The right of a musician not to love Music

There is a sentence that accompanies many musicians from the moment they begin their training: you have to love music. Sometimes it is said explicitly; more often, it is conveyed in much subtler ways, through an entire culture built around the idea of artistic vocation. If you truly love music, you will study for hours. If you truly love music, you will accept the sacrifices. If you truly love music, you will put up with uncertainty, competition, travelling, precariousness and frustration. And, above all, if you truly love music, you should never grow tired of it.

That last idea may sound absurd when stated so plainly, yet it is much more deeply embedded in musical culture than we might think. There is an expectation, particularly strong in the musical world, that a musician’s relationship with what they do should be one of permanent love. Music is presented not simply as a profession or an artistic discipline, but as an essential part of one’s identity. A musician does not merely work with music; they are supposed to live for it, need it, listen to it constantly and find in it an inexhaustible source of pleasure and meaning.

That is why it can be so difficult to say something that should, in fact, be perfectly legitimate: sometimes a musician can hate music.

I do not mean this as a provocative statement, nor necessarily as a permanent loss of interest. I mean moments, stages, even extended periods in which music stops being a source of pleasure and becomes a source of saturation. A musician can be bored at a concert. They can leave a concert hall thinking that they do not want to hear an orchestra again for a very long time. They can go for weeks or months without listening to music by choice. They can cancel their Spotify subscription because they do not want their everyday life to be filled with music. They can come home after a day of rehearsals, teaching, practising, meetings or concerts and discover that the last thing they need is to put on a recording.

They may need silence.

And yet saying this out loud can feel much more difficult than it should.

There is a fundamental difference between loving something and being required to love it. When love for music becomes a condition for considering an artistic career legitimate, it stops being merely a feeling and begins to function as a norm. Love is supposed to justify the effort: the hours of practice, the discipline, the sacrifices, the professional uncertainty, the years of training, the competition, the poorly paid work and the opportunities that never materialise. If all of this is done for love, then somehow it makes sense.

The problem arises when the musician stops feeling that love.

Because then tiredness can no longer simply be tiredness. Saturation can no longer simply be saturation. The desire to step away from music for a while begins to be interpreted as a sign that something is wrong. Perhaps I chose the wrong profession. Perhaps I have lost my vocation. Perhaps I am not really a musician. Perhaps I have lost whatever it was that made me special. Perhaps I should be doing something else.

A human and perfectly understandable reaction to an activity that occupies such a large part of our lives can thus become a crisis of identity.

We also tend to forget that a musician does not necessarily listen to music in the same way as someone who does not work with it. For a musician, listening can also be work. We listen to study a piece, prepare a performance, memorise, compare interpretations, analyse, learn or identify problems. We listen because we have to. We hear the same passage again and again. We work on the same piece for weeks or months and sometimes for years. And after spending such a significant part of the day inside that world, it is perfectly possible for the body and mind to ask for precisely the opposite.

No more stimulation. No other piece. No other concert. No more conversations about music.

Silence.

There is something particularly revealing about what happens socially when someone discovers that you are a musician. One of the first suggestions that often comes up when you are getting to know someone is to go to a concert. Which, in itself, is perfectly reasonable. Except that, when you are a professional musician, there are moments when hearing that someone has chosen a concert as the ideal first date can produce something closer to a panic attack than to romantic excitement.

The irony is that the person is usually trying to connect with you through the thing they assume you love most. “You’re a musician? Let’s go to a concert.” It makes perfect sense. And yet, after spending an entire week rehearsing, teaching, practising, performing, talking about music and listening to other people talk about music, the last thing you may want on a Friday night is another concert.

Something similar happens when someone who is not a musician discovers that you are one and immediately wants to show you their playlist. They send you twenty songs. They tell you about the band they have just discovered. They ask what you listen to. They are genuinely excited to share something with you. And you are thinking: I actually haven’t listened to Spotify in three months.

There is something almost comical about this mismatch. The non-musician thinks, “I’ve found the perfect way to connect with this person.” The musician may be thinking, “Please don’t make me listen to anything.”

We do not necessarily expect the same thing from other professions. We do not automatically assume that an architect wants to spend their holidays visiting buildings, or that a chef wants to spend their evenings off analysing recipes. Yet there seems to be a particular expectation placed on musicians: if you are a musician, you should want music all the time.

And there is another, even more complicated relationship: the relationship with one’s own instrument.

A musician can deeply love their instrument and, at the same time, come to hate it. They can feel enormous gratitude for everything it has allowed them to do and simultaneously experience periods when they do not even want to look at it. They may have built a fundamental part of their identity around it and, precisely because of that, feel that they need to step away. An instrument can represent freedom, expression and pleasure, but also pressure, frustration, comparison, fear and expectation.

There is not necessarily any contradiction in this. Important relationships are not uniform relationships. We can love something and feel rejection towards it at certain moments. We can be deeply connected to something and still need to distance ourselves from it. We can need a break from something that we consider essential.

Perhaps the real problem is not that a musician can come to hate music, but that they feel they are not allowed to say so.

Because what we cannot say, we cannot properly process either. If a musician can admit that they are tired, but cannot admit that they are tired of music; if they can say that they need a break, but cannot say that they need a break specifically from the thing that constitutes their profession, that experience may eventually turn into guilt, shame or a sense of failure.

And this is where the romantic idea of vocation can become particularly damaging.

For a long time, we have constructed an image of the vocational artist according to which someone who truly loves what they do never stops wanting to do it. True vocation is imagined as permanent, resistant to exhaustion and capable of surviving any difficulty. The authentic musician is the one who continues to feel desire even when the circumstances are difficult.

But perhaps an adult relationship with a vocation does not work that way.

Perhaps a vocation can go through different stages. There can be enthusiasm and boredom, discovery and rejection, desire and the need for distance. There can be moments when music feels absolutely essential and others when we need to remove it from our lives for a while. None of this necessarily determines the value of a career.

In fact, perhaps one of the most damaging things we can do is turn love for music into a moral obligation. Desire does not work under orders. We cannot command someone to love, and we cannot command ourselves to feel something that we do not currently feel.

Sometimes we need to stop listening in order to listen again. We need to stop playing in order to play again. We need to stop talking about music in order to remember why we ever wanted to talk about it in the first place.

And perhaps we also need to accept that silence is not a betrayal of music.

Silence can be part of a musical life. It can be the space in which we stop producing, performing, analysing and proving ourselves. A space in which we do not have to justify our professional identity or demonstrate that we still love what we do.

Something may return after the silence. A piece that suddenly moves us again. A sound that awakens our curiosity. The desire to play. The need to listen. An experience that reminds us why we started.

Or it may take longer.

And that should be allowed too.

A musician should be able to say, “Right now, I don’t want to listen to music,” without anyone interpreting it as a confession of failure. They should be able to say, “For a while, I came to hate my instrument,” without their entire career immediately being called into question. They should be able to be bored by concerts, reject a musical recommendation, spend months without Spotify or simply want to be quiet.

Because deeply loving music does not necessarily mean wanting it every day.

Perhaps it means being able to build a relationship with it that is free enough to allow us to step away when we need to. Music does not need us to love it permanently. And musicians should not need to prove permanently that they do.

Perhaps we need to rethink what we mean when we talk about loving music as a musician. A long-lasting relationship with music does not have to be defined by permanent enthusiasm, constant consumption or an uninterrupted sense of vocation. Like any meaningful relationship, it can contain distance, frustration, boredom, rejection and the need to be alone.

There may be times when the most musical thing a musician can do is not listen to anything at all. To put the instrument away. To leave the concert invitation unanswered. To turn off Spotify. To stop talking about music for a while. Not because music has ceased to matter, but because it matters too much to allow it to become an obligation.

Perhaps the freedom to step away is not the opposite of commitment. Perhaps it is one of the conditions that makes a genuine relationship possible.

A musician should not have to prove their vocation by demonstrating that they love music every day. They should be allowed to have complicated feelings about the work they have chosen, including moments of boredom, rejection and even hatred. They should be allowed to say, without shame or fear, “I don’t want music right now.”

And perhaps, after enough silence, music can become something different again: not an obligation, not a profession, not an identity to defend, but simply something we choose to listen to.

Music does not need to be loved all the time to remain meaningful. And perhaps musicians deserve the freedom to remember that, too.