Talk:Musician

See Talk:Instrumentalist for rationale for merging Instrumentalist article into Musician article. --- RobLa 20:40 Nov 16, 2002 (UTC)

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Major Cleanup

I reworded and slashed out a bit of this article in the hopes of bringing it up to writing standards. Although not by any means a fully comprehensive entry, I believe this article now meets Wikipedia writing quality standards, and, if no objection is made within a few days, I am going to remove the tag. That said, this page still needs a lot more content, preferrably with sources. The parts I completely removed:

"culture-specific. Think, for instance, about your own concepts relating to "the heavy metalist"; "the folk musician"; "the DJ"; "the sarangi player"; "the female drummer"; and so on."

"It should be noted that although in many cases the name of the player is made from the name of the instrument + "ist", it does not work for all instruments. Trumpetist for example is nonsense. There are also widespread differences in the acceptability of some of these terms: for example percussionist is in general and uncontested use whereas violist is not."

Candybars 10:40, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

Clever, Inappropriate Paragraph Removed

I took this out:

However, musicians, at least insofar as their human manifestations go, can be distinguished from other creatures that create melodic sounds by their insistence on producing such sounds even when there is no clear reason for them to do so and even in the face of compelling reasons to cease such activity in favour of dealing with crises affecting their personal survival. In other words, even when no reward or likely advantage is to be obtained by the performance of "Brown Eyed Girl" or "Mustang Sally" in a bar full of losers, a musician will, nevertheless, perform such composition or other "song" requested by any audience even as his (or her) girlfriend (or boyfriend) is being wooed by the bartender and/or all his/her belongings are being carted off to a disposal site and/or staff of such establishment are telling him/her to "stop now!". (See also, "guitarist" and "singer" and "homeless person".)

- on the grounds that it is not encyclopedic. It is rather witty and clever and made me smile a bit but I don't think that is a genuine reason for it being in here. Maybe its author would like to reword it into something more suitable? And to be fair some of the humor is a bit old - not such a bad thing but we have all done the homeless joke a bit too much in the past. Maybe a NPOV look at why some people see musicians that way? Otherwise I think it should stay out.

Anonymous grumbler.

More humour for serious musicians - Zigger 17:32, 2004 Mar 28 (UTC)

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Should all the links pointing to [[Bassoonist]], for instance, be changed to [[Bassoon]]ist? I can only think of one instance where the playing of the instrument is unusual (Contrabassoon), however it wouldn't amount to much more than a stub, and should be probably merged into Contrabassoon anyway... Dysprosia 08:00, 7 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Famous

I think a famous one is Ray Charles. --Patricknoddy 20:14, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)User:Patricknoddy --Patricknoddy 20:14, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)User talk:Patricknoddy

Not encyclopedic enough

This article is, in my opinion, not written in a very encyclopedic manner. The paragraph exhibiting its author's negative additude towards bad pop music is very un-equanimous (not that I disagree about its contents.) cool-RR

I removed the paragraph:

• A special exception must be made to so-called "performers", for example Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera. As they sing other peoples songs, dance other peoples choreography, achieve their popularity solely due to good looks, and require the help of an auto-tuning device in order to sound remotely acceptable. As a rule of thumb, as the ratio of 14 year old female listeners to other listeners approaches 2 or more, it becomes increasingly unlikely that the performer in question is actually a musician.

If that paragraphs contributor would like to re-add that information please provide sources which express your opinions. See: Wikipedia:Cite sources and Wikipedia:No original research.

I tried to add some of the terms used in that para to the article, such as "performer". Hyacinth 04:33, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)

On the other hand...

I do believe that there is some reasoning behind seperating performers from musicians. Obviously the above paragraph was written in a completely biased manner, however, if one were to talk to the vast majority of actual musicians out there (The ones we all make homeless jokes about), they would be appalled to be lumped in to the same catagory as "performers". Would there be any way of proving this to be the case? I think that's the more difficult question...

Anonymous Time-Waster

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As a musician, I can certainly agree with being "appalled" as you say, but bad music is still music, and bad musicians are still musicians, so there's really no reason to keep the separation. Lip-synching is a different kettle of fish. --Wahoofive 07:26, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)