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Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician (2022)

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Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician (2022)

#11

Post by titanomachy »

helloplanets wrote: post #9

I don't believe this is how great music usually comes about, not even Techno. It's missing the other essential piece. Being influenced by and completely immersed in a niche of other brilliant people. (The most extreme example of this would be the 90's Detroit-Berlin connection.) Paired with an obsessive work ethic in the studio. If it's only obsession in the studio, things come out dry, uninspired. If there's no surg…

Justin Vernon disappeared to a cabin in Wisconsin for months, where he wrote and recorded one of the greatest and most popular folk rock albums of all time.

Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician (2022)

#12

Post by cousin_it »

helloplanets wrote: post #9

I don't believe this is how great music usually comes about, not even Techno. It's missing the other essential piece. Being influenced by and completely immersed in a niche of other brilliant people. (The most extreme example of this would be the 90's Detroit-Berlin connection.) Paired with an obsessive work ethic in the studio. If it's only obsession in the studio, things come out dry, uninspired. If there's no surg…

Could great works substitute for having a scene? After all, writers have been inspired by Dostoevsky without being part of the same scene as him, and often without being part of a scene at all.

Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician (2022)

#13

Post by bravura »

cousin_it wrote: post #12
helloplanets wrote: post #9

I don't believe this is how great music usually comes about, not even Techno. It's missing the other essential piece. Being influenced by and completely immersed in a niche of other brilliant people. (The most extreme example of this would be the 90's Detroit-Berlin connection.) Paired with an obsessive work ethic in the studio. If it's only obsession in the studio, things come out dry, uninspired. If there's no surg…

Could great works substitute for having a scene? After all, writers have been inspired by Dostoevsky without being part of the same scene as him, and often without being part of a scene at all.

Close contact between exceptional individuals is one of the main values of having a scene.

Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician (2022)

#14

Post by helloplanets »

titanomachy wrote: post #11
helloplanets wrote: post #9

I don't believe this is how great music usually comes about, not even Techno. It's missing the other essential piece. Being influenced by and completely immersed in a niche of other brilliant people. (The most extreme example of this would be the 90's Detroit-Berlin connection.) Paired with an obsessive work ethic in the studio. If it's only obsession in the studio, things come out dry, uninspired. If there's no surg…

Justin Vernon disappeared to a cabin in Wisconsin for months, where he wrote and recorded one of the greatest and most popular folk rock albums of all time.

I actually thought about that while writing the original comment as well. For Emma, Forever Ago is one of my all time favorite albums, good example of raw emotion with no need for any bells or whistles.

The big thing there is, that he already was a professional musician and completely inside a creative scene before leaving for the cabin. (DeYarmond Edison was the band he was in before Bon Iver.)

But yes, things were going way sideways for him, liver issues with mono, so he went to process whatever was going on and had been going on in complete isolation. (Although for the next album, he actually set up a whole "creative commune", a new band around Bon Iver instead of it being just himself, and so on. And I think you can hear the colors he wanted back in the music from it directly.)

A lot of examples of artists going into bouts of isolation, but almost always coming into it from an intense experience. So, the two don't have to be day to day intertwined, although for Techno specifically it's usually the case.

Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician (2022)

#16

Post by helloplanets »

cousin_it wrote: post #12
helloplanets wrote: post #9

I don't believe this is how great music usually comes about, not even Techno. It's missing the other essential piece. Being influenced by and completely immersed in a niche of other brilliant people. (The most extreme example of this would be the 90's Detroit-Berlin connection.) Paired with an obsessive work ethic in the studio. If it's only obsession in the studio, things come out dry, uninspired. If there's no surg…

Could great works substitute for having a scene? After all, writers have been inspired by Dostoevsky without being part of the same scene as him, and often without being part of a scene at all.

Which great writers are you thinking of here? True outsider art is very rare afaik.

Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician (2022)

#17

Post by bh91 »

I find something quite bleak about this.

The joy of participating in music, to me, is one of the few domains where we can still, to an extent, hide away from the relentless enclosure and commodification of every facet of our existence in the name of capitalist value extraction. Imagining oneself as an assembly line in order to rush past the experience of the creative process and arrive as quickly as possible at a finished artifact — to me this is an act of submission. It is accepting that one's market value as a musician, as measured by the number and popularity of commodities they produce, is of vastly greater importance than the depth and quality of their musical experiences, than any joy, pleasure, satisfaction, connection, growth, expression, or catharsis they experience through their participation in music.

I have no doubt this is an effective way to end up with a bunch of finished tracks. But I can't help but feel that it is missing the point.

Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician (2022)

#18

Post by Closi »

bh91 wrote: post #17

I find something quite bleak about this. The joy of participating in music, to me, is one of the few domains where we can still, to an extent, hide away from the relentless enclosure and commodification of every facet of our existence in the name of capitalist value extraction. Imagining oneself as an assembly line in order to rush past the experience of the creative process and arrive as quickly as possible at a fin…

> I have no doubt this is an effective way to end up with a bunch of finished tracks. But I can't help but feel that it is missing the point.

It depends what your goal is - if your goal is to have an enjoyable hobby, then yes, it's probably missing the point.

If your goal is to have the best outputs, then that might involve a different creative process.

If your goal is to make (good amounts of) money, then the popularity of your music is actually important. Writing music that will be popular is a skill in itself, which is probably a different skill to just writing the music that you find the most joy and satisfaction in writing. Writing music that brings you joy and hoping others find the same joy in it might work, but I suspect the musicians making the most money are often working hard to write what the market wants/accepts rather than just what brings them the most joy. There will be exceptions to every rule however.

Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician (2022)

#19

Post by bh91 »

Closi wrote: post #18
bh91 wrote: post #17

I find something quite bleak about this. The joy of participating in music, to me, is one of the few domains where we can still, to an extent, hide away from the relentless enclosure and commodification of every facet of our existence in the name of capitalist value extraction. Imagining oneself as an assembly line in order to rush past the experience of the creative process and arrive as quickly as possible at a fin…

> I have no doubt this is an effective way to end up with a bunch of finished tracks. But I can't help but feel that it is missing the point. It depends what your goal is - if your goal is to have an enjoyable hobby, then yes, it's probably missing the point. If your goal is to have the best outputs, then that might involve a different creative process. If your goal is to make (good amounts of) money, then the popula…

I absolutely agree.

My consternation comes from the fact that we seem, culturally, to have arrived at a place where we value the creation of music (or rather, musical artifacts) in the service of gaining something (fame and profit, primarily) over enjoyment of the experience of music.

Re: Turning music into a chore is how I became a musician (2022)

#20

Post by IAmGraydon »

I’ve been a recording musician for 28 years. Making music a boring chore is not the answer. The best musicians do two things: learn to turn off the over-thinking part of the brain that blocks creativity and second, understand music theory in depth for when that fails and you get stuck.
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