Hi hi, I'm Agustin, long-time friend of @jess, fellow musician and educator in the field. I think it's wonderful to have or try to develop some sort of sense of community through an online posting board beyond youtube and instagram comments of a video. I think thoughts regarding music are much more vast than a short paragraph we may want to write in reaction to a video of someone playing amazingly or not.
When I think back on my particular interests of making music, teaching music, creating music, expressing ourselves in music I tend to think of a core wish for kindness that is primarily at the forefront of each musical interaction. Yet this wish I think is rarely what is taught, seen, or felt in "professional" interactions that I have had, both towards me, but also between other musicians within a group. Happy to be corrected if wrong, and in fact deeply wish these have been isolated incidents. But I'm not sure.
I actually wrote my whole Master's Music thesis on this, the role of people-centered music-making and the characteristics of communication within music-making environments. However, this wasn't the case last week. After almost 20 years in this field, I still got unfortunately tangled into watching one of these ego-driven, self-righteous, no-room-for-empathy-in-opinion, unfounded-hegemonic arguments take place in my own studio space.
Needless to say I could no longer be in this kind of environment, but it left me questioning: "what is it within the wide spectrum of professionality and ability of a musicians that can commonly lead to these dogmatic views of right or wrong, lack of more empathic communication, rushed product-based expectations?" How can we approach music-making and teaching jobs and gigs to have the opposite of those aspects, and in complete accordance to this thread, how can we actually create more community between musicians/educators/creators?
Yeah... I dunno. 20 years and I still don't get it.
Maybe someone can chime in?
Top comments (1)
If taking this out of the context of your post, I feel like you're describing characteristics of someone who lacks emotional maturity. Those people are everywhere. But perhaps something about this type of personality is more drawn to and/or found more frequently amongst musicians?