Individualism and the Music World

Taking a rare break from all of these book reviews, recently I have been thinking about music and who is assigned the credit for a great work. In classical music, we tend to assign the credit to the composer. Which is completely opposite from the pop world where we credit the performer. Why is there this discrepancy?

I think this difference has to do with individualism. Especially in the United States and Western world in general, we have this idea subconsciously in our heads that most endeavors are piloted by a single individual. This individual has the idea, follows it through, and then is deserving of our praise. But that is not how most projects work. Most are a product of many people, each with different inputs, working together as a team.

Now think of music. When we want to credit someone for a work of art, we want it to be the most immediate person to the work. Therefore we default to the artist, the one who made it happen. For music that defaults to the performer, the person closest to the work. Which is what we see in pop music.

Then switch to classical. The problem here is that most classical works are done by a large symphony, a group composed of over 50 musicians usually. Way too many for our individual praise. There’s the conductor, the musicians, the soloists, who to pick? So it goes to the category that usually has a single name next to it. The composer. Our individualist minds cannot handle more than one name, so we look for that one.

Now obviously there’s some problems with this argument, but I think I am correct in saying that this plays a role in it. For more discussion on this idea though, I’d recommend checking out the podcast “Hi-Phi Nation,” there’s an episode that deals with this question, although it goes in a different direction than what I did here.