A musician is not a feeling
I would like to take this opportunity to clarify something that may not always be obvious when I write critically about music and the culture surrounding it: I love music. I have dedicated most of my life to it, and I do not question for a moment the depth or importance that music can have in a person's life. What I do not do, however, is romanticise or idealise it to the point of blindness. I do not believe that loving music requires us to consider everything surrounding it beautiful, meaningful or sacred. Nor do I believe that questioning the culture of musicianship is somehow incompatible with loving the thing itself. On the contrary, I think that caring deeply about something should make us capable of looking at it honestly.
There are aspects of musical culture that I find deeply valuable, and others that I find troubling, outdated or simply absurd. There are ideas about talent, vocation, sacrifice, hierarchy and artistic identity that have been repeated for so long that we barely notice them anymore. We inherit them as part of becoming musicians, often without ever being asked whether we actually believe them. One of the ideas I find particularly persistent is the assumption that a musician's relationship with music must be an extraordinary emotional one. We do not simply work with music. We are expected to love it.
At first, this may sound completely harmless. What could possibly be wrong with loving what you do? The problem begins when love stops being something that happens to exist within a professional life and becomes part of the definition of the professional themselves. When being a “real musician” is somehow connected to how intensely you feel about music, the emotional relationship ceases to be entirely private. It becomes a measure of authenticity.
This is a peculiar demand to make of any profession. We do not normally consider someone's relationship with their subject matter to be proof of their professional legitimacy. A lawyer may be fascinated by law or completely indifferent to it outside working hours. A doctor may have a profound intellectual relationship with medicine, or simply be very good at practising it. An architect can spend the evening thinking about buildings, or spend it thinking about anything else. Their professional identity does not generally depend on the intensity of their feelings towards the object of their work.
With musicians, however, the distinction between profession and affection has always been unusually blurred. We ask musicians not only to work with music, but to have a particular kind of relationship with it. And that relationship is expected to be deep, passionate and, ideally, enduring. The musician is not merely someone who has acquired a specialised knowledge and practice. The musician is imagined as someone who has been called by music, shaped by it and, in some sense, unable to live without it.
This begins very early. Musicians are often introduced to their profession through the language of vocation, passion and sacrifice. We hear stories about the child who could not stop playing, the young person who knew from the beginning that music was their life, the artist who practised while everyone else was playing, the performer who would rather suffer than abandon their calling. These stories can be beautiful and, in many cases, they contain a great deal of truth. But repeated often enough, they become more than stories. They become a model of what a musician is supposed to be.
And once that model has been internalised, ordinary changes in one's relationship with music can begin to feel like failures of identity. If I am tired of music, perhaps I have lost my passion. If I do not want to listen to music after work, perhaps I am disconnected from my art. If I am bored with practising, perhaps I no longer have the vocation I once had. If I spend several months feeling distant from music, perhaps I need to find my way back. The possibility that my relationship with music has simply changed is strangely difficult to accept.
A few days ago, someone commented on an article I had written about a musician's right not to love music. His response was: “Yeh, I get you… you need to rediscover the love though.” It was a small comment, and perhaps he meant nothing more than that love can make life and work more bearable. But I found myself returning to those two words: you need to. Not because there is anything wrong with rediscovering a love for music. Quite the opposite. It can be a wonderful thing to lose something and find your way back to it. What interested me was the assumption that this return was necessary. That, somewhere beneath the exhaustion, boredom or distance, there remained an obligation to recover a particular feeling in order to remain fully what we are supposed to be.
It made me realise that perhaps the issue goes deeper than the expectation that musicians should love music. We have come to associate the emotional intensity of the musician's relationship with music with the authenticity of the musician themselves. If you love music deeply, your commitment appears genuine. If you suffer for it, your vocation appears serious. If you cannot imagine your life without it, your identity appears secure. But what happens when the feeling changes? Why should the professional identity become uncertain simply because the emotion does?
A musician is not a feeling. A professional identity has nothing to do with affection. I can be a musician without loving music every day. I can take my work seriously without feeling passionate about it at every moment. I can have spent decades developing an artistic practice and still reach periods in which I do not particularly want to engage with the thing around which that practice has been built. None of this erases the profession.
In fact, I would argue that there is something more mature in allowing professional identity to survive the fluctuations of emotion. If my sense of being a musician depends entirely on whether I currently feel love for music, then every change in feeling becomes an existential question. I am no longer simply bored, tired, frustrated or saturated. I am suddenly asking myself whether I am still a musician. We have placed an extraordinary amount of weight on a feeling that, by its very nature, is allowed to change.
There is another assumption hidden inside this romanticised model of musicianship: that the quality of what an artist creates must somehow correspond to the intensity of their love for what they do. This is where I find the argument particularly difficult to accept. I was also told, in the same conversation, that it was hard to imagine a musician making “good music” — whatever that means — or music that would stand the test of time if they were disillusioned or no longer in love with what they do.
But why should we assume that?
I am not suggesting that disillusionment automatically produces great art, any more than love automatically does. I am suggesting that we have no reason to treat love as a necessary condition for artistic honesty, quality or permanence. Artists create from an enormous range of emotional and intellectual states: enthusiasm, doubt, desire, frustration, exhaustion, curiosity, grief, discipline, obsession, indifference. Sometimes the relationship with one's own practice is complicated precisely because the person making the work is a human being rather than a permanent state of artistic ecstasy.
The absence of affection does not make what we express through art any less honest or authentic. In fact, authenticity is not necessarily a question of emotional intensity at all. We seem to have confused authenticity with intensity: the more passionately someone feels, the more authentic their work must be; the more devoted they appear, the more serious their art must be. But a feeling is not evidence of truth, and passion is not a guarantee of artistic value.
Perhaps this is one of the less visible consequences of romanticising artistic vocation. We turn something that could be a profession into something that is expected to function as a permanent source of meaning. The musician is not simply supposed to work; they are supposed to believe. Not simply to practise; to be devoted. Not simply to perform; to need to perform. And not simply to engage with music, but to love it.
The language is beautiful. The expectations attached to it are not always so beautiful.
Because once love becomes part of the definition of the profession, its absence becomes a problem that needs to be solved. Rest is no longer necessarily rest. Distance becomes disconnection. Boredom becomes burnout. Indifference becomes a warning sign. And eventually someone tells you, kindly, that you need to rediscover the love. The possibility that nothing needs to be recovered seems strangely difficult for us to tolerate.
Perhaps a musician's relationship with music is simply allowed to become more complicated with time. Perhaps the music we once needed is not the music we need now. Perhaps there are periods when we listen obsessively and others when we want silence. Perhaps we love the instrument but dislike the profession. Perhaps we love performing but hate rehearsing. Perhaps we love teaching and no longer love the stage. Perhaps we love certain music deeply and have no interest whatsoever in the rest. Perhaps we once loved music in a way that was total and adolescent, and later come to relate to it with something quieter and less consuming.
These changes do not necessarily represent a loss. They may simply represent adulthood.
There is something strangely adolescent about the idea that the relationship with one's profession must remain permanently intense in order to remain authentic. We do not expect every adult relationship to preserve the emotional intensity with which it began. We understand that affection changes form, that intimacy can coexist with irritation, that commitment can survive periods of distance. Yet when the relationship is with an artistic practice, we often demand something much more absolute.
Perhaps because we are still attached to the romantic image of the artist: the artist who cannot live without art, who sacrifices everything, who is driven by an almost uncontrollable need to create, whose work is inseparable from their identity. It is a powerful image, but it leaves very little room for ordinary human fluctuation. It also leaves very little room for a musician to simply be a professional.
This is perhaps where I would draw the clearest distinction. I do not want to take love out of music. I want to take the obligation out of love. There is a profound difference between saying “I love what I do” and believing that I must love what I do in order for my work to be meaningful, legitimate or authentic. The first is a personal experience. The second is a professional expectation.
And I think we should be careful about what happens when that expectation becomes part of the culture. If musicians believe that their value depends on remaining passionate, they may learn to hide exhaustion rather than acknowledge it. They may feel guilty for wanting distance. They may interpret boredom as failure. They may remain in situations that no longer work for them because leaving would feel like abandoning part of themselves. The mythology of vocation can be comforting, but it can also make ordinary human limits much harder to recognise.
Love can sustain an artistic life, but so can discipline, curiosity, intelligence, responsibility, craftsmanship and simple professional commitment. These things do not always make for equally beautiful stories, but they are no less real. There may be days when I play because I am fascinated by what I am doing, and days when I play because I have made a commitment and I intend to honour it. I do not think the second day is necessarily less professional than the first.
Perhaps we need to stop asking musicians how much they love music and start paying more attention to what they do with their relationship to it. How they work. How they listen. How they think. How they perform. How they teach. How they collaborate. How they continue when enthusiasm disappears and how they change when it returns. These things tell us far more about a musician than whether they can convincingly describe their profession as a lifelong love affair.
I love music. I do not need to idealise it to prove that. I do not need to romanticise my relationship with it, and I do not need to pretend that everything surrounding musical culture deserves my admiration simply because the music itself matters deeply to me. Perhaps loving something honestly means allowing it to be imperfect, allowing our relationship with it to change, and refusing to confuse criticism with betrayal.
Maybe I will love music tomorrow in a way that I do not love it today. Maybe I will love it differently next year. Maybe I will spend periods of my life feeling very close to it and others feeling almost completely indifferent. Perhaps my relationship with it will continue to change, as every serious relationship does. None of that changes the fact that I am a musician. And I certainly do not think my professional identity should depend on how much I happen to love music today.
