer and radar at Palm Beach Int'l Airport.

Wow - that is a tough gig! My brother in law was an ATC at O'Hare. He was one of the controllers who did not go out on strike when Reagan had just come into office. That was rough and he lost some friends, but he made it through.