Your argument doesn’t acknowledge the keyword of my definition. “Love”.
Music isn’t a human need (as far as I can tell). We are the court jesters entertaining the royal court and the church congregation. We are not the King or the High Priest. We are indentured skilled servants. We don’t lead armies or cure cancer. We simply make a joyful noise, for the uplifting of the people.
Just as the chef can barely make ends meet but keeps cooking because he loves it; likewise, we make music because we love to do it, not because it’s an essential service.
Some say the definition is if you make a living from it. Fine but because it’s an art, my definition is if you love it. If you’re not good at it, so that you don’t make money, but you love doing it, you are still a musician. Just a poor one.
And since we do the thing that we love doing, repitition of the task makes us love it more and more. So the person who decides to get a bot to do it for him hasn’t been growing in their love for the craft and the journey. If they did then generative AI would have little use to them. Maybe help with tech support and the odd novel thing here and there. Other than that, music is as wild horses. You couldn’t drag me away.
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No. He’s doing the work of a dj. Curating other peoples’ work is a curator, not a creator. Our modern tech has created a new profession: “music producer”. That term is to compromise on the void of playing a musical instrument but still ending up with new music. And since he’s a “kid” he’s nothing at all. He’s an apprentice. I wouldn’t give the title of “musician” to the youth, who are full of potential, but that’s about it.
When they sell their beloved skateboard to buy a keyboard. When it becomes their one and only primary hobby.
As a man thinks in his heart so is he.
So a man who thinks upon music all day long, about the feeling of it, tapping on his leg and doing drum sounds by chattering with his teeth, thinking about the roar of the crowd and that the stage is the top of the world. That is a musican.
While the guy who googles how to make money online and step 1 is to “choose a profitable niche” and he chooses music cause it has good numbers and goes ahead and makes AI music; is the opposite of a musician. He’s known as a parasite.
Nope, that’s a dj. Different profession.
Guys like DeadMau5 and Skrillex have respect because they make their own music.
Of course not. Art is objective. If you don’t think so, how come you have a favorite band? And you prefer one album over another? It’s because you’ve objectively decided that is superior to other music. We call that subjective, but only among different people (it’s only relative to the masses but not to individuals). We all know that there is objectively high quality art and low quality art.
Bach was a *master musician. You have conflated the term with the quality of skill. If someone is a cover band then, no they are clandestine musicians. They can make music yes, but if someone doesn’t create the art from within themselves they are not the thing (not music producers; music copycats). They are clouds without water.
There are only so many chords. But when it comes to pop music, what makes money is what is made. So that is the same problem. They are farming the market, so they are business people, not geniune artists. Do they love the art? If so, then why do they need so much help with inspiration?
Probably not, but these principles of what art is overlaps with all of them I think. We can look at a fine sculpture and appreciate it for the skill. We look at the turd on the wall and it doesn’t do anything for us, so it’s not art by definition. Because art is a carrier for a message. The sculptor is expressing the beauty and majesty of the human form. The turd on the wall carries no message.
The art is defined as art because the message it carries, when deployed, has one purpose: Makes the person receiving the message feel alive. If the art in question doesn’t do that, there is something wrong. Either the artist is inexperienced or the more likely reason is because they can’t make people feel alive because they are not alive themselves. They can only reproduce after their own kind.