Two ways of making music
I think music-making can be categorised into two roles:
- Reciter: playing music that already exists
- Creator: creating your own
Reciters' focus is on the details of the performance. Take a typical classical musician for example. Their practice time is focused on mastering technique so that they have maximum expressive control, and getting familiar with the pieces they're going to play so that the more difficult parts feel comfortable. A person playing this role doesn't need to be able to compose music or understand much theory to do their job well. Someone else can take care of the music's creation; the reciter's job is to express it.
Creators, in contrast, learn to speak the language of music. This means their goal is to acquire vocabulary, gain fluency, and express ideas. To do this, you have to be exposed to a large amount of music. You have to analyse it, understand it, and assimilate the elements that you want to use yourself. Creators tend to like exploring the abstractions of music: how things interrelate and create meaning when combined in different ways.
Creation could take the form of composition or songwriting, but it could also take the form of improvisation.
Composers and songwriters are like writers, taking time to sit with their creation and revise it to an ideal state, whereas improvisers' domain is closer to spoken language, since it happens in real time without revision. There is a popular saying that "improvisation is composition sped up." That's true in the sense that both involve learning a musical language and expressing ideas with it. As with spoken language, improvisers depend more on fluency and stock phrases, while composers and songwriters have the time and mental space to try out more unfamiliar ideas, like a writer does with words.
Improvisers share some similarity with reciters, since they both perform and both constantly practise the music they're going to play. But what goes through their minds during the performance is vastly different. The improviser is choosing what to say as well as how to say it, so they must be somewhat fluent in their dialect before they can perform. The reciter's words are already chosen, which allows them to focus all their attention on the "how to say it" part.
Imagine that you learn a beautiful poem in another language that you don't speak. You practise it consistently, mastering the contour of each line, and listen to native speakers performing it for inspiration. With enough practice, you could perform it for a native-speaker audience and bring them to tears, despite not being able to write a poem (or maybe even a sentence) in that language yourself. This is what good reciters are able to do.
The creator aims to master the language rather than the performance of poetry. Their poems might have a similarly powerful emotional effect on readers, but there is no guarantee that their own live performance of them would be very good. Often a great reciter is able to bring out the meaning or emotion of a piece more effectively than its creator. But the creator's path unlocks a door to a world that is incredibly rich and interesting, and inaccessible to reciters – it can only be experienced by exploring it yourself.
These are two very different skill sets, and equally important. It's a shame that music education so often makes it seem like the role of reciter is the only one that exists.
When we teach music to children (in a Western music context), we tend to push them along the reciter's path regardless of the child's inclination. Often it takes until their teenage years or adulthood before they realise composition or improvisation are even an option they could pursue, and they usually have no idea how to begin. The same applies to many adults taking music lessons at a beginner/intermediate level.
But music is a language that pretty much anyone can learn, at least to a conversational level within a particular dialect (e.g. blues, or reggae, or 18th-century Galant style). It doesn't need to be restricted to specialists, just as performing other people's music isn't only for specialists.
The best way to change things, I think, is to build more and better resources that make the creator's path more accessible without oversimplifying. That's the task I've set for myself.