I have a confession to make...
I am a professional musician who rarely listens to music for fun. Does that make me weird? I think it does.
Let me clarify- my life is far from devoid of music. In fact, there is hardly any time when there is no music playing. I listen to music that I’m working on or when I’m looking for a song for a setlist. Beyoncé’s Renaissance and Cowboy Carter are on permanent rotation at our house, and when that’s not playing, I almost always have lofi music on for the dog, to drown out the neighbor dogs and school buses on our street and hoping to save our eardrums from his own reactive outbursts. Sometimes I come downstairs to the living room in the morning and the white noise or lofi has been playing on all night, it’s just a part of the background and I don’t even notice it to shut it off in the evening.
But I rarely just listen to music for fun, outside of my work. I fill my quiet moments with podcasts and youtube videos and rain sounds and episodes of Chopped on TV (fully completing my transformation into my mother). My brain is broken like everyone else in my generation and I don’t like to leave too much quiet time, but for some reason listening to music has become a purely practical event. When I was in graduate school for music, I would put EDM beats or even just white noise in my ears as I left campus, just to drown out my own brain and all the music I had worked on all day. I needed a break from it in order to keep going back.
If I do consume non-work music, it’s still for practical purposes. I usually listen to a song or album one time and that’s it. I love to scroll the ‘New Releases’ tab of Apple Music, and will usually give a listen to any new album by a major artist. I have almost always heard the newest Sabrina Carpenter or Doechii album before anyone I know, within the first few days of release, but it’s just because I want to know what it sounds like and what the trends are in pop music. Once I’ve heard it, I check it off my mental list and move on. If I listen to music on a road trip, it’s the soundtrack to an upcoming show I’m learning (practical), or it’s old music from high school I know well and can sing along to, with the purpose of keeping myself awake (practical).
Once I was chatting with two professional performing musicians over drinks at Pearl’s, on the East end of Cincinnati, and we all came to the realization that how we approached music and what we looked for in it was very different. My partner Douglas talked about loving the music itself- he’s always revered composers and loved music theory, paying close attention to how music is put together. The more complexity and craft there is behind a certain piece, the more he is likely to be obsessed with it.
My friend Tyler loved performers. I remember the summer we met, at a small rural summer opera camp in Arkansas. We would sit in the cabins on our afternoons off and he would play for me performances on youtube of opera singers and musical theater singers and solo pianists. He loved especially bel canto singers, some of the most controlled, refined, and athletic performers in the world (vocally-speaking, anyways), always noting the impressiveness of their skills in language and breath precision. He’s the biggest opera recordings-buff I’ve ever met, but a singer in just about any genre could capture his attention if they were truly talented and made strong, emotional, and technically-perfect choices.
For me, I realized that what I loved about music (and what keeps me coming back to this career, no matter how many times I’ve pretended to quit) is the practical work of actually making music. Yes, I love to practice on my own- playing the piano is just plain fun! However, I’m most excited when I have rehearsals with other people. When I was 6 years old, my piano teacher paired me with my first piano duet partner and taught me that music was something to be made with other people. In college I was technically a solo piano major, and I did give solo recitals when necessary, but my piano teacher had to beg me to practice my Beethoven sonatas when all I wanted to do was play opera arias for a dramatic soprano in a practice room. My graduate degree was specifically in collaborative piano, basically professional accompanying. Playing chamber music, music directing a musical, accompanying an opera rehearsal, these are what makes me happiest and what I have always seeked out. The genre doesn’t matter, as long as I’m making music with other people who care about it and who are approaching their craft from an authentic place.
So I love to MAKE music, and luckily I get to all the time. Most of my consumption of music has always come from my own personal, tactical involvement in the making of it. When I was in high school I actually did listen to a ton of music for fun (mostly musical theater), but even then I imagined myself as a part of the performance, singing or playing or conducting. I was listening practically for instrumentation and style and the creative choices of the performers, looking for anything I could steal learn from that would help me perform the music better and more accurately. For me, the enjoyment of (and emotional connection to) music has always come from being a part of it.
What draws you to music? Do you connect more with the piece, the performers or performing it yourself?
