This particular posting is only the first tentative scratching at a deeply buried issue. It comes from some recent experiences discussing curricular issues with other faculty, and also comparing some of my instinctive responses to questions about a musician’s life to equally instinctive responses that might come from a different musician.
The basic thesis is simple enough: that amongst musicians we find an attitudinal scale ranging from the strictly utilitarian at one end, to the mystic and encompassing on the other.
To illustrate, consider the 100% utilitarian musician: I do not need anything that isn’t absolutely and directly applicable to my chosen work. So a violinist might have absolutely no interest in learning Harmony because, according to this musician, the time is much better spent practicing, learning excerpts, rehearsing, etc.
Or the 100% all-encompassing type: I do not need to play an instrument at all; everything is of interest, and in fact doing something so gauche as actually performing a piece of music lessens it given the crudity of performance compared to the Platonic perfection of the inner musical experience. (Milton Babbitt’s “Who Cares if You Listen?” would be an example of this mindset at its absolute extreme.)
Most musicians fall somewhere in between; very few would be as walleyed as my example violinist, or as impractical as my woo-woo music-only-in-the-mind type. Most of us combine elements of both. For those tending towards the all-encompassing, I would offer Heinrich Schenker as the ultimate archetype, or performers such as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Artur Schnabel, and Glenn Gould. More on the utilitarian side, I would point to many professional singers or orchestral musicians.
Me, for example: I lean towards the all-encompassing, to be sure, but I remain a blue-collar, dirt-under-my-fingernails practical musician nonetheless. I hadn’t the slightest objection to studying Harmony intensively; in fact, I wound up chairing a theory department in a major conservatory. But initially I had no other reason for spending all that time and energy than it is there and I want to know it. Ditto on many other skills, including music history and literature, writing about music, and the like. The fact that many of those interests wound up making me the bulk of my living is immaterial; I could have remained a pianist, after all. The skills—peripheral to my major, which was piano performance—were able to help me make my living because I honed them to a professional caliber, albeit for no other reason than just enthusiasm and interest.
But I’m not necessarily all that typical. Although I cited orchestral musicians as tending towards the utilitarian, we find plenty of variation nonetheless. The principal bassoonist of the San Francisco Symphony is an excellent conductor with his own orchestra, for example, and a musician with a wide-ranging set of interests. He doesn’t go quite as far in the woo-woo direction as I do, but he’s no hammer-and-nails practical guy, either. Of course his expansiveness feeds right into making him the fantastic bassoonist that he is, but I doubt that his primary reason for conducting is to be a better bassoonist.
I’m not bewailing the utilitarian, single focus by any means. It can work. Nor do I mean to imply that a more all-encompassing musician is ipso facto superior to a more deep-and-narrow approach. It’s true enough that personally I think broader musicianship represents a higher calling than utilitarianism, but I recognize that my opinions aren’t absolute truth. They’re just my little snobberies.
Most of the time the contrast isn’t all that noticeable because, as I said earlier, most musicians fall somewhere in the middle. Very few of us entered the profession out of a nuts-and-bolts determination to do just the one thing and nothing else. At certain times in our lives, doing that just one thing might require the lion’s share of our energy and commitment, but other times may call for other mindsets.
But sometimes it gets up close and personal, as has happened with me lately. So it has been on my mind a bit—fermenting and bubbling—but certainly nowhere near ready for prime time yet.