Mr.Gumby wrote:A musician... is delivering a service. You wouldn't hear someone who comes to plaster your walls, do your plumbing or replace the timing belt on your car going on about their passion...
In my experience 'the general public' does put musicians in a different category.
There are endless examples of this over the years. One is the woman who called to hire a piper friend of mine for a party. When he quoted her $200 she was flabbergasted. The woman knew the piper was a piping teacher and immediately asked how much lessons cost. When told $25 she said "well then, I could come down for a lesson or two and do it myself!" My friend got a big laugh at the absurdity and cluelessness of it. Put together all the lessons he had taken as a kid, the summer piping schools he'd attended, his decades of playing at hundreds of events, his lovely vintage pipes worth thousands of dollars, his immaculate kit which cost over a thousand dollars (a kilt alone being around $500).
A lawyer contacted me to pipe at some lawyer gathering, but balked at $200 and hired a student of mine for half that price. What would he say to a client to balked at his price and wanted to hire a person still in law school? The student didn't have the sound I have, the kit I have, and only knew a couple tunes.
I was hired for the Ellen show. Ellen wanted to be seen at the start of the show walking out on stage playing a tune on the pipes. First she had the Property guy get a bagpipe from a prop shop but of course it wasn't in working condition. The Property guy realized that the only way to get a working pipe was to get one currently being played by a good player (smart man, that guy!)
So I come down to the studio, and some assistant says to me "show me how they work, and I'll show Ellen." Amused by the cluelessness of this, I strike up the pipes and play a bit of a tune. The assistant says "I think you're going to have to show Ellen yourself." I'm then ushered in to The Presence and do the same thing in front of Ellen and then hand her the pipes. She makes a couple honking sounds and then says in a disgusted tone "this isn't going to work" and walks away. The assistant says to me "I tried to talk her into hiring a bagpipe group so she could march in with them just pretending to play, but she insisted that she wanted to play the bagpipes by herself." (Smart man, that guy!)
Now, Ellen wouldn't think that she could perform surgery or write up a legal brief or rebuild her transmission after a one-minute lesson, but she imagined that playing a musical instrument was that simple.
I work as an artist and people will often ask "did you ever take an art lesson or is it just a natural talent?" They're amazed that I have an art degree, and that all of our artists have art degrees, and that we can tell by looking at a single piece of a prospective employee's work whether or not they've had formal training. The analogy I've used is a court trial where one of the people gets up and starts talking... it will be quickly apparent to the judge and the other attorney if the guy hasn't been to law school and is just faking it.
The different ways 'the general public' perceives the 'nature versus nurture' thing in regards various professions has always fascinated me.
Go into a doctor's office and you'll see framed on the wall some documents related to the doctor's training. We would think it absurd if a doctor told his patients "You know, I just have a talent for being a doctor!" The public perception is that schooling equals competence, though we all know that two people can sit in the same classes for several years and one person end up being great in their field and the other person being mediocre.
At Disneyland there are a number of extremely good musicians. They've all got music degrees, some of them Masters, some of them Doctorates. From time to time one of the musicians will leave to take a teaching post at a university somewhere. Yet when they're playing they don't have their framed degrees on the wall behind them! And the sign on their dressing room door says "Talent" as if they popped out of the womb knowing music theory and having tens of thousands of hours of lessons and practice and schooling under their belts. The public perception is that talent equals competence.
When the various allied forces had stunning military success in the first Iraq war (Desert Storm) I'd often see military people interviewed being asked to explain the enormity of the success. They all had the same answer: "We have the best training and equipment in the world." I never heard any of these generals say "You know, I just have a talent for war." But any student of the American Civil War knows that the generals on both sides had the same training (nearly all being West Point graduates) but there was a stunning disparity in competence displayed by various men. Clearly 'talent' was at least as important as training.
I don't know if this is a 'profound thought' but it's something that 'the general public' takes for granted, that some fields of human endeavor are things of training, others things of talent.