Performing 'serious' music -- the physical expression of (an often well-known body of) notes and their interrelationships -- is not only highly technical, but also highly artistic.
The technical - given enough attention, the right physiology, the right brain-wiring - really has to be finished ... completely 'automated'. Missing or wrong notes ... I was reading yesterday that Tom Robbins sometimes spent the whole day writing one or two sentences ... that kind of fanaticism required.
The artistic, on the other hand, is much more subjective, and demands much of the performer's attention. And then, Worse yet, there's the game. There are 'standards' of 'musicianship' ... vaguer still, but people 'know it when they hear it'. 'Maverick' interpretations won't cut it with conventional listeners. Etc. etc. Being well-established in the conventional repertoire might be defined as 'literate' enough to allow occasional 'peccadillos'.
That kind of 'career' is only one of many ... there's improv, jazz, pleasuring (in lounges, at home), composing, teaching. To fail at feeding utterly conventional (however learn-ed) expectations doesn't have to be the end.
> As children, we do not understand that the things we love do not belong only to us. Then, I was not prepared to relinquish music to anyone else’s ownership. Now, I have finally loosened my grip.
Something I've always wondered is why musicians peak so young, especially in comparison with other creative types.
First, let's qualify that statement. Is music, like mathematics, a young person's game?
Musicians tend to release their classic albums, i.e. what general consensus agrees is their best work, in their early years, not when they're 40+. Look at the biggest, long-running music acts today, such as The Rolling Stones. No one is going to their concerts to hear their latest material. They want to hear Jumpin' Jack Flash (released ~1968).
The early deaths of legends like Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain etc. are tragic, sure, but does anyone really believe these guys would have put out their best work at 40? The people lamenting wasted potential are perhaps misunderstanding how musical creativity works.
In contrast, writers tend to put out their best work after their formative years. If you think of your favorite writer, I'm willing to bet their magnum opus wasn't released before 30.
Critical mass of the audience, most likely. Early to mid 20s overlaps when people are most willing and able to form their musical and artistic identities as consumers of content.
It's pretty rare to see people older than their mid 20s hanging out in new/hot venues with the latest artists trying to build a following and living/breathing their craft. There's only so many years you can pull it off both as a member of the audience and a creator.
A few years ago I was a minor artist (more a hanger-on than anything) in the EDM scene of a major city for that back when it was the hot thing, and was around a few folks that made it. It couldn't have happened for people in their late 20s or older. That particular grind requires of fueling 18-22 year-olds appetite for drugs, alcohol, and rhythm from Thursday through Sunday, every week of the year. When you factor in the reality of rent and other costs of living, dueling roles as promoter, party goer, content creator, and performer, it really is not sustainable unless you're the azimuth of your craft and an age where you can balance those costs against your future.
It’s not something inherent to music or musical creativity. Classical music follows the same pattern as writing, with the greatest work produced mid to late career. Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Bach, take your pick. So it’s probably just explained by the youth culture around popular music and bands, as other commenters mention.
Some musicians also refine their style and grow with age.
David Bowie's got great music lineup spanning every decade of his career from the 1960s to the day he died. I think people who enjoy his music can easily pick out a definite classic from every decade and everyone has their own favorite period.
Tom Waits started out as an okay musician, and he grew into his own sort of music with age. He's known for his grit and grime, and it's much more profound in his later work than his earliest stuff. A song about being a worn out old drunk on the side of the road hits harder when you hear it from a rugged middle-aged man than a young 20-something.
With these two, Bowie constantly updated his image and tried new things. Tom Waits simply advanced the atmosphere he built up in his earlier work. I think a lot of other popular musicians put more energy and liveliness into their earlier works and can't keep up with it as they get older, or they end up following some music trend that they think will get them pop success instead of just doing their own music.
Virtually every indie band does the latter as they start to get fame, and it often turns off their old fans immensely when they see them become just another soulless pop band.
Some bands do the opposite: have a smash hit, and then they experiment and innovate and come up with new stuff, and it's difficult to have as large an audience as they did when they were cranking out crowd pleasers and floor fillers.
"Weird Al" Yankovic's "crowd pleasers" are his parodies of popular songs, but he and his band have been playing them to a standard of musicianship that only got better with age; and he has also developed more and more original material that is as innovative as it is a fitting pastiche/homage to other artists.
I want to add Kate Bush to this list. She's always seemed fearless to me, both in her exploration of music and in her visual interpretation and performance of that music.
Completely unrelated, but does anyone else get the impulse to open the inspector when they visit an interesting website for the first time? KB's site is built using Drupal (according to Wappalyzer), but there's some fascinating stuff going on in that page - it's been a while since I've come across an image <map> element used on a production site. There's also a lovely old-style carousel on the 'discography' page, using both <img> and <canvas> (for the img reflection) elements. Strange choices for 2020, but I was kinda happy to see them.
Could this be due to the earlier albums being made without big record companies pushing into a certain direction "for marketing purposes"?
The most prominent example in the metal world of this is Volbeat and to a lesser extent Metallica. The first few albums were generally well received by music fans, while both bands slowly changed their style over the years to accommodate more mainstream audiences, leading to a drop in quality.
Counter-examples are bands like Trivium and Tool, which also have evolved musically over the years but not specifically in a direction to please a larger audience, they just kept making music they like for the sake of music.
> Counter-examples are bands like Trivium and Tool, which also have evolved musically over the years but not specifically in a direction to please a larger audience, they just kept making music they like for the sake of music.
Another counter-example is Radiohead, which almost got gripped by the music industry marketing and managed to spectacularly break out of it after OK Computer and the following albums.
They broke off the image that labels wanted to push them into and sell with Pablo Honey which would have been a shame.
I dunno, randomly subjectively I don't find it true. I now searched for older and newer Rolling Stones songs and I don't really find old ones all that better. It is quick search, but I had the same observation with other bands I liked. I am more likely to listen to new albums - unless I have particular nostalgia attached to song. (In particular I find old Madonna boring to listen and tend to like 50% of new songs whenever they come out.)
But, they are not the genre that would be interesting to young crowd. Pretty often they don't speak of feelings that young crowd wants to see in music, they speak to people like me more. This stuff is followed mostly by where young culture goes, because they consume the most, pay the most and have interest to discover new things.
> The early deaths of legends like Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain etc. are tragic, sure, but does anyone really believe these guys would have put out their best work at 40?
I have listened to Kurt Cobain albums lately and what striked me was that the music was much alike song to song. So he would have to change up (angering some fans as result) or his n-th album would become out of touch. Kurt Cobain is precisely the kind of music that spoken strongly to some young people at the time - it expresses certain generational sentiments.
Music is heavily dependent on controlled distribution channels which markets young people to young people. The lifestyle, gigging, being surrounded by drugs and alcohol, it’s a young persons game.
A serious painter could quietly produce work in a studio for decades until they are discovered, same is true for writers or just about art form but with music, and to a slightly lesser extent acting, if you haven’t made it by the time you are 23-25 you most definitely never will. You may become a song writer for hire but you’ll never be famous. The average consumer of music is profoundly disinterested in musicianship, song writing, virtuosity pretty much anything a musician could improve with time.
I’m utterly pessimistic about why most people listen to music. Pop music serves a function somewhere in between a utility kind of like air conditioning and a white noise to play in the nursery to keep the babies from getting anxious. It is also a vehicle to legitimize pop stars as more than just phone and makeup sales people.
I love music but I find myself bitter about it sometimes. It often feels like just something playing in the background while everyone is shopping. Or psychological filler to distract you from realizing how dull the movie you’re watching is.
Many of my closest friends are guys who play in hard rock bands and are not famous at all. We are all at the end of summer in our mid to late 30s. When they were younger there was a cockiness in them about being cool and playing music. Doing lots of acid and being wild. Now that our 30s have passed in a handful of heartbeats I don’t think any of them are keeping the dream alive of being famous as musicians. If anything, they are better than ever before as song writers, musicians, they are still very cool and quick but matured and better humans basically, still very attractive as men but their value as would-be celebrities is basically negative value now. They are still super cool to me and dear as anything in the world as my friends but to people 20 years younger than us, they are now perceived as culture vultures. Becoming old guys at the bar. They are definitely not there yet but it’s wild to see how many of the new ones hanging around acting like they own the world instantly perceive us as dated. Counting us out for no reason other than we are now old, at 36-38. The local scene operates this way, I imagine the music business is no different.
I truly believe most of the loved, classic albums which are almost all universally made by people in their early 20s were made by artists who became even more interesting as people when they turned 30, 40, or older. But they almost all lose that ghost in them which made them do something cool in the first place as they get older and become “too old” for the game. I think it’s heartbreaking to be so easily casted out and replaced. I think that kills the inspiration to make great music. Music is made for people, but if the people no longer want you because you’re old, are you really going to be excited to make music for them?
I think you're talking about popular music. Popular music is pretty much defined by youth culture. And to create music that appeals to youth culture, you have to be young yourself.
Musically, I don't think you lose your abilities as you get older. In fact, I would say you become even better. The most visible example of this is among movie composers. Morricone was in his late 30s when he scored "The Good, The Bad, The Ugly". Hans Zimmer has done some of his best work in his 50s.
As did painters (often famous classic paintings are prepared by the painters students who work for them and then just finished or merely signed by the painter).
Heck, pop musicians have those. The top-40 is full of professional co-writers and ghost-writers and producer teams (while the "star" gets the songwriting credits).
Perhaps it's explore / exploit. You need a huge amount of time to get the fundamentals, and then to use that to find some sort of individual expression. If you ever find one, your incentive is to put out more from the same area, but you hit diminishing returns.
I think it depends on who your audience is. If it's pop music consumed by younger people it's natural younger musicians will be more popular. In my world, contemporary art, a lot of celebrated people only got recognition later in life.
If you look at classical music, many soloists easily performs in their 70s; for most of them, until their bodies become not athletic enough, they do continue to evolve and perform better. Violinists in their forties and fifties are significantly better, more philosophical, than their earlier works.
Even composers are like that. Most continued to put out great work until death.
The thing with popular music, is that it's supposed to be popular, trendy, and just new. Talented composers start putting out innovative works when their are young, and in the eye of the general public, those are more salient, more praise-worthy.
> One possibility is that touring musicians lose touch with ordinary life, and therefore no longer create anything that people can relate to.
Reminds me of an article I read about R.E.M. around the turn of the millennium. The journalist notes that the band members (now all multi-millionaires) now spent their time moving from one posh luxury hotel or perfectly air-conditioned space to another around the world, living in an international cosmopolitan bubble even when not touring. This seemed the very antithesis of the struggle and feeling of local community from which several great rock subgenres had emerged, and it was no surprise that R.E.M.'s work had become bland.
Was listening to Rick Rubin interview Andre Benjamin on Broken Record, and they briefly touched on this and agreed that constant touring creates a bubble that is terrible for writers.
In another part of the interview, Andre Benjamin said he loved going to the laundromat, and his biggest musical aspiration (at the time of the interview) was to play the bass clarinet well enough to be able to play along with anything/anyone at the park or beach (condensing/paraphrasing).
I think it's a combination of things, the career of a pop musician appears to be terrible for their art - probably bad for most of them as people, too.
I think Jimi Hendrix didn't get a chance to make his best work due to his early passing. His last Band of Gypsys album was a glimpse of what could have been and it was on a whole new level in terms of artistry and craftsmanship.
I think to some extent they're forced to peak young. I don't believe musicians are actually at their best when they are young and I'd claim recordings of classical artists through their lives supports this.
For classical music, competitions and conservatoires will only take young people and if you don't go through their processes there's no chance of getting auditions for pro gigs.
I wonder if the author is one of those who needs a few more years to understand themselves well enough to perform at the highest level, by which time she'll be to old to pursue music professionally
I used to be a performing musician myself for many years and I have a formal musical education. The answer to your question depends on the type of music and activity. It takes a lot of time (much more than the famous 10'000 hours) to learn these enormous skills as e.g. a classical pianist and to be able to perform a classical work with the virtuosity and endurance that is expected today. If you don't start as a child, you lack the time until you reach professional age. Moreover, children can learn many things more easily than adults. In pop music it's completely different; you can be successful there without mastering your instrument, if you look good and have a good stage presence - or another characteristic that just happens to be important to a large audience. A young audience is naturally more likely to be attracted by young idols. A big portion of luck is needed in any case.
You could consider the marketing factor: early work from lesser musician is designed to sell. Then when fame is there, maybe they can focus on something more driven by their artistic désires.
The stones released a classic blues album lately. That was purely for them not so much for selling. They can afford that because of their huge fame.
It seems like concert pianist or nothing? There is lots of work for studio players or joining a band. Creativity is king , there is only so much room to play cover tunes many pianists publish on youtube.
> There is lots of work for studio players or joining a band
Unfortunately not. There are more and more musicians, since more and more music colleges are springing up, and fewer and fewer gigs, because it is easier and usually cheaper to hire a DJ, and people are just as satisfied. One could get the impression that today musicians are trained primarily to educate new musicians, a kind of end in itself, as is already known in other non-STEM studies.
I re-watched Whiplash recently. It is a marvelous movie for many reasons, but I always wondered how accurate its depiction of a competitive Jazz band really is.
Many jazz musicians (including myself) would say that it's a ridiculous, gross misrepresentation of what playing in a Jazz band is about. For me it's infuriating to watch! I could go on for a long rant now, but I'd rather let an actual jazz drummer speak: https://youtu.be/7GfegGYzD1E?t=238
This is why the modern mantra of 'never give up' is not actually good unversial advice. Sometimes giving up one target and switching to something else is the smart thing to do.
On one hand there's something to be said about persistence and discipline. You can find loads of stories of people sticking through the hard times and being rewarded for it.
On the other hand, there's opportunity cost in sticking with a failing endeavor. I am a hobbyist musician too, I spend a lot of time at the piano but I sometimes think to myself "what if I just used all of that time to advance my career instead?"
The real problem is that you don't know what can happen so we're left making guesses. Maybe the author of the article could have found some niche as a studio musician and had a long and successful career. Maybe calling it quits and changing careers while they're young would unlock a new passion that they're much more successful at.
I find it amazing that anyone reaches the level of technical skill required to play a musical instrument while maintaining any kind of artistic drive. I play guitar for fun, and for me to learn anything that sounds any good takes hours of repetition to the point that when I can finally play something to a level that sounds passable, I am so utterly sick of hearing it that I start to dislike most pieces I've learned!
This sentence resonated with me, maybe it's this feeling that keeps someone playing: "There were tricky passages I would dread, notes in the middle of chords I would bluff and hope nobody noticed. But in between attacks of nerves I felt a thrill, and a sense of harmony, when I managed to make the notes sparkle; when my mind, my hands and my ears were all in sync."
I’m a competent amateur guitarist and I feel your pain. Learning pieces so they are good enough to perform takes so much practice and I too get sick of them before I can play them adequately!
You’re just wired a certain way. I can work on a 16 bar segment of a song for days and love it more each time I play it. The good ones never get old. Music affects me like an addictive drug.
Non specialists are totally unaware of the extreme difficulty of performing solo live music, particularly with polyphonic instruments like piano or classical guitar.
As a music teacher I have assessed many students at that level, and as a performer I know pretty well what stage fright is. So I completely understand these feelings.
Some of my best students suffer from stage fright more than the rest of them.
My hypothesis is that the richer and deeper the message one can and want to express, the clearer her awareness of being far from her intention and, therefore, the bigger the chance to make mistakes.
The is certainly unfair. Better students may fail more than average students because they are better in their musical thought and musical capabilities.
Other ways of evaluating musical performance would be more adequate. One would be to collect recordings (with no post-processing) that students could prepare outside the stage with professional recording tools. The live performance assessment is still necessary, but not the only measure.
The gap between playing excellently and doing so at the stage is huge, and extra musical factors play an important role.
For doing well in live concerts you need specific preparation, you need to know and play by heart and fluently everything, of course. Then, you need to train on different stressing scenarios particularly designed to test that you can keep playing so. Finally, you need self-confidence on your own skill.
Some people find useful to nurture their self-esteem; others (me among them) prefer to cultivate humility: what matters most is the music I'm playing, not me. The ideal is to become completely transparent at the stage so that the musical essence passes through me as it should sound.
I juggled both music and software for many years before deciding to focus on music (almost!) exclusively. This is a somewhat reductive analysis, but in my experience a successful performing or composing career doesn't require concert pianist-level perfection. Curiosity, honesty in one’s artistic expression, some degree of uniqueness and, finally, a dogged persistence, will suffice. Granted, it can be difficult to have that dogged persistence particularly given the economic parameters that musicians are subject to. So it is not for everyone.
(I never had concert pianist talent or technique, but it still did take me many years to shed the “louder/faster/denser” ideology of a modern jazz education. Also known as, lacking taste and maturity in one’s earlier years.)
I spent my undergrad years on a music scholarship, while quietly taking computer classes in the background and hanging out in the labs at night instead of the practice rooms. I had talent, but I think even then I subconsciously knew I didn't really want to do it. I got into four out of five of the grad programs I applied to in music--good programs, too!--but I just didn't have the motivation. A summer of interning as a sysadmin and I was lost: I deferred grad school for a year and then never went, and I've been in IT ever since.
The thing it took me a long time (and some therapy) to grasp was that I didn’t fail. I made a positive decision for the direction I wanted my life to go in, and took it. And more importantly, I didn't have to give up music just because I didn't make it my career. I now play multiple instruments and enjoy a much broader array of music than I ever did as a student, playing and singing American traditional, Irish, and folk music with my family and other people. Having let go of feeling obliged to make it a career, I felt free to make it a passion without feeling like I had to succeed. I wish more people felt like they could study music in college in order to make it a wonderful part of their lives, rather than "if I can't be Horowitz, there's no point in continuing with this".
One wonders if the amount of life satisfaction is negatively correlated with the amount of personal pronoun on offer.
Unless it starts to get awkward, actively cutting back on the "I" and "me" in writing, thought, and conversation seems to put the focus back on the topic.
The degree to which this observation applies to TFA is a matter of opinion, and piling on the author is not the intent.
44 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 91.1 ms ] threadThe technical - given enough attention, the right physiology, the right brain-wiring - really has to be finished ... completely 'automated'. Missing or wrong notes ... I was reading yesterday that Tom Robbins sometimes spent the whole day writing one or two sentences ... that kind of fanaticism required.
The artistic, on the other hand, is much more subjective, and demands much of the performer's attention. And then, Worse yet, there's the game. There are 'standards' of 'musicianship' ... vaguer still, but people 'know it when they hear it'. 'Maverick' interpretations won't cut it with conventional listeners. Etc. etc. Being well-established in the conventional repertoire might be defined as 'literate' enough to allow occasional 'peccadillos'.
That kind of 'career' is only one of many ... there's improv, jazz, pleasuring (in lounges, at home), composing, teaching. To fail at feeding utterly conventional (however learn-ed) expectations doesn't have to be the end.
First, let's qualify that statement. Is music, like mathematics, a young person's game?
Musicians tend to release their classic albums, i.e. what general consensus agrees is their best work, in their early years, not when they're 40+. Look at the biggest, long-running music acts today, such as The Rolling Stones. No one is going to their concerts to hear their latest material. They want to hear Jumpin' Jack Flash (released ~1968).
The early deaths of legends like Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain etc. are tragic, sure, but does anyone really believe these guys would have put out their best work at 40? The people lamenting wasted potential are perhaps misunderstanding how musical creativity works.
In contrast, writers tend to put out their best work after their formative years. If you think of your favorite writer, I'm willing to bet their magnum opus wasn't released before 30.
Why is this? What accounts for the difference?
It's pretty rare to see people older than their mid 20s hanging out in new/hot venues with the latest artists trying to build a following and living/breathing their craft. There's only so many years you can pull it off both as a member of the audience and a creator.
A few years ago I was a minor artist (more a hanger-on than anything) in the EDM scene of a major city for that back when it was the hot thing, and was around a few folks that made it. It couldn't have happened for people in their late 20s or older. That particular grind requires of fueling 18-22 year-olds appetite for drugs, alcohol, and rhythm from Thursday through Sunday, every week of the year. When you factor in the reality of rent and other costs of living, dueling roles as promoter, party goer, content creator, and performer, it really is not sustainable unless you're the azimuth of your craft and an age where you can balance those costs against your future.
David Bowie's got great music lineup spanning every decade of his career from the 1960s to the day he died. I think people who enjoy his music can easily pick out a definite classic from every decade and everyone has their own favorite period.
Tom Waits started out as an okay musician, and he grew into his own sort of music with age. He's known for his grit and grime, and it's much more profound in his later work than his earliest stuff. A song about being a worn out old drunk on the side of the road hits harder when you hear it from a rugged middle-aged man than a young 20-something.
With these two, Bowie constantly updated his image and tried new things. Tom Waits simply advanced the atmosphere he built up in his earlier work. I think a lot of other popular musicians put more energy and liveliness into their earlier works and can't keep up with it as they get older, or they end up following some music trend that they think will get them pop success instead of just doing their own music.
Virtually every indie band does the latter as they start to get fame, and it often turns off their old fans immensely when they see them become just another soulless pop band.
"Weird Al" Yankovic's "crowd pleasers" are his parodies of popular songs, but he and his band have been playing them to a standard of musicianship that only got better with age; and he has also developed more and more original material that is as innovative as it is a fitting pastiche/homage to other artists.
Kate Bush homepage - http://www.katebush.com/home
Completely unrelated, but does anyone else get the impulse to open the inspector when they visit an interesting website for the first time? KB's site is built using Drupal (according to Wappalyzer), but there's some fascinating stuff going on in that page - it's been a while since I've come across an image <map> element used on a production site. There's also a lovely old-style carousel on the 'discography' page, using both <img> and <canvas> (for the img reflection) elements. Strange choices for 2020, but I was kinda happy to see them.
The most prominent example in the metal world of this is Volbeat and to a lesser extent Metallica. The first few albums were generally well received by music fans, while both bands slowly changed their style over the years to accommodate more mainstream audiences, leading to a drop in quality.
Counter-examples are bands like Trivium and Tool, which also have evolved musically over the years but not specifically in a direction to please a larger audience, they just kept making music they like for the sake of music.
Another counter-example is Radiohead, which almost got gripped by the music industry marketing and managed to spectacularly break out of it after OK Computer and the following albums.
They broke off the image that labels wanted to push them into and sell with Pablo Honey which would have been a shame.
But, they are not the genre that would be interesting to young crowd. Pretty often they don't speak of feelings that young crowd wants to see in music, they speak to people like me more. This stuff is followed mostly by where young culture goes, because they consume the most, pay the most and have interest to discover new things.
> The early deaths of legends like Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain etc. are tragic, sure, but does anyone really believe these guys would have put out their best work at 40?
I have listened to Kurt Cobain albums lately and what striked me was that the music was much alike song to song. So he would have to change up (angering some fans as result) or his n-th album would become out of touch. Kurt Cobain is precisely the kind of music that spoken strongly to some young people at the time - it expresses certain generational sentiments.
A serious painter could quietly produce work in a studio for decades until they are discovered, same is true for writers or just about art form but with music, and to a slightly lesser extent acting, if you haven’t made it by the time you are 23-25 you most definitely never will. You may become a song writer for hire but you’ll never be famous. The average consumer of music is profoundly disinterested in musicianship, song writing, virtuosity pretty much anything a musician could improve with time.
I’m utterly pessimistic about why most people listen to music. Pop music serves a function somewhere in between a utility kind of like air conditioning and a white noise to play in the nursery to keep the babies from getting anxious. It is also a vehicle to legitimize pop stars as more than just phone and makeup sales people.
I love music but I find myself bitter about it sometimes. It often feels like just something playing in the background while everyone is shopping. Or psychological filler to distract you from realizing how dull the movie you’re watching is.
Many of my closest friends are guys who play in hard rock bands and are not famous at all. We are all at the end of summer in our mid to late 30s. When they were younger there was a cockiness in them about being cool and playing music. Doing lots of acid and being wild. Now that our 30s have passed in a handful of heartbeats I don’t think any of them are keeping the dream alive of being famous as musicians. If anything, they are better than ever before as song writers, musicians, they are still very cool and quick but matured and better humans basically, still very attractive as men but their value as would-be celebrities is basically negative value now. They are still super cool to me and dear as anything in the world as my friends but to people 20 years younger than us, they are now perceived as culture vultures. Becoming old guys at the bar. They are definitely not there yet but it’s wild to see how many of the new ones hanging around acting like they own the world instantly perceive us as dated. Counting us out for no reason other than we are now old, at 36-38. The local scene operates this way, I imagine the music business is no different.
I truly believe most of the loved, classic albums which are almost all universally made by people in their early 20s were made by artists who became even more interesting as people when they turned 30, 40, or older. But they almost all lose that ghost in them which made them do something cool in the first place as they get older and become “too old” for the game. I think it’s heartbreaking to be so easily casted out and replaced. I think that kills the inspiration to make great music. Music is made for people, but if the people no longer want you because you’re old, are you really going to be excited to make music for them?
Musically, I don't think you lose your abilities as you get older. In fact, I would say you become even better. The most visible example of this is among movie composers. Morricone was in his late 30s when he scored "The Good, The Bad, The Ugly". Hans Zimmer has done some of his best work in his 50s.
As did painters (often famous classic paintings are prepared by the painters students who work for them and then just finished or merely signed by the painter).
Heck, pop musicians have those. The top-40 is full of professional co-writers and ghost-writers and producer teams (while the "star" gets the songwriting credits).
Just watch this, including the audience reaction. It's stunning how good she still is.
https://youtu.be/BF7pmimzjBs?t=53
Even composers are like that. Most continued to put out great work until death.
The thing with popular music, is that it's supposed to be popular, trendy, and just new. Talented composers start putting out innovative works when their are young, and in the eye of the general public, those are more salient, more praise-worthy.
Nick Cave is a counter-example to the above, btw. I think he's just gotten better and better with age
Reminds me of an article I read about R.E.M. around the turn of the millennium. The journalist notes that the band members (now all multi-millionaires) now spent their time moving from one posh luxury hotel or perfectly air-conditioned space to another around the world, living in an international cosmopolitan bubble even when not touring. This seemed the very antithesis of the struggle and feeling of local community from which several great rock subgenres had emerged, and it was no surprise that R.E.M.'s work had become bland.
In another part of the interview, Andre Benjamin said he loved going to the laundromat, and his biggest musical aspiration (at the time of the interview) was to play the bass clarinet well enough to be able to play along with anything/anyone at the park or beach (condensing/paraphrasing).
I think it's a combination of things, the career of a pop musician appears to be terrible for their art - probably bad for most of them as people, too.
Is that pop/rock musicians? If so, that's because pop is a young person's game/interest.
Tons of Jazz, classical, ethnic genre, electronic, OST etc, musicians have produced their best works in their later years...
For classical music, competitions and conservatoires will only take young people and if you don't go through their processes there's no chance of getting auditions for pro gigs.
I wonder if the author is one of those who needs a few more years to understand themselves well enough to perform at the highest level, by which time she'll be to old to pursue music professionally
The stones released a classic blues album lately. That was purely for them not so much for selling. They can afford that because of their huge fame.
Unfortunately not. There are more and more musicians, since more and more music colleges are springing up, and fewer and fewer gigs, because it is easier and usually cheaper to hire a DJ, and people are just as satisfied. One could get the impression that today musicians are trained primarily to educate new musicians, a kind of end in itself, as is already known in other non-STEM studies.
On one hand there's something to be said about persistence and discipline. You can find loads of stories of people sticking through the hard times and being rewarded for it.
On the other hand, there's opportunity cost in sticking with a failing endeavor. I am a hobbyist musician too, I spend a lot of time at the piano but I sometimes think to myself "what if I just used all of that time to advance my career instead?"
The real problem is that you don't know what can happen so we're left making guesses. Maybe the author of the article could have found some niche as a studio musician and had a long and successful career. Maybe calling it quits and changing careers while they're young would unlock a new passion that they're much more successful at.
This sentence resonated with me, maybe it's this feeling that keeps someone playing: "There were tricky passages I would dread, notes in the middle of chords I would bluff and hope nobody noticed. But in between attacks of nerves I felt a thrill, and a sense of harmony, when I managed to make the notes sparkle; when my mind, my hands and my ears were all in sync."
As a music teacher I have assessed many students at that level, and as a performer I know pretty well what stage fright is. So I completely understand these feelings.
Some of my best students suffer from stage fright more than the rest of them.
My hypothesis is that the richer and deeper the message one can and want to express, the clearer her awareness of being far from her intention and, therefore, the bigger the chance to make mistakes.
The is certainly unfair. Better students may fail more than average students because they are better in their musical thought and musical capabilities.
Other ways of evaluating musical performance would be more adequate. One would be to collect recordings (with no post-processing) that students could prepare outside the stage with professional recording tools. The live performance assessment is still necessary, but not the only measure.
The gap between playing excellently and doing so at the stage is huge, and extra musical factors play an important role.
For doing well in live concerts you need specific preparation, you need to know and play by heart and fluently everything, of course. Then, you need to train on different stressing scenarios particularly designed to test that you can keep playing so. Finally, you need self-confidence on your own skill. Some people find useful to nurture their self-esteem; others (me among them) prefer to cultivate humility: what matters most is the music I'm playing, not me. The ideal is to become completely transparent at the stage so that the musical essence passes through me as it should sound.
(I never had concert pianist talent or technique, but it still did take me many years to shed the “louder/faster/denser” ideology of a modern jazz education. Also known as, lacking taste and maturity in one’s earlier years.)
The thing it took me a long time (and some therapy) to grasp was that I didn’t fail. I made a positive decision for the direction I wanted my life to go in, and took it. And more importantly, I didn't have to give up music just because I didn't make it my career. I now play multiple instruments and enjoy a much broader array of music than I ever did as a student, playing and singing American traditional, Irish, and folk music with my family and other people. Having let go of feeling obliged to make it a career, I felt free to make it a passion without feeling like I had to succeed. I wish more people felt like they could study music in college in order to make it a wonderful part of their lives, rather than "if I can't be Horowitz, there's no point in continuing with this".
Unless it starts to get awkward, actively cutting back on the "I" and "me" in writing, thought, and conversation seems to put the focus back on the topic.
The degree to which this observation applies to TFA is a matter of opinion, and piling on the author is not the intent.