If you don't seem to be going anywhere, should you just stop making music?

[herodotus]

per the terms 'hobby', 'professional' as posed vs 'one's entire life', I have to note that Charles Ives' profession was not 'composer', it was the insurance business. Hard to feature him coming downstairs with tears in his eyes 'I can't come up with insurance ideas any more!'

Yes.

The thing is, I have no problem with people going into music to be a star or make money, or giving up music because they think they won't ever achieve these goals. What I can not stand, though, is the notion that the only 'real' musicians are the ones making a living as performing or recording artists. This idea is so unjust, so historically ignorant and so culturally vacuous that it makes my head hurt just thinking about it.

The fact is that if you took the money, glamour and celebrities out of it, sustained interest in music itself is actually pretty rare. I know of very few people who will even sit and listen to something for longer than a minute without talking or screwing with their phone or studying or whatever.

[james0tucson]

So, it's years and thousands of dollars invested and all I have to show for it is a free Soundcloud page. I really don't feel I have the 'fire' I had when it comes to making music. Nobody buys anything. Barely comments are posted and I feel -for what?
I don't even feel I know music anymore. The stuff I hear I loathe and I've always just made music I like, and not cared what anyone else thinks.
So it begs the question, do I try and sell what I can to recoup some of my huge investment? What if the muse strikes again later?
I don't know if it's just the time of year or the mood I'm in, but I just feel aimless and restless and nothing makes me happy anymore.
Maybe it's just one of those 'life changes' everyone goes through.
WTF knows....

If you have a reason for making music that is anything other than "for the satisfaction of having made it" then you will probably be disappointed.

I have a $22,000 piano. If I was ever forced to see that as an "investment" that could be "recouped" through my music, I would have killed myself long ago.

It makes no sense to me at all to think of things in these terms. Yeah, I realize that money is a finite resource and that a less idealistic person might decide that the resource could be or should be applied elsewhere. From time to time, I've bought gear from people who "retired from the music business." This has always bewildered me, because I don't even understand the concept. You "retire from music" when you become deaf, lose your hands, or die for example.

[vurt]

didnt you recently beat cancer?
do you think it could be part of the after effects of that?

i know a few people who have beatenlife threatening illnesses and afterwards they doget a bit "lost" because a part of the mind had accepted they may not be here. its a big adjustment i guess.

[Sendy]

The financial thing is weird. I'm surrounded by people, including my parents (who for a long time hated my music), telling me I should be making money from music because it's "good enough". My parents have been super supportive (apart from anomalies like the row they had when my mum bought me a piano when I was 12) but now there's this expectation of "you have the talent, now validate it with money". And yes, it'd be nice to make some money either doing music, sound design or both, and I'm going to try! But ultimately it was never about that and to some extent never will be. Something happened when I was about 6 or 7 and I made a "guitar" out of elastic bands on an ice-cream tub and later on found a book on music theory. I think my parents having pretty decent taste in music and playing a lot of it also helped. Ever since then it's been a case of make music/sounds/noises or be slowly driven insane.

And 99% of the time the music I do make, though I'm pleased with it, it never quite does all of the things I set out to make music do. You're never quite satisfied with any of the destinations you reach so in the end it becomes nothing but a lifelong journey. Have you ever had that dream where you find a long-forgotten tape which you discover has 4 or 5 mind-blowing space-bending compositions on it that YOU WROTE, music that's phenomenal in ways you didn't even know existed?... you think "did I make this?" and then you wake up and remember all you have is your usual body of work with all it's flaws, mixing errors, high-hats that are slightly too loud, awkward transitions, etc... That's my motivation. Like Achilles in Zeno's paradox, I'll never be able to catch these ideals, but I'll make do with being allowed to fashion some rough, watered-down and three-dimensional approximations of the impossible ideals I hold so dearly in mind.

[osiris]

I have a $22,000 piano. If I was ever forced to see that as an "investment" that could be "recouped" through my music, I would have killed myself long ago.
--
That's my favorite reply.
Thanks for that.
Yes I did beat cancer, in fact I'm in full remission from what the docs tell me, and I wonder if this is all a little post depression setting in. I've been reading up on it a bit - trying to get a handle on things. There was a very good article at the Mayo Clinic website about this very thing.
I also think it's a birthday thing. Birthdays, for me, are always very fun, or 'oh let;s look back and take stock and here's a long list of your failings' sort of thing.
I think this is one of those.

[ghettosynth]

I have a $22,000 piano. If I was ever forced to see that as an "investment" that could be "recouped" through my music, I would have killed myself long ago.
--
That's my favorite reply.
Thanks for that.
Yes I did beat cancer, in fact I'm in full remission from what the docs tell me, and I wonder if this is all a little post depression setting in. I've been reading up on it a bit - trying to get a handle on things. There was a very good article at the Mayo Clinic website about this very thing.

Glad to hear it mate.

[ghettosynth]

Something happened when I was about 6 or 7 and I made a "guitar" out of elastic bands on an ice-cream tub.

Woah, we have a common experience. Except, I was about 9, mine was a shoebox, and I was very much into electronics and focused heavily on trying to get a microphone close enough to the bands to sound really cool through an old radio I had that an aux input. I discovered feedback early in life, but, it would be years before I made any "useful" connection between string length and pitch.

[Sendy]

Something happened when I was about 6 or 7 and I made a "guitar" out of elastic bands on an ice-cream tub.

Woah, we have a common experience. Except, I was about 9, mine was a shoebox, and I was very much into electronics and focused heavily on trying to get a microphone close enough to the bands to sound really cool through an old radio I had that an aux input. I discovered feedback early in life, but, it would be years before I made any "useful" connection between string length and pitch.

I always wish I got into electronics. I'd collect components when I was a kid, sometimes off of illegal dumps or stuff my dad gave me. But the closest I got to making anything out of it was making a board with a lightbulb and switch on it. It had batteries too. It was crap, in a funky skillo sort of way.

[ghettosynth]

Something happened when I was about 6 or 7 and I made a "guitar" out of elastic bands on an ice-cream tub.

Woah, we have a common experience. Except, I was about 9, mine was a shoebox, and I was very much into electronics and focused heavily on trying to get a microphone close enough to the bands to sound really cool through an old radio I had that an aux input. I discovered feedback early in life, but, it would be years before I made any "useful" connection between string length and pitch.

I always wish I got into electronics. I'd collect components when I was a kid, sometimes off of illegal dumps or stuff my dad gave me. But the closest I got to making anything out of it was making a board with a lightbulb and switch on it. It had batteries too. It was crap, in a funky skillo sort of way.

I think that, much like you discovered a book on music theory, it came down to similar experiences for me. Although, I can't say exactly because I know the interest goes back very far into my childhood. I remember seeing a picture of a "circuit", probably in an encyclopedia, which inspired me to try to make a circuit in a cigar box with parts taken from toys that I had taken apart. I can specifically recall trying different ad-hoc connections of parts understanding only the idea that the circuit must form a "circuit." I was about six when this happened which means that I was taking my toys apart carefully for at least a year or so.

Somewhere along the way I found a very useful book on transistor projects that had just the right amount of theoretical discussion to keep my young mind engaged and by the time I was about 9, it was officially "my hobby."

I remember enjoying music and sound quite differently from my siblings and peers, for example, enjoying the blues in my teenage years as opposed to pop and really getting into dancing in PE class in grade school. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to engage in any formal music training as a kid. My seventh grade general music teacher recognized my interest as he asked me to stay after class one day. I thought that I was in trouble for something and it sent my stress level through the roof. But, no, he just wanted to personally invite me to join summer band as it was the last opportunity for someone to engage in school band without having any prior training. I was excited to do so but school was several (as in 10 to 20) miles from my house and my parents could not figure out a way to get me to and from school. Truth be told, they didn't try very hard as they were not keen on listening to me practice. Harsh, yes, but hey, I've heard me practice and it's painful to say the least. So in fairness, it was a reasonable concern.

As a young teenager I tried several times to get my hand on some instrument but, without going into detail, I simply wasn't able to for various reasons and so my interests shifted towards electronics and radio. I didn't get my first instrument until after I had turned 18. After listening to some particularly inspiring blues records I just decided to go buy a harmonica, and then a few months later, a really crappy guitar.

[Hink]

Something happened when I was about 6 or 7 and I made a "guitar" out of elastic bands on an ice-cream tub.

Woah, we have a common experience. Except, I was about 9, mine was a shoebox, and I was very much into electronics and focused heavily on trying to get a microphone close enough to the bands to sound really cool through an old radio I had that an aux input. I discovered feedback early in life, but, it would be years before I made any "useful" connection between string length and pitch.

mine was a shoebox many times (like my parents got new shoes, I got a new ax), but that was something I saw on romper room so I was pre-school and I never put a mic on that...when I was 7-9 for xmas my father got me a toy from Raytheon (where he wroked) called Lectronix or something, I have been able to find it in the past but cannot now. It was building blocks each with an electronic component in it connected by magnets under contacts...you put the projects together on a cookie sheet like surface. It had a speaker, switches, pots, even a solar cell that was used to build a light based theremin type device which was a ball to play with. I think dad wanted me to into electronics instead I became a hippie rock and roller...I guess he should have known when we built my first amp from a dead ham radio amp...dad was so proud of how clean it was and my 1st question was "where's the distortion?"

[ghettosynth]

per the terms 'hobby', 'professional' as posed vs 'one's entire life', I have to note that Charles Ives' profession was not 'composer', it was the insurance business. Hard to feature him coming downstairs with tears in his eyes 'I can't come up with insurance ideas any more!'

Yes.

The thing is, I have no problem with people going into music to be a star or make money, or giving up music because they think they won't ever achieve these goals. What I can not stand, though, is the notion that the only 'real' musicians are the ones making a living as performing or recording artists. This idea is so unjust, so historically ignorant and so culturally vacuous that it makes my head hurt just thinking about it.

Surely there's a simple distinction here. I don't think anyone said anything about being a "real" musician, however, being a "pro" certainly means that one is making at least some part of their living "as" a musician. In fact, I would say that to most people, the thing that separates "pros" from "amateurs" is whether or not they earn their living with the skill in question.

Even when I made some money at it, however, I considered myself an amateur. I viewed as pros friends of mine who made their entire living either playing in bands, or teaching. Granted, they never made it out of the small local scene, but they earned their living from music.

So, well, "Justin Bieber" = pro, "your favorite local musician who still works at GC" = amateur.

I'm not personally making any kind of judgement here, these are just words that have a meaning.

[jancivil]

per the terms 'hobby', 'professional' as posed vs 'one's entire life', I have to note that Charles Ives' profession was not 'composer', it was the insurance business. Hard to feature him coming downstairs with tears in his eyes 'I can't come up with insurance ideas any more!'

It would undoubtedly be more frustrating to not experience success with music if ones work had limited reward. I imagine that I would be severely depressed if music was my only intellectual pursuit and I failed to achieve some measure of professional success.

This doesn't really address what I have said. I do not have this measure success by money disease. I think this is a terrible way to go, I think it is perverse and wrong and I find that the society that uses that metric is ignorant and vapid. I don't know what 'if music was my only intellectual pursuit' is supposed to address either. I have finished a couple of screenplays myself for starters. That said, I don't think of myself as 'an intellectual'. I am known for a certain acumen in detecting the heart of a legal argument, on either side [talent] but I don't have what it takes to do that and music.

My experience with music is music qua music, and amounts to this: it makes life worth living. I am passing happy with my own work. The opinions of people may or may not be useful, depending, but I have set a high bar for myself which I aim to pass and I love the work enough, would work myself to death to do so.

Like I said, you have to address what role music plays in your life. For me, it's not so much an intellectual pursuit so much as... I'm long past questioning this as valid, it works for me. I could never live the life that Charles Ives led, and I'm making (accepting your) big assumptions here that may not be true, working in something that was ultimately meaningless just to pursue meaning elsewhere. I get that's one of the ways that one can make music a bigger part of their life, but it would never work for me.

Far be it from me to have an opinion about what works for any other person. Beyond that, I don't know what assumption you are presenting as if to address here either. It is a fact that the celebrated 'genius composer' Charles Ives was also known as an innovator in the insurance business. I could not do two things like that myself I don't think. I think this is an example of a much stronger and healthier person than I. Music as an intellectual exercise, that's not my conception at all. I am very interested, ie., curious about music as 'an art' - or really it matters not at all the framing of it, music qua music - which is going to exceed people's attention for such who care less about it than I do.

Frank Zappa consistently called his 'music music' his hobby, supported by his entertainment business or 'It's time to get back on stage with the R&B' having exhausted his money hiring orchestras.

So to be clear, whatever Frank Zappa meant by hobby vs life's passion is not what I mean. To suggest that Zappa was anything but a professional musician is a bit dishonest. He clearly dedicated his life to music and whether he's "getting back on stage" to create music he could sell or hiring orchestras for whatever reason, it's all music.

FZ learned early on that he was not going to have a lot of success in the composer game as he saw it; from his perspective from a kind of lower class, trying to hire classical groups out of his own pocket and it be a viable business model. So he took over an R&B band and by force of personality made them believe in him enough to play the 'perverted music' in a setting that could be sold to hippies. I did not suggest he was not a professional musician, but that he was a professional musician in popular forms of music and that aside from the R&B/Hard Rock/whatever stage show and the comedy routine he would not have afforded the serious music, this according to his account. Which seems to be true enough, beside his tendency to self-mythologize. Which is itself a self-conscious commercial strategy.

I think of a hobby like most Americans think about television. In fact, I watch very little television because I have several hobbies.

well that's great, it's great to have a release. I haven't had a job for over twenty years myself. If I continued on as I was in the late 80's, too tired to pursue music to the extent I was motivated to do (and bring the ideas, which were constant, unrelenting ideas to fruition), I don't know what I would have found to do to get out of that. The universe threw up a roadblock one day, a hit and run and it took me some time to rebuild myself.

It is a vocation for me and I'm now at a point with enough of an opus under the bridge I can watch some tv and not feel too guilty. I get your definition, it's a normal definition as far as it goes, but there seems to be a bright line between professional, which signals this /measure success in music by material reward/ notion (ask yourself this: was Van Gogh a failure at an artist in his life, having sold no painting ever, only redeemed by the millions the paintings bring now? What does that say, is it society's estimation that's the 'value'?), and 'one's life'.

I remember well a girl I sort of knew with an affluent family who said to me during my time at conservatory as a performance major on my instrument: "It's so great to have a hobby you love so much". It chafed at me. I never made it as a touring classical guitarist. One day my instrument was stolen and the path to a viable instrument for the gig wasn't there. I'm glad to have been forced to focus on my own idea of the thing. The end of that path would have been *a hobby* like people I know today have it, that's that reality. I'm just saying that 'professional' vs 'one's entire life', this bright line of demarcation is just some convenient language, and Charles Ives for one illustrates how the dichotomy is false.

[jancivil]

Have you ever had that dream where you find a long-forgotten tape which you discover has 4 or 5 mind-blowing space-bending compositions on it that YOU WROTE, music that's phenomenal in ways you didn't even know existed?... you think "did I make this?" and then you wake up and remember all you have is your usual body of work

I've dreamed some music yes. One thing I remembered some of and worked it out as best I could.

BUT, I listen to my body of work and it is that dream. It's unbelievable that the body I inhabit did it. At times it's like another person did it. It is actually worth the nightmare that my life became.

the next thing starts from scratch, though and could be a long slow journey; the last time was an impossible cul de sac. I move away from a composition more typically because it's at a close to ideal state I can deeply enjoy. Music that I did where no one else will.

I was able to outlive myself and achieve because I gave up on the dream of having material comfort, or a family, or being celebrated by others, or a balance a healthy person enjoys, in favor of obsession, sessions that go for longer than a day, and a style of life that signals a shorter span of life in the end. throwing all of my inheritance - and this is a strange bit of fortune - into the tools to do it rather than a home.

osiris is recovering from trauma and this was an expression of a depressed state I think. But typically I'm taken aback by people with the what's it all about sort of sound, regarding music. I don't have a choice. I was able to fulfill the functions of a messenger well enough as it didn't require me to take my mind off of music for very long. It's very distracting. Now that I work with a DAW rather than pencil to paper it's more of an unconscious constant rhythm than the naming and planning thing which would probably get me diagnosed as crazy.

[ATS]

So, it's years and thousands of dollars invested and all I have to show for it is a free Soundcloud page. I really don't feel I have the 'fire' I had when it comes to making music. Nobody buys anything. Barely comments are posted and I feel -for what?
I don't even feel I know music anymore. The stuff I hear I loathe and I've always just made music I like, and not cared what anyone else thinks.
So it begs the question, do I try and sell what I can to recoup some of my huge investment? What if the muse strikes again later?
I don't know if it's just the time of year or the mood I'm in, but I just feel aimless and restless and nothing makes me happy anymore.
Maybe it's just one of those 'life changes' everyone goes through.
WTF knows....

I've had the same feelings in the past and even started a similar thread. I took about a year off from making music and now back it. I really hope most people don't do it for the money because it is damn hard to get anyone to buy music anymore. And even harder if you are going it alone without a (real)label. For me I take breaks but I always come back to making music eventually. Just don't worry about it. If you don't feel like making it, find something else to do. I honestly think the bug will bite you again down the road. It seems for all the years I been making music the best way to get people to listen to yours is to listen to theirs and comment back and fourth. It pretty much has to be a social thing if you want people to listen. For me I actually do care what other people think and try to keep that in mind when I am making music. But like I said don't worry, just wait for the bug to bite you again and you will be back at it with a fresh outlook. It actually helped my mixing for some reason taking the break I did somehow.

[ATS]

I have a $22,000 piano. If I was ever forced to see that as an "investment" that could be "recouped" through my music, I would have killed myself long ago.
--
That's my favorite reply.
Thanks for that.
Yes I did beat cancer, in fact I'm in full remission from what the docs tell me, and I wonder if this is all a little post depression setting in. I've been reading up on it a bit - trying to get a handle on things. There was a very good article at the Mayo Clinic website about this very thing.
I also think it's a birthday thing. Birthdays, for me, are always very fun, or 'oh let;s look back and take stock and here's a long list of your failings' sort of thing.
I think this is one of those.