Art vs Artist who are terrible people.

[ejd53]

+1

As far as music being inherited goes, music is a lot like language. You have grammar that tells you how loud, how long, the order of phrases, etc. Just as children in a multilingual home pick up languages, children in a musical home probably pick up music. It's another form of aural communication that they are exposed to from an early age.

We've had the conversation that music and software code are the same. They're symbolic languages with instructions that tell you what to do & when to do it (and music even has "go tos", "do whiles", and other control structures.) Some universities even accept software as a substitute for a foreign language credit. If they're going to recognize software that way, they should do the same for music.

Music is an interesting topic; it is one of the great cornerstones of the nature vs nurture argument and the existence of musical prodigies argues strongly for the nature faction. My own experiences in a musical home (my mother was an opera singer and voice teacher and my son is the principal cellist of the Louisville KY Orchestra) probably skew my views somewhat, but trust me when I say that it's not just practice (although you can't do it without long hours of practice). Neither my brother nor my sister nor I were inclined to follow a musical route (although we did play the obligatory instruments in the school band) although my mother and father surrounded us with music growing up. I knew the names of the pieces that were the background to Warner Brother's cartoons. Strangely, the one that always stuck with me the longest was not the fantastic "What's Opera, Doc?" (kill the wabbit), but Mendelssohn's Hebrides overture whenever that stupid hopping crow would cross the screen and all the other action would stop.

Do children pick up music in the house at an early age? Absolutely, but the ones who are really musicians react differently. My son was definitely exposed to classical (and other types of) music when he was young, but no more (probably less) than I was; however, from the time he could walk, it affected him differently. To make a long story short, by the time he was four he was begging me to let him play an instrument. I asked him which one and he chose the cello, and he makes his living with it today. He was born with whatever it took for him to become a musician; it could not be taught, it was always there. If it could be taught like a language, everyone could do it (even Heifetz remarked once that string playing was easy, all you had to do was put the right finger on the right place at the right time), and we know that that is not the case.

 

[tkern]

I went to college at Berklee and the range of people who went there was very diverse. The graduation rate was 3%. The number came from people dropping out because they formed a band, got a paying gig, moved on to another college or field, or just couldn't hack it.
My father was a blacksmith and my mother a paralegal. There was always music in my home but never anything more complex than Frank Zappa's "Strictly Genteel" or Eric Johnson. I went to school for music but ended up in a restaurant because I enjoyed the field. ... and I had to pay rent. Will I ever go back to music? Maybe.

I haven't thought about taking the music out of societal context as Seth suggested but I can definitely see why. I wonder though if, as an example, you have someone you very much respect (baseball player, musician, Wolverine) and meet that person face to face and discover they're a horrible person, would they continue to hold your respect? It seems that most people are ok with their entertainment being produced by whomever and it seems it comes down to one's inherit enjoyment of a work vs. one's chosen moral ground.

 

[WildBoar]

For me, once the horrible part of the persona is exposed my overall respect for that person is reduced to simply a respect for/ appreciation of their talents. But even that respect gets diminished. I guess at some level I think they are only that good at whatever their talent is because they focus less of their energy/ effort into other aspects of their lives. So there may be many others out there who could achieve what that artist accomplished if they did not put some of their energy into being better at other aspects of their lives/ relationships.