If you’ve been part of music for a long time, or even just a moment, I hope something here makes you feel seen.
What Makes a Musician?
If you’re rehearsing and learning music, you are a musician. Not someday. Not when you’re “good enough.” Now.
You, yourself alone, can only give and take that identity from you.
Everyone who has ever been pulled to the arts knows what it feels like when something clicks, and you feel more deeply than you do in everyday life. Music becomes more than sound. It becomes an outlet. A language for emotions you can’t quite explain any other way.
If you’re like me, it might have started something like this: performing in youth ensembles, private lessons on the side, community theater, and competitions. But at what point does it move from curriculum to who you are?
I’ve seen plenty of people sit in ensembles and go through the motions. Not quitting, but not connecting either. And the difference isn’t always skill.
It all comes down to your preference for expression. I have known great singers where it is clear as day they were meant to perform. You can see how every fiber of their being feels everything. Not just their own part of the music, but the entire accompaniment, the silence, the breath before, during, and after a sound, the meaning behind the text, the reason behind the configuration of chords. They are so connected to the sound that it becomes spiritual.
Now, this isn’t to say that every performance needs to make you cry, but it should influence you to feel something on a deeper level.
And if it doesn’t, it’s worth asking why.
Sad pieces might not be the key to you unlocking your artistry.
What do I love about myself as an artist?
What emotions do I naturally connect to?
Will this satisfy the artist in me?
The answers to those questions shape the kind of performer you become, and if you want to push yourself and really grow, you have to step outside of that comfort. Choose music you wouldn’t normally pick. Study it until you understand it from every angle. Learn how to connect to something unfamiliar.
Sometimes it’s not about loving everything you do, but learning to find joy in the things you find uninteresting. Because growth doesn’t always come from loving what you’re doing. It comes from learning how to find meaning in it anyway.
As a vocalist and a former alto, I know what it feels like to be handed the “simpler” lines, but if you listen to all the moving parts around you and take into consideration how important the stagnation of your notes is, it becomes something beautiful to enjoy. You can make each vowel and breath into a wave of sound, instead of something flat and lifeless.
It’s about perspective. Play around with your part and make it interesting. Because being a musician isn’t about how difficult your part is. It’s about how deeply you choose to feel it.
Emotions are the key to everything in life and music is just one part of that.
So yes, you can be a musician and play as well as the next person, but if you don’t feel anything, it means nothing. To move an audience beyond words is the sole purpose of music, and few have come to fully understand and execute that mindset. To put your whole body and soul into something majority of people only hear.
That is the difference.
That is what makes a true artist.
Leave a Reply