Art music

[Toddskins]

There's a new movie out called "Art School Confidential". The reviews about it brought up the point that applies to any art genre. I thought I'd share a bit of the theme. First, a partial of a review that hits, to me, right at home:

"BY ROGER EBERT / May 12, 2006
I believe you can go to school to learn to be an accountant, a doctor, a physicist, an engineer, an astronaut. I am not sure you can learn to be an artist. Artists are born, not made, and the real reason to study the arts is to have fun, learn technical skills, network with other creative types, fall in love with people who are not boring, and do the work you probably would have done anyway. "

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/.../60508003/1023


When I read Ebert's review of the movie, I thought "How true this is of true artists."

I just was talking to another musician friend of mine a couple weeks ago who was telling me about how he was explaining to his own kids about "music and the musician" in attempting to produce something truly exquisite which was [paraphrasing], "...the true notion of making art, was such that it caused one to turn inward in such a way as to NOT want to be a part of the "scene".

... that the art (whatever form) was done for the sheer joy and expression of what it was." i.e., Van Gogh

He then recanted to me something one of his own teachers in college had said and done to him which was something like, "...He continued to tell me all my shortcomings, making me get both angry and depressed, and all this was to make me look deeper into myself, and practice many more hours each day than I had already been doing. I got to the point where my lip control and breathing were, what I believed to be, perfect." [He was a flute player]

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I wish I had just a few more people who appreciated this sentiment, and were skilled enough to know excellence when they hear it (or see it, as the case may be). My own music is so "not normal", but moves people to exclaim things that I cannot write.

It is so rare to find these people. So very rare.

I end up playing mostly for God, and myself.

Anyone else feel like this?