Yes, it Matters if Musicians Compose their own Music

I became vexed the other day when I read an extended discussion on Reddit in which the top comments all indicated that most music listeners do not do not think it matters if a band or singer actually composed their own music. Soon everyone listed great performers who were very successful without writing much, if any of their own music and lyrics. Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Whitney Houston and others were listed. The lists were meant to somehow prove that being great does not require being the originator of the material. These people were all great performers¹ but the discussion avoided the question presented in the original post, which asked why some people considered it significant that a performer composed their own hits.

I was not surprised by these lists of great performers being posted as replies to the original question taking into consideration that so many people are aware of music but do not truly pay attention to the provenance of it. After all, people become rich and famous from performances all the time, without ever having to create the songs they are performing. Many songwriters are completely unknown to the general public. Fame and money are measures of success in many, but not all contexts. The question that must be asked is, “Famous for what?” The answer is performance. The answer is not creativity. Creativity is the realm of the composer.

Creativity is present to some degree in all of us, but truly great creativity is exceedingly hard to come by. That is why many people who appreciate music are more impressed by artists who write their own material than artists who do not. If value is determined by availability, then good songwriting is the diamond of music world². Good performance is sand. Ok, that might be a slight exaggeration. I too have enjoyed music merely for performance. Sometimes the cover tune is better than the original. Other times the songwriter is anonymous, because while they can write good music, they can’t perform it as well as others. I will upgrade good performance to platinum or silver, maybe the very best performances are gold, but none are diamond. My point is that good composers are rare. Good compositions are therefore also rare. Many, many, many songs are recorded. Only a few songs are good, even fewer songs  become hits (and half of those are crap too). There are many good singers. There are not many good songs. Only composers can achieve diamond.

Every high school in the world graduates a few good performers every year. Didn’t you go to school with at least one or two people that had good singing voices? I went to high school with several students who went on to be scholarship music majors in college, some to fairly prestigious music schools. None of them are famous. A country the size of the United States produces thousands upon thousands of people with sufficient talent and skill to be good performers every year. It is rare only in the casual sense, but not truly rare in the larger context of the market for music. If I pay for music, I do not want common, I want exceptional.

A better analogy perhaps, is painting. I do not mean painting houses or fence posts, but works of art. Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa. Untold thousands of others have copied it. To copy it well certainly requires a lot of skill. I wouldn’t say that every high school in America graduates someone every year capable of producing a truly good copy, but I would say that every art school probably does. How much would you pay for a good copy of the Mona Lisa? How many painters have become famous for copying the Mona Lisa? How much is the original worth? The original is priceless. Leonardo became historically famous. So famous that I can just use his first name and you still know who I’m talking about. A good copy probably costs a few bucks, just enough to cover the materials and a tiny profit, and the artist is poorly compensated and remains anonymous to history. This analogy illustrates my point about musicians who do not write their own music. The ability to perform a song well is commendable, but pales in comparison to the ability to create the music in the first place. Composition is permanent, performance is ephemeral. Creation is greater than performance every time.³

It’s noteworthy that improvisation is a form of creativity, so a performing artist that can improvise is greater than one that can’t. But improvisation implies variations on an original theme, while still preserving the original enough to be recognizable, so it’s not a replacement for the full act of creation. While I enjoy live performances (I listen to them all the time), I personally prefer good studio recordings because they afford the opportunity to get the music perfect, or as close to it as possible. The pinnacle is to be able to both create and perform well. Those are the artists I place on a pedestal. You can keep Sinatra, I’ll take the Beatles every time.⁴

Footnotes

1. Personally I have always felt that Frank Sinatra was a much better actor than a singer.
2. We are excluding artificial diamond for the purposes of the analogy here. Artificial diamond can be mass produced, making it the, uh, boy band of the gemstone world I guess.
3. In the process of thinking through this essay, I finally realized that this is why I’m uninterested in some other arts like theater and dance, although I’m occasionally interested in playwrights and their scripts (especially Shakespeare) and less often the composition and choreography of ballet. Most of the time the players are just parroting back something that was created long ago. I’m interested in the existence and story of a play or ballet, not how well it is performed on a particular night. I find the permanent creation more valuable than an ephemeral performance of it.
4. In my opinion, the Beatles were not much in live performances, but that only detracts slightly from their legacy, since they were so good at writing and recording, while Sinatra created almost nothing. A better example is Steve Winwood, who wrote or co-wrote numerous hit songs and can perform them very well, even improvising extremely well on both guitar and keyboard. I didn’t use Winwood because he is not as well known.