Other children might have things they intended to do, but gifted young musicians had destinies. Making career decisions was too mundane for people whose musical talent would enable them to fly over the heads of their contemporaries as if on a magic carpet.

And yet when it came to making decisions about jobs and careers, the music lovers of the family were elbowed out of the limelight by the economists. When money became an issue, a career in music was suddenly much less desirable. Fathers who had backed their talented offspring all the way through grade exams and music competitions were suddenly aghast at the idea of those same youngsters trying to earn a living from music.

Music carries some of humanity's finest impulses and spiritual expressions, and contributes to society's psychological health, so it should be worth more than many other endeavours. The question of whether it is a proper job has a different flavour in different countries.

In Britain, no artist is considered to have a proper job. Most parents would experience a tremor of anxiety if their offspring announced they were marrying an actor, painter, poet, folk singer. But if our society regarded these jobs as valuable, they would be better funded and better paid, becoming "proper" in the process. In Britain a proper job means regular hours and reliable pay. Better still, you should be seen to be at work, seen by people around you in the same position; having a proper job contains a large element of fitting in.

If you laze around at home and occasionally produce something that earns lots of money, that's not a proper job. If you work extremely hard and make almost nothing, that's not a proper job either. A poet who labours for weeks over a poem and wins a £50 prize cannot congratulate themself on finally having a proper job. If that same poet writes a film script that wins an Oscar, is that more proper?

Is being Leonardo da Vinci a proper job? Is it more of a proper job to be Leonardo than to be Damien Hirst? Is being a supermodel, earning thousands of pounds each week, a proper job? Is working in a sweatshop a proper job?

Even the notion of a proper job may be under attack, now that many jobs are losing their security. When I started out as a young professional musician, concert offers were slow to materialise. I sometimes temped as a secretary because my keyboard skills had enabled me to become a fast typist. These were the only times in my life when I worked predictable hours in someone else's office. I could not get over the empty feeling of spending eight hours a day typing someone else's letters, filing someone else's forms. Nothing I produced would be my work or credited to me, not even if I became a permanent staff member.

My bosses would thank me for doing something quickly, but I didn't originate anything, influence what was said, or see the result of what I was involved in. Every day I left at 5pm feeling as if my own mind had been "on hold". I felt as if I hadn't yet begun work for that day, which was just as well, considering that I still had to practise my piano in the evening. Yet friends were impressed that I was actually engaging with the world of work. Was this the proper job that society would have preferred me to do?

I was used to spending the day practising, rehearsing, studying, memorising music, doing my own admin, trying to create concert opportunities (all unpaid). On concert days, I would work late into the night. My glimpse of office life was unsettling. I knew that any competent person could have done what I did there.

In other words, I was interchangeable with any other competent person: it didn't have to be me. This was not something I had ever felt in the world of music. Nevertheless, as a secretary I was paid by the hour whether I was doing anything useful or not. Being brilliant wouldn't earn me more pay, but I couldn't be paid less either. If there was no work to be done, I was paid anyway.

And at certain times it was taken for granted that we wouldn't tackle anything new, but would just tidy our desks, hang around chatting, and wait for the moment we could leave.

This was utterly different from life as a musician. I spent long hours practising, for which I was not paid. When I joined a chamber group, we spent enormous amounts of time rehearsing, and enormous amounts of time writing letters, researching opportunities and making phonecalls to drum up work. That was unpaid, too. When we finally got concert offers, we were usually paid for the concerts, but the fees had retrospectively to cover all the unpaid time that we had spent practising and rehearsing.

On paper, the concert fees looked fine. But they never covered all the time and effort spent in getting and preparing for the concert, trying to publicise it, buying music, travelling to rehearsals, buying concert clothes and accessories, maintaining instruments, travelling to the concert itself, staying overnight if it was far from London, and paying commission to any concert agent who had been involved.

A large part of what we earned had immediately to be deducted for expenses. I felt this keenly when applying for my first loan. My bank manager looked through my accounts and pointed out that his young secretary earned the same as I did, but that she was considerably richer in real terms because she had no expenses, whereas I had to spend about a third of my total income on financing my work (and therefore should not be lent a large sum of money).

When we in the chamber group compared our lives with those of more sensible friends who had gone into, say, the civil service or accountancy, our position seemed foolhardy. If we did not get concerts, there would be no money. The satisfaction that we got from a successful concert would be offset by the worry of weeks without income until the next one. There was no sickness benefit, no paid holidays, no pension. No tenure, no subsidised canteen, no company car, no maternity leave, no sabbaticals. Clearly it was far from being a proper job. And yet we remained dedicated musicians, still fuelled by the years of preparation that brought us to this point.

In a pre-industrial society we might have found a happier place, with people around us making things and getting paid erratic prices for them, or not making things and not getting paid. If everyone around us were responsible for their own handiwork, living on the proceeds of what they could grow or produce, seeing the immediate result of their labours, we might fit in better. As it is, being a freelance musician probably hasn't changed very much for centuries, whereas many other jobs have changed beyond recognition.

I used to think that having a wildly fluctuating income, dependent on one's own enterprise, was an intriguing and - how shall I put it? - a lifelike way of proceeding. However, as the years went on I noticed that other people, living on boringly inert salaries, had achieved far greater material ease. These days, when we meet freelance musicians from other countries, we often compare notes. They face similar problems, but we envy them in at least one important respect: many foreign musicians - especially from mainland Europe and Scandinavia - thrive on the knowledge that their work is considered important.

Musicians have high status in the community, even if they are not rich, and their vocation is regarded as a higher calling than a mere "proper job". The luckiest ones are supported with all manner of grants, residencies and rewards unavailable in this country.

Here, the status of musicians is equivocal. People are happy to come and applaud at concerts while breathing a sigh of relief that they are not married to a musician. Musicians themselves regard their work as culturally important, but wish it were equally valued by the community. And as for enrichment and reward, these remain largely metaphorical. This is an edited extract from Susan Tomes' Musician's Alphabet, which is published next month by Faber.

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