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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: Accuracy vs. Musicality (and YMMV)
Post Subject: One normal day in the life of a working artistPosted by rowuk on: 1/23/2026
Thank you for the detailed discourse. What you wrote applies to really serious artists too.
1) In the example of a trumpeter, we get an instrument (in my case at 10 when my grandfather died), some preliminary lessons and with some luck, get our first pleasure by playing simple tunes for the parents/grandparents.
2) This could continue for a lifetime, but often, we have the desire for more. We get lessons from an accomplished player and discover that the only way to get better is to practice the things that we can not play and learn things that we do not know. The accomplishments slow down as our motivations are not immediately rewarded. This can in fact be very destabilizing. Many quit. Those that meet the challenge learn a lot about the bodies reaction to daily life. At this stage, we develop routines that generally lead to more consistent play. We often start comparing our play to those around us. Teachers are blamed for routines not working or when they deeply criticise certain aspects of our play. Also at this stage many quit. They have enough performance qualities to be successful in community ensembles and in principle move back to level one.
3) A small proportion of these performers discover that making music is much more than playing in tune and in time at an appropriate volume. This starts the search for musicality - our own voices. Life becomes frustrating as the journey becomes singularily ours. The deeper relationship to the composers, their surroundings, their technique, the relevance to our lives all takes time and this is in fact isolating. More often than not, we learn things that we can not even add to our performances. We learn how small we are in the bigger picture of things and how fragile even that existence is. At the same time, there is an explosion of awareness that many performances (also recordings) are problematic at best. Still, at this level, we are asking more questions (to ourselves) than getting answers. I believe that this humility (to be able to ask questions) makes me more quiet than louder, especially with criticism. Extremely slow Bruckner movements can be a conductors artistic response to an overly reverberant performance space instead of them being a musical idiot. On the other side of the coin, a spectacular (in the sense of it being a spectacle) performance is what it is - often level 1 or 2. Still, we can learn something.
After a life of trumpet performance, I am at a stage where my body is playing a much greater role in how and what I am willing to perform. I believe that this is level 4 where I will learn what to do with that lifes experience. I am not sure if it will result in absolute reclusion or end up with me being the grandfather in ensembles full of stories and lifes lessons.
Schopenhauers "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung" (The world as will and imagination) gets into the power of music although he writes nothing about the path to get there. In his world, all musical performances were live and special opportunities. There were no recordings to play back and analyse at leisure. Considering that contemporary readers have a relationship to music play far different than his (in quantity of exposure and ability to select WHAT WE WANT TO LISTEN TO), I think that we must at least keep this in mind while reading.Rerurn to Romy the Cat's Site